Hidden Legacies How discontinued International Organizations have shaped European governance since the 1910s

Project Information

InechO

Grant agreement ID: 101096005

DOI

10.3030/101096005

EC signature date 31 May 2023

Start date 1 October 2023

End date 30 September 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 497 395,00

EU contribution

€ 2 497 395,00

Coordinated by

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - InechO (Hidden Legacies How discontinued International Organizations have shaped European governance since the 1910s)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2026-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

What happens after international organizations (IOs) cease to exist? While IOs’ ends are occasionally discussed in political science and legal studies, we know very little about their legacies, and hence the subsequent role and impact of people, ideas, practices and objects (including buildings and budgets) that once filled them with life and meaning. InechO hypothesizes that for a full understanding of international history and questions of political governance more broadly, it is indispensable to consider the legacy and impact of liquidated IOs. New beginnings frequently echo the work of earlier IOs, even if existing interpretations and narratives ignore or downplay such links. Using largely neglected public and private sources as well as interviews, InechO will break new ground for international and European history by focusing on the “afterlives” of European International Organizations since the 1910s. InechO analyzes the long period since the 1910s and highlights five empirical case-studies representing the whole spectrum of possible options: 1.1 Sugar Union, 1.2 League of Nations, 1.3 Nazi Internationalism, 1.4 European Coal and Steel Community, 1.5 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). The PI will write a synthetic monograph analyzing additional case studies.
Informed by and contributing to an interdisciplinary state of the art, InechO builds on an innovative set of concepts and methods to address these issues. InechO will thus establish a new conceptual framework that will help research to rethink the nature of international cooperation and internationalism. Its approach and its findings are also highly relevant for the analysis of other world regions and their international history and for audiences beyond academia.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Overall, the first phase of InechO has demonstrated that the project has potential for original insights and proven its feasibility. The PI has published a conceptual article on the death of IOs, i.e. the introduction to the special issue “Vanished Institutions” in the Journal of Modern European History 23/2 (2025). The PI and other team members have presented InechO’s insights on several occasions to both academic and non-academic audiences.
The InechO team has conducted research in 23 archives across 15 states: from Scandinavia to Italy, the Netherlands to Poland and Ukraine, as well as the USA and has done oral history interviews. This is particularly relevant as unexamined archival material on the transformative period of the 1990s (which saw a spike in IGO terminations) is now available. Simultaneously, contemporary actors from that period are still available for in-depth interviews. Each of the case studies investigates the afterlife of a discontinued Intergovernmental Organization (IGO). Case studies differ regarding their historical context, the ideological underpinnings and various types of formal ends: ‘pan-European’; West and East; capitalist and socialist; liberal democratic, fascist and state socialist; explicitly European and allegedly international or global, but with a strong Eurocentric core, in some cases also with a colonial dimension. Even more importantly, we have cases of succession, absorption and dissolution. All these dimensions are also represented in the PI’s synthetic monograph. The team’s initial work on the case studies has examined the legacy dimension, testing and complementing InechO’s typology of transfers as developed for the proposal: delimitation (links to earlier IGOs are downplayed or denied, but might still exist), selective adaptation (partial transfer; certain links are emphasized, earlier IGOs form potential learning opportunities, other links or continuities might be identifiable) and direct adoption (links or continuities to earlier IGOs are essential).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

InechO addresses international organizations’ (IOs) afterlives at a moment in which liberal internationalism and the post–Cold War international order witness a transformative crisis. It revisits history not just to gain a better understanding of the “afterlife” of international organizations in the past but also to shed new light on international cooperation more broadly and to generate new knowledge of what the past can tell us for today. For a long time, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), the core pillars of internationalism and a sub-type of IOs, were seen as particularly robust. For this reason, the public and research have paid little attention to their demise and even less to their legacies and links to other forms of (international) governance.
The most significant achievement, beyond the state of the art, has been the establishment of an empirical basis to answer InechO’s innovative research questions. The research conducted so far has shown InechO’s feasibility. More importantly, it has demonstrated the innovative potential of the project: we can now empirically substantiate the grant proposal’s hypothesis that IGO’s legacies matter. The impact and forms of such legacies were, however, even more diverse than previously thought. These empirical insights have helped us to fine-tune our conceptual framework with the aim of theorizing about IOs’ afterlives.