William E. Rappard, Uniting Europe: The Trend of International Cooperation Since the War (1930)

Rappard’s work is a single-author interwar study of European and international cooperation after 1918, ranging from Germany’s postwar condition and Europe’s changing economic position to peace pacts, the League Secretariat, and the League Council. Its central thesis is cautious but forceful: Europe is not being “united” by sentiment, constitutional design, or the simple triumph of idealism, but by the pressure of facts—economic interdependence, intellectual contact, and the insufficiency of sovereign states acting alone.

But as long as states retain their complete political independence, while becoming increasingly interdependent economically and intellectually, international cooperation, wasteful and inefficient as it often is from the administrative point of view, will continue to be and ever more to become a vital necessity for all.

That sentence gives the book its governing tension. Rappard does not deny sovereignty; indeed, he treats it as the premise from which cooperation must proceed. His argument is therefore neither nationalist nor federalist in any simple sense. International organization appears as a practical adjustment to a world in which states remain formally independent while becoming materially unable to solve major problems alone.

The work’s structure moves from diagnosis to institution. Rappard first situates postwar Europe in economic and political context, with Germany as a central problem and symptom. His economic analysis stresses Europe’s relative decline and fragmentation rather than merely the devastation of war.

From 1913 to 1926 the foreign trade of North America increased relatively faster than that of the world, that of the world faster than that of Europe, and that of western Europe faster than that of eastern Europe.

This comparison allows Rappard to frame cooperation not as benevolence but as competitive necessity. Europe’s internal divisions weaken it in a world economy whose centers of growth are shifting. Yet he resists crude social or economic determinism, as when he rejects facile explanations of political form by occupational structure:

Surely not to the effect that agriculture is the economic synonym for political dictatorship.

The conceptual move is characteristic: Rappard links economic conditions to politics without reducing one to the other. European cooperation is made necessary by interdependence, but it still depends on institutions, public opinion, administrative habits, and diplomatic restraint.

The later portions of the work turn to the instruments of postwar order. Rappard treats the Kellogg Pact as important partly because its simple language could reach ordinary citizens and help create a public psychology favorable to peace. But his deeper institutional interest lies in the League of Nations. He separates the League’s temporary entanglement with the peace settlements from its more lasting significance as a machinery of consultation, administration, and conciliation.

The execution of the peace treaties is a secondary, an almost accidental, and essentially a transient function of the League.

This distinction is crucial. The League is not, for Rappard, reducible to Versailles. Its value lies less in enforcing a punitive settlement than in creating regular procedures and an international habit of mind. That habit is embodied above all in the Secretariat, whose staff must transcend national allegiance in the conduct of official duties.

The members of the staff carry out, as I have explained, not national but international duties.

Here Rappard’s vision of “uniting Europe” becomes administrative and ethical as much as constitutional. International cooperation requires people trained to act internationally, not merely delegates bargaining for states. Yet he remains sober about institutional power. The League Council is not a sovereign authority standing above governments, and Rappard explicitly refuses the fantasy of a global magistracy.

In other words, the Council has throughout acted as a somewhat modest and timid international conciliator, mediator, and arbiter, but never as a world magistrate, majestically enforcing the dictates of justice.

The relevance of the work lies in this realism. Rappard’s Europe is neither a completed union nor a failed dream, but a field of partial, uneven, indispensable cooperation. He presents international organization as inefficient, compromised, and often timid, yet still historically necessary because modern states cannot escape their mutual dependence. The book’s lasting contribution is to define cooperation not as the opposite of sovereignty, but as the discipline sovereignty must learn under modern conditions.