Liberal and Illiberal Internationalism in the Making of the League of Nations Convention on Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace

Abstract

The 1936 League of Nations Convention on the Use of Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace sought to shape a liberal international public sphere, through encouragement of empathetic and neighborly broadcasts to other nations and prohibitions on international broadcast of hostile speech and false claims. It expressed 1920s liberal hopes that adding protocols and rules to international communications would foster peace. How was it then that by the late 1930s these same hopes for an international public sphere of civil and peace-fostering international discourse appeared to many liberals in national contexts as not only fantastical, but illiberal, a clear threat to the emerging core liberal value of free speech? Analysis of the making and early implementation of the Convention facilitates understanding of the rapid change in the valency of these ideas and illuminates the historical contours of the always-contested line between liberal and illiberal policies in communications history. That line is difficult to discern clearly in this case for two main reasons: removing offensive criticism of other nations from international broadcasting was perceived as illiberal censorship by some and as laudable self-restraint and international good manners by others; positive liberal internationalist content was perceived as educational by liberal internationalists and as potentially illiberal propaganda by nationalists. Viewing the making of the Convention through the lens of the contest about what constituted liberal and illiberal internationalism helps us better understand both its high ambition and some of the reasons why it was so quickly labelled a failure. [End Page 165]