Bureaucrats make unlikely heroes, and they do not come much more unlikely than Sir Eric Drummond. An Old Etonian from the Scottish aristocracy, he had pursued an unglamorous career in the Foreign Office before the first world war, and his conversion to Catholicism shortly before his marriage may have further damaged his prospects. He was third or fourth choice to run the newly established League of Nations in 1919, but he made a brilliant job of it on a shoestring budget, and in the process he created something new in world affairs – an embryonic international civil service. The relatively small staff that worked under Drummond inspired the 1945 formation of the United Nations, a larger and more lavishly funded international body, and thus in some measure created the world we know today.
Susan Pedersen’s strikingly original book puts Drummond and those around him in the spotlight, and in the process transforms our understanding of the League of Nations. For many years after it was disbanded in 1946 the league was a byword for failure, a graveyard of hopes. Even during the war, about the only thing the architects of the UN could agree on was that their new world organisation should have a different name. Given the considerable continuities in function and personnel, this rebranding worked surprisingly well – even as the league was being unceremoniously wound up, the new UN was welcomed with high hopes.
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