![]() ![]() The article emphasizes the shipowners’ propositions to form their own private security organization in response to the Liberal government’s assertion of neutrality in labour disputes. It looks at the transnationalization of its anti-labour schemes and the formation of an international body of strike-breakers, the International Shipping Federation, to deal with the question of maritime labour at home and abroad. Significance of the league of three emperors 1873 professional#Using a vast array of sources, including several series of minutes and the financial records and ledgers of the association of shipowners, this article provides a number of insights into the Federation’s organizational and operational structure, the subcontracting of labour replacement to professional or commercial strike-breaker agencies as well as the delegation of protection tasks to vigilante groups. This article examines the policy and strategies of the Shipping Federation, which was the most aggressive employer association in the United Kingdom during the pre-war period. We want to suggest that private international fora such as the ICC nurtured the fluidity of diplomacy involving both states and non-state actors. In a last section, we suggest some effects of this private diplomatic arena by investigating the extent of ICC’s influence on the League of Nations and the United Nations. We argue that this very arena, mid-way between firms and states, offers insight into the corporatist dimension of 20th century diplomacy. We then discuss a neglected private diplomatic arena, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), a business association created in 1920 as a parliament of world business in which capitalists from different nations exchanged in a “diplomacy-like” way. It shows that business and state diplomacy were tightly intertwined: business people acting as diplomats, state actors following business goals. How do business actors participate in diplomatic activities? Do companies embrace national diplomatic agendas, or do they pursue atomized aims, disconnected from national contexts? In this article, we review the literature on business actors in diplomacy in search for answers to these questions. After WWI, in the context of generalized social uprising, those exchanges paved the way for the foundation of the International Organisation of Industrial Employers, which was to become an Internationale in the employers’ camp. Key employers learned from one another and diffused strong anti-labour ideology and practices all over Europe. The chapter shows that associations met internationally in congresses and conferences, as well as through key individuals acting as transnational brokers. In comparison to the rich literature available on the international dimension of labour militancy the current state of the literature on employers’ organizations does not enable to apprehend the depth of these transnational exchanges among employers. ![]() While the foundation of these associations has been studied for most national cases the transnational exchanges that inspired these foundations have remained little studied. ![]() Among other things these associations constituted strike insurances, shared blacklists of unionized workers and provided strikebreakers when needed. Around 1900 throughout Europe, employers facing labour militancy founded powerful local and national employers’ associations. This chapter investigates how employers organized to defend these fortifications and responded to the challenges of the labour movement, from the turn of the twentieth century to the early 1920s. Maier wrote: “if the weakness and divisions of the attackers are well known, the strategies of social and political defense remain unexplored” (Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 1988: 4). Comparing post-WWI European societies to fortresses attacked by revolutionaries and defended by “the forces of order” Charles S. ![]()
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