From Geneva (1927) to Amsterdam (1931): the question of international regulation of social questions between renewal and resistance

The question of international regulation of social questions had been present in European political debates since the turn of the century. The French socialist Albert Thomas had actually been very active prior to 1914 in private non-state expert networks that met on an international level to debate social reforms. The activism of new institutional actors and the diffusion of new ideas encouraged by a kind of solidarity prevailing among the formerly allied counties and presented through the perspective of internationalism after the Great War will be my main topic of analysis through the international economic conference of Geneva (1927) to the one of Amsterdam in 1931. Thomas was convinced that Fordism with its greater productivity would lead to higher salaries earn through less working hours by securing a strengthened participation of workers in the operations of the firm. But resistance came from the dominant economic thinking of the time which can be qualified as orthodox even if it was the target of increasingly open attacks after the crisis of 1929. Economic theory long remained one of the most significant obstacles to social reforms by showing that measures in favour of workers violated natural laws and carried with them the risk of disastrous consequences that would primarily impact the working class. Social arguments in favour of intervention thus found more support in the world of human experience than that of economic theory, deprived as they were of a doctrine on which they could lean.