Who Begins: Transfer and Transformation of Administrative Culture From the League of Nations to the World Health Organization

This article reconstructs the course of WHO-establishing activities and analyses how the WHO’s administrative culture was a continuation of its interwar predecessor, the League of Nations Health Organization, with the momentum of the war’s aftermath allowing for several overdue re-arrangements. Based on documentation of the WHO, the League of Nations Archive, as well as private records of key players, the article first traces strategic considerations by key players from only partially corresponding expert clusters, all entitled and aspiring to establish their version of the best public health agency possible. The establishing interactions between key experts and officials, but also personnel pooling logic and the early WHO’s approach to managing diversity of its staff speak for a considerable transfer of practices in administration between the predecessor and successor organizations.

Despite the UN authorities’ programmatic statements, documents on the founding years of the WHO reveal an unbroken continuity of many intact administrative practices, functional bodies, and work focuses from the LNHO. These were largely defined by new labels and added to the legitimacy that the WHO needed in its formative years. Analyzing these continuities from the interwar decades of public health internationalism, the article spotlights the junctures where deliberate changes were undertaken disguised as the zero hour, allowing to resolve the previously unmanaged issues. The text thus contributes to a more complex and comprehensive picture of how international bodies of a global scale survive and live on, even after their presumed and declared death.