Transnational Nationalism and Idealistic Science: The Alcohol Question between the Wars

This article studies the interwar international conferences on the alcohol problem. How did they view the alcohol problem and its causes; what were the consequences for the individual and the society as a whole; and which solutions merited discussion? The first post-war conferences enjoyed an optimistic and internationalistic atmosphere, added to by American prohibition, which had given the temperance movement plenty to be hopeful about. But when the 1920s turned to the 1930s, the conferences were transformed into arenas for national solutions and into outright propaganda pieces. The responses to the alcohol problem debated in the interwar conferences built on a combination of scientifically masked ideological conviction and ideologically inspired passion for science. The apparently neutral ethics of such thinking was manifested in various radical measures to combat alcohol abuse.


Introduction
When the conference delegates of the 15th International Congress against Alcoholism came together in Washington, DC at the end of September 1920, the circumstances were in many ways very different from the setting of the last pre-war conference in Milan in 1913. The war had left a mark on the alcohol question, for the war-time mobilisation and the time of crisis had led to widespread alcohol restrictions. Russia had introduced prohibition as early as 1914 as part of the war effort, and would go on to maintain it until 1925. 1 And in Washington, DC in 1920, the conference participants convened for the first time in a country that had introduced total prohibition, which had been aired and petitioned in these conferences ever since the late 1800s.
The special circumstances of the interwar years changed how the alcohol problem was formulated in many other ways. The First World War had shaken the trust in transnational exchange and collaboration which lay at the very core of the international conferences. This trauma also gave rise to the ideological antagonisms of the interwar period, with fascist and Nazi regimes in Italy, Germany and Spain, and a Bolshevik takeover in Russia. The interwar years made room for a considerably greater range of views at the conferences as to what the state, politics and civil society could achieve than had been the case in the early twentieth century.
This article studies the international conferences on the alcohol problem, arranged in 1920-1939 by the International Temperance Bureau (ITB, renamed in 1923 as the International Bureau Against Alcoholism, IBAA). While it may be somewhat misleading to treat the interwar years as a uniform entity, the conferences did reflect a concentration on certain topics all through the period. I will therefore focus on continuity rather than change, but will also comment on recognisable discontinuities during this period.
As historical and social science research has shown, alcohol and drug issues have functioned as a catalyst for more comprehensive questions such as youth unemployment, nationalism or anti-modernity. The aim of this article is both to characterise the general themes that were discussed in the name of the alcohol problem and also to investigate how the alcohol question was framed in terms of these themes. 2 How did these societies depict the alcohol problem and its causes? What were the consequences for the individual and the society as a whole? Which solutions merited discussion? Was there any common ground in terms of, for instance, generally accepted scientific descriptions of the alcohol problem?
The source material comprises the conference proceedings of seven of the eight international alcohol conferences held during 1920-1939 (see Table 1). 3 These proceedings tell us who the participants were and which organisations were present. The reports give us access to formal speeches and other manifestations of conference etiquette, to minuted discussions and-most important in terms of this study-to the participants' papers which had been dispatched and were read aloud in the conference. These debated a range of issues, including the impact of alcohol on the brain, relevant restrictive systems, the significance of female citizenship on the alcohol question, and sterilisation as a means of solving the alcohol problem. My analysis builds on the common and recurring topics and themes in these conferences. Occasional comparisons with the pre-war conferences build on a previous study on the anti-alcohol conferences during the years 1885-1913. 4 Previous research and theoretical aspects will be discussed with each theme.
I will next briefly discuss the formulation of the alcohol problem and the transnational framework of the conferences. This will be followed by a discussion of the proposals to remedy the problem of alcohol. The last empirical section will historically contextualise the alcohol problem in relation to modernisation efforts, state-ideological currents and contemporary aspirations to explain the alcohol question in scientific terms. The article concludes with a round-up of the arguments.  All conference volumes barring one have been accessible at The Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs (CAN). Despite all efforts, it has not been possible to trace the report of the 1937 conference in Warsaw.

The Alcohol Problem and the Conferences
In comparison with the period around the turn of the century, the alcohol problem was rather played down as a political question in the interwar years. 5 A great many countries introduced some form of retail control on alcohol in the course of the 1910s, and this trend was further boosted by the strive for national efficiency and sober warfare during the First World War. 6 When several countries (Russia, Iceland, Norway, Finland and the United States) also introduced their own versions of prohibition during or soon after the war, the future looked bright for one of the key objectives of the radical temperance movement. 7 This also contributed to a relative weakening of, or at the very least to a more passive role for, the temperance movement which had left such a clear mark on the anti-alcohol conferences of the first decades. As the political scientist Mark Lawrence Schrad has shown, the number of temperance organisations at these conferences already peaked at the 1911 meeting in The Hague, falling away remarkably toward the end of the period studied here. 8 The conferences were important in several respects. They showed that the alcohol question had become such an important social political question that these large-scale meetings were warranted. The meetings had served as key sites for international knowledge and policy dissemination in the alcohol field ever since the very first conference in 1885 and continued to do so for another hundred years. They were the key and frequently held meetings for researchers, government officials and NGO representatives to gather around a topic which, since the late nineteenth century, had been described as a critical issue for Western societies. Despite its weakened status, the temperance movement nevertheless had a clear role in the conferences. Representatives of various temperance organisations regularly appeared as speakers, and several conferences also discussed the movement as such. 9 The spirit of the temperance movement continued to rest upon the conferences, which were against alcohol rather than non-partisan discussions about alcohol (the exception was the 1934 conference in London, which like the London conference of 1907 went under the heading of an International Congress on Alcoholism). The anti-alcohol line was made even clearer at the 1920 conference in Washington DC, which established that this was 'distinctly a Congress against alcoholism'. 10 The message was enhanced on many occasions, as several presentations dwelled on the harmful effects of alcohol on the individual and society. Alcohol was 'a narcotic, a poison, and an abnormal drug', with terrible effects: 'it diminishes that moral, mental, and physical standard so necessary to the good of mankind'. 11 Alcohol caused disease, death and criminality, damaged the offspring, led to mental illness, moral depravity and juvenile delinquency, and destroyed societies and civilisations. 12 It mattered a great deal that the battle against alcohol was being wielded on an international forum. As Schrad argues, it helped to make the demands appear universal, as a fight between good and evil, rather than as a result of provincial interest formations. 13 Alternatively, one can observe, as the historian Ian Tyrrell claims, how '[t]he impact of industrialization, commercial prosperity, and the growth of rapid communications sharpened intellectual interest in matters international and transnational'. 14 The anti-alcohol movement was also just one of many international movements from the 1800s onwards that were organised around various social issues. The international arena, the transnational collaboration and the national sphere where actual policies were worked out were all part of the same picture. The national and the international were not at the opposing ends of the spectrum. Rather, internationalism demanded a certain nationalism: internationalism could be understood as collaboration between nations (as opposed to cosmopolitanism which had an indifferent relationship to the nation). 16 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman has identified this as a 'nationalism backed by moral universalism'. 17 And as the historian Robert Hohner has shown, such nationalism could appear as a kind of imperialism, which anchored matters close to American hearts in an international context and was happy to export the practice of prohibition to the rest of the world. 18 US Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels summarised the American stance eloquently in the 1920 conference in Washington, DC: Men of America are concerned for the welfare of men in Africa, and men in Asia, and men in Europe. And so this international body, powerless to legislate for any government, still has about it the power to educate, the power to inspire, and it has the purpose to say that what is evil to ignorant peoples and child races is evil to the educated people of the most advanced races. 19 American enthusiasm about the international arena as an opportunity to mediate American experiences was understandably and especially palpable in the conference on home ground in 1920, when the long battle of the temperance movement had been crowned with nationwide prohibition. Finally, here was an opportunity for 'the women of the world [to] strike hands with the men of the world, and they will march together until Prohibition shall be a fact in the constitution of every nation under the sun'. 20 Historian Virginia Berridge argues that in Britain, too, research questions and discussions about control and legislation were similarly posed in an international and comparative context and that the anti-alcohol conferences were a natural arena for such debates. 21 The interwar years are here labelled as a time of 'continuing-and growinginternationalism of the alcohol question and of research'. 22 Despite this, and unlike narcotics, international agreements did not regulate the alcohol traffic of the interwar years. The only exceptions were the various restrictions on the alcohol trade in and to the European colonies-just like before the First World War. 23 The rhetoric of international 16 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995); Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism. Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997); Samuel Edquist, Nyktra svenskar. Godtemplarr€ orelsen och den nationella identiteten (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001). solidarity was overflowing at the first post-war conference: 'we are living in a time of international interest, we are learning that no nation can live to itself, that our problems are your problems and that your problems are our problems'. 24 Such internationalism would never really reach the same enthusiastic heights, and it became increasingly clear in the 1930s that many conference participants represented nations on a collision course.

Debating Solutions: From Moral Suasion to Sterilisation
The rhetoric of war was never far away, and the war demanded its dues: soldiers, workers and citizens had to stay sober. As Lloyd George, British Chancellor of the Exchequer had observed in 1915, 'We are fighting Germany, Austria, and Drink; and as far as I can see the greatest of these three deadly foes is Drink'. 25 Some pre-war problem formulations, such as the coupling of alcohol and national efficiency or motherhood, were also strengthened by the war. 26 Conference delegates argued that the dire material circumstances had made people regard alcohol as an unnecessary luxury; that the war had helped to foster a sense of solidarity which was favourable to the temperance cause; or that people had simply come to realise during the more or less dry war years that they lived happier and better lives without alcohol. 27 But alcohol was still used and misused, and one of the suggested solutions to this problem was moral suasion.
The moral ground of the temperance movement was more often than not similar to missionary religiosity. As the sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Katariina Warpenius have put it, many 'found it quite easy to amalgamate teetotalism into their own religious doctrines'. 28 Abstinence and religiosity shared several points of contact, which is also evident in the conference delegates' background organisations, including the Anti-Saloon League and Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). 29 It was also made clear that religion could become a useful resource in the temperance work: 'Without religion there is no basis of authority above the human will, and without authority higher than the will of man there is no law and no morality', claimed the Catholic prelate Regis Canevin, for example. 30 The prohibition in the United States was interpreted as a manifestation of religious inspiration, and in the 1920 conference in Washington, DC Christian citizens were encouraged to involve themselves in society and politics to solve the problem of drunkenness. 31 Similar to the pre-war conferences, temperance education-of the youth in particular and often as part of school work-came to have a central role in solving the alcohol question. 32 But it is obvious that talk of temperance education was rather toned down in comparison with the earlier conferences. 33 Maybe this was because the question offered few new angles of approach and it was therefore seen as well and truly 'debated to death', as the liberal politician and physician Curt Wallis had claimed at the 1907 conference in Stockholm. 34 Young people and women were perfect representatives of the alcohol question, both as its tender victims and as its would-be solution. Women drank less than men, but they were nevertheless often the focus, sometimes as mothers, when the alcohol question was debated. 35 As the Canadian Chief Justice of the Supreme Court argued in the 1920 conference, women were 'the most directly affected, the most immediately exposed victim[s] of alcohol'. 36 According to the American Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, women would therefore drive the temperance question. Indeed, according to Bryan, American prohibition would have been introduced much earlier had it been decided by women. 37 Female qualities and duties were regularly extolled as promoting temperance: women were exemplary builders of character and now that more countries had granted them political citizenship, they were able to drive these questions as voters and legislating politicians. Women's responsibility for home and children were in the end the arguments that sealed their role in temperance work. 38 In this context, home was not only a private family sphere but also 'an ever widening circle'. 39 Home and nation were part of a larger context in which women were tasked with nurturing both their own children and the characteristics of the population as a whole; women were 'the guardians of the race', ultimately responsible for any 'influence upon race deterioration'. 40 There were far fewer conference presentations on alcohol treatment in the interwar years than there had been before the First World War. 41 This may be because remarkably few treatment institutions had survived the war, in the English-speaking world at least, and there were therefore fewer treatment units to provide treatment experiences. Social work researcher Jim Baumohl and sociologist Robin Room have analysed the impact of the war on this development and have shown that institutional treatment was unaffected in those countries which remained outside the war, such as Sweden and Switzerland. At the same time, one also needs to pay attention to what institutional treatment consisted of. Baumohl and Room quote the 1937 study by the physician Robert Fleming, according to whom responsibility for treatment rested with different authorities in different countries: To epitomize, perhaps unfairly, in Sweden social workers, in Germany the geneticists, in Switzerland the moralists, and in Vienna an overworked psychiatrist do the actual work, while in England the community has a laisser-faire attitude and no one is responsible. 42 Conference presentations on institutional treatment often came from countries such as Sweden and Finland, which had defined the alcohol problem in social terms and relied on social retraining. Some presentations also came from the Soviet Union, where it became possible in 1927 to commit alcohol misusers into coercive treatment on social grounds. 43 When the United States joined the ranks of countries with prohibition, lines between legitimate and illegitimate alcohol consumption were redrawn. The enemy became more easily identified, as it now appeared in the shape of organised crime. This was also illustrated in the 1925 conference in Geneva, when a number of delegates discussed alcohol smuggling. 44 Further, alcohol producers and their backers were seen as a threat to sobriety: it was the alcohol trade that was the main factor behind widespread alcoholism, claimed two French physicians in London in 1934. 45 The breweries were powerful bodies, and their economic resources could manoeuvre both governments and the press. 46 As the Methodist preacher Purley Baker aptly put it at one of the anti-alcohol conferences: 'All great moral reforms that seriously affect the monetary interest of a large group of people quickly assume a political aspect . . .'. 47 Had it not been for 'the business 40 McIlroy, 'Alcohol and Womanhood', 92. 41 Edman, 'Temperance and modernity'. judgment of man', the United States would have introduced prohibition many years sooner. 48 And in France, for example, it was almost impossible to ignore the many interests of the wine producers when the alcohol problem was being tackled. French alcohol consumption had reached record levels at the turn of the century, and the French temperance movement was weak and splintered. 49 One conference presentation went as far as claiming that the efforts of the temperance movement went against the French mentality: Finally, three traits of the French mentality constitute an added difficulty: the individualism of the Frenchman, which makes him hesitate to enroll himself under a banner; the instinct of independence, which often turns him away from signing an engagement of abstinence; and the fear of the ridiculous, which makes him afraid to affirm his anti-alcoholic convictions. 50 Most participating countries had by this stage however introduced some kind of alcohol controls. In Britain, the war experiences helped to shift the focus from individual alcohol misuse to collective alcohol control. 51 The conferences debated large-scale consumption studies as points of departure for various alcohol-political initiatives. 52 Similarly, the conferences frequently got to hear accounts of the different national restrictive systems or prohibition. 53 Still, conflicts between the various systems were obvious. By the interwar period, many in the Scandinavian temperance movement had finally accepted the Gothenburg system, which aimed to remove the profit interest from the alcohol trade by introducing a nonprofit alcohol retail monopoly, and which had long been seen as a wet alternative to prohibition. 54 At the same time, the Gothenburg system also allowed an institutionalisation of (regulated) alcohol consumption, which further distanced the drinking Europe from the dry United States. Such conflicting aims were also evident in the conferences. 55 Toward the end of the period studied here, one Swedish delegate found himself defending the state monopoly against criticism which claimed that this was to be seen as an 48 Bryan, 'Response', 402. alcohol-favouring policy rather than as a compromise between dry and wet alcohol policies. 56 The Gothenburg system had been frequently debated at pre-war conferences, but prohibition started to dominate the discussions once it had been introduced in several countries. 57 The 1920 conference in Washington, DC was almost taken over by those singing the praises of prohibition. The Persian delegate was able to put the matter in some perspective by referring to the 300-year ban on alcohol, decreed by the prophet Muhammad, but otherwise the credits were innumerable. 58 Ideas about the degenerating impact of alcohol had circulated at least since the eighteenth century, and the historian William Bynum in fact traces them back to antiquity. The Lamarckian theory of inheritance-that acquired characteristics could be passed on to offspring-was admittedly being questioned at the time. 59 But as far as some conference delegates were concerned, it was still held to be true that the alcohol misuser 'belongs to an inferior stock', that his 'tendency to drink is based on an inborn inferiority', and that his alcohol consumption in turn led to inferior offspring. 60 Women in particular should abstain from consuming alcohol because of its degenerating effects. 61 In the conferences before the First World War, such thoughts had not led to any consensus about suitable measures. While some saw in them a heavy argument in favour of public sobriety, there were others who would rather have restricted the procreation of alcohol misusers. Persuasion and internment were debated as suitable means, but sterilisations were not advocated. 62 In the interwar period, turn-of-the-century hygienic movements turned to a state-sanctioned agenda, which then appeared in many different guises depending on the ideological setting of the state. Comprehensive public health measures against sanitary problems and unhealthy environments shared the platform with measures of a more race-biological nature. As the historian Martin Pernick has shown, it is therefore not particularly helpful to make a distinction between interwar eugenics and public health measures. 63 The primacy of the collective was a common feature in both, and to Arthur Newsholme, one of the leading public health experts in Britain, this was also absolutely central in the development of civilised societies: 'Each advance in civilization implies increasing communal, supplementary to personal, control and limitation of acts which for the individual may be innocent, but which have been shown by protracted experiment and experience to be inimical to communal wellbeing . . .'.    On the rhetorical level, then, the ambitions expressed here were not that different from those in Nazi Germany. The uniformed German physician Erich Bruns stated in the 1939 conference in Helsinki that the national socialist worldview underpinned all thinking and action in Germany-and that health was not an individual matter but concerned the entire nation. 65 But proposals for practical measures during this time show a radicalisation of racial hygiene, which had served as a frame of thought in the temperance work ever since the late 1800s. The war boosted ideas about national efficiency in several fields, and in Britain, for example, this was linked with population quality and the racial hygiene of future generations. In France the concept of race featured prominently in wartime debates on alcohol use, when the fear of losing the war was linked to prospects of alcohol-related degeneration and troubles of rebuilding the country after the war. 66 Racial hygiene was an international phenomenon and not the sole province of any single ideology. 67 Liberals first raised interest in Sweden before racial hygiene was picked up by radical socialist and agrarian circles. In the United States, an early wave of sterilisations in the racial hygienic spirit has been linked with progressive forces, while similar measures in Britain met with resistance: the Labour Party rather regarded racial hygiene as anti-working class. Racial hygiene was a similarly complicated concept within nations, too. For example, in Britain it responded to a more conservative idea of mankind, that people had to find their natural place in society or that divisions in society reflected divisions of ability, while also demanding radical social reform. Michael Freeden also identifies several common points of departure in social reform movements, socialist circles and the racial hygiene movement in Britain. 68 In Germany, eugenics was integral to Nazi ideology, legitimating sterilisation and murder, though the forced sterilisation of alcohol misusers predated Nazism. The Weimar government's aim to find savings in costly institutional care led to expanding psychiatric non-institutional care, which served to justify sterilising outpatients and those who were considered beyond cure. 69 But racial hygiene did not necessarily result in sterilisations. The goal of promoting good qualities (positive eugenics) and obstructing bad qualities (negative eugenics) could also appear as birth control advice. The way the causal relation worked was central: should poverty and social problems be explained by poor inheritance or should social problems and poverty be understood as concurrent and socially dependent forces? The former was the predominant notion during the interwar period, which explained the interest to limit the procreation of socially troublesome groups. 70 This is where sterilisations-forced or otherwise-became one of the means in Germany: 'chronic alcoholics' were sterilised because their alcohol misuse was a manifestation of social or psychopathic damage. 71 The conferences debated relatively frequently the possibility of restricting the procreation of alcohol misusers. In his presentation, the physician Charles T. Stockard maintained that rather than being the problem, alcohol was the solution when it came to this 'class of weak mediocre people': 'Alcohol is one of the things that will tend to eliminate bad individuals, and inasmuch as from an economic standpoint they may not do much good or amount to much, why not use this means of eradicating them?' 72 Stockard's proposal of passive but purposeful killing had been discussed and dismissed in Vienna by the well-known race biologist Auguste Forel as an ineffectual method as early as 1901. 73 In the 1920 conference, too, the proposal met with polite resistance from delegates who preferred to stop 'these defectives' from procreating by confining 'them to farms where they would be treated kindly and mercifully, in a sort of colony where they would be prevented from reproducing'. 74 Inheritance and environment were debated as competing and complementary factors during the entire interwar period when an individual's behaviour was to be made sense of. The usual conclusion was that biological inheritance was the stronger of the two and that alcohol misusers therefore should be prevented from parenthood. 75 As internment was deemed to be complicated, ineffectual and costly, and as a marriage ban was seen as similarly ineffective, sterilisations appeared to be the most promising means. Germany had in 1934 adopted a law enabling forced sterilisation in serious cases of alcoholism. 76 But with 'the growth of genetic knowledge and with the arousal of a "Racial Conscience" in the minds of our citizens', hopes were also pinned on voluntary sterilisation, 'not as a punishment or a deprivation, but as a privilege, and as a way out of a great difficulty, and as a means of harmonising conflicting individual and racial interests'. 77 One of the few dissenting voices came from the Catholic church, which held that sterilised drinkers would suffer from much eroded sexual control, that sterilisation would be an encroachment on a person's free will and-with the backing of a papal announcement-that such measures were against nature. 78

Modernity, State Ideology and Science
In comparison with pre-war conferences, the alcohol problem was debated in much more concrete terms in the interwar years. 79 71 Burleigh, 'Psychiatry, German Society, and the Nazi "Euthanasia" Programme', 219. experiences, the aim to achieve both military and civic efficiency. 80 The Catholic church still regarded an individual's moral stature as an unquestioned element of the solution, but many more delegates preferred to advocate for practical responses which were depicted as ethically neutral. As Charles T. Stockard claimed, one could not approach this question 'from an ethical or humanitarian standpoint; we've got to consider it on a scientific basis'. 81 This is where sterilisations appeared as a technical solution to a practical problem, and this approach permeated several aspects of the alcohol problem.
As before the First World War, the demands of the modern society helped to define the alcohol problem. 82 The ever-expanding mechanisation and Taylorism left their mark on the working environment where sobriety and efficiency were demanded from the workers. 83 Alcohol had had its place in working life-at times even sanctioned by the employer-and it was not without friction that people now adjusted to the demands of the new era. Employers, too, could find this development problematic, as lumberjacks, for example, who had stopped drinking became wealthier and therefore took longer holidays. In a somewhat curious contribution in the 1920 conference, a representative of the American forest industry put his trust in the churches: if these materially contented young men could be made to marry or if they could be rendered culturally more refined, one could hope to increase their requirements in life and thereby encourage them to work more. Still, unconditional condemnation of alcohol in working life was much more common, all in the name of increased efficiency and safety. 84 Leisure was another dilemma, and all the more so with increasingly shorter working hours. 85 Leisure pursuits could come in all kinds of unwanted guises, such as the much debated 'dancing nuisance', with concomitant drinking and immorality. 86 To remedy this, one needed new leisure interests, such as sports. But doing sports did not necessarily mean staying sober, which is why a number of conference papers talked about the benefits of alcohol-free sports. Increased motoring also promoted the virtues of non-drink driving. 87 80 Newsholme, 'The Place of the Alcohol Question in Social Hygiene'; F. A. Brandt, 'Alcohol and Railways', CP 1923.  Modernity demanded its dues but also met its critics. The destructive but logical function of alcohol in industrial society had been addressed since Friedrich Engels' studies on the condition of the English working class and the nature of alcohol as an escapist comforter. 88 At times the conferences would raise these perspectives again, but preferably with the caveat that increased welfare, improved working conditions, better education and training, and a more varied leisure time had by now decreased the need for alcohol as a social anaesthetic. With such ideological positioning of alcohol policies it was natural that the representative of Soviet state socialism in the 1934 conference knew how this question would be best solved: improve the general living conditions, give people a more varied leisure time, offer them better housing, create public employment and social services. 89 The two world wars remodelled the very structures of the warring nations and in many cases also the make-up of nations which managed to stay outside the wars. Warfare, military preparedness, trade embargos and rationing meant that the modern states had to assume new duties. The politically and administratively revitalised states also addressed the alcohol problem with a new conviction during the interwar period. The aspirations were announced loud and clear when one of the leaders of the British temperance movement, Theodore Neild, lamented in the 1920 conference that the nation did not always have enough power to carry out its policies; what was needed in such cases was nothing less than 'complete control'. 90 Interwar developments also led to varying levels of state potency. No wonder that in Helsinki in 1939, only a month before the Second World War broke out, Robert Hercod (Executive Director of ITB and IBAA in 1907-1950) acknowledged that the constitutional basis was remarkably different in, for example, Germany and Britain. The dictatorships had certain undeniable advantages: 'In the totalitarian countries where the State takes upon itself the education of youth outside the school and the home, a vigorous attitude against alcohol and the abstinence of the youth leaders is of extreme importance.' 91 This was confirmed by the German delegates Hans Seidel and Ernst Bauer, who witnessed how the German notion of the state had changed, thereby also changing the nature of involvement among the official bodies whose duty it was to fight alcohol misuse. This fight was now more comprehensive and was understood as the sum of all measures-'die Gesamtsumme aller Massnahmen'-by the authorities who were to guide the people and the nation. 92 The clearest indications of views on state control were seen when the conferences debated the liberal dilemma of collective rule for the benefit of the individual. This was not a major problem in the authoritarian states of the interwar period, but was also not a matter of principle for the democracies, either, when it came to dissecting their undemocratic ways of governing the colonial populations. 93 The colonial powers could without problems make decisions on sales restrictions and prohibition; indeed, the question about alcohol consumption among 'the Native Races' was 'a subject which par excellence is suitable for discussion at an International Conference'. 94 At the same time, this care for the natives spoke of one's own problems and the shortcomings of national politics. After all, 'what is evil to ignorant peoples and child races is evil to the educated people of the most advanced races'. 95 The alcohol problem was understood and solved in a national-and on many occasions in a nationalistic-context. The First World War fed on and reproduced nationalistic frames of understanding which survived the peace and continued to organise political thinking during the interwar period. 96 In the conferences, this mindset could argue that alcohol use was a foreign custom or that solutions to the alcohol question were intended to preserve the national community, 'die Volksgemeinschaft'. 97 During the politically turbulent interwar period the nationalistic take on the alcohol question went hand in hand with increasingly obvious political positioning, especially in the 1930s when Nazi Germany was seeking to sell its ideological framing by the side of liberal and social democratic democracies and the communist Soviet Union. The reading of the conference proceedings, therefore, gives us a rather different picture of the interwar development, which Berridge has described as a period of growing internationalism. 98 One obvious change during this period is in fact the decline of internationalism and the onslaught of nationalistic propaganda manoeuvres. The less important role of the transnational temperance movement and the rise of totalitarian regimes most likely contributed to this.
The totalitarian regimes also used the conferences as propaganda platforms, as when the Soviet ambassador to Britain, Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, presented a paper in the 1934 conference in London on how his country had tackled the alcohol problem during the last decade: This has been brought about by the development of the national economy, the successful fulfilment of the Five-Year Plan, the tremendous growth in education, the wiping out of unemployment and the collectivisation of the countryside. The health services, the prophylactic treatment of social ills, which has grown so tremendously in the last few years, the improvement in workers' dwellings, the extensive housebuilding, the system of public feeding, which now embraces 20 million of the the solutions in this very legitimacy. And it is here that the scientific argument often stood the debate in good stead.
In this context, science and ideology should not be treated as opposing entities. I do not agree with Schrad's view that the conferences represented either transnational advocacy networks or epistemic communities, the former described as 'primarily [motivated] by shared normative understandings' and the latter as sharing 'scientific and cognitive understandings'. 107 This distinction helps Schrad to establish that epistemic communities are only loosely connected to the political process, while transnational advocacy networks 'actively seek social and political change based primarily on shared understandings of right versus wrong and good versus evil'. 108 But, as previous research has shown, a scientific rendering of a question can also contribute to a de-ideologisation of sorts which enables a stronger political mobilisation in various questions. 109 The interwar anti-alcohol conferences did indeed feature fewer presentations which conceived the alcohol problem in religious or general moral terms. Still, science was not necessarily able to determine whether something was true or not, and as the philosopher Roger Smith has shown, the biological sciences of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have been both descriptive and normative. Smith also points out that biologists' references to 'the body politic' or 'the social organism' have sought to anchor ideologically preferable ideals in accounts of the natural order. 110 As a frame of understanding and as a basis of state action, racial hygiene obviously depended on this scientific legitimacy. Historian of ideas Gunnar Broberg and historian Mattias Tyd en have even claimed that racial hygiene made such inroads into contemporary societies because it expressed a more widespread reliance on science. And historian Yvonne Hirdman argues that scientific competence was a prerequisite in interfering with people's lives during the 1930s whether they wanted it or not. 111 Then as now, the positivist ideal of science strengthened time-and culture-bound notions on the society and the individuals, endowing them with traces of eternal truths. Or, as the historian Martin S. Pernick has described this in the context of the American movement of racial hygiene: 'This widely shared faith in objectivity did not succeed in eliminating subjective values from medicine, but it did serve to delegitimise the openly political and ethical debate that is necessary if a culture is to assess its value judgments intelligently'. 112 The anti-alcohol conferences valued the scientific argument highly. Conference delegates toned down their emotional aversion to alcohol, and when the repeal of American prohibition was being debated, it was made clear that the decision could not be based 107 Schrad on 'a wave of sentiment' but that the matter should rest on 'sound evidence'. 113 This also applied to temperance education: to be successful, such education should abstain from 'moral exhortation against drinking' in favour of 'scientific facts'. 114 And when one discussed suitable methods of alcoholism treatment, the debate was able to draw on 'modern scientific conception'. 115 The temperance movement had already before the First World War complemented its ideological pathos with arguments of a scientific nature, continuing these efforts by, for example, collecting scientific facts through the Scientific Temperance Federation. 116 Such methodical truth-seeking work may have lacked a certain fervour, but it was no longer possible to sell 'facts which can not be thoroughly backed up by the best scientific evidence'. 117 The passion for science reappeared when a somewhat misguided debate was said to have 'wandered very far afield from the scientific discussion of the problem of alcoholism'. 118 Science had also shown that the modern life demanded sobriety. 119 Sterilising alcohol misusers was not an issue, either, that could be discussed 'from an ethical or humanitarian standpoint'; it could only be seen 'on a scientific basis'. 120 Also, a shift from medical aspects to social factors was motivated by 'a more scientific outlook on social phenomena in general'. 121 With science on one's side, it was possible to promote certain questions with much more credibility: 'Science has taught us that even a moderate use of intoxicating liquor is harmful', said William Jennings Bryan, thereby also settling the question of whether it was preferable to abstain from alcohol altogether or drink in moderation. 122 But the fact that it was Bryan who flew the flag of science suggests caution. Bryan was a sworn enemy of Darwinism and the evolutionary theory, and played a significant role in the 1925 Scopes Trial on the right to teach evolutionary theory in American state-funded schools. Bryan did not dismiss science but rather argued that evolutionary theory was unscientific. 123 But he also pleaded the authority of religion: 'If you have any faith in the Bible, turn back through its pages and find that wine has been a mocker throughout the years.' 124 Later at the same conference, Bryan admitted that he had always been 'interested in the demonstrations of science' but that he nevertheless felt that 'the instinct is often more speedy in its action and more sure in its results than mathematical calculations'. 125 His more traditional stance on the temperance question was backed by P. J. O'Callaghan, a representative of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union: 'There is nothing 113 real or great in the world but ideals; the rest of the world dies'. 126 Or, as it was expressed in the 1934 conference in London: 'Science and Idealism must go hand in hand'. 127 There was thus no shared point of departure and strategy built on scientific grounds. It was not even certain that the conference delegates were speaking about the same question. As William White has shown, there was tremendous breadth in the conceptual understanding of the alcohol problem. Turn-of-the-century attempts to describe alcohol misuse as a disease had made few converts, and the problem formulation was also relatively disparate in the interwar years. 128 As shown in a recent project on 'addiction concepts' in four European countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no conceptual common comprehension of 'addiction' between the countries-even if you limit this to the medical field. 129 Not surprisingly then, this was also the case at the investigated conferences with their broader scope of perspectives.
The 1920 conference discussed alcohol's 'specific action on the human brain' but alcoholism was still defined as, for example, 'men's abuse of alcohol'. 130 In the last conference of the interwar period, one fascinating presentation offered the theoretical possibility that alcohol misuse could be seen as a particular manifestation of an overwhelming 'S€ uchtigkeit', an addiction which could also appear as a wandering urge ('Wandertrieb'), kleptomania ('Stehlsucht'), pyromania ('Brandstiftungssucht'), a compulsive urge to commit murder ('Mordsucht'), a dancing urge ('Tanzsucht') and as a general urge to seek pleasure ('Vergn€ ugungssucht'). 131 People who might be seen as problem gamblers today were also included, as were those athletes and adventurers who yearned for a thrill. 132 However, at the same conference-and in order to underline the breadth of contemporary understandings-it was also argued (typically enough by a Nordic representative) that it was extremely hard medically to determine alcoholism and that the problem should rather be approached from a social angle. 133

Conclusion
The First World War tested the internationalistic ambitions of popular movements. Much has been written about the disappointment within the labour movement when workers 126 The historian David T. Courtwright maintains that the governing ideas about alcohol, tobacco and other drugs (ATOD) at this time emphasized their differences rather than commonalities. were sent to fight other workers in the bloodiest war known to contemporary mankind. 134 The first post-war conferences nevertheless enjoyed an optimistic atmosphere, and American prohibition had obviously given the temperance movement something to be hopeful about. But when the 1920s turned to the 1930s, it became increasingly evident that the conferences were being transformed into arenas for various national agendas. Such shared problems as criminality, population characteristics, core functions of the state, and industrial efficiency were increasingly given a national stamp. And when the enthusiasm of the early years over the desirability for prohibition had waned, it was possible to see how the common endeavour to solve a common problem through a common agenda was exchanged for national solutions and outright propaganda pieces, where one's own responses were marketed as a logical outcome of state ideological aspirations.
This was a transition period for the temperance movement. On the one hand, it was driven by a relatively vague religious yet still idealistic power. On the other hand, for both strategic and epistemological reasons it was influenced by scientific thought. The division was apparent across the whole field, from inspired Presbyterian ministers and Nazi philosophers of a mysterious bent to science-prone Baptists and sociologically-oriented communists. The radical responses of the racial hygienists made room for ideological convictions of varying colours, but they also shared a common faith in ethically neutral science. Sterilisations were propagated and practised as a reaction to individuals' alcohol consumption in such democratic countries as Sweden, the United States and Weimar Germany. The national socialist takeover in Germany extended the eugenic arsenal to include murder.
The responses to the alcohol problem debated in the interwar conferences built on a combination of scientifically masked ideological conviction and ideologically inspired passion for science. The apparently neutral ethics that we can detect in such thinking was manifested in its most extreme forms in the horrors of the Second World War. The more brutal varieties of race biology were discredited in the racist genocide committed by the Nazis, but the 'scientification' of the alcohol problem had only been hinted at during the interwar period. While the rise of the influential alcoholism movement after the Second World War was equally grounded in social, economic and ideological currents, it was often portrayed as a triumph of science. Now that various means of collective alcohol restrictions had been found wanting, the alcohol problem needed new solutions. After the Second World War, the relationship would yet again be shaken between the alcohol misusing individual and a new kind of society. Agreement no. 266813-Addictions and Lifestyle in Contemporary Europe-Reframing Addictions Project (ALICE RAP-<www.alicerap.eu>). Participant organisations in ALICE RAP can be seen at < http://www.alicerap.eu/about-alice-rap/partner-institutions. html>. The views expressed here reflect those of the author only and the European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.