Graduate unemployment in Interwar Belgium: a transnational analysis of a new field of expertise

Today, employability of university graduates is in everyone’s mind, not less in graduates’ mind themselves than in that of the authorities. But the fear about graduate unemployment has nothing new. The Great Depression of the 1930’s also saw a huge increase of unemployment among degree-holders – at least, if one follows the contemporaneous prose.
In my thesis project, I study the graduate unemployment crisis in Belgium in the Interwar period. More precisely, I study the birth of a new expertise dedicated to this old social problem. The 19th century has been punctuated by outbursts of fear among the ruling classes against the rise of an “intellectual proletariat”; but the Interwar period was the first time that some people dedicated themselves to a careful, systematic study of the phenomenon, claiming on scientific objectivity to promote their views. Who were these ‘experts’ in Belgium? Were they recognized as such by Belgian rulers? And how did they built their claim on expertise?
What I have discovered so far from untouched Belgian archives, is that the use of transnational networks was decisive in building these experts’ knowledge and authority. They met their European counterparts in the context of League of Nations institutions, such as the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation. In this presentation, I intend to display the first promising steps of my work on these transnational exchanges of ideas about graduate unemployment policies and statistics, focusing on the conflicting political views on education and labour that shaped the work of these experts.