William Emmanuel Rappard

Nationality

Switzerland

Date of Birth

1883

Date of Death

1958

Political
Preference

Internationalist

William Rappard was a Swiss academic and diplomat. He was a part of several Swiss diplomatic missions and a member of the Swiss delegation to the peace conference in France at the end of World War I. He was responsible for convincing U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to choose Geneva as the headquarters of the League of Nations from 1920 onward.

Rappard co-founded and was the Director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1927. It would proof an important institutional hub for future neoliberals.
He was a member of the Swiss delegation of the League of Nations Assembly from 1928 to 1939.

After the war, he was involved with the launch of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, an international network for liberal economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Rappard also attended the Congress of Europe in The Hague in 1948, although he did not favour Swiss participation in the process of European integration.