William Emmanuel Rappard was born on 22 April 1883 in New York City to Swiss parents; at the time his father was working in the United States as a representative of various Swiss industries. Rappard enrolled at Harvard University in 1906 where he completed his graduate studies in Economics in 1908. The next academic year he studied at the University of Vienna in Austria-Hungary attending the seminars of two leading figures of the Austrian school of economics Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Eugen Philippovich von Philippsberg. In 1911 he returned to Harvard as an adjunct professor of political economy. He left two years later to take up the position of professor of economic history and public finance at the University of Geneva where he also served as a rector for some years during the 1920s and again in the 1930s.
Rappard was a member of various Swiss diplomatic missions including the peace conference in France that ended the First World War. He was said to have made a strong impression on US President Woodrow Wilson and was pivotal in persuading him to base the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva. In 1920 Rappard started work for the League as director of the Mandates Division, overseeing the administration of colonial territories lost by the Central powers following the war. He became a member of the Permanent Mandates Commission in 1925 serving until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
In 1927 Rappard co-founded the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, alongside the internationally respected economist Paul Mantoux. Rappard’s goal was to train future generations, with the help of international renowned scholars, so that they may in turn contribute to global peace and freedom. Among these internationally renowned scholars that taught alongside Rappard in the 1930s were, among others, Hans Kelsen, Pitman B. Potter, Michael A. Heilperin and Wilhelm Röpke. Alongside these Rappard brought numerous noted visiting scholars including F. A. Hayek, Lionel Robbins, Quincy Wright, Luigi Einaudi, Eric Voegelin, and Bertil Ohlin. Rappard remained the director of the Graduate Institute until his retirement in 1955.
Throughout the 1920s and 30s Rappard defended the League of Nations in principle although he had become disillusioned with it in practice. He saw nations pursuing their national interests single-mindedly, refusing to respect decisions made by the international court and finally faced with rising hostility from Italy, Germany and Japan countries resorted to national armament over collective security. Rappard sought to address why nations had moved away from the classical-liberal world of peace and freedom citing the interconnectedness of economic and political nationalism and the power that states had gained during the First World War as a key reason. This economic nationalism continued during the interwar period with countries unwilling to rely on imports in case international conflict rendered them unavailable. Rappard believed that the Second World War was an unavoidable culmination of these policies.
After the Second World War Rappard expressed doubt in the new United Nations describing it as a product of the victors of the Second World War and criticized it for its initially restrictive membership and the power which it gave to the five members of the Security Council. Later he warned of the calamity of a war breaking out between the two nuclear powers the United States and the Soviet Union. Although he believed that the Soviet Union would eventually collapse from internal forces he stressed the need for the West have its own ideal. In his last book The Secret of American Prosperity, Rappard expounded the role that human liberty played in America’s success and argued that Europe should relearn that lesson while retaining their unique culture and traditions.
William Rappard passed away on 29 April 1958 shortly after his 75th birthday. In 1977 the former International Labour Organisation building was named after William Rappard. It was the first building in Geneva to be built specifically to hold an international organization and after the ILO left hosted the secretariat of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the library of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Since 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the GATT and became the main occupant of the Centre William Rappard.