League of Nations

League of Nations, founded in 1919 as part of the Versailles settlement at the end of the First World War, was intended to be a world-wide peacekeeping organization. Its principal founder was Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), president of the USA; but, for reasons primarily of American internal politics, the US Senate did not ratify the treaty in which the League's covenant was first set out, and the USA was never a member. Germany did not join until 1926, and left in 1934—an early indication by Hitler that he did not agree with world peace; and not till after Germany left did the USSR join. The League therefore lacked the membership of several important world powers, and never exercised the full influence envisaged for it by its founders.

Moreover Mussolini twice defied it—over the comparatively trumpery Corfu incident of 1923, and over his invasion of Abyssinia in 1935; and Japan defied it in Manchuria in 1931 (see Manchukuo). Although its members all undertook, in article 10 of its covenant, ‘to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members’, this did not stop many of them from embarking on further pacts of mutual assistance, limited to particular areas; which in turn reflected badly on the good faith of their adherence to article 10. Article 16 provided for immediate economic and social, and potential military, sanctions against any member that committed any act of aggression; but when it came to the point, in Manchuria and in Abyssinia, little economic or social and no military action was taken. The League was, in short, as was said of Prohibition in the USA, ‘an experiment, noble in motive’ that turned out too ideal for the real world.

It provided a useful forum in the 1920s for international debates and for attempts to arrive at a general understanding about disarmament; and various subsidiary organs, such as the (still existing) International Labour Organization, were of substantial use in promoting welfare over much of the world's territory. The colonial possessions of Germany and Turkey, both defeated in the First World War, were parcelled out in League of Nations mandates among the victorious powers; some of these became independent, as had been Wilson's intention, in the 1930s (for example Iraq), while others (like Palestine) were still under the control of their mandatory power in 1939. League inspections of them had ceased by that date.

The last political act of the League was to expel the USSR, in December 1939, in response to the Soviet invasion of Finland (see Finnish–Soviet war). Thereafter the League entered a state of suspended animation and was replaced in 1945 by the United Nations, with a different constitution and a more comprehensive membership (see San Francisco conference).

M. R. D. Foot

Bibliography

Walters, F. P. , A History of the League of Nations, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952).