League of Nations

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LEAGUE OF NATIONS.

FAILURES AND SUCCESSES
LEGACY
BIBLIOGRAPHY

The League of Nations was established as part of the peace settlement of 1919, with the express aim of ensuring that no conflict on the scale of World War I would ever occur again. The United States president, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), took the lead in pressing for the immediate formation of a worldwide organization of states during the opening phase of the Paris Peace Conference. He insisted that the constitution of the new body—to be called the Covenant—should constitute the first twenty-six articles of each of the peace treaties concluded in 1919–1920. Ironically, Wilson's attempt to secure United States membership in the League by incorporating its constitution into the Treaty of Versailles failed when in November 1919 and again in March 1920, the United States Senate failed to ratify the treaty. Thus the United States never became a member of the League of Nations.

The major aims of the League were to prevent the outbreak of a major war, and to contain and resolve, by peaceful means as far as possible, any disputes that did break out between nations. In an attempt to maximize its effectiveness, the League was given a wide range of functions, all of which, separately or in combination, could provide "avenues of escape" from war. Thus the League was equipped to play many different roles: to act as a permanent interstate conference; as a disarmament agency; as the guarantor of the frontiers of its member states; as an agency for arbitration, conciliation, and the orderly settlement of disputes; as a body that could promote peaceful change and oversee mandates and minority provisions; and as an agency that could resolve wide-ranging international social and economic issues. It was also to oversee the International Labour Organization and other international bureaus. Geneva was chosen to be the headquarters for the new League.

The League of Nations came into existence in January 1920 and worked through two main decision-making bodies: an assembly that included delegates from all member states and met annually and the League Council, which comprised the major League powers and four representatives of smaller states, and met regularly during the year. There were four major powers who became founding members in 1920: Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Germany and other former enemy powers were not invited to join the League in 1920 because the peacemakers at Paris agreed that they should have to demonstrate their fitness for inclusion by showing that they were carrying out the terms of the peace treaties. Nor was Bolshevik Russia—perceived as a hostile regime that aimed to undermine the peace settlement—regarded as an acceptable member. There were forty-three founding members of the League; sixteen from Europe; seventeen from Central and South America; five Dominions of the British Empire; China, Japan, and Siam from Asia; Persia (Iran); and Liberia. The League Assembly in 1920 voted for the inclusion of six more states, five from Europe and one from Central America.

FAILURES AND SUCCESSES

Any assessment of the League's effectiveness between 1920 and 1939 must take account of its many and complex functions. While it clearly failed to perform well in its most high profile roles, and failed abysmally to prevent the outbreak of World War II, it also recorded some modest successes and left an enduring legacy. As a permanent interstate conference that aimed to include all the peace-loving states of the world, it has already been noted that the League was severely weakened by the failure of the United States to join. Until the mid 1920s, the League Council contained as many minor powers as it did major ones, but in 1926 Germany joined the League and stayed until 1933. In that year, both Germany and Japan gave notice that they intended to leave the League, but in 1934 the USSR became a member, only for Italy to withdraw three years later.

Thus the League never contained all the world's major powers and it therefore failed in one of its major objectives. However, the members it did have met regularly, and the friendships forged among the delegates helped to oil the wheels of international diplomacy, especially between 1925 and 1933. More important, an influential international secretariat was built up at Geneva of experts and civil servants from across the world, which administered League machinery and advised its member states. The wide-ranging expertise and specialist networks that developed at Geneva in the 1920s and 1930s exerted an influence on international affairs well beyond World War II.

As a disarmament agency, the League failed completely to persuade the great majority of its members to disarm to any great extent. It was the failure to achieve any lasting international arms limitation agreements that led people at the time and subsequently to dismiss the League as a totally ineffective body. However, in this role the League faced a number of severe obstacles that made success virtually unachievable from the start. In the face of a Germany that had been defeated but that was still territorially intact, and a hostile Bolshevik regime in Russia, mainland European powers demanded additional security from the League before they were prepared to reduce their armaments. With the United States out of the League, naval disarmament talks took place away from Geneva. Though representatives from both the United States and the USSR worked with League powers at Geneva from 1926 to draw up a disarmament convention, discussions were bedeviled by political and technical disagreements. The League Disarmament Conference that met in 1932 finally broke up in disarray after Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) led the German delegation out in October 1933.

League efforts to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of member states were also doomed to failure in the unstable aftermath of World War I. It proved impossible to preserve the postwar European and global territorial status quo, not least because leading League powers such as Japan and Italy had unsatisfied territorial ambitions that they were determined to pursue. And because neither Germany nor the USSR accepted the 1919 peace settlement as more than provisional, there was no way that the League would be able to prevent substantial territorial changes from occurring at some future point. The only issue was whether the changes would take place peacefully or through military challenge.

The League did have some success in resolving minor territorial disputes. A potential conflict over the Aland Islands between Sweden and Finland was peacefully settled in 1920, and the League also supervised the division of Upper Silesia between Poland and Germany in 1921. A dispute between Bulgaria and Greece was brought to an early end by firm League action in 1925. However, the seizure of Corfu by Italy in 1923 as retaliation for the murder of an Italian official, allegedly by Greek bandits, proved more difficult to resolve. Corfu was handed back to Greece, but only after the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) had tried hard to cause divisions between League powers and to deny that the League should have any jurisdiction over the dispute. The Greeks had to pay Italy a large indemnity, and the crisis revealed how limited the League's power was in the face of strong divisions between its leading members.

The two major conflicts that fatally challenged the League's credibility and authority and as a peacekeeping agency were the Manchurian dispute between Japan and China in 1931–1933 and the invasion and occupation of Ethiopia—a League member since 1923—by Italian troops in 1935. The League failed to prevent Japan from establishing the Manchurian province in north China as a Japanese-controlled puppet state or to force Italy out of Ethiopia. Indeed, the effect of halfhearted League action to try to restrain Japan and then Italy helped to drive both powers into an alignment with Nazi Germany. And as substantial German rearmament got under way after 1933, east European League members came under threat. Austria was annexed to Germany in March 1938, and six months later the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia was ceded to Hitler. In March 1939 German troops invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. The League proved powerless to protect its members in the face of a resurgent German state, and in September 1939 World War II broke out when German troops invaded Poland. A last—and futile—League gesture in 1940 was to expel the USSR when it invaded Finland, the only time in its history that such action was taken.

As an administrative body, the League proved to be useful in supervising treaty agreements. It kept reasonable order in the Saar until 1935, and in Danzig, and it received annual reports from mandatory powers in respect of the mandates over German and Turkish colonies that had been established in the early 1920s. It also had responsibility for overseeing minority agreements entered into by a number of new central and east European states as part of the peace settlement, and it worked hard to try to resolve a range of potentially explosive ethnic tensions, though it lacked any means of enforcing its recommendations. And as Germany was not covered by any minority agreements, the League was unable to protect Jews from persecution after 1933.

The League also undertook a wide range of humanitarian activities such as assisting refugees, trying to prevent white slave trafficking and drug smuggling, and combating tropical diseases and the spread of infection. The International Labour Office was active in promoting labor agreements between employers and workers and improving working conditions. There was general agreement among member states that the League's social and economic activities had proved to be very effective, and in the late 1930s a League report called for an expansion of activities in these areas. While the League had failed in its major aims, its "nonpolitical" work was very successful and was continued and expanded upon by the United Nations.

LEGACY

Thus, the League did have some important successes, not least in providing the foundations for the United Nations after World War II. It is interesting that the United Nations has faced similar problems to the League, in particular the concern of member states to protect their own national interests and the difficulty of achieving any common agreement to pursue collective goals on a sustained basis. But globalization has resulted in increasing numbers of international bodies, and all of them have learned from the League's failures and are building on its foundations.

See alsoRed Cross; United Nations; Versailles, Treaty of .