League of Nations

Creation

• Created 10th January, 1920

  • Covenant of the League of Nations signed 28 June, 1919, but came into effect with the rest of the Treaty of Versailles on Jan 10

• Outlined by Woodrow Wilson in his 14 Point Speech in 1918

  • Wilson fought hard for its creation during the Paris Peace Treaties settlements

  • Wilson won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts

• Its first meeting was held on January 16, 1920

  • First meeting of the Assembly took place on 15 November, 1920

Membership

• Total of 63 members

  • 42 founding members

  • 58 members at its peak, some joined and others left

• Members left/removed

  • Brazil was the first founding member to withdraw in 1926

  • Costa Rica withdrew in 1924, making it the quickest withdrawal

  • Italy left after the League placed sanctions on them for invading Abyssinia, these sanctions never harmed Italy

  • Soviet Union was removed after invading Finland in 1939

  • Germany withdrew in 1933 after Hitler came to power

  • Japan left after the League supported Chinese sovereignty in 1933

  • Spain left in 1939

  • Argentina stopped participating in December 1920, but resumed in September 1933

  • Vichy France withdrew in 1941, but Free France rejoined in 1943

• Egypt was the last state to join

• 3 members ceased to exist - Ethiopia, Austria, and Czechoslovakia

• Australia was granted entry as an autonomous nation, despite it being under the British Empire, marking the start of Australian independence

Failures

French and British self-interest

Absent powers

Inefficient sanctions

Lack of army

Unfair treaties

Reaching decisions too slowly

• Issues that affected interests of the Great Powers weren’t resolved easily or at all

  • Poland - 1920

    • Dispute between Poland and Lithuania over the city of Vilnius, which was majority Polish but occupied by Lithuania. The Poles invaded and occupied it, and the issue was referred to the League.

    • Poland was a French ally, so France didn’t punish Poland after the invasion

    • The League called for a Polish withdrawal, and the Polish accepted but never did

    • Vilnius remained under Polish control until 1939 when they were invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union

• Countries threatened to leave

  • Italy invaded Corfu after an Italian general was killed and ordered Greece to pay 50 million Lira, Italy wasn’t condemned because they were a permanent member and they threatened to leave the League

• USA never joined

  • American people protested joining because they were against getting involved in European affairs

  • Congress agreed to join under the condition that only Congress could take the USA into war in the future, and Wilson declined, so Congress voted to not join

  • USA was a major power after World War One, so their absence was seen as an absent keystone

  • This added to the lack of the League’s enforcement power

  • League sanctions against Italy were ineffective because Italy continued trading with the USA

• Members left

  • Italy - 1935

  • Japan - 1933

  • Germany - 1933

  • Showed the League’s ineffectiveness in terms of enforcement and the lack of incentive to join and comply

• Britain and France ignored the League after 1938, instead pursuing appeasement of Germany

• Failed to resolve some conflicts

  • Mukden incident - 1931

    • Japanese blamed Manchuria for an incident that happened at a Japanese railway in Manchuria and used it as an excuse to invade, the League was worried intervening would cause a wider war and thus didn’t do anything

    • Lack of the USA for enforcement added to this weakness

  • Italian invasion of Abyssinia

    • League condemned it and sanctioned Italy, but did not ban the sale of oil or close the Suez Canal to Italian ships

    • The League of Nations didn’t pursue anything further due to a lack of a force to withstand Italian aggression and a fear of pushing Italy into an alliance with Germany, which showed the influence of British and French self-interest in the decision making of the League

  • Spanish Civil War - 1936

    • The Republican Foreign Minister Julio Alvarez de Vayo appealed to the League, but they did nothing to help Republican Spain or prevent foreign intervention

    • The only action the League took was banning foreign volunteers, which was ignored

• Failures of original goals

  • Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments - Explore possibilities on disarmament

    • This was not made up of government representatives, but of famous people who often disagreed, leading to no actual outcome

  • Geneva Protocol of 1924 - Meant to defend victims of violent aggression, but was vetoed by Britain as it would interfere with their policing efforts in overseas territories

    • Failure of an attempt to reach collective security

    • USA and British dominions strongly opposed it

    • Called for a disarmament conference in 1925

    • Nations who didn’t comply would be dubbed aggressors and any victim of aggression would gain immediate League assistance

  • World Disarmament Conference - 1932

    • Though the Treaty of Versailles determined that the Allied Powers were supposed to disarm, Britain didn’t, France refused to until they were given a guarantee that they’d be protected if attacked, and Czechoslovakia and Poland were wary of an attack from the west

    • This meant that no power actually disarmed

    • There were attempts made to reach an agreement, one was almost successful in limiting naval size of multiple nations, but no agreement was ever reached

    • The lack of disarmament from powers was used as an excuse by Germany to rearm themselves, leading to their strength in intimidating other countries and fighting in World War Two

  • The League did nothing to prevent German aggression towards Austria and Czechoslovakia

    • Unable to maintain collective security

  • Unable to uphold peace

    • Self-interests and fear of greater conflict led to the League doing nothing in the face of aggression

  • Britain and France kept their colonies

    • Continued human rights abuses and no protection of minorities and natives

    • Quit India movement in 1942 was a protest against British Rule in India

    • Rights abuses continued in South Africa, Congo, and Algeria

    • The League’s control of mandates was dominated by European ideologies such as Christianity, ‘civilization’, and ‘good governance’

End

• Ended officially with the creation of the United Nations in 1946

  • Many League organizations were transferred to the United Nations

  • Diplomatically stopped operations with the outbreak of war in 1939 due to membership issues and neglect from Great Powers

• The main headquarters, the Palace of Nations in Geneva, was unoccupied for almost 6 years until the end of World War Two

• United Nations conceptualised at the Tehran Conference in 1943

• Final League session concluded on 18 April 1946, which was concerned with liquidating and transferring assets to the United Nations

  • $22,000,000 ($356,000,000 in today’s money) in assets transferred to the United Nations, including the Palace of Nations and the League Archives

  • Reserve funds were returned to the countries that supplied them

Successes

• Stopped conflicts through diplomacy

  • Greek invasion of Bulgaria - 1925

    • League condemned Greece’s actions

  • Aaland islands dispute - 1921

    • Both Sweden and Finland demanded control over the islands, League decreed that it would remain Finnish but the inhabitants would be protected and the islands would be demilitarized, Sweden was reluctant to accept

  • Upper Silesia - 1921

    • Both Poland and Germany wanted control over Upper Silesia, and according to a plebiscite, the League decided it would be split between the two

  • Albania - 1921

    • The borders of Albania were not decided in the Paris Peace Treaties, causing some disputes with Greece and Yugoslavia, the League decided Albanian borders should remain mostly as they were in 1913 with 3 minor changes that favored Yugoslavia. Yugoslav troops were made to withdraw.

  • Memel - 1923

    • The fate of Memel was undecided after the war, as it was predominantly German but Lithuania had claims. As it hadn’t been decided, Lithuania invaded and the issue was referred to the League, who decided it would become Lithuanian.

  • Mosul - 1920

    • The region of Mosul was disputed between Turkey and the mandate of Iraq. A vote showed that though the inhabitants didn’t want to be part of either country, they’d prefer Iraq. The League decreed it would be part of Iraq, but Turkey rejected this until 1926

  • Saar

    • A referendum was held in 1935 to determine whether Saar would become under German or French control. The people voted 90.3% in favor of becoming Germany, and the League quickly approved and supported this

• Refugee Committee

  • Sent 500,000 prisoners of war home

  • Found a home for 600,000 Greeks fleeing Turkey

• Drugs and Health

  • Improved drug controls

  • Ran education programs

  • Supported measures against leprosy and malaria

• Issues that did not affect interests of Great Powers were usually resolved

• Disarmament

  • The League began collecting data on arms trade and banned poison gas in war in 1925

• Gave representation to minor nations

• International Labor Organization - 1919

  • Successfully convinced multiple countries to standardize the 8-hour work day

  • Restricted the addition of lead to paint

• League Health Organization

  • Focus on ending epidemics such as malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever

    • Started an international campaign to exterminate mosquitoes

  • Worked successfully with the Soviet Union to prevent typhus epidemics, including an education campaign

• Labor violations

  • Reduced slavery in Ethiopia and Liberia

  • Reduced the death rate of workers on the Tanganyika Railway from 55% to 4%

  • Abolished slavery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal, Transjordan, Persia, and Bahrain

  • Reduced women and child trafficking

Historiography

The League is a useless fraud and an irrelevance not worthy of study

AJP Taylor - British Historian

“Only a handful of eccentric historians still bother to study the League”

Margaret Macmillan - Canadian historian

“The League of Nations has been ridiculed by historians and political scientists since its collapse in 1945.  They note that the institution failed to keep the peace, failed to punish transgressors, that its promises of collective security and disarmament went unfulfilled, and that revisionist states largely ignored its injunctions. 

I do not dispute the realities of these failures; rather, I argue that the too-common attitude of casual ridicule overlooks the League's genuine contributions, particularly in two areas of relevance to international security.  First, the League's efforts at disarmament embodied characteristics with direct relevance to the post-Cold War arms control environment….  Second, Britain and France … attempted to utilize the League as the cornerstone of an alternative to traditional balance-of-power grand strategies.”

Andrew Webster

Historiography

“The League is dead. Long live the United Nations”

Robert Cecil - British diplomat

The failure of the League to act as soon as a great power invaded another state ultimately doomed the League

“We know the World War began in Manchuria 15 years ago...Manchuria, Abyssinia, Munich have killed another great illusion, the belief that appeasement, seeking the national interest at the expense of others, individual action, secret bargains, could bring us peace.”

Philip Noel-Baker - Representative of the United Kingdom

The Second World War was a result of Woodrow Wilson’s utopianism. Power, not idealism, creates peace. ‘Realist’ historians view the League not only as ineffective but also as having encouraged the Axis to go to war

E H Carr - British historian

“[The League] was a bold step towards international cooperation which failed in some of its aims but succeeded comprehensively in others”

Ruth Henig - British historian

The League’s failure was less due to the inadequacy of the attempt at ‘collective security’ than to the Great Powers’ failure to properly support it.

Frank Walters - Former deputy secretary general of the League

Great Powers pursue their own interests. If they cannot do so through the League, then blame the League, not the powers.

Gerhart Niemeyer - Professor of political theory

“Fifty years later one cannot but agree with him”

Christopher Seton-Watson - Speaking on E H Carr’s theory

The League was a spectacular failure

John Mearsheimer

“The League’s birth arose out of a series of political fantasies: that the cease-fire of 1919 was a peace and not merely a truce; that national interests could be subordinated to world interests; that a government can espouse a cause other than its own.”

The League idea withered and died when each nation remembered that its holy mission was to serve itself, and that all agreements, oaths, treaties, and compacts are invalid when they conflict with that sacred cause.”

Elmer Bendiner - American journalist

“The Geneva system … was not a substitute for great-power politics but rather an adjunct to it.  It was only a mechanism for conducting multinational diplomacy.”

“More doors were opened than shut”

Zara Steiner - American-British historian

“Thus, in the past two decades, the League has been portrayed in an increasingly positive light … given the circumstances…

A new generation of historians is arguing that the League’s importance lies in the fact that it set in motion a different dynamic of international cooperation…

The conventional view of the League of Nations is that it was a complete failure having been unable to prevent the outbreak of a second major European conflict in 1939.  Some dismiss it as a total irrelevance and those who study it as ‘eccentric historians’ …

I am one of those ‘eccentric historians’ who has studied the League for over 30 years and who argue that its creation marked an important step on the road to our contemporary global system of international organisation, coordinated through the United Nations, which was built on the foundations of the League’s experience. 

[The League] was a bold step towards international cooperation which failed in some of its aims but succeeded comprehensively in others.”

Ruth Henig - British historian