Foundation, structure, work and decline of
the League of Nations
- Foundation: The idea of US
President Woodrow Wilson. The League was designed to treat war as
an illegal act, rather than the nature of relations among states as
it had been viewed under the old balance of power ideas. The league
would decide who had broken the peace and then all the members would
punish the "aggressor" nation. It was located in Geneva,
Switzerland.
- Structure of the League.
First there was the Secretariat, Council and
Assembly. The secretariat served as the bureaucracy of
the league and the leader, the Secretary General, was in charge of
this bureaucracy. The League Council was responsible for the
primary job of maintaining world peace. Decisions had to be
unanimous to take action. It had four permanent members (Britain,
France, Japan and Italy with the US expected to be added later, but
Germany took the spot instead). Non permanent members varied from
four to eleven. The Assembly was where the member states
voted on general issues.
- Work. WWII revealed the
league as a failure at keeping the peace. However, subunits of the
League had some success. A World Court, and commissions on
Disarmament, Health, Mandates, Refugees and Slavery met with some
success. The Court was supposed to mediate disputes between
states while the Disarmament commission oversaw the massive
naval disarmament of the 1920s as well as the outlawing of chemical
weapons. Finally, the Kellogg-Briand Pact made declaring war
practically illegal and was the basis for post-WWII prosecutions of
war criminals. The Health Commission was a forerunner of the
World Health Organization while the pre-existing Refugees
commission was able to help with the terrible amounts of
refugees created by WWII. The Mandates commission
oversaw the foreign governance of areas deemed not ready for
self-rule (e.g. Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Tanzania, etc.)
- Decline. The 1920s were the golden
age of the League. It was a period without major war that
oversaw great success in disarmament, the settling of refugees,
combating the Spanish Influenza pandemic, as well as welcoming
Germany back into the family of nations as a Permanent Member of the
League Council. The 1925 Treaty of Locarno saw Germany
formally recognize its western borders with France and Belgium. The
League left open the question of Germany's eastern borders and the
very touchy issue of ethnic Germans living outside of
Germany. However, this issue after Locarno was expected to be solved
by peaceful diplomacy. The US did not belong to the League, but
Wilson's dream was mostly coming true.
- However, the 1930s would undermine the
League. First Japan and then Germany left in 1933 with Italy
(1935) leaving over the League reaction to it's invasion of
Ethiopia. Losing three permanent members critically damaged the
ability of the League to act. This left Britain and France to police
the world. However, both nations were reluctant to use military
force due to rampant pacifism combined with and unwillingness to use
economic sanctions during the Depression. Perhaps the critical
blow was when Italy invaded Ethiopia and expected its allies
France and Britain to go easy on them. An ugly anti-Italian debate
erupted in both nations and mild sanctions were applied. Finally,
neither Britain nor France were ready for war and neither wanted to
be drawn into a war over Ethiopia. Mussolini quickly recognized that
his fear of Collective Security was unfounded and that the League
was incapable of taking action. After initially staying close to
France and Britain to keep Hitler out of Austria, he now cut a deal
with Hitler.
- Finally, the issue of ethnic Germans would first work within the
league, and then finally destroy it. The Locarno Treaty of 1925 had
left open to revision Germany's borders to the east. This meant the
large German populations in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, as
well as the "Free City" of Danzig. It was forbidden to Germany to
unify with Austria as part of the Versailles Treaty, but most felt
this was one of the cruelest aspects of Versailles. Thus, when
Hitler moved troops into Austria, Europe hardly flinched. Later,
when Hitler threatened war over the Sudeten German region of
Czechoslovakia, Britain in particular was flatly unwilling to get
into a war over peoples and places of which they knew little. The
policy of Appeasement simply recognized the right of Germany to
bring Germans back into its own borders and undo some of the wrongs
of Versailles. However, when Germany sent troops into the non-German
Czechoslovakian regions, all of Europe took notice. Hitler had gone
outside the League framework and had engaged in a naked land grab.
Britain and France then guaranteed Poland with a formal alliance
(clearly giving up on the League and Collective Security). When
Germany invaded Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany
as states unto themselves--not as part of the League.
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