League of Nations

• 1. Introduction

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  The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation built to keep the peace, and its founder won a Nobel Prize for it before failing to bring his own country aboard. In 1919, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson was honoured as the leading architect of the League. The following spring his own Senate refused to ratify it. The body opened its doors on the 10th of January 1920, born out of the Paris Peace Conference that closed the First World War. At its peak it held 58 member states. It also held a paradox at its heart. Here was an organisation meant to enforce world peace, yet it owned no army of its own. Benito Mussolini caught the contradiction in a single line. The League, he said, is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out. So how does a peace organisation work without force behind it? Who dreamed it up, what disputes did it actually settle, and why did it collapse just as a second world war began? The answers stretch from a Geneva lakeshore to the deserts of South America, from refugee passports to a poison-gas ban that one nation refused to sign for fifty years.

• 2. Roots Of An Idea

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  In 1795, the philosopher Immanuel Kant published Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, sketching a league of nations to control conflict between states. Kant did not want a global government. He hoped each state would declare itself free, respect its citizens, and welcome foreign visitors as fellow rational beings. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Concert of Europe tried to hold the status quo and avoid war. By 1910, international law had begun to take shape through the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Theodore Roosevelt, accepting his Nobel Prize in 1910, said it would be a masterstroke if the great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace. A small forerunner already existed. The Inter-Parliamentary Union was founded in 1889 by the peace activists William Randal Cremer and Frédéric Passy. By 1914, a third of the members of parliament across the 24 countries that had parliaments served in it. Its structure, a council headed by a president, would later echo in the League itself. The term itself came in 1914, coined by the British political scientist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who also drafted a scheme for its organisation. He believed secret diplomacy had brought about war. The impossibility of war, he wrote, would grow in proportion as foreign policy became known to and controlled by public opinion. The next forerunners would carry the idea into wartime politics, and into the hands of women determined to be heard.

• 3. Drafting The Peace

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  In January 1915, a peace conference directed by Jane Addams met in the neutral United States, calling for a permanent league of neutral nations to work for peace and disarmament. Within months came a call for an international women's conference at The Hague. Coordinated by Mia Boissevain, Aletta Jacobs and Rosa Manus, the congress opened on the 28th of April 1915 with 1,136 participants from neutral nations. It founded the organisation that became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1915, former president William Howard Taft led a similar American body, the League to Enforce Peace, advocating arbitration and sanctions on aggressive countries. The Fabian Society in England went further than the legalists. The Fabians argued for a council of great powers to adjudicate world affairs and for a permanent secretariat. Woodrow Wilson placed a league of nations to ensure peace and justice among his Fourteen Points in January 1918. British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour argued that durable peace needed some international sanction to give pause to the hardiest aggressor. In early 1918 Balfour commissioned the first official report, led by Walter Phillimore and known as the Phillimore Committee. Its members included Eyre Crowe, William Tyrrell, and Cecil Hurst. The two principal drafters of the Covenant were the British politician Lord Robert Cecil and the South African statesman Jan Smuts. Smuts proposed a council of great powers as permanent members and a mandate system for captured colonies. Cecil pushed the administrative side, calling for annual council meetings, quadrennial Assembly meetings, and a large permanent secretariat. Catherine Marshall, a British suffragist, read the draft Rules of Procedure, found them completely undemocratic, and got them modified on her suggestion. The shape that emerged would have to find a home, and Geneva was waiting.

• 4. A Home In Geneva

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  The Covenant of the League of Nations was signed on the 28th of June 1919 as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. The first meeting of the Council took place on the 16th of January 1920 in Paris, six days after the treaty came into force. On the 1st of November 1920, the headquarters moved from London to Geneva, where the first General Assembly was held on the 15th of November 1920. Geneva made sense. Switzerland had been neutral for centuries and already hosted the International Red Cross. Support came from Swiss Federal Councillor Gustave Ador and the economist William Rappard. The Palais Wilson, on Geneva's western lakeshore and named after Woodrow Wilson, became the League's first permanent home. The architecture of the body rested on three constitutional organs. The Assembly represented all members, each state allowed up to three representatives and a single vote. The Council acted as an executive, beginning with four permanent members, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Japan, plus four non-permanent members elected for three-year terms. The first non-permanent members were Belgium, Brazil, Greece, and Spain. Decisions in both bodies required unanimity, a reflection of the League's belief in the sovereignty of its members. The League sought a solution by consent, not by dictation. The Permanent Secretariat at Geneva ran the civil service, and by 1931 its staff numbered 707. Between 1920 and 1939 the Council held 107 sessions in total. The League consisted of 42 founding members in November 1920. Germany was admitted by a resolution on the 8th of September 1926, becoming the fifth permanent member of the Council, after Werner Dankwort pushed for his country to join. The Soviet Union joined on the 18th of September 1934, lifting the membership to its largest extent of 58 states.

• 5. The Quiet Victories

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  Led by Fridtjof Nansen, the Commission for Refugees was established on the 27th of June 1921. At the end of the First World War, two to three million ex-prisoners of war lay scattered across Russia. Within two years the commission helped 425,000 of them return home. In 1922 it set up camps in Turkey, helping to prevent the spread of cholera, smallpox and dysentery while feeding the refugees inside. It created the Nansen passport, the first internationally recognised identity card for stateless people. The International Labour Organization was created in 1919 from Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles, with Albert Thomas as its first director. It gave seats not only to governments but to representatives of employers and workers. It restricted the addition of lead to paint, convinced several countries to adopt an eight-hour work day and forty-eight-hour week, and pushed shipowners to be liable for accidents involving seamen. The League's Health Organisation focused on ending leprosy, malaria, and yellow fever, the last two through an international campaign to exterminate mosquitoes. It worked with the Soviet government to prevent typhus epidemics. The Slavery Commission sought to end slavery and slave trading, often by pressing the governments that ran mandated countries. Ethiopia committed to end slavery as a condition of membership in 1923. The League helped reduce the death rate of workers building the Tanganyika railway from 55 to 4 per cent. Under its pressure, Afghanistan abolished slavery in 1923, Iraq in 1924, Nepal in 1926, Transjordan and Persia in 1929, Bahrain in 1937, and Ethiopia in 1942. The French philosopher Henri Bergson became the first chairman of the committee on intellectual cooperation, the precursor to UNESCO.

• 6. Settling The Map

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  Åland is a collection of around 6,500 islands in the Baltic Sea, almost exclusively Swedish-speaking, yet part of the Russian Empire from 1809. When Finland declared independence in December 1917, most Ålanders wished to rejoin Sweden, and by 1920 the dispute risked war. In June 1921 the League announced that the islands would stay part of Finland with guaranteed protection and demilitarisation. It was the first European international agreement concluded directly through the League. Upper Silesia tested the League next. A plebiscite on the 20th of March 1921 saw 59.6 per cent, around 500,000 votes, favour joining Germany. On the 12th of August 1921 the League was asked to settle the matter, and a commission with representatives from Belgium, Brazil, China and Spain studied it. Most of the area went to Germany, but the Polish section held most of the region's mineral resources and industry, and the settlement produced peace there until the Second World War. The League resolved a clash between Iraq and Turkey over the former Ottoman province of Mosul in 1926. A Commission of Inquiry with members from Belgium, Hungary and Sweden found the people of Mosul wanted neither Turkey nor Iraq, but if forced would pick Iraq. The Council awarded Mosul to Iraq on the 16th of December 1925. In South America, business leaders from Peruvian rubber and sugar industries seized the border town of Leticia on the 1st of September 1932. After League mediation, a final peace in May 1934 returned Leticia to Colombia, with a formal apology from Peru and free navigation on the Amazon and Putumayo Rivers. The League itself governed the Free City of Danzig from the 15th of November 1920 to the 1st of September 1939, and ran the Saar Basin until a 1935 plebiscite saw 90.3 per cent vote to join Germany.

• 7. When Eagles Fell Out

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  In September 1931, a section of the South Manchurian Railway was lightly damaged by the Japanese Kwantung Army as a pretext for invading Manchuria. The army renamed the region Manchukuo and on the 9th of March 1932 installed Puyi, the final emperor of China, as nominal head of state. The Lytton Report appeared in October 1932, refused to recognise Manchukuo, and demanded Manchuria be returned to China. The report passed 42-1 in the Assembly in 1933, with only Japan voting against. Rather than withdraw its troops, Japan withdrew from the League. The British historian Charles Mowat argued that collective security was now dead. The Chaco War followed. The League failed to prevent the 1932 conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay over the arid Gran Chaco, a war that caused 57,000 casualties for Bolivia and 36,000 dead for Paraguay. In October 1935, Mussolini sent 400,000 troops to invade Abyssinia. Marshal Pietro Badoglio led the campaign, ordering bombing, the use of mustard gas, and the poisoning of water supplies, even against undefended villages and medical facilities. Italian forces captured Addis Ababa in May 1936, forcing Emperor Haile Selassie into exile in England. The League imposed economic sanctions in November 1935, but they neither banned oil nor closed the Suez Canal. In June 1936, with no precedent for a head of state addressing the Assembly in person, Haile Selassie appealed for help in protecting his country. The Hoare-Laval Pact of December 1935, an Anglo-French attempt to partition Abyssinia, leaked to the public and forced both Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval to resign. One reason the sanctions stayed mild was British and French fear of driving Mussolini and Adolf Hitler into an alliance.

• 8. The Last Years

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  On the 19th of March 1920, the United States Senate voted on ratifying the treaty, and the 49-35 result fell short of the two-thirds majority needed. Senate Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge wanted a reservation that only Congress could take the country into war, and Wilson refused to compromise. The League's credibility never recovered from American absence. Departures piled up through the decade. Japan and Germany left in 1933, Italy in 1937, and Spain in 1939. When the Spanish Army launched its coup on the 17th of July 1936, the League would neither intervene nor stop foreign intervention. Hitler and Mussolini backed Francisco Franco's Nationalists while the Soviet Union helped the Republic, and the Nationalist victory in 1939 confirmed to all observers that the League was ineffective. On the 7th of July 1937 Japan began a full-scale invasion of China, and the Chinese representative Wellington Koo appealed to the League on the 12th of September. The League turned the case over to the Nine Power Treaty Conference. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of the 23rd of August 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland on the 30th of November 1939. On the 14th of December 1939 the League expelled it, the only member ever to suffer such an indignity. The main organisation ceased operations on the 18th of April 1946, with components folded into the new United Nations. The League lasted 26 years. Three of its institutions carried forward: the International Labour Organization, the Permanent Court of International Justice as the International Court of Justice, and the Health Organisation as the World Health Organization. The mandate system had placed colonial powers under international observation, and most remaining mandates became United Nations Trust Territories, with one process of independence not ending until 1990.