Why did the League of Nations fail?

Whilst the idea of some mechanism for co-operation between the powers to tackle international disputes had its origins in the nineteenth century, it was the First World War that prompted the creation of the League of Nations. Such a body was called for by President Woodrow Wilson in January 1918 as a means of 'affording mutual guarantees of political Independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike'. A detailed scheme was accepted the following year at the Versailles Peace Conference, and the League, as an international body with a permanent secretariat in Geneva, was swiftly established.

In the wake of the First World War the League was seen by its supporters as a means both for ensuring that the conflict of 1914-18 remained 'the war to end all wars' and as an expression of international co-operation. The idea of the League as a moral force for good was engendered by the speech of President Wilson and expressed in, for instance, the membership of the League of Nations Union (LNU) in Britain. Whilst many churches were corporate members of the LNU, individual membership peaked at 404,868 in 1931.

The Covenant of the League nevertheless did not attempt to abolish war, but to introduce rational dispute-resolution - which would hopefully amount to the same thing by tackling the causes of war - to international problems. Provision was made for a three month moratorium on resort to armed conflict whilst arbitration, judicial settlement or an enquiry into the matter by the League's Council was undertaken. Contrary to popular perception, those who broke the peace were to be strongly dealt with: under Article 16 any member state waging war in disregard of the Covenant was seen as having declared war on all the League's members and was liable to economic sanctions whilst the Council considered what armed forces member states should contribute 'to protect the covenants of the League. The Covenant also gave the Council power to formulate plans for reductions in national armaments in die light of the competitive build¬up of forces which was deemed to have contributed to the slide to war in 1914, an objective which culminated in the World Disarmament Conference of 1932-4.

Its Council thus clearly played a major part in determining the effectiveness of the League. Originally the Council was expected to consist of permanent representation of the five main Allied victors of the First World War, the United States of America, Britain, France, Italy and Japan, together with four (later nine) representatives from the rest of the member states. Ironically. however, despite their role in the creation of the League, the United States were never to take their seat. The Covenant had deliberately recognised the Monroe doctrine of 1823, that a League which largely consisted of European powers would not intervene with the primacy of American interests in the western hemisphere. Congress, which swung to the Republicans in 1918, however decided that not only did it not want Europeans interfering in the Americas, it also did not desire the American entanglement in European affairs that membership of the League appeared to imply. The Americans. having played their part in making the peace settlement that followed the First World War, were therefore not to participate in maintaining it. One consequence was that, although most South American states were members, the League was unwilling to intervene in a number of small wars on that continent during the 1920s without American participation. American unwillingness to contemplate sanctions against Japan was also a factor in the feeble League response to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, despite the Chinese appeal against this breach of the Covenant.

Other major powers were also initially unrepresented on the Council. Germany did not join until 1926 and the Soviet Union until 1934. Germany was to leave again in 1933 whilst the Soviet Union was expelled over the invasion of Finland in 1939. Meanwhile Japan (1933), Italy (1937) and Spain (1939) - which had effectively been a permanent member of the Council - were also to leave the League. The League, in other words, did not serve as the arena of international arbitration its supporters had hoped for. In addition, its Council did not act as a powerful corporate body to carry forward the League's agenda instead, permanent Council members such as Japan simply gave notice to quit when it became clear that sticking to the Covenant was incompatible with perceived national interests.

Attempts to deal with such defections and the breaches of the Covenant that gave rise to them were prevented by a number of factors. Most important was that whilst the League possessed a certain moral authority as long as member states were prepared to respect its provisions, it had no independent power. Its only means of imposing its will was through the collective action of its members. It had no forces of its own. The French, in 1932. did propose the creation of an international force of national contingents alongside the establishment of a number of arms dumps for the exclusive use of the League, but even this modest infringement of national sovereignty met with little interest. Instead the Covenant explicitly recognised national sovereignty. Article 5, for instance, stating that except where expressly provided, 'decisions at any meeting of the Assembly or of the Council shall require the agreement of all the members of the League present at the meeting:

This made it difficult in practice to implement the apparently severe Article 16. For instance, although only three powers joined Italy in opposing the imposition of sanctions following its invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, this meant that the League could only recommend. rather than require, its members to cease trading with the aggressor state. When it came to military sanctions the Council could do no more than make recommendations. And in practice many member states were unwilling even to implement economic sanctions. In the case of Abyssinia, for instance, even Council members such as Britain and France were unwilling to pursue measures such as the closing of the Suez Canal to hinder the Italian war effort, largely because they were more concerned to maintain Italian membership of the Stresa front against Germany than they were to punish its aggression. Great Power pragmatism was similarly to bedevil the World Disarmament Conference. The League, in other words, was only as effective as those states which were prepared to become and remain members chose to make it.

This was also true of some of the other activities of the League. The World Economic Conferences of 1927 and 1933, for instance, produced little in the way of concrete agreement on the severe economic problems of the time. This is not to say there were not significant, if unspectacular, successes in areas such as public health. These were. however, away from the politically fraught fields of economics or international diplomacy, and it was by its activities in these, especially the last, that the League was to be judged.

It certainly failed to realise the high hopes that attended its birth. Despite some successes, such as the 1924 Corfu incident. in the 1930s the League repeatedly proved an ineffective instrument to tackle aggressors. It was already effectively dead by the time the world plunged into war once more in 1939. As Germany, Italy and Japan were no longer members, the League, accordingly, could no longer function even as the arena for Great Power negotiation, which it had done with some success in the 1920s.

The Second World War was to end with the replacement of the League by a new organisation, the United Nations (UN). The new body, however, in many ways, built upon the work of the old. The main differences were in the attitude of the USA to the UN and in the powers of the new Security Council. Nevertheless, although Chapter 7 of the UN Charter is on paper stronger than Article 16 of the Covenant, in practice differences between members of the Security Council have rendered it no easier to implement than Article 16 for most of the UN's history. This explains rather than excuses the undoubted failure of the League of Nations to enforce Article 16. It should be borne in mind, however, that this was as much a collective failure of its membership - and of those states which were not members - as of the organisation itself.