h. Jobs Kennedy, John. She is particularly weak in outlining the origins of the League of Nations Union in the earlier League of Nations Society, which was very much an intellectual élite group initially unwilling to proselytise for fear of being seen as a stop-the-war movement, and the League of Free Nations Association organised by David Davies and several others connected with Great Britain’s 1918 propaganda offensive, who urged the immediate creation of a League among the Allied Powers which would control the world’s resources and force Germany to pay a high price for admission. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. These could not be compartmentalised into old-fashioned sovereign states of the kind that the UN exists to guarantee, leaving the organisation unsure of how to treat them. While Cecil was one of the first to break away from Lloyd George, his intention was to create a different centre grouping of politicians of higher moral tone and ethical commitment. The imposition of a peaceful world order was a key objective for the League of Nations, established in the aftermath of World War One. A UN soldier on duty at Kigali Airport, Rwanda (13) This contrasts sharply with the bland, almost feel-good statement with which McCarthy ends her book: the League of Nations Union ‘succeeded … in persuading Britain’s quiet citizens to recognise foreign affairs as their own intimate concern and international government as a cause which deserved their support, and perhaps even, on occasion to break their silence in order to say as much’ (p. 253). I have argued that British political leaders and senior officials wanted a League not out of subservience to popular pressures, but because they believed that it would provide the desired basis for post-war stability. Diplomacy. For generations the standard work on the League movement during the First World War has been recognised to be Henry Winkler. The League and the LNU can be understood only if both sets of questions are asked and answered. Disarmament was highly advocated by the League, which meant that it deprived countries that were supposed to act with military force on its behalf when necessary from means to do so. In reality, the League depended mainly on France and Britain; the British and French had done so much to bring the league into being and it depended so heavily upon them for its continued existence. Commission on Armaments (1921) The League set up an independent commission, but it failed to get agreement on disarmament because Britain objected. His largely self-serving rhetoric has too often been taken at too close to face value by historians. He has held Fellowships at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. The development towards taking responsibility in countries at risk of disintegration, was due to a dramatic increase in the prestige and initiative of the UN Secretary-General. According to Dr. Peter Hough, ‘ The League was an irrelevance anyway, having failed to act against blatant acts of aggression by its member states on a number of ccaisions throughout the 1930’s (2004:32) In order to understand why the League of Nations failed it is vital to understand why it was set up to begin with, and to understand the realist and idealist ways of thinking. The failed attempt to impose an oil embargo on Italy demonstrated that any credible system of economic sanctions was far distant. She tends to see Conservative and traditional élite backing of the League as a concession to public opinion, and perhaps amounting to little more than lip-service. There was a widespread belief...that the League's prestige was growing incrementally. The League of Nations was dominated by Britain and France because they were the main powers in Europe. The causes may be summed up as follows: (1) it was due to the selfish policy pursued by the big Powers that the international organization could not effectively enforce peace in the world. * The case of Germany: • The Saar referendum of 1935 was in favour in Germany: This offered a moment`s escape from the pervasive melancholy of … On September 3, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson embarks on a tour across the United States to promote American membership in the League of Nations… The United Nations: Sacred Drama by Conor Cruise O'Brien and Feliks Topolski (Simon & Schuster, 1968), The Rise of the International Organisation. My reply would be that diplomatic historians have dealt admirably with those problems in the recent literature, whereas no-one had bothered to ask the questions that pre-occupied me. Still more worrying was the explosive upsurge of terrorist violence, which in many places has dissolved the shape of military conflict in ways that make the traditional methods of monitoring ineffective. Another crucial function was the establishment of Mandates to bring all the territories that had been liberated from German and Turkish rule, at the end of the Great War, to eventual self-determination. Why did the League of Nations fail in the 1930s? Last updated 2011-02-17. The League of Nations in the 1920s: Part 1 – The Theory Worksheet to accompany the game at www.activehistory.co.uk 1. Proposal for a League of Nations. Yet, middle-class dominance at the grass roots was a matter of fact rather than aspiration. By subscribing to this mailing list you will be subject to the School of Advanced Study privacy policy. LNU speakers gained easy access to the classroom. The war and the immediate post-war period was important also in that the governments were coalitions, traditional party divisions seemed decreasingly relevant, and all men of good-will were expected to work together for the national good. Devised at the end of World War I by the victorious Allied nations, the League of Nations was an organisation committed to international cooperation. What some have called the 'third world UN' emerged out of the shadow of the 'cold war UN', to the horror of conservative American opinion, which had expected the UN to function as a vehicle for US values - or in effect US policy. Before this, the closest approach to an international political structure had been the Congress System, in which the European great powers held occasional summit meetings to discuss issues they found urgent. Kissinger, Henry. Helen McCarthy writes of a ‘recent groundswell of scholarly interest in the League [of Nations]’, which was surveyed by Susan Pedersen in a 2007 review essay. Just fill in your details. (9) While McCarthy does not make an international comparison, the development of British public opinion clearly followed a different path. The LNU, as McCarthy brings out, was to a quite remarkable degree based on church and chapel congregations, which were predominantly female. 2. 5. Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations. On January 10, 1920, the League of Nations formally comes into being when the Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, takes effect.  ©  © Between the humiliation of seeing one of its members, Austria, taken over by Germany in 1938 without even a formal protest, and the absurdity of expelling the USSR after the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 (an event that neither the USSR nor the League were involved in), all that remained were such wraithlike undertakings as the British Mandate in Palestine.  © It expected to support governments of whatever party in promoting a widely accepted national policy. Education was a key liberal value, seen as a means of socialising mass democracy. The League of Nations was an American idea championed by President Woodrow Wilson during the negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Versailles, the agreement that officially ended World War I. (6) It did establish links with the British Legion, and recruited heavily on Armistice Day. Very few of us who were in the Union heart and soul considered the Covenant absorbingly interesting. In discussing this, McCarthy does not always get her tone right. Prior to 1920, British passports consisted of a single sheet of card. I freely confess that it was not out of any prior interest in the League itself, of whose history I knew little other than the standard textbook narrative of high hopes in the 1920s dashed by international crisis in the 1930s. The destructiveness of World War I led American and British statesmen to champion a league as a means of maintaining postwar global order. The League of Nations Questions and Answers - Discover the eNotes.com community of teachers, mentors and students just like you that can answer any question you might have on The League of Nations Unfortunately, Wilson's thinking about the way that self-determination would work in the real world, and about getting his idea for a 'community of power' off the ground, remained vague. Lloyd’s conclusion is trenchant: ‘the hope that British public opinion could play an important role in the making of foreign policy had proved to be ill-founded’. Lloyd provides a careful and incisive analysis of the failure of the Union to shift government policy on this matter. I do note the genuine liberal internationalist sympathies of Conservatives involved with the LNU, and I would urge readers to judge my analysis of the LNU’s response to popular militarism (and indeed, to popular imperialism, not referred to in the review) for themselves, which I think is rather more nuanced than the review suggests. It was rooted in a comprehensive liberal critique of the pre-war international system, which was widely believed to have been the cause of the carnage of 1914-18. Journal DOI: 10.14296/RiH/issn.1749.8155 | Cookies | Privacy | Contact Us. The spirit of the times, however, which was overbearingly personified in the president of the USA, Woodrow Wilson, pushed towards the creation of a more comprehensive global organisation, which would include all independent states, and in which even the smallest state would have a voice. Others, particularly the Secretary, Maxwell Garnett, had reservations, but Cecil was convinced that the IPC was ‘almost the last hope for peace in Europe … If it fails, I do not think the League can go on’(p. 223). None-the-less, UNTSO (the UN Truce Supervision Organisation) opened the gates to a wave of - often bafflingly labelled - successors: UNMOGIP, UNEF, UNOGIL, UNFICYP, UNIMOG, ONUMOZ, UNPROFOR. The United States was one of five permanent members of the Supreme Council, with the other four countries the USSR, France, Nationalist China, and Britain. At the same time, he did not want to ruin or dismember Germany. ...labelling is inescapably a political act. Devised at the end of World War I by the victorious Allied nations, the League of Nations was an organisation committed to international cooperation. This is the official Web Site of the United Nations Office at Geneva. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. But the nature of the problems emerging in the last decade of the 20th century was extremely worrying. BBC © 2014 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Although Cecil was premature, and his political schemes came to nothing, the Union followed his centrist vision. Her claim that the Geneva Protocol of 1924 was ‘milder’ than the Treaty of Mutual Assistance of 1923 (p. 22) is unsupported by evidence or analysis, and is simply incorrect. For centrism in the early post-war period see Kenneth O. Morgan. (1) To this she adds my own 2009 book (2), which came out in time for her to notice, but not to use. As it was, the direction of the system was left in the hands of states - primarily Britain and France - whose altruism was questionable and whose economic resources had been crippled by the war. As stated above, the League did not have its own military force; thus, it had to rely on its member nations to provide the troops necessary. McCarthy examines the Peace Ballot in some detail. Iris Murdoch would recall that ‘she and her fellow students used to carry a copy of Article 16 in their pockets at all times’ (p. 112), though McCarthy accepts that such zeal was likely confined to Badminton. Support for the League peaked in 1931 just as it was ebbing on the continent. Germany had been a League mem­ber since 1926. As my book tries to show, there is a huge amount more to be said about the LNU as a presence in inter-war associational life and as an interlocutor in debates about the quality of British democracy, the meanings attached to ‘good citizenship’, and the educability of the mass electorate. The League of Nations was an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to provide a forum for resolving international disputes. Viscount Cecil Robert. Draft of Colonel House, July 16, 1918. Therefore, it could not carry out any threats and any country defying its … The wider circumstances of that time were unpropitious, but the basic problem persists: as President Assad of Egypt told Tony Blair, in the wake of the attack on New York on September 11 2001, labelling is inescapably a political act. There seemed to me to be a disconnect between the burgeoning ‘new political history’ which dealt with political identities and cultural representations, and the existing standard works on the evolution of inter-war foreign policy in which the LNU traditionally featured. University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill. Yearwood’s discussion of Lloyd’s analysis, however, rather reinforces the narrowly instrumentalist view that previous historians of the LNU have taken, that is, that it failed in the end to change government policy, and therefore it ‘failed’ absolutely, and there’s not much more to be said. The UN secretariat came to represent the apparent 'democratisation' of the organisation, as the General Assembly began to assert itself after a decade of US domination. Pacifism was a great problem: the League’s two largest members, Britain and France, were very reluctant to resort in sanctions and military actions. Why did the League of Nations fail? The League's structure/organisation was inefficient. (Lytton Report)Japan invaded Manchuria but still wanted more. In 1920, the League of Nations organised the Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets in Paris. Structure - Voting Procedure What is the … Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. For the league to function properly, the countries that made it up would have needed to act in unison but they tended to act in their own self-interest. Only two nations are for the time being left out. Or, still more disastrously, in the case of Italian pressure on Abyssinia, the guilt was clear enough but the key powers, Britain and France, were unwilling to antagonise the guilty party because of their wider strategic fears. Like the proverbial old soldier, the League never died, but rather faded away. During conflicts, they were not prepared to abandon their own self-interest to support the League. It does not challenge the main conclusions of Donald Birn’s pioneering 1981 study (4), but does broaden and deepen it. On the 19 th October 1935, the League of Nations voted to impose sanctions on Italy after it invaded Abyssinia. When bad things happened, they would condemn them but this was pretty much all they could do on their own. Nor was it from a firm training in diplomatic or international history. Wilson did gain approval for his proposal for a League of Nations. The League of Nations was the first intergovernmental organization that was established after World War 1 in order to try and maintain peace. When China appealed to the League, it took a full year for officials of the League to report back from China and Japan what the truth was. The League of Nations did not have a policy of appeasement because it was powerless. It was founded on 10 January 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War, and ceased operations on 20 April 1946. What appeared to have been the repudiation of the League with the Hoare-Laval Pact largely destroyed the credibility of Geneva. First of all, let me thank Peter Yearwood, whose own work has made such an important contribution to the field, for taking the time to read my book on the League of Nations movement in Britain. A league for all nations? Between 1920 and 1939, a total of 63 countries became member states of the League of Nations.The Covenant forming the League of Nations was included in the Treaty of Versailles and came into force on 10 January 1920, with the League of Nations being dissolved on 18 April 1946; its assets and responsibilities were transferred to the United Nations. These reasons include Italy being a threat to the rest of the world, having an alliance with Italy, Abyssinia meant nothing to the League of Nations and the League couldn’t afford to help Abyssinia. Defeating the League of Nations It was founded on 10 January 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War, and ceased operations on 20 April 1946. As you can see, the League of Nations was quite fluid in terms of who joined and who left (or was removed!). President Wilson; America failed to ratify the League Covenant There is no other way to do it than by a universal league of nations, and what is proposed is a universal league of nations. The League of Nations Union saw its job as ‘fostering intelligent citizenship and developing enlightened patriotism’ (p. 132). He hoped that once the League was established, it could … While teachers largely accepted the Union’s internationalism as part of the general turn away from the jingoistic masculinity of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, they worried about the possible intrusion of ‘propaganda’ into the classroom. No, my interest in the League of Nations Union (LNU) stemmed from a fascination with an entirely different problem altogether: the impact on British society of the franchise extensions of 1918 and 1928, which transformed Britain from a limited, property-based franchise into a genuinely mass democracy in which the working classes and women formed a majority of the electorate. She refers several times to the Four Points of the International Peace Campaign, but she never gives them, even though whether to grant dispensation from the third point (calling for ‘Strengthening of the League of Nations for the prevention and stopping of war by the organization of Collective Security and Mutual Assistance’ (12)) was a matter of considerable importance within the Union. The League, therefore, resembled a club of winners, with the largest force against the defeated countries. Once big powers started to challenge the status quo, as Japan did in Manchuria, the League found it practically impossible to reach a clear verdict on who was guilty of 'aggression'. By December 1920, 48 states had signed the League Covenant, pledging to work together to eliminate aggression between countries. This experience did not just demonstrate the failure of the League, but also, proved that a great power could commit an assault without fear of sanctions. Many of the tensions between the centrist and the campaigning approaches and the intrinsic weaknesses of the LNU are clearly brought out. Lord Robert Cecil, the Chairman and effective leader of the Union throughout, in government or out, characteristically tried to contrast his zeal for the League with the alleged indifference of other Conservatives. Because the French were realists who had no use for lofty ideals of questionable practical value. Yet the League of Nations did work surprisingly well, at least for a decade after the war. Japan simply fell out with the League of Nations because of this fact that any leading member's self-interest always prevails, hence linking back to the question, Japan's self-interest was the main driving-force behind the Manchurian Crisis. The member countries of the League of Nations spanned the globe and included most of Southeast Asia, Europe, and South America. Not even Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s was ready for an open break with the LNU. Charles Townshend is Professor of International History at Keele University. 3) USA was not going to help with sanctions as did not want to harm own economy. The secret diplomacy of the old order would be replaced by...open discussion. Weak powers. Interested in reviewing for us? The lack of the U.S's support meant that these two state's armies were no where near the scale that the Fascist nations were amassing. 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