The League of Nations

Enduring Legacies of the First Experiment at World Organization

M. Patrick Cottrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317395966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

The League of Nations occupies a fascinating yet paradoxical place in human history. Over time, it's come to symbolize both a path to peace and to war, a promising vision of world order and a utopian illusion, an artifact of a bygone era and a beacon for one that may still come. As the first experiment in world organization, the League played a pivotal, but often overlooked role in the creation of the United Nations and the modern architecture of global governance.

In contrast to conventional accounts, which chronicle the institution's successes and failures during the interwar period, Cottrell explores the enduring relevance of the League of Nations for the present and future of global politics. He asks: What are the legacies of the League experiment? How do they inform current debates on the health of global order and US leadership? Is there a "dark side" to these legacies?

Cottrell demonstrates how the League of Nations' soul continues to shape modern international relations, for better and for worse. Written in a manner accessible to students of international history, international relations and global politics, it will also be of interest to graduates and scholars.

1 The League of Nations experiment and the quest for world order

• The problem of (liberal) order

• The League as experiment

• Conclusion: charting the legacies of the League experiment

The League of Nations represents a seminal experiment in the quest for stable, peaceful world order. Rising from the ashes of war and championed by Woodrow Wilson, the League initially inspired great hope before collapsing under the weight of the very conflict it sought to prevent. Although there can be no doubt that the League failed in many fundamental respects, it also left a lasting impact that continues to shape the present and future of international order in ways that transcend the conventional wisdom. To lay the foundation to consider this impact, this chapter addresses two questions.

First, what do we mean by order? The problem of order has long confounded those who seek to understand the relations among states and other actors that comprise international society. As the first experiment at world organization, the League of Nations reflects the birth of the liberal order and is itself a major inflection point in human history. Yet contemporary debates in international relations seem to converge on the notion that this order is, at minimum, under severe stress. Indeed, many leading thinkers perceive an order in crisis, though with very different assessments of what such crisis may portend, a point introduced in the first section and discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. Treating the League of Nations as an experiment can not only help understand the roots of contemporary liberal order, but also analyze the implications of the present stress and prospects of its future, which leads to a second question.

What does analyzing the League of Nations as an experiment buy us? Experiments are based on received wisdom, which serves as a baseline to help generate new knowledge and ideas. Experiments are also part of an iterative process of trial and error. In the case of the League of Nations, an experimental lens therefore encourages us to consider factors such as temporality, the role of ideas in cementing (and overturning) a given order, and the adaptive capacity of the institutions currently in place to govern in the twenty-first century.

The problem of (liberal) order

The problem of international order has long occupied scholars of global politics and raised a number of enduring questions.¹ How can order develop out of an anarchical international system that lacks a central governing authority? What forces create and sustain a political order? Can the primacy of self-interest be reconciled with the degree of cooperation necessary to provide common goods? What drives change within an order or the collapse of an order altogether? Indeed, the framing memorandum for the seminal 1983 special issue of International Organization, one of the flagship journals in the study of international relations, described “the most fundamental concern of social theory” to be “how order is established, maintained, and destroyed” (Strange 1983, 345).² Questions of order, “the recognition of patterned regularity in social and political life,” are often examined in the context of international institutions that codify these patterns (Lieberman 2002, 698).³ It is in this sense that Georg Sorensen defines world order as a “governing arrangement among states.” ⁴For Henry Kissinger, whose intellectual career has largely been devoted to the topic, a political order rests on two central pillars: “a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of power that enforces restraint when rules break down, preventing one political unit from subjugating all others.”⁵ Kissinger and other realist thinkers emphasize the exercise of material power of states in accounting for the origins and maintenance of a stable order. Although rules are usually the byproduct of negotiations, they tend to promote great power interests and cement power relationships. Indeed, the materially powerful have important advantages in establishing the basis for institutional order.⁶ They can leverage resources, media outlets, and knowledge pools in a strategic fashion to secure favorable rules of the game. Furthermore, agreements without the backing of material power are unlikely to be complied with or enforced and will therefore lack the political authority to be stable. A given order may be challenged or overturned as the distribution of power shifts and/or interests of the powerful change.

However, order cannot be created and sustained by material power alone. As Inis Claude contended, “power and legitimacy are not antithetical, but complementary,”⁷ and legitimacy of action is something desired by the powerful to sustain their rule.⁸ Andrew Hurrell goes a step further to consider the role of the institutionalization of order. “A great deal of the struggle for political power is the quest for legitimate and authoritative control that avoids costly and dangerous reliance on brute force and coercion.”⁹ He stresses the “importance of institutions to the stabilization and legitimization of power in general and of unequal or hegemonic power in particular.”¹⁰

The rules, norms, and practices that constitute the order rely on commonly held ideas and values.¹¹ Accounting for the creation and maintenance of political order must therefore consider the processes by which problems are conceived, preferences are formed, how cost and benefit calculations come to be defined, and crucial aspects of institutions as agents of transformation that may have important implications for furthering our understanding of the sources of international cooperation and normative order.¹² A stable political order therefore resides at the intersection of the social, i.e. commonly accepted rules or norms, and the material, i.e. the ability to marshal the necessary power required to maintain stability in turbulent times. When this intersection is able to strike the balance between material power and social purpose, an order is likely to be seen as more legitimate by the governed. However, such legitimacy is not easy to maintain. The right or authority of the political institutions to govern is derived from the consent of the people. When that consent—the social mortar that binds a given order together, and hence constitutes legitimacy—is lost, sometimes those institutions face crisis¹³ and raise doubts about the durability of a given order. At such junctures, relevant actors are faced with a choice: uphold the existing order through reform, abandon it, or replace it with something different.¹⁴ Indeed, one of the defining debates of the twenty-first century is whether the international liberal order will continue to withstand the test of time and emerging global power transitions.

What is meant by liberal order? The complexity of the term lends itself to a range of different uses. Broadly conceived, it refers to a set of principles and ideas, in the intellectual tradition of liberal luminaries such as Immanuel Kant, that comprise a broader vision of a world governed by an open economic system, international laws and institutions, cooperative (if not collective) security, collaborative problem-solving, and democratic values.¹⁵ The emphasis on these principles is not static, but rather varies by context, time, and circumstance.

The League of Nations represents the first attempt to institutionalize a liberal order on a global scale—its ambition and scope unprecedented in history. For Woodrow Wilson, the League’s most famous champion and ardent supporter of a post-World War I “peace without victory,” such an order would be rooted not in a balance of power, but in a community of power. “Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace,” he asked rhetorically in a speech to the US Senate in January 1917, “or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”

Wilson also had a bigger picture in mind from the outset. He knew that the League, like any institution charged with establishing and maintaining order, would have to evolve in stages. As Wilson explained to Jean Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador, “there would thus be created, little by little, precedents that would break the habit of having to recourse to arms …” and “in the very process of carrying out these covenants … a machinery and practice of cooperation would naturally spring up which would … produce … a regularly constituted and employed concert of nations.”¹⁶ This vision has not yet come to fruition. However, as the subsequent chapters of this book illustrate, the League remains important precisely because it continues to serve as the launching pad for the broader project of international liberal order. Indeed, the contemporary world order, and most of the institutional pillars that reinforce it, derives a significant part of its legitimacy from its liberal character and principles first enshrined by the League.

While some perceive the present liberal order to rest on stable footing,¹⁷ others contend that a more fundamental and ominous shift may be on the horizon.¹⁸ Some of the commonly made arguments and questions raised in contemporary discourse surrounding liberal order might be thought of in terms of three related crises: one of power, one of institutions and the ideas cemented within them, and one of democratic leadership or authority.

The first crisis of liberal order is often framed in terms of power. Conventional wisdom now agrees that the “unipolar moment” of US hegemony is over, though assessments of the magnitude and direction of this shift vary. Some contend that the rise of emerging powers, and China in particular, portends a return to geopolitics characterized by regional and global competition that could overturn the existing liberal order. Others point out that a narrow focus on states obscures the bigger picture of an extraordinarily complex global landscape characterized by non-state actors such as private corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society, international organizations, criminal networks, and terrorists that influence outcomes more than ever before. Shifts in the way that power is distributed and diffused in the “new world order” motivate discussion of the implications of a post-American world.

A second crisis therefore focuses on the limitations of the international institutions charged with preserving existing liberal order and the enduring relevance of the ideas upon which they are based. Today many scholars and policy-makers perceive the cornerstone institutions of global governance to be under stress as they struggle to meet new challenges and accommodate shifts in power, with some going as far as to question the future of multilateralism.¹⁹ The United Nations (UN), for example, is slow to adapt to new geopolitical realities, having been forged in an era with different power dynamics and prevailing ideas. No idea has shaped the contemporary order more than sovereignty, which is enshrined in our maps and our laws and reproduced in the UN system. Yet for a world that faces “problems without a passport” like climate change or the spread of disease, a rigid reliance on sovereignty may become our undoing.

Moreover, global governance problems—whether derived from a perceived “democratic deficit,” organizational pathologies, or design flaws—often undermine institutional capacities to address the changing needs of the global community. However, where does needed change and reform come from? Can the current liberal order be salvaged, or are there alternative sets of rules and norms that will underwrite a post-liberal order? In a “G-zero” or “post-American” or “nobody’s” world, where will the material resource commitment and political authority necessary to revitalize and sustain a liberal order come from?²⁰

Some scholars perceive a crisis not in terms of the liberal model, per se, but rather in terms of authority. The more the rest of the world views an order as legitimate, the more likely they will be to cooperate voluntarily and the lower the cost of coercion will be. However, even legitimate orders are paradoxical. On one hand, the more legitimate a given order, the greater likelihood that the international community will attain the depth of cooperation required to address common problems. On the other hand, because institutions often formalize unequal power relationships, it could actually make some constituents worse off. Consequently, while states and other actors have largely agreed to the rules that define the liberal order (and especially the liberal economic order), the crisis of authority may come from the desire for more influence within it or a more just distribution of its benefits. Critics often ask questions like: Who are the winners and losers in a twenty-first-century liberal order? Is there a collective unwillingness to remain bound by the so-called “golden straitjacket” of a Western-dominated order? Who sets the agenda and defines problems? Power disparities and corresponding social roles can have a profound impact on perceived legitimacy of a given order. Powerful states do, of course, provide a disproportionate share of the resources for institutions to function and their support is usually required to manage the institution and secure compliance, but they also use this leverage to pursue their strategic interests and perpetuate their relative power in the international system, which can undermine institutional legitimacy both in terms of process and substance.²¹ Simply put, the inequity and power asymmetries invite discord and decay of the social bases of liberal order.

The crisis of authority also spills into the realm of leadership and domestic politics. The longstanding so-called “American problem” serves as a lightning rod for some of these arguments. It is well known that the United States, which pushed so hard for the creation of the League as a vehicle to “make the world safe for democracy,” did not ultimately join it. Even after being granted a “second chance” to underwrite a more robust version of liberal order after World War II with the accompanying institutional architecture, the United States has often behaved inconsistently with the values it helped propagate. Democracy promotion has proven to be an uneven and often damaging enterprise,²² rais...