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1 The League of Nations faces the progressive crisis of the interwar period
The League of Nations, which arose in 1919 as a result of the Great War (1914â1918), represented a multilateral organization without historical precedents, which came to reformulate the traditional modus operandi of international relations. Its fundamental aim was to prevent the recurrence of a disaster of such magnitude, through public diplomacy â avoiding the traditional secret diplomacy, widely responsible for the drift toward the First World War. It was based on a system of collective security whose ultimate legal expression was the Founding Covenant of the LoN itself. A Covenant that in its print guaranteed national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of the member states of the organization.
On January 18, 1919, the Paris Peace Conference began. In its second full session, held on the 25th of that same month, a resolution was unanimously adopted by virtue of which the League of Nations (LoN) Covenant was constituted as an integral part of the peace treaties that followed the Great War. Fourteen countries would initially be represented in this agreement, whose contents would be prepared by a special commission. This commission was headed by US President Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the main father of the new organization, after having announced to his countryâs Congress his famous Fourteen Points on January 8, 1918, which would shape the peace after the war. The last of these points mentioned the creation of a higher body that would guarantee both the political independence and the territorial integrity of all nations,1 a proposal that showed the stamp of one of the founding principles of the United States itself. The final text of the Covenant was submitted on April 28, 1919.
Months earlier, the American president had arrived in the French city of Brest with the Covenant (the legal support of the new multilateral organization) under his arm. He announced that, after the military tragedy of exhaustive trench warfare that had just concluded, the recourse to war must be neutralized by creating an agency (the League of Nations) to moderate decision-making at the national level. To begin with, a task as complex as reaching a comprehensive disarmament agreement had to be accomplished. Wilsonâs proposals were shared by other prominent figures of the time, such as Jan Christiaan Smuts, who published an essay under the title The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion, a work that influenced both the ideas of the American president himself as well as the peace negotiations in Paris. However, there were also opposing positions: French statesman LĂ©on Bourgeois expounded the idea of a generalized fear in the face of possible German revenge, which in practice translated into an appeal to realpolitik. But Wilson was not satisfied with simply achieving peace and returning to the pre-war international order, but rather went on to look for a new working system for international relations which would be founded not on negotiations and particular interstate alliances, but rather on collective security, multilateralism, public diplomacy, and the adherence of the member states to a universal system of law. In other words, something that went much further than the only sort of antecedent of such a project, as could somehow be considered the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Concert of Europe that came from it. In its origins, the League of Nations represented, as Mazower has stated, a bridge between the imperial world of the nineteenth century and the rise of the nation-state of the twentieth century, whose multilateral essence was supposed to help strengthen transparency over secrecy, as well as participation over exclusion.2
Immediately, Wilson began to be dismissed as naive, and his ideas were quickly neutralized by the powers of his own country, starting with the world of finance and, particularly, by the weapons industry. The perception then spread that the president was putting global interests before those of his own country. This is why, paradoxically, although the origins of the League of Nations were in the White House, the United States did not end up being a part of the organization. However, the idea survived beyond Wilson, despite not being able to convince his own countrymen of his project.
The LoN, with its commitment to open, public, and multilateral diplomacy, represented the symbol that emerged after the end of the Great War. It was also one of the three great geopolitical consequences of this conflict for the future, along with the revolutionary processes that took place in Russia in 1917 that gave rise to the birth of the first self-named socialist state (the Soviet Union) and also had its international projection through the Comintern created in 1919, and the disintegration of four empires (the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Russian, and the Ottoman). This last consequence included the complexities that came from the birth of new states and national minorities because of border movements, as well as the rise of nationalist extremism, and these took place especially in the countries most affected by the Versailles order: Germany and Italy. A key element in the configuration of the new world that emanated from that conflict was the politicization of the masses, and its interest and consequent insertion in collective affairs after directly suffering the war.
The LoN became the primary agency for the development of international relations, whose most important goal was to ensure peace at the global level. The collective security system through which this ambitious and noble objective would try to be achieved consisted of holding periodic meetings in Geneva. The interstate differences that would otherwise have resulted in conflict (or which were liable to do so) would be arbitrated and, if necessary, the imposition of economic and military sanctions against the aggressor would be resorted to.
The new project was given a key framework from the outset: the Covenant of the LoN, consisting of a preamble and 26 articles. It also had an important handicap at its birth that has already been mentioned: the absence of the United States, having been rejected by a Senate of a marked conservatism and vested interests of primary importance.
Between the approval of the Treaty of Versailles and the return of President Wilson to the US, a bitter struggle took place between supporters and critics of the League of Nations. The presidential initiative was blocked by the Senateâs Foreign Relations Committee, chaired and dominated by a bitter enemy of Wilson, Henry Cabot Lodge. This body paved the way for the establishment of a foreign policy apart from the collective project, a position motivated by the decision to return to isolationism, coupled with an absolute skepticism toward the proposed general disarmament. Lodge slowed the process of ratifying the Covenant in the aforementioned committee throughout the summer, a key time to cool the enthusiasm of those in favor of the presidential decision and to propose no less than 14 amendments to the text â in a clear ironic reference to Wilsonâs Fourteen Points. This led to the refusal of the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and to enter the new organization.3 The de facto powers had imposed themselves on the presidential will. Forces over which Wilson himself had already warned:
Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.4
However, such a will to return to isolationism had great support not only among the Republicans but among the American people in general, determined to recover their traditional distance from the turbulent European political life.
As honest as President Wilsonâs purposes might have been, neither his personalism nor his internationalism pleased most of his countrymen, many of whom admonished him that he was elected to govern their country, not to solve the worldâs problems. This collective feeling helped bring Republican candidate Warren G. Harding to power in the 1920 presidential elections. With that election, the American people confirmed their stance against Wilsonian idealism and internationalism, opting instead for a realistic and isolationist leadership. The infancy and period of growth of the new organization was, in this way, in the hands of the government plans of London and Paris. Washingtonâs absence was a deciding factor in the evolution of the organization. Although the power of the US was not comparable to that which it would boast a couple of decades later, the origin of the ideal represented by the LoN had been included in the last of the famous Fourteen Points presented before Congress by Wilson,5 and the text of the Covenant itself was in clear harmony and relationship with them. The fact that the same country from which the multilateral project had been promoted was not part of the project already constituted a false first step in its existence. Although other countries of great importance, such as Germany and the Soviet Union, did not at first join in Geneva, they did so later (in 1926 and 1934, respectively). In the case of Spain, and after the efforts carried out by the Count of Romanones with Wilson, in which he had to justify, among other things, Spanish neutrality during the Great War, the US president proposed that Spain be admitted as a member country of both the organization and of its executive body.
The absence of Washington from the organization weakened the possibility of success of the new type of planned coexistence, and the tension was growing between those countries that advocated a status quo of international society after 1918 and those others that refused to accept such a scenario. These last ones did so by orienting their objectives instead toward revisionist positions against the diktat or the imposition of a coexistence that they were not willing to abide by, at least in the way in which it had been proposed to them. The other major absence highlighted in the incipient project, as has already been mentioned, was that of the still-young Soviet Union. Because of the 1917 Revolution, Moscow was excluded from the Paris peace negotiations in 1919 and Lenin, in turn, rejected the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the border agreements it bounded, as well as rejected the incipient organization. Something similar happened with Mexico, due to its revolutionary process initiated in 1910 â although the official excuse for its exclusion was its neutrality during the war.
The League of Nationsâ body was composed of three main bodies: the General Assembly (with an Executive Committee in charge of electing non-permanent members of the Council), the Council (consisting of five permanent members [those nations that were victorious in the Great War] and another four rotary members [based primarily on the criteria of regional representativeness] with the main purpose of studying any issue related to maintaining peace on a worldwide scale), and the General Secretariat (which would prepare the documents for both the Assembly and the Council). Sections such as disarmament or protection of national minorities had great importance in daily operations. The technical agencies held the highest respect within the League of Nations (and most of them would continue to develop their roles as part of the future United Nations). Other autonomous bodies, although linked to the League of Nations itself, would be the Permanent Court of International Justice (with its headquarters in The Hague) and the International Labour Organization (also located in Geneva).
On January 10, 1920, with the enactment of the Treaty of Versailles, the LoN was officially born. From then on, it was established that world peace would only take place through an international agreement that promoted the guarantee of collective security, which would replace the competitive struggle for the best weapons and the best allies. The collective trauma of the Great War favored the agreements, which would translate into periodical intergovernmental deliberations, arbitration, and the recourse of applying economic and military sanctions to an aggressor state. This last point represented the main implication of the collective security system, based on the commitment made by each member state to respond jointly to an attack made against any other member. It was a collective project whose need was only made clear in the eyes of international society â internationalized throughout the nineteenth century, following the recent war trauma. The evolution of international law during the nineteenth century shed light on the idea of a possible supranational arbitration in order to resolve the conflicts.6 Disarmament was the main reason why, both in parts of Europe as well as in the United States, the new international creature was considered a reflection of a utopia and, as such, condemned in advance to failure. The lack of political will on the part of the member states made it defective every time a thorny issue arrived in Geneva, with the Japanese aggression against China being the first example that proved such a reality. The Palais des Nations thus became the luxurious hall in which international diplomacy periodically had its pleasant stays on the banks of the Lake LĂ©man. The League of Nations was born as a result of a tragic event, of a magnitude unique until that moment: the then known as the Great War. That such a denomination was lost in the very short historical period of two decades â the time it took for a new world war to erupt â is evidence of its failure.
The reasons for this failure can be found in the extreme fragility of the international society created by the Treaty of Versailles, as evidenced by the behavior of the great powers in the face of the repeated violation of the very foundations of the peace that was intended to be built. This seriously called into question the existence of an institution that constituted the framework for multilateral relations at the time and was born precisely on the pretext of avoiding such dangers. The Covenant of the LoN imposed some obligations, but lacked the necessary mechanisms (technical bodies that would provide agility to the Geneva framework, which was enormous and clumsy due to the fact that it was just recently established, as well as to its natural condition as a complex organism) for the immediate application of sanctions stipulated in it in the case of a violation of the acquired commitment. This is where the role of the states that held the greatest power within the new system came into play, a system of international relations based on a supposed multilateralism, but apart from which, in the end, was the same old system of alliances as before the Great War.
The Covenant had its origin in the immediacy that followed the horrors of the conflict that ended in 1918, in a context of exaltation of the pacifist ideal, in which there was no consideration of the difficulties that came out of the incorrect stipulation of the steps to be followed in order to safeguard the peace based on the articulation of the constituent text of the organization. Article 15 of the Covenant called on all LoN member states to resolve their differences through an arbitration referred to in Article 13, which meant giving up war. In the event that one of the parties in dispute was to try to impose itself on another by force, it would be sanctioned. Article 16 included the sanctions in question: economic and financial in the first instance, then moving on to military ones if necessary. The nations represented in Geneva would have to put at the service of the LoN the military forces that were needed to enforce the commitments stipulated in the Covenant. With this order, the lack of the organizationâs own armed forces was compensated for, motivated in that time by British desire and against the French will. Londonâs opinion in that regard was merely another display button of the imperial worldview of the Tories â and of more than just a few Liberals and members of the Labour Party. The United Kingdom was still the largest imperial power in the world, and without taking this self-perception into account, one cannot understand its persistent rejection of issues related to equal treatment or condition.7 This was part of a widespread aversion to cosmopolitanism amongst the European right wing in the twenties and thirties. In the event of a military conflict involving any member state of the LoN, the other countries that were part of the organization could not remain neutral. This was laid out in various articles of the Covenant.
Article 12 stipulated that, in the event of any disagreement between them that might cause a rupture, it would be subjected to the arbitration or judicial settlement procedure, or to the Councilâs examination, requiring that in no case shall they resort to war before a period of three months has elapsed after the judgment of the arbitrators, or after the judicial decision or opinion of the Council. According to Article 13, the member states had pledged to submit in full to arbitration or judicial settlement, the cause of dispute being submitted to the Permanent Court of International Justice or to any other jurisdiction or court designated by the parties, under the commitment to comply in good faith with judgments and to no longer resort to war against a member of the League that submits to said judgments ...
