The Peace That Never Was

A History of the League of Nations

Ruth Henig

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912208562
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Ninety years ago, the League of Nations convened for the first time, hoping to create a safeguard against destructive, world-wide war by settling disputes through diplomacy. This book looks at how the League was conceptualized and explores the multifaceted body that emerged. This new form for diplomacy was used in ensuing years to counter territorial ambitions and restrict armaments, as well as to discuss human rights and refugee issues. The League's failure to prevent World War II, however, would lead to its dissolution and the subsequent creation of the United Nations. As we face new forms of global crisis, this timely book asks if the UN's fate could be ascertained by reading the history of its predecessor.

1

One Vision – Many Approaches

For centuries, philosophers and statesmen had dreamed of constructing inter-state systems or international frameworks to promote harmony and preserve peace amongst potentially antagonistic states. But it took the four long years of appalling waste and senseless slaughter on the battlefields of the First World War before such dreams were translated into reality, and the construction of a League of Nations was catapulted to the top of the peace agenda in January 1919.

Looking back to the immediate aftermath of the war, it is clear that the international environment of 1919–20 could not have been less auspicious for the birth of the world’s first truly international organisation. The impact of the First World War was far-reaching and long-lasting; much of the damage was immediately visible, such as the sudden end of four great empires, massive financial indebtedness amongst nations, the outbreak of revolutions and of serious social unrest not just in Europe but across the globe, and not least the obvious physical damage in the shape of the scarred battlegrounds and devastated regions of France and Belgium.

But many historians also argue that the prolonged conflict had profound social, economic and political effects which persisted for decades, and that it was only in the 1990s that Western societies began fully to recover from the shock of the First World War.¹ However, precisely because of the enormous damage that the war had caused, it was imperative that a League of Nations was constructed as quickly as possible. Its establishment would be one of the few tangible gains of the war, serving as a symbol of hope for millions of bereaved families, displaced individuals and fleeing refugees that their sacrifices had not been in vain, and that the end of the First World War would truly bring about lasting peace amongst nations.

Whilst the war was undoubtedly the most important catalyst in the establishment of the League of Nations, there were a number of significant developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which highlighted the need for an international body which could broker agreements between states on specific issues or on problems which were proving particularly difficult to solve. The scientific and technological revolution which gathered pace in the second half of the 19th century created the need for a network of international agreements, all of which required central co-ordination, to oversee worldwide postal deliveries, lay cables and link telegraph systems and regulate major waterways, amongst other things. Over 300 international conferences were held to discuss such issues as sanitation, police regulations, patents, copyrights, the standardisation of weights and measures, agricultural and commercial issues, and the establishment and operation of the International Red Cross.² The spread of free trade around the globe and the opening up of markets led to an increase in the numbers of commercial treaties between states, and to the provision of informal mechanisms through which disputes could be arbitrated.

The use of arbitration to resolve disputes, not just of a non-political nature but increasingly intractable political issues, grew markedly at the end of the 19th century and in the first decade of the 20th. The United States and Britain were able to resolve a number of differences fairly amicably after the American Civil War, most notably the claims arising out of the damage inflicted during that conflict by the Confederate warship Alabama, built in the shipyards of Birken-head, which the British Prime Minister Herbert Gladstone agreed to settle through arbitration in 1871. Between 1899 and 1903, some 20 governments signed arbitral agreements; and by 1914, 100 arbitration treaties were in force.³ The use of arbitration treaties as a valuable means of resolving potential disputes between states was very strongly advocated in the United States, and the US Secretary of State from 1905–8, Elihu Root, who had enjoyed a distinguished legal career, was responsible for concluding some 40 reciprocal arbitration treaties which eventually covered 24 countries. However, it had become very clear before 1914 that the process of arbitration had its limitations. It could deal effectively with disputes arising from legal issues or misunderstandings relating to treaty provisions, but Root’s agreements could not extend to matters involving national honour, vital interest or independence. The American Senate took a close interest in negotiations, and insisted on the right to approve, in each case, the agreement on which particular issues were to be the subject of arbitration. And while informed opinion in the United States continued to favour the use of arbitration to resolve international disputes, the United States Government, in the early years of the 20th century, refused to submit three outstanding controversies to arbitral settlement, two relating to Panama and one to an ongoing dispute with Mexico.⁴

The limits of arbitration as a means of resolving disputes between nations were highlighted very graphically under the US Presidency of William Howard Taft, who took office in 1908. Like Root, he had enjoyed a distinguished judicial career, and in his new position he was keen to further the idea of world peace through the process of arbitration. His ultimate goal was to help to establish ‘an arbitral court whose jurisdiction should be increased ultimately to include all possible disputes of an international character’ and he proceeded to negotiate treaties with Canada, Britain and France in which the parties would arbitrate all justiciable disputes. While the negotiations with Canada eventually failed, a more serious obstacle was the insistence of the American Senate that disputes arising from issues such as immigration, state indebtedness and the Monroe Doctrine could not be included.

Leading Republicans such as the former President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge expressed their strong view that there were circumstances in which the United States would choose to fight over differences with other states, rather than resort to arbitration or negotiation. In the end, the Senate approved a reservation excluding certain types of disputes from consideration by the projected arbitration treaties, before approving their conclusion. In a telling comment, anticipating the later problems which arose in the United States over ratification of the League Covenant, a United States internationalist observed in 1912 that ‘we cannot enter into international agreements and at the same time maintain intact in every respect what is called sovereign power or senatorial prerogative’.⁵

The first Hague Conference, held in 1899, boosted calls for an international arbitral tribunal or world Supreme Court. Convened by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia primarily to discuss means of limiting, and if possible reducing, the growth of armaments between nations, the 26 states which attended, (which included mainly European states, but also the United States, Mexico and five Asian countries) were also tasked to examine how best to advance the pacific settlement of disputes. There was general agreement on what the rules of arbitration should be, and that a Permanent Court of Arbitration should be set up, but in practice this only amounted to the establishment of a panel of judges who would be willing to resolve disputes through arbitration if any were to be submitted to them. The ‘Court’ would have no power to enforce decrees, though it was given administrative machinery to provide a permanent framework for any tribunals which might be required, and each state would retain full sovereignty to decide whether they wished to avail themselves of the service or not.

The final convention adopted by the Hague Conference also included a provision for the appointment of ‘International Commissions of Enquiry’ which might help to resolve disputes arising not from matters of national honour or of vital interest but involving differences of opinion on points of fact. Five years later, this diplomatic mechanism proved invaluable in resolving the ‘Dogger Bank’ incident during which the Russian fleet, on its way to fight Japan in the Far East, fired on some British fishing vessels, having mistaken them for enemy ships.⁶

Thus it appeared that a promising start had been made. Four cases were brought before the Hague Arbitration Court in the first few years of the 20th century, and many internationalists hoped that further such gatherings at the Hague might crystallise into ‘a permanent and recognised advisory Congress of Nations’. One Congressman, Richard Bartholdt, even suggested the members of such a body should agree to respect each other’s ‘territorial and political integrity’, and that armed forces of the nations represented should be at the service of the Congress to enforce any decree which the Hague Court might issue in accordance with treaties of arbitration.⁷

The annual meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a body established in 1889 to enable members of parliaments and assemblies from different countries to meet regularly, recommended in 1905 that a further Hague Conference should be held, and raised the possibility of a reorganised Inter-Parliamentary Union becoming a representative arm of a Hague Conference which would meet on a regular basis. In 1907, a second Hague Conference was convened, a much bigger gathering than the first, with 256 delegates from 44 countries. But the greater number of countries represented made it more, not less, difficult to reach agreement on issues such as general treaties of arbitration or the establishment of a more permanent Court of International Justice, since all decisions had to be unanimous. Some discussions on the rules of warfare and on questions of neutral rights did result in general agreement, but disagreements on how to select the judges prevented any progress on the establishment of a Permanent Court of International Justice. While there were hopes that a further Hague Conference might be called, the international climate in the years leading up to 1914 made this increasingly unlikely.

Nonetheless, influential figures in the United States remained convinced that arbitration offered the most promising means of resolving international disputes and promoting world peace. Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt emphasised to the Nobel Committee, in 1910, the importance of arbitration treaties and of strengthening the Hague Court. He believed the Great Powers ‘should form a League of Peace to keep peace amongst themselves and prevent it being broken by others’.⁸

The wealthy American industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, returning to his native Scotland in 1905 to address the students of St Andrews who had elected him as Rector, called for a League of Peace to try to stop wars. Two years later he used the phrase ‘League of Nations’ to describe an international entity which could call on an international force similar to that which quelled the Boxer Uprising in China in 1900.⁹ In 1910, Carnegie used some of his considerable wealth to set up the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a $10 million endowment and Elihu Root as its first president. He and many other United States internationalists tried to advance the use of arbitration by the Hague mechanism, and to reinforce President Taft’s efforts to persuade the United States government to submit disputes to arbitral processes. William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson’s first Secretary of State, followed a somewhat different course after 1913, promoting a series of bilateral treaties aimed to resolve any disputes that might arise between the signatories by resort to a standing International Commission of Enquiry, and by using ‘cooling off periods’. The treaty signatories pledged themselves not to go to war for a period of 12 months, during which time investigations could take place and attempts be made to deal with the problem through arbitration. Bryan claimed to have used this approach successfully many years previously to resolve labour disputes, and was convinced that a ‘cooling-off period’ of twelve months would allow tempers to calm and would facilitate peaceful negotiations. Within a year, over 20 treaties had been negotiated, with countries which included Britain and France. Significantly, however, the German government refused to follow suit.¹⁰

In the years before 1914, especially on the European mainland, there was markedly less confidence in the possible efficacy of arbitration, or of ‘cooling off’ processes, and growing pessimism about the ability of any international mechanisms to resolve inter-state disputes. In 19th-century Europe, the leading powers attempted to resolve conflicts, particularly amongst smaller powers, by working collaboratively through the Congress system or ‘Concert of Europe’, established after the Vienna settlement of 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Meeting periodically to deal with problems of mutual concern, the major powers in Europe came together on a number of occasions during the 19th century to deal with sudden diplomatic crises or to settle thorny and contested issues. The ‘Concert of Europe’ successfully adjudicated on claims arising from the European ‘scramble for Africa’ in the 1870s and early 1880s, and spent much time and energy trying to resolve or to limit a number of contentious territorial disputes in eastern and south-eastern Europe arising from the inexorable decline of the Ottoman Empire. However, the system could only work if individual states took the lead in convening a meeting to resolve or to head off a crisis, and the other major powers were prepared to respond. There was no machinery to compel states to attend or to ensure that meetings were held at regular intervals.

As Europe became dangerously divided between two Great Power ‘blocs’ in the early years of the 20th century, and as levels of military preparedness and of armaments rose alarmingly, willingness to submit disputes and grievances to a conference of powers declined. The outbreak of two Balkan Wars, fuelling Serbian nationalism and posing a serious threat to the stability of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was followed by a conference at which the major European powers exerted pressure over the belligerent Balkan states to prevent them from engaging in further hostilities, and to stop themselves from being dragged into the series of conflicts. But the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 triggered a sequence of events which proved far more difficult to contain.

As war clouds gathered, the British government, through its Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, desperately tried to convene a conference of the leading European powers to try to resolve the crisis, but could not persuade the German or Austro-Hungarian governments to attend. In early August, 1914, a large number of European powers found themselves instead drawn into a war which lasted for much longer and cost far more in both human and material resources than anyone had imagined to be possible in 1914. And as the war escalated, Grey and the British government became ever more convinced that the First World War would not have broken out had there been an international body in existence in 1914 which could have compelled states to submit their disputes for discussion and potential resolution according to a set of agreed procedures.

A number of influential individuals close to the Liberal Government shared this view. Viscount Bryce, who had been a Liberal MP for 27 years before serving as Ambassador to the United States between 1907 and 1913, and a group of like-minded international pacifists, who included the Cambridge historian and writer Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and the Liberal MP Sir Willoughby Dickinson, met regularly after the outbreak of the war to discuss and try to formulate a set of principles on which an international body to preserve peace between nations might be based. As the war intensified and resulted in increasing numbers of casualties, the group, in February 1915, produced a set of ‘Proposals for the Avoidance of War’. They advocated that an international court of justice or the Hague Court of Arbitration should deal with justiciable disputes. A ‘Council of Conciliation’ should consider all other disputes. While this took place, the affected states should agree not to resort to war within a year, or within six months after an award or report from the international body. All the other signatory powers should take sanctions of an economic or more ‘forcible’ kind against a state failing to abide by these agreements. The Council could take action if peace was threatened in any way, even if the parties most directly involved did not refer their quarrels to it, and it could also propose programmes of disarmament.¹¹

As the British Ambassador to the United States, Bryce had forged close links with Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, and with Secretaries of State Root and Bryan. The ideas of his group were quickly circulated around the 60 or more peace groups which existed in the United States at the outbreak of the war. Some of these, such as the American Peace Society and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believed that the most promising route to secure international peace lay through the adoption of judicial processes such as arbitral courts and a determined push towards the codification of international law which states would agree to observe. Other groups, however, felt that concerted political pressure was also required to maintain peace amongst sovereign states. In 1915, around 300 leading peace campaigners, meeting at Philadelphia, agreed to a series of proposals which were very much influenced both by the Bryan treaties and by the proposals of the Bryce group.

A League was to be established of all the great nations and some medium-sized powers, to ensure that they submitted justiciable disputes to a judicial tribunal and non-justiciable disputes to a Council of Conciliation, for ‘hearing, consideration and recommendation’. Force, either economic or military, would be used by League members to compel states to submit any disputes to the appropriate body. But the League would also encourage the rule of law to spread by holding conferences from time to time to formulate and to codify the rules of international law. A new organisation, the ‘League to Enforce Peace’, was set up to campaign nationwide and further afield on the basis of these proposals, designed, as one of its leading advocates said, to establish a League which could ‘compel enquiry before nations are allowed to fight’.¹² For the next three years, League campaigners worked tirelessly to spread their ideas across the United States, and to bring their influence to bear particularly on Senators, whose role would be decisive in supporting or rejecting any United States bid to join a new international body. Would Senators, especially Republican ones, support the concept of a League which could commit the United States to war, and which might allow European powers to interfere in the affairs of Central and South America? Clearly, the role and functions of such a League, and the potential actions the United States might be asked to carry out as a member of it, were bound to arouse considerable controversy in a country whose involvement in international diplomac...