League of Nations

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The League is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out
—Benito Mussolini after invading Ethiopia and realizing the League wouldn't do a thing to punish him
Map of member states of the League of Nations and its semi-official flag.
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The League of Nations was the precursor organization to the United Nations. Created after World War I, the organization was designed by Woodrow Wilson of the United States to be a place where nations could solve issues non-violently and avoid war. While it failed to stop the majority of wars between the two world wars, it laid the groundwork for numerous other international bodies in the future.[1]

Contents

[edit] Powers

The League's powers were laid out in its Covenant.[2] Much like the League itself, these powers sound threatening on paper but really weren't all that scary, as Mussolini points out in his quote above. The League's first power was to be able to discuss issues and come to international agreements through its parliament. Despite taking a unanimous vote to do anything, this system was largely effective in the 1920's.[3]

The League's second power was its ability to use force if a nation disobeyed. This was the weakest of League's three powers, the League had no standing military and no nation's military could be used as a replacement.(Not that any nation was signing up). To compound this, most of the nations with powerful militaries were out of play. Germany and the USSR were banned from the League, Imperial Japan was too far away and the US wasn't interested in joining. England and France were members but had no interest dealing with issues outside of Western Europe.[4]

The League's final power was to use economic sanctions against nations that disobeyed. This sanctions were never used due to lack of effectiveness. Many of the League nations were openly trading with each other and penalizing one League member would mean penalizing the others. In the case of some nations like Japan, their main trading partner was outside the League (USA) so sanctions wouldn't have been effective even if they were enforced.

[edit] The Good

The League of Nations created the Nansen passport, an international passport for refugees. It also did help free African slaves in Africa. The League of Nations did stop some minor territorial disputes.[5]

Much of the good the League did was recognized after it died. The League was crucial in helping nations understand that issues like poverty, slavery, illegal drugs and the lack of rights for women were global issues that don't have to be tackled alone by one nation.[6]

[edit] The Bad

The League of Nations was a failure at its main goal, which was to stop wars. The tipping point of the League's lack of power in this regard was when Italy invaded Abyssinia where the leader of Abyssinia literally begged the League to do something and Italian delegates shouted him down. The League did nothing to stop Germany's highly illegal rearmament or its takeover of Austria or the Sudetenland. It also didn't stop that small war led by that guy with the weird mustache.

However, the League of Nation's failure of this comes from a mixture of structural errors and human errors. Leaving the League of Nations had no penalties and penalties usually weren't enforced as members of the League were afraid these penalties would interfere with their own operations.[7] The League's structural errors are numerous, one of the largest being that the League required unanimous decisions on everything, making it a slow and weak institution.[8]

Other organizations also overruled the League, such as the Conference of Ambassadors, an entente made up of France, England, Italy and Japan with the USA as an observing member. This conference overruled the League numerous times including the time Poland invaded and occupied the capital of Lithuania. This only helped to add to the League's perceived and real weakness.[9]

Many of the penalties also had no weight behind them in reality. While the League was considering giving Japan economic penalties after it invaded Manchuria for bullshit reasons[10], in hindsight economic penalties wouldn't have had any affect on Japan as their main trading partner was the US, another non-League member.

Under the terms of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japan declared war on Germany near the start of World War I. With British forces, Japan jointly captured the German settlement in China, and by itself seized German colonies in Micronesia. After the conclusion of the war, Japan was awarded with the German Micronesian territory as a League of Nations Mandated Territory. This territory proved strategically useful to Japan during World War II in conducting its war of aggression in the greater Pacific region.

Three of the planet's most powerful nations weren't members (US, Germany and USSR) for various reasons (internal politics, lost WWI, Red Scare) and voting a new member in required a unanimous vote.

[edit] Overall

The League of Nations mostly failed due to the timing of the organization's creation. We have the first example of an international diplomatic body being created when nationalistic tensions are high after WWI. and the colonialist powers were too broke to really do anything. Despite the threat of force, the League wasn't really in too much of a position to force anyone to do anything. The organization was more or less bound to fail despite it being a very innovative idea at the time.

[edit] Footnotes

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