137–41). 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. For centrism in the early post-war period see Kenneth O. Morgan. 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. Its own members betrayed it and let it down. 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. He did, however, make sure the League of Nations was an inextricable part of the final agreement. Polson-Newman, ‘The League of Nations Union’. Just fill in your details. 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. The effect of this was to make the League seem less binding. Dealing with such internal conflict was a far more ambitious and demanding task than the traditional role of assisting consenting states to observe ceasefires. As you study what the League did, you will be able to decide if you think the League was a success or a failure. Members of the League, especially Britain and France feared another war and therefore did not want to use force. This is the official Web Site of the United Nations Office at Geneva. 132). Very few of us who were in the Union heart and soul considered the Covenant absorbingly interesting. Methods of investigating disputes, and helping to keep the peace, were regularised. The LNU was not intended to ‘shore up middle class anti-socialism’ (p. 157). He has held Fellowships at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. ), The breakdown of such states...revealed a maelstrom of elemental national forces. Though relatively minor, these were just the kind of incidents that had in the past triggered regional conflicts - and indeed World War One itself. When the Allies finally began to prepare for the end of World War Two, they rejected any idea of restoring the League, and instead moved to establish a new organisation, the United Nations (UN). Respect for the League had fallen so far that the Gestapo invaded the home of the League high commissioner in Danzig the night before the war began, and when Britain and France sent in notifications of their declarations of war, they pointedly did not invoke the Covenant of the League of Nations–Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. A century ago Friday, on Jan. 25, 1919, nearly 30 countries approved a proposal to create a commission to establish the League of Nations.  © Major E.W. I fully concede that those looking for a detailed re-examination of British foreign policy concerning the League – or the history of British involvement in the League itself – will not find it in my book. Support for the League peaked in 1931 just as it was ebbing on the continent. (2) The League of Nations remained totally inactive when Japan attacked Manchuria in 1931. Germany had been a League mem­ber since 1926. Pacifism was a great problem: the League’s two largest members, Britain and France, were very reluctant to resort in sanctions and military actions. Britain was too scared to argue in case there was another war. The centrist policy of the LNU was to a large degree abandoned as Cecil moved the organisation sharply to the left, aligning it with the International Peace Campaign and functioning as part of the Popular Front. One trade unionist on an LNU deputation to Downing Street found his colleagues ‘a poor babbling crowd with all the traditional courtesies, gratitudes and sophistication, so that I felt quite out of place and unhappy’ (p. 169). 4. I confess that I was not aware of Lorna Lloyd’s book on the International Court; one is human, after all, and cannot read everything. 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. I describe my point of departure at such length because it goes some way, I think, to explaining the differences of outlook between myself and Peter Yearwood, who – from the standpoint of a diplomatic historian – takes issue with what he sees as the insufficient attention paid in the book to the substantive ‘issues’ confronting the League. 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). Wilson did gain approval for his proposal for a League of Nations. 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. 5. Among these were not only such low-key but effective institutions as the International Court and the International Labour Organisation, but also the working assumptions of the secretariat, and some key operations - including those that would soon come to be called 'peacekeeping' operations. Interested in reviewing for us? How did it change the way ordinary voters participated in politics, or expressed themselves politically? (6) It did establish links with the British Legion, and recruited heavily on Armistice Day. 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. Proposal for a League of Nations. In her conclusion McCarthy quotes the reflection of a Branch Secretary: ‘Let us be honest with ourselves. why so many soldiers survived the trenches, how Pack Up Your Troubles became the viral hit. The United States did not join the League of Nations because of opposition in the press and the U.S. Senate. Many of the tensions between the centrist and the campaigning approaches and the intrinsic weaknesses of the LNU are clearly brought out. The Union’s failure prefigures its failure in the late 1930s, though in the earlier case it abandoned its campaign once it became clear that the government would not budge. In response to the first debate, the only members of the League that could, in theory, stand up to an aggressive nation such as Germany were Britain and France. Viscount Cecil Robert. The League of Nations Union saw its job as ‘fostering intelligent citizenship and developing enlightened patriotism’ (p. I was (and remain) a historian of Britain – and of the British domestic social and political scene at that, rather than of British foreign policy. A powerful Mussolini was willing to go against the League. The machinery of the League organisation grew more substantial, and the secretariat began to carve out the basis for a quasi-independent role, although this was unplanned and unlooked-for by the old great powers. Although Cecil was premature, and his political schemes came to nothing, the Union followed his centrist vision. Kissinger, Henry. Italy , France , Britain , Hitler , League of Nations , Mussolini , Abyssinia Please leave a comment below Cancel reply Nor was it from a firm training in diplomatic or international history. 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. The participation of the middle-classes in the Union suggests that accounts of their retreat into suburban domesticity have been exaggerated. Surely we can recognise that we are each contributing in different ways to a broader and deeper understanding of the place of the League in British politics and society between the wars? The proliferation of League activity, however, carried risks: as one of its founders, Lloyd George, put it, 'it had weak links spreading everywhere and no grip anywhere'. World Depression made nations less cooperative. (9) While McCarthy does not make an international comparison, the development of British public opinion clearly followed a different path. At its height in 1934 and 1935, the League had 58 member countries. (To his credit, the much-maligned Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had sponsored international efforts to ban 'inhumane' weapons such as expanding or exploding bullets; but these efforts were only partially successful.). House, Edward. Yet the League of Nations did work surprisingly well, at least for a decade after the war. Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations. McCarthy’s title is slightly misleading in that her book is not about the League, but rather about the British League of Nations Union and how it ‘inspired a rich and participatory culture of political protest, popular education and civic ritual...’ (p. 1). 2. The UN may have almost stumbled sideways into its peacekeeping role. Not even Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s was ready for an open break with the LNU. He currently holds a Leverhulme Major Fellowship to work on the history of the 1916 Irish Rebellion. The LNU, as McCarthy brings out, was to a quite remarkable degree based on church and chapel congregations, which were predominantly female. The LNU was not asking them to go in a direction where they did not want to go. 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. 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. Certainly, as a critic pungently put it, the Union’s leadership did include a surprising number of military figures, ‘disgruntled generals, and disappointed admirals’. 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. The League of Nations was the first intergovernmental organization that was established after World War 1 in order to try and maintain peace. (A vivid insight into how this American pressure operated can be found in Conor Cruise O'Brien's To Katanga and Back. They allowed the dispute to be settled outside the League.! Only the UN could provide a framework for these; yet the possibility of taking effective measures is likely to be frustrated by the difficulty of finding a common definition of terrorism. 3. Charles Townshend assesses its chances. Like the proverbial old soldier, the League never died, but rather faded away. As you can see, the League of Nations was quite fluid in terms of who joined and who left (or was removed!). Read more. But the nature of the problems emerging in the last decade of the 20th century was extremely worrying. 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 League of Nations did not have a policy of appeasement because it was powerless. 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. If America would have been present, they could’ve stopped Japan. McCarthy earlier emphasised how far Cecil had transcended his earlier establishmentarian Anglicanism to gain acceptance by Nonconformists as an outstanding Christian statesman. Why do you think the air strike was important to Germanys plan to invade Britain? Lloyd provides a careful and incisive analysis of the failure of the Union to shift government policy on this matter. In particular, the 12th and 15th articles legalized war in some cases and the 23rd did not provide racial equality for all peoples. 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. The League of Nations was to be "an assembly of all sovereign nations, pledged to preserve the independence and territorial integrity of each member" (Pious). The League of Nations, born of the destruction and disillusionment arising from World War One, was the most ambitious attempt that had ever been made to construct a peaceful global order. It may be argued that this deserves only a couple of paragraphs in a book whose focus is elsewhere, but it may also be argued that those paragraphs could and should have been better. 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. The American absence in the League of Nations did not prevent the nation from becoming an official member of the United Nations, formed at the conclusion of the Second World War. Just a few final remarks: I’m afraid that I disagree with Peter Yearwood’s suggestion that the book presents Conservative support for the League as merely ‘lip-service’ to public opinion. 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. CAUSE OF FAILURE| MANCHURIAN CRISIS| FAILURE OF DISARMAMENT| ABYSSINIAN CRISIS| The self-interest of leading membersThe League depended on the firm support of Britain and France. The League managed to resolve some territorial disputes, and also to alleviate the illegal slave/opium trade, but it could not prevent some wars from starting or Germany from invading European countries. ... which the League did not have. The failures of the League in the 1930s were not only because of aggressor nations undermining its authority, but also down to its own members. 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. (5) It did not challenge the idea of Great Britain’s central role in the development of a better 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 … McCarthy’s strength is in her attempt to ask new questions and to try different approaches to the development of a popular movement, but other historians’ questions about issues and high politics are also still worth asking. Getting London to sign this provision for the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court in justiciable disputes was seen as a key issue for the LNU in the second half of the 1920s. Yet the League of Nations did work surprisingly well, at least for a decade after the war. A series of disputes - between Germany and Poland over Upper Silesia, between Italy and Greece, and between Greece and Bulgaria - were resolved under its auspices. Members of Hamas (the Islamic resistance movement), and the Islamic Jihad organisation, may be terrorists to the government of Israel, but to others they are fighters against oppression. This was especially at the time when the position was held by the charismatic Dag Hammarskjöld - from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in the Congo in 1961. This is where the LNU presented itself to me as a potentially illuminating case study. He did not want Britain being told what to do by a League of Nations, and he certainly did not want the countries of the British Empire deciding that they wanted to rule themselves. CAUSE OF FAILURE | MANCHURIAN CRISIS | FAILURE OF DISARMAMENT | ABYSSINIAN CRISIS | The self-interest of leading membersThe League depended on the firm support of Britain and France. When Hitler began to break the Treaty of Versailles in the 1930s, the League was powerless to stop him. The title 'nation' had always been (for both League and UN) a polite fiction for a club of sovereign states, who often contained within them various ethnically diverse minority groups, sometimes with a claim to nationhood in their own right. Asquith to Lady Venetia Stanley 12 March 1915, in. Salvador de Madariaga famously described him as a ‘civic monk’. At the same time, he did not want to ruin or dismember Germany. Despite the recurrent funding problems, of the kind that had also dogged the old League, the upbeat official view was that the organisation's prestige had never been so high. The surviving victorious great powers at the end of the Great War - Britain and France - would have preferred to go no further than regularising the old Congress System. 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 League's structure/organisation was inefficient. I was intrigued to discover just how the LNU managed to recruit hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and to persuade millions of people to vote in its ‘Peace Ballot’ of 1934–5, when much of the secondary literature seemed to tell a story of mass political apathy, particularly in relation to foreign policy. All writers on the LNU have stressed the degree to which it carried on the traditions of liberalism at a time when the Liberal Party became fragmented and marginalised. This was clearly an act of war in violation of the Covenant. By Charles Townshend Gradually this came to include the defence of human rights as well as the resolution of territorial conflict. Draft of Colonel House, July 16, 1918. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. By subscribing to this mailing list you will be subject to the School of Advanced Study privacy policy. If there is to be a new age of terrorism, it can only be countered by the development of international - indeed global - security agencies. She sees this as an important part of ‘the larger history of the democratisation of Britain’s political culture between the wars’ (p. 2). 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. I hope that other readers may find The British People and the League of Nations illuminating on these not – and I hope Peter Yearwood would agree – wholly insignificant historical problems. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so. 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. Start studying Explain why Britain joined the League of Nations in 1919. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1994. Dealing with such internal conflict was a far more ambitious...task. The Corfu crisis, the revulsion against Lord Birkenhead’s call for sharp swords, and the apparent revival of Liberalism in the 1923 election, made it clear that support for the League of Nations could not be challenged in British politics. This would significantly restrict the ability of the LNU to act as a campaigning organisation. 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. However, the League did not have a military force at its disposal and no member of the League had to provide one under the terms of joining – unlike the current United Nations. His largely self-serving rhetoric has too often been taken at too close to face value by historians. In effect it showed that the UN might need to take governmental responsibility in some situations. McCarthy shows how his choice undermined the LNU, which came to be seen as propagandist rather than educational. The failed attempt to impose an oil embargo on Italy demonstrated that any credible system of economic sanctions was far distant. The only problem with this was the fact that there were only two nations with sufficient manpower to supply this need, France and Great Britain – and they had been significantly weakened from World War I. The crisis for Great Britain would come in 1935–6 with the Peace Ballot and the Abyssinian War. Does the UN have the 'grip' to impose a common view? Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, 1096–7. Address by the President to the nation, 1962. 2. But workers who did join often felt patronised and talked down to. LNU speakers gained easy access to the classroom. When bad things happened, they would condemn them but this was pretty much all they could do on their own. President Wilson; America failed to ratify the League Covenant 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. Links with the peace, were regularised the nature of the League Covenant pledging... By 1935, the League, therefore, resembled a club of winners, with the force. Legalized war in violation of the Treaty of Versailles in the 1930s than on the,... 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