League of Nations Failure

Even before its first meeting, the League of Nations suffered what some historians have characterized as a death blow: the U.S. rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and with it, the League of Nations. A variety of factors led to the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the treaty, among them Woodrow Wilson’s personal antagonism with the Senate’s leading Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee; the fact that Wilson largely ignored the Senate—under the U.S. Constitution that body responsible for the ratification of any treaty—in the treaty negotiation process; Wilson’s intransigent rejection of any amendments or “reservations” to the treaty or the Covenant proposed by the Senate, most especially Lodge’s desire to eviscerate Article 10; and, finally, the baneful effects of political partisanship (Wilson, a Democrat, faced Republicans who controlled both houses of the 66th Congress in 1919). In the end, faced with the choice of ratification with Lodge’s “reservations,” or outright rejection of the treaty, Wilson instructed Senate Democrats to vote against the treaty; it was finally defeated on 19 March 1920.[25] The United States never became a member of the League of Nations.

Without the United States as a member, the chief powers in the League before 1926 were Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. The way in which each of them viewed the new international organization is of paramount importance in understanding the future demise of the League. The majority of the British public supported the ideals of the League, but the British government viewed the League largely with indifference. This indifference began early on. While Woodrow Wilson had represented the United States on the League of Nations Commission, Great Britain was represented not by David Lloyd George, its prime minister, but by Lord Cecil, an important personage to be sure, but one who held no office within the government in early 1919. Lloyd George preferred what his cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey called “Diplomacy by Conference”—where the great powers would meet in a less formal setting to discuss problems—to any system such as the League. Near the end of his tenure as Prime Minister in 1922, Lloyd George apparently had a change of heart, but by then it was too late; the League’s power had already been undermined.[26]

After 1922, successive British governments saw the League as a useful tool for pursuing some foreign policy objectives, but failed to embrace the “League idea” in its totality. This policy was in part due to the fact that except for the years 1924 and 1929-31, when Labour governments were in power, Conservatives and traditionalists, men like Stanley Baldwin[27] and Lord Curzon[28] who opposed collectivist notions of foreign policy, dominated the government and the Foreign Office. They were staunch advocates of the Old Diplomacy. British indifference toward the League was also a result of the change in circumstances after the U.S. defection. The British, who anticipated that the United States would help shoulder the burden of securing France and the European peace, now found themselves in the position of having to defend that peace alone. It was a position they declined to take.[29]

The French shared the attitude of the British toward the League of Nations, but for different reasons. French representatives at Paris had had very little to do with the framing of the Covenant, and they did not share much of the document’s idealism. The French therefore saw the League primarily as a tool which could help protect France from any future German attack—une agression de l’Allemagne—and not as an instrument of international goodwill. The French approach was realistic—perhaps brutally so—and contrasted markedly with that of Wilson and some of the conservative, but pro-League Britons like Lord Cecil. The French also did not suffer from the division of domestic opinion as did the British, for both Rightists and Leftists in France supported the League in the same way. Both groups favored a strong national defense, and saw no difference between pursuit of that policy, and support for the League’s collective security elements.[30]

Prior to the fascist takeover in 1922, Italy’s attitude toward the League was one of skepticism. At the Paris Peace Conference, the Italian government had sought territorial gains along the Adriatic Sea, but due to Woodrow Wilson’s opposition, was unable to obtain them. Because Italy was resource-poor, the Italians also hoped that the new League of Nations would establish an agency to ensure the equitable distribution of raw materials among member countries. The British Commonwealth countries, particularly Canada, opposed such a move, arguing rather disingenuously that the League was not competent in that area. Facing increasing economic misery at home, and the frustration of their ambitions abroad, many Italians turned to fascism and Benito Mussolini. Mussolini disliked the League because it represented the status quo, but remained generally conciliatory toward the organization until the mid-1930s.

Like the Italians, the Japanese were somewhat disappointed by the Covenant. Japan’s delegate on the League Commission at the Paris Peace Conference, Baron Makino, proposed a sentence be added to the Covenant’s preamble stating that the members of the League accepted the principles of the equality of nations and races, and the just and equal treatment for nationals of all countries. While most of the members of the Commission supported the principle, Woodrow Wilson, William Hughes, prime minister of Australia, and William Massey, prime minister of New Zealand, all opposed its inclusion. Each of their countries had imposed restrictions on Japanese immigration and wanted to avoid including anything in the Covenant that might affect those restrictions. Despite this initial setback, the Japanese fully supported the League of Nations in its early years. In the words of F. P. Walter, a prominent League official, “Japan appreciated the fact that at Geneva she stood on an equal footing with the leading States of Europe and could watch and, if she chose, share in, the management of international affairs.”[31] Once the militarists assumed power in Japan in 1930, the attitude of the Japanese toward the League quickly became one of veiled hostility until the advent of the Manchurian Crisis.

Although the League ultimately collapsed due to its inability to maintain a viable system of collective security and arbitration, its early years did witness some successes in that area. Even before the first Assembly met in 1920, the League Council worked to resolve the Aaland Islands dispute between Sweden and Finland without the parties escalating to violence[32]. The Council settled a similar dispute between Germany and Poland over Upper Silesia in 1921. A border conflict between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925 led also to successful Council intervention.[33]

From the very beginning of the League, however, an insidious pattern emerged with regard to Council intervention in international disputes. Dominated as it was by the great powers, the Council seemed more willing to settle disputes involving small powers than those which involved one or more great powers, or which involved the interests of any great power.[34] This double-standard ultimately proved disastrous for the long-term success of the League and helped undermine confidence in the organization. Extra-League security arrangements, like the “Little Entente” (1920) and the Locarno Pacts (1925), emerged not only as manifestations of eroding confidence in the League’s ability to maintain peace and security, but also had the effect of further sabotaging the League by indicating a regression into the Old Diplomacy. Attempts to strengthen the League by increasing its powers of coercion in the event of a rupture of the peace, like the Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes (1924), or the “Geneva Protocol” for short, which called for compulsory arbitration, met with resistance and failure, primarily from Great Britain. League-sponsored disarmament met a similar fate. The talks started and stalled throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, until Hitler withdrew Germany from the talks and from the League itself in October 1933. The Disarmament Conference limped along for a few more months, but when it became clear that Germany would not return, it finally collapsed and rearmament in Europe began anew.

Despite earlier provocations, the first real test of the League’s ability to maintain global peace and security came in 1931. On 19 September, while the Assembly met in Geneva, it received word that a clash between Japanese and Chinese troops had taken place the previous day at Mukden, a small railway town in Manchuria. Advancing Japanese troops, despite vigorous Chinese resistance, continued to press ever-deeper into southern Manchuria. By Monday, 21 September, additional information had reached Geneva: the situation in Manchuria was rapidly deteriorating. The Chinese representative at Geneva appealed to the League Council, invoking Article 11 of the Covenant, under which the League maintained the right to “take any action that may be deemed wise and effectual to safeguard the peace of nations.”[35]

Because of conflicting reports from the Chinese and the Japanese as to the actual situation in Manchuria and its causes, the Council asked both sides to try to work together to resolve the crisis on their own. Contrary to its representative’s good faith utterances on the Council, however, Japan was not withdrawing from previously-held positions in Manchuria. Instead, Japanese forces continued to advance in an attempt to undermine the Manchurian regime of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang and to replace it with one more to their liking.

By mid-November, the worsening crisis in Manchuria was punctuated by the Council’s inability to act decisively. Rather than confess its inability, or run the risk of war with Japan by invoking Articles 15 and 16 of the Covenant, the Council agreed to a third, and less problematic, alternative. Kenkichi Yoshizawa, Japan’s representative on the Council, proposed that the League send a commission of inquiry to Manchuria to discover for itself what were the facts of the dispute. The Council agreed. Nearly three and one half months after the crisis began, the Council despatched to Manchuria the “Commission of Inquiry to the Far East,” better known after its chairman, Lord Lytton. The Lytton Commission, its members drawn from the great powers, finally arrived in Manchuria in April 1932.[36] The Japanese Army, meanwhile, had occupied three of Manchuria’s five provinces and installed Henry Pu-Yi, the last of the Ch’ing emperors of China, as ruler of the new state of “Manchukuo,” the foundation of which the Japanese proclaimed on 1 March.

Throughout the summer of 1932, the Lytton Commission labored to discover the causes of the “Manchurian Incident” and to render an impartial verdict.[37] On 4 September 1932, the commission members signed their 100,000-word report and despatched it to Geneva. While giving some credence to Japanese claims regarding Chinese maladministration in Manchuria, the Lytton Commission clearly cited Japan’s violation of the Covenant.[38] After several months of reviewing the report, the Assembly, to which the responsibility for handling the dispute had been transferred, voted to adopt it. The Japanese delegation walked out of the Assembly; one month later, in March 1933, Japan announced its withdrawal from the League. While condemning an act of aggression by one League member against another, the members of the League nevertheless failed to restrain the aggressor. Once the Assembly adopted the Lytton Commission’s report, it took no further action against Japan.

The lesson of the League’s failure to deal effectively with the Manchurian Incident was not lost on the two revisionist powers in Europe: Germany and Italy. Beginning in 1935, German rearmament under Hitler brought only empty condemnatory resolutions from the Council, as its key members, Great Britain and France, now preferred to deal with political problems outside the machinery of the League. For his part, Mussolini quickly realized that the governments of Britain and France were willing to appease him in order to avoid great power conflict and to keep him from siding with Hitler. Il Duce turned that knowledge into leverage after his troops clashed with those of Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) on 5 December 1934 near the Abyssinian desert town of Wal Wal (Ual Ual).[39]

On 13 December, the Abyssinia government notified the League Council of the problem and asked for arbitration. The Council was then not in session; it was due back in session in January. On 3 January 1935, after three weeks of apprehensively watching Italian troops mass along the frontier, Haile Selassie instructed his ministers at Geneva to appeal to the League by invoking Article 11 of the Covenant.

The growing Abyssinian crisis had all the earmarks of another major test for the League. The small powers on the Council looked to Britain and France for leadership, but the British and French governments saw the crisis not simply as a League matter. They, too, had interests in the region, had had differences with Abyssinia in the past, and were faced with choosing either Haile Selassie or Benito Mussolini. In the calculus of realpolitik, Mussolini was the preferred choice. The British and French governments feared Nazi Germany’s growing power and sought to use Italy as a counterbalance to it. Mussolini had not yet aligned himself with Hitler, and that fact held out the hope that he could be persuaded not to.[40] This hope informed the British and French decision to pursue a dual policy with regard to the crisis. Within the League, they would allow discussion of the crisis, but try to forestall any attempts to take action against Italy. Outside of the League, where Mussolini preferred to deal with the crisis, the British and the French sought to appease the Italian dictator—at the expense of Abyssinia.[41]

On 7 January 1935, French foreign minister, Pierre Laval[42], met with Mussolini in Rome and signed a series of agreements which led to French concessions to Italy in Africa in exchange for promises of support for French policy against Germany. Laval also promised that France would ignore future Italian action against Abyssinia. After the Italian government informed London of the bargain, the British Foreign Office appointed a commission to study the problem and make recommendations. In mid-June 1935, the commission recommended that the British government should not oppose Italian action against Abyssinia, but should use the opportunity presented by the crisis to rectify British colonial boundaries in East Africa.

While Pierre Laval and Sir Samuel Hoare, the new British foreign minister, were busy obstructing Abyssinia’s efforts at Geneva to gain the League’s support, Italy’s armed forces were equally busy preparing for their impending attack on Abyssinia. They were aided indirectly by the British government, which allowed the Italians to ship war material through the Suez Canal. Throughout the rest of the summer, Mussolini made preparations for war. Fearful that public opinion might force them to take action against Italy if Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, the British and French governments tried to offer him virtual control of that country without resorting to war.[43] Mussolini, however, remained elusive.

At the September meeting of the Assembly, the Italian delegation began to build its “case” against Abyssinia by presenting a long and scathing memorandum condemning Abyssinia’s “backwardness” and alleging that Haile Selassie was unfaithful to his country’s international obligations. The memorandum was untrue in almost all respects, but served its purpose well: it deflected attention away from the motives of the Italian government and toward the supposed failings of Abyssinia’s.[44]

On 11 September, Sir Samuel Hoare delivered a speech at the Assembly in which he expressed the British government’s continuing support for the League and the principles of the Covenant, including “collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression.”[45] A subsequent—and reluctant—speech by Laval affirmed France’s public commitment to the League and the Covenant. Some of the other League members openly supported the British and French statements. Most, however, remained silent, fearful of antagonizing Italy.

The Council, in the interim, attempted to come to a peaceful solution to the crisis. A Council committee worked out a scheme whereby Abyssinia would agree to accept a panel of advisors, appointed by the League, who would aid the emperor in modernizing his country’s civil administration and help resolve some of its internal troubles. Haile Selassie accepted the committee’s proposals as the basis for discussions with Italy, but Mussolini was uninterested in concessions and rejected the overture. But Mussolini’s rejection exposed the real purpose of the earlier Italian memorandum; he was clearly not interested in reforming Abyssinia, but in conquering it.

Having failed in its task of conciliation, the Council turned to judgment of the dispute. On 5 October 1935, a thirteen-member committee, appointed by the Council to study the dispute, issued its report. In studiously measured terms, it concluded that the fault for the crisis lay with Italy. The report, though important, was too late. Two days before, on 3 October, Mussolini had ordered the invasion of Abyssinia.

Mussolini’s actions quickly brought a vote for economic sanctions against Italy, with all League members save Italy and its satellites, Albania, Austria, and Hungary, voting for their imposition. By 18 November, the sanctions, which included an embargo on arms, loans, and much trade, took effect. Despite their public support for sanctions, behind the scenes Laval and Hoare still sought to appease Mussolini, whatever the cost to Abyssinia. In early December, Laval worked out a plan whereby Italy would be given roughly two-thirds of Abyssinia in exchange for peace. Needing the support of his British counterpart, Laval pressured Hoare into accepting the plan, which subsequently became known as the Hoare-Laval Pact. Laval presented the agreement to the Council of the League, asking it to suspend judgment until word on the plan arrived from Addis Ababa and Rome. Mussolini’s indifference quickly killed the idea, but public outcry at the blatant betrayal of Abyssinia forced Hoare from office and caused the British cabinet to disavow the plan.

As the Council continued its hand-wringing throughout the months of the spring of 1936, Italian airplanes dropped bombs and poison gas on Abyssinian villages and towns. League sanctions were having a definite impact on the Italian economy, but soon proved insufficient to derail Mussolini from his course of action against Abyssinia, mainly because they did not include precisely those vital raw materials—oil, coal, and rubber—that he needed to continue the war. By May, Addis Ababa had fallen to the invading army and Emperor Haile Selassie had fled the country. The Italian conquest of Abyssinia was complete.

Within a month, the British government argued that the sanctions against Italy should be lifted, stating that since Italy had presented the world with a fait accompli, i.e., the conquest of Abyssinia, no purpose would be served in continuing them. In their view, the sanctions were intended to restrain Italy and to deter it from conquering Abyssinia. The sanctions had, therefore, obviously failed. As a counterpoint, the government’s opposition in Britain argued that the sanctions had produced a tremendous strain on Italy’s already overtaxed economy, and that continuation of the sanctions would soon compel Mussolini to let Abyssinia go. But it was precisely the possibility of war with Italy, or worse yet, the destruction of the Italian economy and the fall of Mussolini which the British government most feared. The collapse of Italy would mean the loss of a potential counter weight to an expansionist Nazi Germany. For London’s practitioners of realpolitik, this was a possibility to be rigorously avoided. Britain took the lead in announcing its readiness to lift the sanctions against Italy. Other League members—most reluctantly—followed suit. The League Assembly officially ended the sanctions on 15 July 1936. Before the end of the year, and with blatant disregard not only for the League’s Covenant, but the Stimson Doctrine as well, all but four of the League’s members—Bolivia, China, New Zealand, and the USSR—voted to recognize Italy’s annexation of Abyssinia. Despite having received all that it wanted, in December 1937, the Italian government announced its withdrawal from the League.

Although the League of Nations continued to hold annual sessions for the next three years, and despite talk among its members of reforming the organization, after the Abyssinian affair the League was clearly ruined as an instrument of collective security. A victim of the Old Diplomacy, it never recovered. After the Second World War erupted in September 1939, the League suspended its operations in Geneva, transferring a few of its technical activities to the United States and Canada. Although some of its supporters, among them Lord Cecil, remained hopeful for its reconstitution, their hopes were soon dashed. By war’s end a new international organization, the United Nations, had been born. Accepting the inevitable, in April 1946, the members of the League met one final time and voted the organization out of existence.

(Source: Karl J. Schmidt)

Resources

Notes

25. The Senate ratified a separate peace treaty officially ending the war with Germany in July 1921. For a discussion of the nature of Senate opposition to the League, see Ralph Stone, The Irreconcilables: The Fight Against the League of Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).
26. See Peter Yearwood, “‘On the Safe and Right Lines’: The Lloyd George Government and the Origins of the League of Nations, 1916-1918,” The Historical Journal 32, no. 1 (1989), 131-55.
27. Stanley Baldwin, First Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, 1867-1947; parliamentary private secretary to Bonar Law, 1916-17; joint financial secretary to Treasury, 1917-21; president of the Board of Trade, 1921-22; chancellor of the Exchequer, 1922-23; prime minister, May 1923-Jan. 1924, Nov. 1924-June 1929, and again, 1935-37.
28. George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess Curzon of Keddleston, 1859-1925; MP, 1886-92; under-secretary, India Office, 1891; parliamentary under-secretary for foreign affairs, 1895-98; viceroy of India, 1899-1905; lord privy seal, 1915; war cabinet member, 1916-18; foreign secretary, 1919-24.
29. See Arnold Wolfers, Britain and France between Two Wars: Conflicting Strategies of Peace from Versailles to World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 321-30.
30. Ibid., 29-32.
31. In fact, the Japanese delegation each year was quite large, often much larger than that of many of the European countries represented. As Walters recounts, “the Japanese delegation was so numerous that a ship had to be specifically chartered to bring it to Europe.” See F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 116. For a contemporary analysis of Japan’s involvement in the League to 1929, see Masatoshi Matsushita, Japan in the League of Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929).
32. See James Barros, The Aaland Islands Question: Its Settlement by the League of Nations (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1968).
33. See James Barros, The League of Nations and the Great Powers: The Greek-Bulgarian Incident of 1925 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).
34. The Corfu Crisis is a prime early example of the Council’s unwillingness to coerce one of the great powers. In 1923, Mussolini precipitated the crisis after he ordered the bombing of the Greek Island of Corfu in retaliation for the murder of General Tellini. Tellini was an Italian member of the Delimitation Commission which was attempting to delimit the boundary between Albania and Greece. Rather than deal with the crisis itself, the League Council opted to allow the Conference of Ambassadors, an organization established by the allies in 1919 to deal with problems arising out of the peace treaties, to settle the dispute. Even though Greek responsibility for the murder was never established and despite the fact that Italy had designs on Greek territory and used Corfu as a mere pretext, the Conference settled the dispute to Mussolini’s satisfaction. The way in which the League Council dealt with Corfu, and future problems involving great power confrontation, became its leitmotif. See James Barros, The Corfu Incident of 1923: Mussolini and the League of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).
35. Scholarly literature on the Manchurian Crisis is large, but the best and most comprehensive analysis of the crisis remains Christopher Thorne,The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931-1933 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972). I have drawn on this work for the following discussion.
36. The long delay in constituting the commission was compounded by the time-consuming route it took to Manchuria. Rather than take the most expeditious—but probably least comfortable—route, via the Trans-Siberian Railway, as the Chinese had hoped it would, the commission instead traveled westward from Europe by ship. After arriving in East Asia, the commission first spent time in Japan and then in Shanghai and Nanking, before finally visiting Manchuria. Walters, History of the League of Nations, 483.
37. The task facing the commission was difficult and the environment strenuous. In a letter to his wife one week after he arrived in Mukden, Lord Lytton described the conditions there: “The behaviour of the Japanese military here is really absolutely incredible. I shall be very glad to get out of the country.” If Lytton was disturbed by what he saw, he was also frustrated. Two months later, he told his wife that he had “no hope of persuading the Japs to give up wanting to dominate Manchuria” and prophetically feared that “if they take Manchuria away…it will prove the frame of their empire in the long run.” See Lord Lytton to Lady Lytton, 28 April and 23 June 1932, File Box “Manchuria,” Lytton Papers, Collection of Lady Hermione Cobbold, Lake House, Knebworth, United Kingdom.
38. See U.S. Department of State, Manchuria: Report of the Commission of Inquiry appointed by the League of Nations (Washington, DC: G.P.O., 1932). The complete text of the report, including notes by the secretariat, and maps, is in League document C.663.M.320.1932.VII.
39. Italian designs on Abyssinia predated Mussolini’s dictatorship. Abyssinian troops had successfully defended against an earlier Italian invasion in 1896. Two good works on the history of the Abyssinian affair are: Frank Hardie, The Abyssinian Crisis (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974) and Anthony Mockler, Haile Selassie’s War (London: Oxford University Press, 1984).
40. Indeed, recent events proved that Mussolini was still opposed to Hitler. After Austrian Nazis assassinated their country’s chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in July 1934, Mussolini despatched four divisions of troops to the Austrian border to forestall a Nazi takeover of the country.
41. For an analysis of the British government’s views of the crisis, see George W. Baer, The Coming of the Italian-Ethiopian War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 172-210; the French government’s views and policies can be found in Franklin D. Laurens, France and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, 1935-1936 (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).
42. Laval later served as premier of the Vichy government (1942-44). His institution of forced labor and other repressive measures in France led to his trial for treason and subsequent execution.
43. In the early summer of 1935, a “Peace Ballot,” sponsored by the British League of Nations Union and organized by Lord Cecil, was distributed to voters throughout Great Britain soliciting their opinions regarding British membership of the League, including the use of economic and military sanctions against aggressor nations. Seventy percent of the nearly ten million people polled voted in favor of combined economic and, if necessary, military sanctions, to restrain an aggressor.
44. Walters, History of the League of Nations, 642-45.
45. Quoted in Henig, League of Nations, 128.