League of Nations Summary

The Covenant of the League of Nations was incorporated in the Peace Treaty in 1919. After the World War I, the demand for an international organization to prevent war has often been made in the last four centuries after any great European conflict. The League proved incapable of effective action in the face of territorial aggression in the 1930s by Italy, Germany and Japan. The league ceased to function as a collective-security organization, although its social and economic activities continued until World War II.

The League of Nations, even though ultimately unsuccessful in achieving collective security, established a new pattern of international organizational activity.

Fundamentally, this demand is that the relation of these States among themselves shall be subjected to something analogous to the system of law and order to which men have subjected themselves within the smaller units in which they live. It is an illustrative commentary on the maxim of the Roman lawyers?—?ubi societas ibi lex. But the purpose and the content of these rules for the conduct of their relations?—?the lex?—?necessarily depend on the nature of the units of the society and on the nature of their relations. When Grotius, for example, wrote his famous work on the Law of Nations, he was writing of a Society of States whose intercourse was disturbed by the continual outbreak of hostility.

Indeed, Europe had been convulsed by the Thirty Years’ War for a whole generation prior to the publication of his work. Thus it was natural and indeed inevitable that the rules which Grotius produced for the guidance of the Society of States, as he knew it, amounted to little more than a code of laws for the better conduct of war. He did indeed sketch the outlines of a law for the pacific relations of States, and in the following century and a half his successors developed to some extent what he had begun. But only after the Napoleonic wars was the first serious attempt made to establish an organized system of conducting international affairs with a view to the avoidance of war.

Legal Materials

The League of Nations was the ill-fated predecessor of the United Nations. You can get copies of League of Nations Materials from NYPL Premium Services, the Columbia Law School Library and other libraries with substantial international law collections.

For a discussion of the materials produceded by the League of Nations, the Leagues’ document numbering system, and sources for finding League materials, seeResearching League of Nations Documents by Gabriela Femenia.

History of the League of Nations

The following commentary about the origin of the League of Nations in the Churchill Era is produced by the Churchill College (Cambridge): International organization founded at the end of the First World War to promote disarmament, settle disputes between countries through diplomacy, and improve world welfare. Without forces of its own, the League depended on the European powers to enforce its resolutions.

The League was ultimately a failure, proving unable to prevent aggression by Italy and Germany in the 1930s, and was replaced by the United Nations after the Second World War.

To Alexander of Russia’s scheme of a Holy Alliance we need only briefly allude. Though admirable in intention it was rejected as “sublime nonsense and mysticism” by Castlereagh, and it eventually degenerated into a mere prop of despotism supported by the empires of Central Europe and France. But the work of Castlereagh is worthy of closer attention. He tried to substitute for the chaotic political methods of the past a system of Diplomacy by conference, confining his efforts, however, to the Great Powers; though he desired to make their attitude to the Smaller Powers one of “influence rather than authority.” He provided his “Conference of Ambassadors” with an organized plan of work and with a secretariat, and he supplemented it by occasional Conferences of the Principal Statesmen of the Concert. His Conference of Ambassadors continued to sit in one form or another for almost six years, and he held four or five of his Conferences of Principal Statesmen.

Resources

See Also

• League of Nations conventions
• Arab League
• League of Nations
• Arab League History
• United Nations Creation
• Arab League Membership
• Arab League Activities

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