The League of Nations

Makers of the Modern World: The peace conferences of 1919-23 and their aftermath
By Ruth Henig

The League of Nations. Published on the 90^thanniversary of the League of Nations' first meeting; January 16th, 2010.

Many of the peacemakers who came to Paris in 1918-19 had thought deeply about establishing an international body of stature and authority to prevent war from breaking out again in the future. Large and small nations were vociferous in their discussions and arguments about the form and role which the League should have. This book looks at how the League was shaped and the multi-faceted body which emerged, and how it was used in ensuing years to counter territorial ambitions and restrict armaments, as well as its role in human rights and refugee issues. The failure of the League to prevent the Second World War would lead to its dissolution and the subsequent creation of the United Nations.

Following the Peace Conference, in the 1920s France and Britain were the two major powers driving the League, and they had very different approaches to peacekeeping and to the prevention of disputes. The book examines initiatives such as the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the Geneva Protocol, and analyses the succession of crises which the League had to deal with, from the Italian invasion of Corfu in 1923, to the Greek invasion of Bulgaria in 1925, the dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1928, the Manchurian Crisis of 1931-3, and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.

Dr Ruth Henig CBE is an academic historian and Labour Party politician. She was awarded a PhD in history from Lancaster University in 1978, where she was a lecturer in Modern European History. She served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities from 1997 to 2000 and in April 2006 she was one of six people to receive the first Honorary Fellowships of Lancaster University. She specializes in 20th-century international history. She has written three Lancaster Pamphlets, on the origins of the First and Second World Wars, Versailles and After: 1919-1933, on the Treaty of Versailles and international diplomacy in the 1920s, and The League of Nations (1973). Her other books include (with Chris Culpin and Eric Evans) Modern Europe 1870-1945 (1997), (with Simon Henig) Women and Political Power: Europe Since 1945 (2000) and British Government and League of Nations 1919-40 (2001). Henig was a Labour member of Lancashire County Council from 1981 to 2005. She was awarded a CBE in 2000 for services to policing, and in 2002 was appointed as a Deputy Lieutenant for Lancashire. She was made a life peer on 8 June 2004 as Baroness Henig, of Lancaster in the County of Lancashire. In December 2006 she was appointed Chair of the Security Industry Authority.

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A review in House Magazine (The House Of Lords) by Denis MacShane:

'While Margaret Thatcher ennobled Tory historians such as Hugh Trevor Roper, Labour went instead for sociologists like Raymond Plant or Anthony Giddens as dons to don the ermine. The rejection of both economies and history, and a preference for sociology as the guiding academic discipline of New Labour, deserves a PhD Thesis.

One historian who did slip quietly into the Lords is Ruth Henig, a former stalwart of 20th century Mitteleuropa history at Lancaster University. Now she has written a very fine, short study of The League Of Nations, the unhappy precursor to the United Nations. It is part of the excellent Haus Publishing series, makers of the modern world. Children to GCSE, A/S and A/L studies are often required to study failures of the politics, economies, society and international relations between 1919 and 1939, and these books are very good introductions.

The estimable Keith Simpson used to draw up reading lists for fellow MPs. now installed as the foreign secretary's PPS, he could not do worse then to get master and new ministers to read Baroness Henig's book.  It is a guide to how national egos and short-sighted contempt for international treaties and supra-naional institutions often lead to serious global breakdowns. 

American politics is full of UN-sceptics, and we have plenty of Eurosceptics in our public life. Yet as pillars of liberal, open trade democracies that loath militarism and venerate rule of law, it is the US and the UK that should be at the forefront of making supra-national law-making and rule-enforcing bodies work work properly.

Just imagine if we had a UN that could have enforced its resolutions in Iraq after 1991;  an EU that upheld worker rights so that British workers did not feel threatened by foreign labour;  or a UN able to defend the state of Israel it gave birth to in 1948 without Jews feeling every Arab or Islamist hand wanted Israel's destruction.

The League Of Nations was a long time coming. Kant wrote his Perpetual Peace in Napoleonic times. Britain took the lead in the 19th and early 20th century in setting up international arbitration bodies and out fits like the international Postal Union to agree common rules for exchanges across frontiers. But it required the horrors of the first world war before the great leap forward was made to set up The League Of Nations. British Ministers were at the forefront. Foreign secretary Arthur Balfour and his cousin, Lord Robert Cecil, pushed hard to set up the League.

The French were French . 'Marshall Foch believed that the League was a queer Anglo-Saxon fancy, not likely to be of the slightest importance in practice,' Cecil noted in his diary. President de Gaulle had a similar contempt for the UN, suspending French payments in pretest at UN interventions in the then Congo in the early 1960s. For Foch and de Gaulle, only nations counted. Today China, Iran and Russia have a similar approach.

In a sense the league was stillborn when the US refused to ratify the treaty that set it up. President Wilson was full of lofty ideals but he baulked at Japan's insistence that the new league should combat racial discrimination. Japan was thinking o the dreadful treatment of its people on the west coast of the United States. But the 'yellow peril' was a stock-in-trade for the American press, , just as 'Euro-federalism' is for The Daily Mail and The sun in our time.

In the end, Wilson failed to bring the US public opinion and a treaty-ratifying majority in the senate with him, and the league was set up without the US. It was unable to to stop the rise of European fascism. In 1936, the Royal Navy sailed to prevent oil and other supplies reaching republican Spain, The cynicism of the Hoar-Laval Pact, as a British foreign secretary accepted fascist Italy's invasion and occupation of of Abyssinia, set the seal on the League's Failure.

Sadly, the ostrich tendency is still alive and well in international politics. The grave-diggers of the UN and the EU are busy at work. Reading this Book might just give them pause for thought.'

A nice review from the H-Diplo Review Project in America.

Click here to view the full review in PDF format.