Abstract
The creation of the League of Nations was an extraordinary event. Not only had there been nothing like it before, but there was very little in the system of international relations which existed in 1914 or in the previous history of diplomacy to suggest its possibility. The guiding principle of all states in their relations with each other was the protection of their national sovereignty, and any development that might interfere with this, even in a very small way, had always been resisted. International co-operation in the most important area of peace and security had, perhaps inevitably, been limited and temporary, but even in much less contentious matters, such as setting up an efficient international postal system, or deciding upon rules to govern the laying down of marine cables, or regulating the spread of epidemic diseases by international sanitary conventions, progress had taken many years. In each case this was because one or more states had opposed change in the belief that its sovereignty might be infringed or that it might lose some narrow national advantage. Even so derisory an issue as an attempt to determine internationally agreed safety standards in the manufacture of matches had been vigorously resisted by Britain on the latter grounds. Yet a few years after this episode Britain was one of the principal founders of the League: a permanent international organisation with wide-ranging responsibilities.
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References
W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London, 1929) p. 142.
About 200 disputes went to arbitration between 1815 and 1900.
P. S. Reinsch, Public International Unions (Boston, 1911) p. 21.
Ibid., p. 6 for an early use of the term ‘interdependence’.
L. S. Woolf, International Government (London, 1916) pp. 102–4.
Ibid., p. 104.
The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences: The Conference of 1899 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (New York, 1920) pp. 18–19.
Ibid.
This was, in fact, little more than a list of arbitrators who were available to states which might wish to make use of their services.
F. Wilson, The Origins of the League Covenant (London, 1928) pp. 18, 58.
H. W. V. Temperley, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, vol. IV, (London, 1924) p. 24.
Castlereagh, speaking on the proposed Protocol of the Congress of Troppau, quoted in Woolf, International Government p. 24.
Viscount Grey, Twenty Five Years (New York, 1925) p. 256.
E. Bendiner, A Time for Angels (London, 1975) p. 12. See also F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London, 1952) p. 18.
D. F. Fleming, The United States and the League of Nations, 1918–1920 (New York, 1932) pp. 3–8.
Ibid.
For a summary of the work of these groups, see A. Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law (London, 1936) pp. 160–73; also A. J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, Conn., 1959) pp. 46–155.
D. H. Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. I (New York, 1928) p. 4.
R. S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (London, 1939).
Bryan actually claimed that this idea originated in similar proposals that he had been advancing for some years as a means of resolving labour disputes. The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan (Washington, 1925) pp. 384–85.
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The fourteenth point stated that ‘a general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’.
C. Seymour (ed.), The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. I (London, 1928) p. 209.
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R. Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston, Mass., 1921) p. 34.
See his letter to House, dated 22 March 1918 in Baker, Life and Letters vol. VIII, p. 43.
See House’s letter to Wilson, 14 July 1918, ibid., p. 279.
Ibid., p. 43, also p. 74. See also S. F. Beamis (ed.), The American Secretaries of State and their Diplomacy, vol. X (New York, 1954) p. 154.
Baker, Life and Letters vol. VIII, pp. 340, 343.
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See his exposition of the League to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ibid.
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Ibid., p. 161.
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Miller, Drafting of the Covenant vol. II, p. 28. See also G. Curry, ‘Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts and the Versailles Settlement’, American Historical Review vol. LXVI, no. 4 (July 1961) 968–86.
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Egerton, Great Britain p. 114.
This is in fact too great a claim for any individual, if only because many important items in the Covenant were only arrived at in the course of the actual Paris negotiations.
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Ibid., pp. 106–16.
See Zimmern, The League of Nations pp. 151–9.
See D. Mitrany, The Functional Theory of Politics (London, 1975), and the same author’s seminal essay, A Working Peace System: An Argument for the Functional Development of International Organisation (London, 1943).
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For the Italian draft see Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. II, pp. 246–55.
Ibid., p. 300.
Seymour (ed.), Intimate Papers vol. IV, p. 477.
PPC vol. II, pp. 662–3.
Egerton, Great Britain p. 85.
See Zimmern, The League of Nations p. 207, and also Lloyd George’s ‘Fontainbleau Memorandum’ in his Memoirs of the Peace Conference (New Haven, 1938) p. 269.
A. J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (London, 1968) pp. 9, 36 and 363. See also N. G. Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (New York, 1968) p. 6, and J. M. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism and the Versailles Peace (New York, 1966) pp. 314, 385.
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Ibid., p. 120.
Miller, Drafting of the Covenant vol. I, p. 63.
This was Wilson’s so-called ‘fourth draft’.
Egerton, Great Britain pp. 121–5.
Miller, Drafting of the Covenant vol. II, p. 237.
Ibid., vol. I, pp. 168–70, vol. II, p. 264.
Ibid., vol. II, p. 169.
Wilson, Origins of the League Covenant p. 93.
Articles 11–17 in the Covenant.
Article 19 in the Hurst-Miller draft. Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. II, p. 237.
Telegram to Lansing from American Ambassador in Tokyo, 15 November 1918, PPC, vol. I, p. 490.
Fleming, The US and the League p. 184.
Miller, Drafting of the Covenant vol. I, pp. 286–9 for the text of the memorandum.
Ibid., vol. II, pp. 580–91.
Wilson, Origins of the League Covenant pp. 64–5.
Harold Nicholson writes of the atmosphere in Paris following the ‘sinking of the vessel of Wilsonism’ as follows: ‘It was almost with a panic rush that we made for the boats, and when we reached them we found our colleagues of the Italian delegation already comfortably installed. They made us very welcome.’ Peacemaking 1919 (London, 1934) p. 70.
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© 1982 David Armstrong
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Armstrong, D. (1982). The Origins of the League of Nations. In: The Rise of the International Organisation: A Short History. The Making of the 20th Century. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16010-5_1
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