THE HIGH CONTRACTING PARTIES

4 THE HIGH CONTRACTING PARTIES

5 In order to promote international cooperation and to achieve

6 international peace and security 722

by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war,

8 by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between

9 nations,

1 by the firm establishment of the understandings of international

2 law as the actual rule of conduct among Governments, and

3 by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all

4 treaty obligations in the dealings of organized peoples with one

5 another,

6 Agree to this Covenant of the League of Nations.

2 It was not just the edifice of the League of Nations that suggested

3 a real change in world politics. Rather it was the role that the authors

4 of the covenant had in mind that was groundbreaking. The preamble

5 to the 26 articles of the covenant offered a huge amount of hope

6 particularly in terms of the collective rejection of war and acceptance

7 of international law. After the carnage of the First World War the

8 desire to establish a genuine system of collective security where

9 war between members was unthinkable (article 10) and an attack

30 on one was to be considered an attack on all (article 16) was very

1 understandable. But the League was more than a security actor. Its

2 economic, legal and social agenda was equally impressive. It dealt

3 with global problems including environmental issues, health issues

4 and even humanitarian issues such as refugee crises and national

5 reconstruction. It established the Permanent Court of International

6 Justice, the Health Organization and the International Labour

7 Organization. Yet different commentators view the League in

822 different ways. Armstrong et al. argues:

36 A NARCHY AND THE MODERN INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM Although lacking any mechanisms to enforce observance of these

standards, this did imply a limited right for the League to concern itself with human rights – a subject that was to become increasingly important to the League’s successors. Second, the Covenant was a clear acknowledgment of the increasing range of common interests shared by states outside the field of security, and the need for more effective centralized supervision of these.

(Armstrong et al. 2004: 21) Yet Cassese believes that the ‘system set up in 1919 greatly

resembles that devised in 1648’ primarily because there was no real attempt to restrict the right of sovereign nation-states to go to war in pursuit of their interests (Cassese 2001: 32). There is no doubt that the League paved the way for the UN. Equally, however, there is no doubt that the League was a spectacular failure as two decades after these bold declarations were made the world was once again in the grip of total war.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS What went wrong? History tells us that the ethos of the League of

Nations was shattered by a series of serious political failures. The first and perhaps most damaging was the failure to keep the USA on board. The First World War had clearly marked the end of European dominance of world politics. Therefore when the US Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty, the League effectively lost its most important member. One consequence of this was that the European powers consistently failed to use the League’s potential and often ignored or made scant use of the articles that allowed for decisive action to be taken against aggressors. This, coupled with the withdrawal of Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union at various points, undermined the unanimity that was supposed to underwrite the potential of the League to act effectively as a genuine international governmental organization in world politics. The crises came to a head in the face of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931. This annexation of one of China’s richest provinces was part of the ‘Tanaka plan’, a campaign of territorial expansion that was a response to the view that Japan had not had its fair share of the spoils of the First

A NARCHY AND THE MODERN INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

1 World War. The idea that moral condemnation from the League would

2 prevent such aggression was exposed as wishful thinking. Indeed

3 Japan, a genuinely powerful actor in its own right and a permanent

4 member of the council, objected to criticism from the relatively

5 powerless members of the assembly. This, coupled with the failure

6 of the League’s commitment to collective security to produce decisive

action, spelled the beginning of the end for the League and the

8 ‘Utopian’ experiment of liberal internationalism. When in 1935 the

9 League failed again to respond to aggression (this time in the face of

10 the Italian invasion of Ethiopia) the fate of the experiment was sealed.