Were you born before April 19, 1946?  I was. That means that you and I both lived when  the League of Nations lived.

The League of Nations lasted for 26 years from January 10, 1920 until April 19, 1946. It went out of formal existence on the day of the first meeting of the United Nations in London. Although the best thinking behind the League  was done by Americans, the United States never joined.  America's absence from and leadership of the League doomed it to failure. The League's failure, in turn, made straight the path to the Second World War. 

The League of Nations had a very promising  and positive first ten years of existence. It then became increasingly defied by nations such as Japan, Italy and Germany and ultimately irrelevant and ineffective. It expelled only one member for wrongdoing: the USSR for its invasion of Finland. (That was the major reason why the victorious Soviet Union would  not allow the League to live on after World War II.)  In some ways, however, the League's "Covenant" or constitution was both more flexible  and more democratic than the Charter of the United Nations, whose structure is about 80% identical with the League's. Indeed, the League was vastly more innovative than the United Nations. Vastly. The League did five things for the first time which
the U.N. could only copy.

The League of Nations was created to solve one age-old problem.   How do you persuade nations not to go to war?  How do you prevent large scale cross border violence: the angry movements of national armies and navies of sovereign territorial nation states? 

The working assumption behind the League was that international peace had one supreme enemy. That was the then prevailing doctrine that each independent territorial state was absolutely free to do with its resources anything its leaders chose for itto do. If Japan or Germany or the United States wanted to invade China or Poland or Cuba, that was no one's business but the invader's. War was one of many totally ordinary and conventional relationships between states: such as trade, diplomacy, tourism and mail. War was as normal and natural as breathing. It had always been that way and always would remain that way.

In August of 1914 in Europe a general peace ended which had endured (with isolated exceptions such as Prussia against France and Austria-Hungary against Prussia) a hundred years: since the second squashing of Napoleon. During the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe's rulers began to knit themselves and the world together through a growing habit of consultation. 

The nations also created a number of important, pioneering international organizations (IOs). In 1865 came the International Telegraphic Union and in 1874 the best and post powerful of all, the International Postal Union. 1890 saw the New World's pan American Union. In 1905 came the International Institute of Agriculture and in 1907 the International Health Office. BY 1914 there were thirty such IOs. They were all rather humdrum and managed only such matters which did not arouse strong nationalist passions. There was no movement to unite them under an overarching Super-International Organization.

Major developments at the turn of the century were the First Hague
Conference in 1899 and the Second Hague Conference in 1907. These were called by the Tsar of Russia. Governments discussed proposals to settle disputes by arbitration and in other pacific ways. Germany was against many such ideas. Some 44 nations were represented at the second conference in 1907. Seventeen were from Central and South America. They agreed to meet again eight years later in 1915. But by then it was too late: World War I had intervened. The weak habit of infrequent consultation among nations had
not proven enough to prevent war.

In the meanwhile the U.S. had won what Theodore Roosevelt called the "splendid little" war with Spain. In some ways the less said about the reasons for declaring war on Spain the better. But that is not true of the innovative way the Americans made peace with Spain. Only 20 years before the end of World War I, the American negotiators under President William McKinley did several things right which President Wilson did wrong in 1918-1919. 
 

• First,  McKinley stayed home, left details to his team on the spot, relying on the telegraph for staying in touch. 
• Second, the five man American Peace Commission contained three Senators and one private person, Whitelaw Reid, the successor to Horace Greeley at the New York TRIBUNE.

The United States was never a League member. But American President Woodrow Wilson, more than any other single human being, brought the League into being. Indeed, under its own rules, the League could not hold its first meeting unless and until convoked by the President of the United States.

Let me close with a list of five ostensibly ho hum organizational
initiatives  (there were other innovations as well) which the League did
for the first time in human history. 
 

• (1) The League of Nations established a PERMANENT SITE (Geneva, Switzerland) for meetings of all member nations. 
• (2) At that site there met several times a year a small COUNCIL, dominated by the Great Powers. 
• (3) In Geneva from time to time there also convened from time to time a large ASSEMBLY of sovereign, equal nations. 
• (4) Meetings were SCHEDULED and frequent--particularly of the Council. Gradually, member nations accredited permanent year-round REPRESENTATIVES to the League at Geneva. 
• (5) The League of Nations at Geneva was administered by a SECRETARY GENERAL supported by a permanent, year round international civil service called the SECRETARIAT. Even Americans were members of the Secretariat and other organs of the League such as its International COURT and the International Labor Organization.  All of these features were retained in 1945-46 and until today by the United Nations.

Think of it, before 1919-1920 not a single one of the five organizational
features had ever existed before in a worldwide international organization. Now that is what I call heavy lifting. All those innovations carried over to the United Nations. It was, obviously, not those five innovative structural features which induced America to decline to join the League of Nations.

In my next column: why the USA stayed out of the League of Nations.

-000-

for the Asheville TRIBUNE

[revisited 04/16/2005]