In January 1918, nine months after the USA had entered the First World War, its president, Woodrow Wilson, made it clear, in his ‘Fourteen Points’, that he wanted a new order to world politics, the abandonment of the balance-of-power system and the introduction of some form of international association to provide collective security. The League of Nations, ratified by the signatories to the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 and instituted in 1920, was this new association. Ironically the main reason it failed was that the USA’s membership was blocked by the Senate. With the USA thus entering an isolationist period the hope that the League would be able to enforce its decisions on aggressive member states depended on the European powers, which effectively meant on the United Kingdom and France, because the primary problems were caused by the other two powers, Germany and Italy. Germany in fact withdrew from the League in 1933 as soon as Hitler came to power and Italy withdrew in 1937 two years after the League had declared it the aggressor in its invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia); the Soviet Union was expelled in 1939 after its invasion of Finland.
Because the League had no military force it attempted to wield power by economic sanctions, although these were never effectively applied. Had France and the UK seriously wished to support the League’s peacemaking efforts they could probably have done so. But during the 1930s the UK was preoccupied with its policy of appeasement towards the dictatorships, and Third Republic France was internally too divided and weak to engage in a forceful foreign policy. Nevertheless, the League had some successes: its judicial branch, the Permanent Court of International Justice, was rather more effective and respected than its successor, the United Nations’ International Court of Justice, and its International Labour Organization was surprisingly effective in improving working conditions throughout the League’s membership, and survived the transition from League of Nations to United Nations. The League was formally dissolved in 1946 to make way for its successor, the UN, which until relatively recently was no more successful, despite not suffering from US refusal to participate.
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