The first histories and ‘Realism’,   The Revisionists,    The Last Word - Ruth Henig,   

The modern historian Susan Pedersen, in her summary of the historiography of the League, points out that, in its day, the League was the subject of considerable scholarly interest – there are 3,000 books in the League’s archive, most of them published before 1950.  Most of those books, she tells us, were based on the League’s own records, and were about the work of the League.  She might have added that many of the authors – especially those writing in the early years of the League – were enthusiastic supporters of the League’s work, and a good number had actually worked for the League. 

Thus Edward A Harriman, an American lawyer writing in 1927, described the League as “‘one of the most important events in all history”.  And although works in the 1930s were “more subdued in their optimism” as one reviewer puts it, they nevertheless retained their optimism.

1.  THE FIRST HISTORIES AND ‘REALISM’

The Second World War put paid to more than the League itself – its destroyed its reputation.  After the war, Susan Pedersen tells us, the flow of books on the League “slowed to a trickle”, and most of them “’decline and fall’ narratives or analytical postmortems” based on diplomatic records of the member nations, and most deeply critical of the League. 

Most post-war writers were influenced by the work of British historian EH Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis (1940).  Carr blamed Anglo-American liberalism and Woodrow Wilson’s “profitless” utopianism for the war: “Power is a necessary ingredient of every political order.  Historically, every approach in the past to a world society has been the product of the ascendency of a single Power”.  And the best way to secure peaceful change is? ...  to “do our best to make ourselves as powerful as possible”. 

Indeed, as the decade wore on, western writers found themselves in the middle of a Cold War nuclear stand-off in which “the Russians only understand one language - ‘how many armies have you got?’” (President Truman, 1946)

In this atmosphere, therefore, anyone arguing for collective security was shot down.  The first real history of the League was written by Frank Walters, a former deputy secretary general of the League, who argued in his History of the League of Nations (1952) that the failure of the League was less due to the inadequacy of the attempt at ‘collective security’ than to the great powers’ failure properly to support it.  Gerhart Niemeyer immediately challenged him (The Balance Sheet of the League Experiment, 1952): great powers pursue their own interests; if they could not do so through the League, then blame the League, not the powers. 

‘Realist’ historians then, and some still, dismissed the League as not just failing to stop war, but as actively contributing to it.  Thus in 1989 Christoher Seton-Watson could write of Carr’s judgement: “fifty years later one cannot but agree with him”, and as late as 1994 John Mearsheimer – who believes in ‘world-offensive realism’, a neo-realist theory which declares that international relations are anarchic, and that the best way of defence is offence (“A state’s ultimate goal is to be the hegemon of the system”) – declared in The False Promise of International Institutions that “the single case of an operative collective security system” in history – the League – was “a spectacular failure”. 

Thus in the 1960s and 1970s the focus of historians was to list and explain the Leagues’ failures, with the main debate about whether the responsibility for that failure lay with the League or the great powers. 

Their conclusion could scarcely have been more negative – for instance this assessment by Elmer Bendiner, in Time for Angels: the Tragicomic History of the League of Nations (1975):

The League’s birth arose out of a series of political fantasies: that the cease-fire of 1919 was a peace and not merely a truce; that national interests could be subordinated to world interests; that a government can espouse a cause other than its own. 

The League idea withered and died when each nation remembered that its holy mission was to serve itself, and that all agreements, oaths, treaties, and compacts are invalid when they conflict with that sacred cause. 

In 1966 the British historian AJP Taylor labelled the League “a useless fraud” and an “irrelevance” not worthy of study.  Indeed, in 2003 Margaret Macmillan could write mischievously: “only a handful of eccentric historians still bother to study the League”. 

2.    THE REVISIONISTS

In 1989, however, the world changed.  The Soviet Union collapsed and eastern Europe scrambled to join the western world.  At the same time ethnic conflicts and issues such as ‘failed states’, international terrorism, drugs trafficking, refugees and climate change – i.e.  a world which had irretrievably become ‘global’ – led to a change in the way historians thought about the League of Nations. 

They began to think, not so much as simplistically about ‘why it failed’ but about what it did, how it worked and what has been its legacy.  I suppose the underlying theme was: Can we learn anything from the League of Nations? 

The first consequence was a moer positive rethinking of the place of the League in the diplomacy of the 1920s, and even of the 1930s. 

This does not involve a denial of the failures of the League – even the shallowest trawl of the web unearths numbers of academic studies exploring 'why the League failed', or revealing its flaws.  As Susan Pedersen writes (Back to the League of Nations, 2007):

If these new accounts show that statesmen were able to use the League to ease tensions and win time in the 1920s, no such case appears possible for the 1930s.  Indeed, the League's porous, publicity-conscious character and consensual, dilatory processes may have played a role in that deterioration.  Diplomacy requires reliable interlocutors who can speak for their states; it requires secrecy; and it requires the ability to make credible threats.  The Covenant's security arrangements met none of those criteria”. 

Rather, historians are redefining what the League was trying to do away from a simplistiic assertion that it was trying to achieve 'world peace' – so Zara Steiner writes in The Lights that Failed (2005):

The Geneva system … was not a substitute for great-power politics but rather an adjunct to it.  It was only a mechanism for conducting multinational diplomacy. 

and she concludes: “More doors were opened than shut”. 

Similarly, Peter Yearwood, The League in British Policy (2009) comments that:

rather than an attempt to realize an abstract idea (usually characterized as ‘collective security’), [the League] was a means by which practical British statesmen tried to deal with pressing problems… British League policy has to be regarded not as a concession to idealism but as part of the general development of British foreign policy. 

and Andrew Webster, in The League of Nations and Grand Strategy (2012), comes to a similar conclusion:

The League of Nations has been ridiculed by historians and political scientists since its collapse in 1945.  They note that the institution failed to keep the peace, failed to punish transgressors, that its promises of collective security and disarmament went unfulfilled, and that revisionist states largely ignored its injunctions. 

I do not dispute the realities of these failures; rather, I argue that the too-common attitude of casual ridicule overlooks the League's genuine contributions, particularly in two areas of relevance to international security.  First, the League's efforts at disarmament embodied characteristics with direct relevance to the post-Cold War arms control environment….  Second, Britain and France … attempted to utilize the League as the cornerstone of an alternative to traditional balance-of-power grand strategies. 

A second revision of historian’s thinking about the League has been to start studying in proper detail “the Third League of Nations” – i.e.  the agencies and committees of the League which dealt with transnational issues: the PCIJ, ILO, LNHO, the protection of ethnic minorities, etc. 

Not all of these studies are complimentary.  Modern historians have found that, e.g:

•  the League’s control of the colonial Mandates was dominated by the European ideals such as Christianity, ‘civilisation’ and ‘good governance’,

•  the League refused to address 306 of the 455 complaints from ethnic minorities, and put the Versailles Settlement and the prestige of the League before the interests of the complainants. 

Nevertheless, Susan Pedersen comments, in these transnational issues the League “proved surprisingly effective”, gathering data, carrying out on-site visits, negotiating agreements, and monitoring compliance:

The League’s specialized agencies proved, then, to be more expansive, flexible, creative and successful than its security or state-building arrangements.. 

Similarly, Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy (2013) explains how efforts to support global capitalism became a core objective of the League of Nations, culminating in an international Economic Conference in London 1933 (albeit it ‘torpedoed’ by the USA). 

And Antony Anghie (Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 2004) regards the League’s creation of a world-wide centralised authority to monitor the mandates system as the foundation of modern global institutions such as the World Bank. 

The respected historian Ruth Henig concludes (History Today, 2010, and The Peace That Never Was, 2019):

Thus, in the past two decades, the League has been portrayed in an increasingly positive light … given the circumstances…

A new generation of historians is arguing that the League’s importance lies in the fact that it set in motion a different dynamic of international cooperation…

The conventional view of the League of Nations is that it was a complete failure having been unable to prevent the outbreak of a second major European conflict in 1939.  Some dismiss it as a total irrelevance and those who study it as ‘eccentric historians’ …

I am one of those ‘eccentric historians’ who has studied the League for over 30 years and who argue that its creation marked an important step on the road to our contemporary global system of international organisation, coordinated through the United Nations, which was built on the foundations of the League’s experience. 

[The League] was a bold step towards international cooperation which failed in some of its aims but succeeded comprehensively in others.

3.    A LAST WORD

The above constitutes the historiography (writings by historians) about the League, but I have recently been reading contributions about the League from international legal experts - and they have a VERY different, much more positive, 'take' on the League because they see its legal precedents separately from the political narrative. 

Thus, in 1987, David Kennedy, Lecturer on World Organissation at Harvard Law School, could assert that the success of the League was that it established in international relations the role of the 'plenary' (i.e. a discussion forum of all the nations) and "the transformative power of institutionalisation” - indeed established in the minds of all the nations the NEED for an organisation to oversee international relations (which led of course to the establishment of the United Nations after the Second World War). 

He does not even see the Second World War as a failure of the League:

We might best think of the Second World War as the elaborate fulfilment of the League's best substantive imagination - a war of all against the aggressor.

And, most recently (2020), Professor of International Law Jean d’Aspremont has defined the League as a successful “experiment narrative” in international law:

The League, now located in a clearly identified and limited past, having shown its flaws and limitations, can now generate insights for the present which it continues. 

International lawyers confidently claim that the failure of the League was instructive and conducive to important lessons for subsequent international legal practice and institutions.  The “lessons learnt” are numerous.  The failure of the League is now commonly presented as having taught the architects of the post-Second World War regime a great deal, especially in terms of prohibiting aggression, organizing measures of coercion, the readiness to subject oneself to a supervisory body, making international organizations effective, enhancing the feeling of importance of international cooperation, the non-generalization of the bindingness of decisions of international organizations, etc.  The whole United Nations system is presented as the brainchild of the failure of the League of Nations... 

It must be acknowledged [also] that not all the “lessons learnt from the League” are ascribed to its failure.  Some formative value is sometimes ascribed to those perceived successes and achievements of the League, for instance, in relation to the League activities in terms of disarmament, fight against slavery, the fight against terrorism, economic cooperation and financial cooperation, codification, registration of treaties, protection of minorities, all the general activities of the League deemed “technical”, and even collective security or the mandate system. 

I am going to leave the last word to Spanish diplomat Salvador de Madariaga who, in 1938, even as the League collapsed politically, could state with satisfaction:

A world community exists.  We have smuggled that truth into our store of spiritual thinking.