Intersex people face stigmatisation and discrimination
from birth, particularly when an intersex variation is visible. In some
countries (particularly in Africa and Asia) this may include infanticide, abandonment and the stigmatization of families. Mothers in East Africa may be accused of witchcraft, and the birth of an intersex child may be described as a curse.
Intersex infants and children, such as those with ambiguous outer
genitalia, may be surgically and/or hormonally altered to fit perceived
more socially acceptable sex characteristics. However, this is
considered controversial, with no firm evidence of good outcomes. Such treatments may involve sterilization. Adults, including elite female athletes, have also been subjects of such treatment. These issues are recognized as human rights abuses, with statements from UN agencies, the Australian parliament, and German and Swiss ethics institutions. Intersex organizations have also issued joint statements over several years, including the Malta declaration by the third International Intersex Forum.
Implementation of human rights protections in legislation and regulation has progressed more slowly. In 2011, Christiane Völling won the first successful case brought against a surgeon for non-consensual surgical intervention. In 2015, the Council of Europe recognized for the first time a right for intersex persons to not undergo sex assignment treatment. In April 2015, Malta
became the first country to outlaw nonconsensual medical interventions
to modify sex anatomy, including that of intersex people.
Other human rights and legal issues including the right to life,
protection from discrimination, standing to file in law and
compensation, access to information, and legal recognition. Few countries so far protect intersex people from discrimination.
Research indicates a growing consensus that diverse intersex bodies are normal—if relatively rare—forms of human biology,
and human rights institutions are placing increasing scrutiny on
medical practices and issues of discrimination against intersex people. A
2013 first international pilot study. Human Rights between the Sexes, by Dan Christian Ghattas, found that intersex people are discriminated against worldwide:
Intersex individuals are considered
individuals with a "disorder" in all areas in which Western medicine
prevails. They are more or less obviously treated as sick or "abnormal",
depending on the respective society.
Multiple organizations have highlighted appeals to LGBT rights
recognition that fail to address the issue of unnecessary "normalising"
treatments on intersex children, using the portmanteau term "pinkwashing". In June 2016, Organisation Intersex International Australia
claimed contradictory statements by Australian governments, suggesting
that the dignity and rights of LGBTI (LGBT and intersex) people are
recognized while this is contradicted by practices which are opposed
being performed on intersex children continue.
In August 2016, Zwischengeschlecht
described actions to promote equality or civil status legislation
without action on banning "intersex genital mutilations" as a form of
"pinkwashing".
The organization has previously highlighted evasive government
statements to UN Treaty Bodies that conflate intersex, transgender and
LGBT issues, instead of addressing harmful practices on infants.
Legal prohibition of non-consensual medical interventions
Regulatory suspension of non-consensual medical interventions
Physical integrity and bodily autonomy on intersex not legislated
Intersex people face stigmatisation and discrimination from birth. In
some countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, this may include
infanticide, abandonment and the stigmatization of families. Mothers in
east Africa may be accused of witchcraft, and the birth of an intersex
child may be described as a curse. Abandonments and infanticides have been reported in Uganda, Kenya, south Asia, and China.
In 2015, it was reported that an intersex Kenyan adolescent, Muhadh
Ishmael, was mutilated and later died. He had previously been described
as a curse on his family.
Non-consensual medical interventions to modify the sex
characteristics of intersex people take place in all countries where the
human rights of intersex people have been explored.
Such interventions have been criticized by the World Health
Organization, other UN bodies such as the Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, and an increasing number of regional and
national institutions. In low and middle income countries, the cost of
healthcare may limit access to necessary medical treatment at the same
time that other individuals experience coercive medical interventions.
Several rights have been stated as affected by stigmatization and coercive medical interventions on minors:
In recent years, Intersex rights have been the subject of reports by
several national and international institutions. These include the Swiss
National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics (2012), the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (2013), and the Australian Senate (2013). In 2015 the Council of Europe, the United Nations Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the World Health Organization also addressed the issue. In April 2015, Malta became the first country to outlaw coercive medical interventions. In the same year, the Council of Europe became the first institution to state that intersex people have the right not to undergo sex affirmation interventions.
In countries around the world,
intersex infants, children and adolescents are subjected to medically
unnecessary surgeries, hormonal treatments and other procedures in an
attempt to forcibly change their appearance to be in line with societal
expectations about female and male bodies. When, as is frequently the
case, these procedures are performed without the full, free and informed
consent of the person concerned, they amount to violations of
fundamental human rights...
States must, as a matter of urgency, prohibit medically unnecessary
surgery and procedures on intersex children. They must uphold the
autonomy of intersex adults and children and their rights to health, to
physical and mental integrity, to live free from violence and harmful
practices and to be free from torture and ill-treatment. Intersex
children and their parents should be provided with support and
counselling, including from peers.
In 2017, the human rights non-governmental organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch published major reports on the rights of children with intersex conditions.
Although not many cases of children with intersex conditions are available, a case taken to the Constitutional Court of Colombia led to changes in their treatment.
The case restricted the power of doctors and parents to decide surgical
procedures on children's ambiguous genitalia after the age of five,
while continuing to permit interventions on younger children. Due to the
decision of the Constitutional Court of Colombia on Case 1 Part 1
(SU-337 of 1999), doctors are obliged to inform parents on all the
aspects of the intersex child. Parents can only consent to surgery if
they have received accurate information, and cannot give consent after
the child reaches the age of five. By then the child will have,
supposedly, realized their gender identity. The court case led to the setting of legal guidelines for doctors' surgical practice on intersex children.
In April 2015, Malta became the first country to outlaw non-consensual medical interventions in a Gender Identity Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics Act.
The Act recognizes a right to bodily integrity and physical autonomy,
explicitly prohibiting modifications to children's sex characteristics
for social factors:
14. (1) It shall be unlawful for
medical practitioners or other professionals to conduct any sex
assignment treatment and/or surgical intervention on the sex
characteristics of a minor which treatment and/or intervention can be
deferred until the person to be treated can provide informed consent:
Provided that such sex assignment treatment and/or surgical intervention
on the sex characteristics of the minor shall be conducted if the minor
gives informed consent through the person exercising parental authority
or the tutor of the minor.
(2) In exceptional circumstances treatment may be effected once
agreement is reached between the Interdisciplinary Team and the persons
exercising parental authority or tutor of the minor who is still unable
to provide consent: Provided that medical intervention which is driven
by social factors without the consent of the minor, will be in violation
of this Act.
The Act was widely welcomed by civil society organizations.
In January 2016, the Ministry of Health of Chile
ordered the suspension of unnecessary normalization treatments for
intersex children, including irreversible surgery, until they reach an
age when they can make decisions on their own. The regulations were superseded in August 2016.
On 22 April 2019 the Madras High Court (Madurai Bench) passed a landmark judgment and issued direction to ban Sex-Selective Surgeries on Intersex Infants based on the works of Gopi Shankar Madurai. On August 13, 2019 the Government of Tamil Nadu, India
has issued a Government Order to ban non-necessary surgeries on the sex
characteristics of babies and children in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu with 77.8 Million people, this regulation is exempted in the case of life-threatening situations.
A law that provides for a general ban on operations in children and
adolescents with 'variants of gender development' ('Varianten der
Geschlechtsentwicklung') was passed in the German parliament on March 25, 2021. According to a report in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt,
the law is intended to strengthen the self-determined decision-making
of children and adolescents and avoid possible damage to their health.
Surgical changes to gender characteristics
should only take place - even with the consent of the parents - if the
operation cannot be postponed until age 14. The Federal Chamber of
Psychotherapists requires the mandatory participation of a counsellor
with experience on intersex in an assessment before a possible
intervention. While supportive of progress, the law that was finally passed was also criticized by the Organisation Intersex International (OII) Germany, OII Europe, and Intergeschlechtliche Menschen, because of the existence of exceptions.
In 2015, the Council of Europe published an Issue Paper on Human rights and intersex people, remarking:
Intersex people's right to life can
be violated in discriminatory “sex selection” and “preimplantation
genetic diagnosis, other forms of testing, and selection for particular
characteristics”. Such de-selection or selective abortions are
incompatible with ethics and human rights standards due to the
discrimination perpetrated against intersex people on the basis of their
sex characteristics.
Protection from discrimination
Explicit protection on grounds of sex characteristics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Finland, Greece, Serbia, Malta, Portugal)
Explicit protection on grounds of intersex status (Australia, Jersey)
Explicit protection on grounds of intersex within attribute of sex (South Africa)
A handful of jurisdictions so far provide explicit protection from discrimination for intersex people. South Africa was the first country to explicitly add intersex to legislation, as part of the attribute of "sex". Australia was the first country to add an independent attribute, of "intersex status". Malta
was the first to adopt a broader framework of "sex characteristics,
through legislation that also ended modifications to the sex
characteristics of minors undertaken for social and cultural reasons. Bosnia-Herzegovina listed as "sex characteristics" Greece prohibits discrimination and hate crimes based on "sex characteristics", since 24 December 2015. Since 2021, Serbia also prohibits discrimination based on "sex characteristics".
Education
An
Australian survey of 272 persons born with atypical sex characteristics,
published in 2016, found that 18% of respondents (compared to an
Australian average of 2%) failed to complete secondary school, with
early school leaving coincident with pubertal medical interventions,
bullying and other factors.
Employment
A
2015 Australian survey of people born with atypical sex characteristics
found high levels of poverty, in addition to very high levels of early
school leaving, and higher than average rates of disability. An Employers guide to intersex inclusion published by Pride in Diversity and Organisation Intersex International Australia also discloses cases of discrimination in employment.
Healthcare
Discrimination protection intersects with involuntary and coercive medical treatment. Maltese protections on grounds of sex characteristics provides explicit protection against unnecessary and harmful modifications to the sex characteristics of children.
In May 2016, the United States Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement explaining Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act
stating that the Act prohibits "discrimination on the basis of intersex
traits or atypical sex characteristics" in publicly funded healthcare,
as part of a prohibition of discrimination "on the basis of sex".
In 2013, it was disclosed in a medical journal that four unnamed
elite female athletes from developing countries were subjected to
gonadectomies (sterilization) and partial clitoridectomies (female genital mutilation) after testosterone testing revealed that they had an intersex condition. Testosterone testing was introduced in the wake of the Caster Semenya case, of a South African runner subjected to testing due to her appearance and vigor. There is no evidence that innate hyperandrogenism in elite women athletes confers an advantage in sport. While Australia protects intersex persons from discrimination, the Act contains an exemption in sport.
Remedies and compensation claims
Intersex activists on a boat at Utrecht Canal Pride on June 16, 2018
Compensation claims have been made in a limited number of legal cases.
In Germany in 2011, Christiane Völling was successful in a case against her medical treatment. The surgeon was ordered to pay €100,000 in compensatory damages after a legal battle that began in 2007, thirty years after the removal of her reproductive organs.
On August 12, 2005, the mother of a child, Benjamín, filed a lawsuit against the Maule Health Service
after the child's male gonads and reproductive system were removed
without informing the parents of the nature of the surgery. The child
had been raised as a girl. The claim for compensatory damages was
initiated in the Fourth Court of Letters of Talca, and ended up in the Supreme Court of Chile.
On November 14, 2012, the Court sentenced the Maule Health Service for
"lack of service" and to pay compensation of 100 million pesos for moral
and psychological damages caused to Benjamín, and another 5 million for
each of the parents.
In the United States the M.C. v. Aaronson case, advanced by interACT with the Southern Poverty Law Center, was brought before the courts in 2013.
In 2015, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit dismissed the
case, stating that, "it did not “mean to diminish the severe harm that
M.C. claims to have suffered” but that a reasonable official in 2006 did
not have fair warning from then-existing precedent that performing sex
assignment surgery on sixteen-month-old M.C. violated a clearly
established constitutional right."[83][84]
In July 2017, it was reported that the case had been settled out of
court by the Medical University of South Carolina for $440,000, without
admission of liability.
In 2015, Michaela Raab filed suit against doctors in Nuremberg,
Germany, for failing to properly advise her. Doctors stated that they
"were only acting according to the norms of the time - which sought to
protect patients against the psychosocial effects of learning the full
truth about their chromosomes." On 17 December 2015, the Nuremberg State Court ruled that the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Clinic pay damages and compensation.
With the rise of modern medical science in Western societies, many
intersex people with ambiguous external genitalia have had their
genitalia surgically modified to resemble either female or male
genitals. Surgeons pinpointed the birth of intersex babies as a "social
emergency".
A secrecy-based model was also adopted, in the belief that this was
necessary to ensure “normal” physical and psychosocial development. Disclosure also included telling people that they would never meet anyone else with the same condition. Access to medical records has also historically been challenging. Yet the ability to provide free, informed consent depends on the availability of information.
Some intersex organizations claim that secrecy-based models have been perpetuated by a shift in clinical language to disorders of sex development. Morgan Carpenter of Organisation Intersex International Australia quotes the work of Miranda Fricker
on "hermeneutical injustice" where, despite new legal protections from
discrimination on grounds of intersex status, "someone with lived
experience is unable to even make sense of their own social experiences"
due to the deployment of clinical language and "no words to name the
experience".
According to the Asia Pacific Forum
of National Human Rights Institutions, few countries have provided for
the legal recognition of intersex people. The Forum states that the
legal recognition of intersex people is:
firstly about access to the same rights as other men and women, when assigned male or female;
secondly it is about access to administrative corrections to legal documents when an original sex assignment is not appropriate; and
thirdly, while opt in schemes may help some individuals, legal recognition is not about the creation of a third sex or gender
classification for intersex people as a population, but instead is
about enabling an opt-in scheme for any individual who seeks it.
In some jurisdictions, access to any form of identification document can be an issue.
Gender identities
Like
all individuals, some intersex individuals may be raised as a
particular sex (male or female) but then identify with another later in
life, while most do not.
Like non-intersex people, some intersex individuals may not identify
themselves as either exclusively female or exclusively male. A 2012
clinical review suggests that between 8.5-20% of persons with intersex
conditions may experience gender dysphoria,
while sociological research in Australia, a country with a third 'X'
sex classification, shows that 19% of people born with atypical sex
characteristics selected an "X" or "other" option, while 52% are women,
23% men and 6% unsure.
Access to identification documents
Depending on the jurisdiction, access to any birth certificate may be an issue, including a birth certificate with a sex marker.
In 2014, in the case of Baby 'A' (Suing through her Mother E.A) & another v Attorney General & 6 others [2014],
a Kenyan court ordered the Kenyan government to issue a birth
certificate to a five-year-old child born in 2009 with ambiguous
genitalia. In Kenya a birth certificate is necessary for attending school, getting a national identity document, and voting. Many intersex persons in Uganda
are understood to be stateless due to historical difficulties in
obtaining identification documents, despite a birth registration law
that permits intersex minors to change assignment.
Recognition before the law means
having legal personhood and the legal protections that flow from that.
For intersex people, this is neither primarily nor solely about amending
birth registrations or other official documents. Firstly, it is about
intersex people who have been issued a male or a female birth
certificate being able to enjoy the same legal rights as other men and
women
Some countries like Australia and New Zealand exempt female genital
mutilation laws from intersex people. and the laws may exist but may not
be enforced in some other countries like the United States.
Binary categories
Access
to a birth certificate with a correct sex marker may be an issue for
people who do not identify with their sex assigned at birth, or it may only be available accompanied by surgical requirements.
The passports and identification documents of Australia
and some other nationalities have adopted "X" as a valid third category
besides "M" (male) and "F" (female), at least since 2003. In 2013, Germany became the first European nation to allow babies with characteristics of both sexes to be registered as indeterminate gender
on birth certificates, amidst opposition and skepticism from intersex
organisations who point out that the law appears to mandate exclusion
from male or female categories.
The Council of Europe acknowledged this approach, and concerns about
recognition of third and blank classifications in a 2015 Issue Paper,
stating that these may lead to "forced outings" and "lead to an increase
in pressure on parents of intersex children to decide in favour of one
sex." The Issue Paper argues that "further reflection on non-binary legal identification is necessary":
Mauro Cabral, Global Action for Trans Equality
(GATE) Co-Director, indicated that any recognition outside the “F”/”M”
dichotomy needs to be adequately planned and executed with a human
rights point of view, noting that: “People tend to identify a third sex
with freedom from the gender binary, but that is not necessarily the
case. If only trans and/or intersex people can access that third
category, or if they are compulsively assigned a third sex, then the
gender binary gets stronger, not weaker”
Civil-rights movements
often seek to ensure that individual rights are not denied on the basis
of membership in a minority group. Such civil-rights advocates include
the global women's-rights and global LGBT-rights movements, and various racial-minority rights movements around the world (such as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States).
The infringement of fundamental human rights
is intolerable by the democratic nation-states. However, it is argued
that a nation state's principles of nationalism may provoke oppressive
and discriminatory action towards the fundamental human rights of
minority groups. The First argument of nationalism imposing
discriminatory measures upon its citizens can be exemplified through
French nationalism. France is regarded as a democratic secular state; a
principle of French nationalism is enforcing the ideology of equality
and women's rights.
The Muslim ban illustrates that nationalistic principles can
impose on the fundamental human right of freedom of choice.
Specifically, in the choice of personal religious attire for minority
groups in the western hemisphere; French Muslim women. The 2010-1192 act
exemplifies advocacy for women's rights in French nationalism but the
imposes on a woman’s freedom of choice.
Issues of minority rights may intersect with debates over historical redress or over positive discrimination.
History
The issue of minority rights was first raised in 1814, at the Congress of Vienna, which discussed the fate of German Jews and especially of the Poles who were once again partitioned up. The Congress expressed hope that Prussia, Russia, and Austria
would grant tolerance and protection to their minorities, which
ultimately they disregarded, engaging in organized discrimination.
The 1856 Congress of Paris paid special attention to the status of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In Britain, William Gladstone made the massacres of Bulgarians by the Ottoman Empire a major campaign issue and demanded international attention. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 dealt with the status of Jews in Romania, especially, and also Serbia, and Bulgaria. On the whole, the 19th-century congresses failed to impose significant reforms.
The first minority rights were proclaimed and enacted by the revolutionary Parliament of Hungary in July 1849. Minority rights were codified in Austrian law in 1867.
Russia was especially active in protecting Orthodox Christians and Slavic peoples under the control of the Ottoman Empire. However the Russian government tolerated vicious pogroms against Jews in its villages. Russia was widely attacked for this policy.
By contrast there was little or no international outrage regarding the
treatment of other minorities, such as black people in the southern United States before the 1950s when African colonies became independent.
Minority rights at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919
For information about Minority rights at the Paris conference, see Minority Treaties.
At the Versailles Peace Conference
the Supreme Council established 'The Committee on New States and for
The Protection of Minorities'. All the new successor states were
compelled to sign minority rights treaties as a precondition of
diplomatic recognition. It was agreed that although the new states had
been recognized, they had not been 'created' before the signatures of
the final peace treaties. The issue of German and Polish rights was a
point of dispute as Polish rights in Germany remained unprotected,
unlike the German minority in Poland.
Like other principles adopted by the League, the Minorities Treaties
were a part of the Wilsonian idealist approach to international
relations; like the League itself, the Minority Treaties were
increasingly ignored by the respective governments, with the entire
system mostly collapsing in the late 1930s. Despite the political
failure, they remained the basis of international law. After World War II, the legal principles were incorporated in the UN Charter and a host of international human rights treaties.
International law
Minority rights, as applying to ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples, are an integral part of international human rights law. Like children's rights, women's rights and refugee rights, minority rights are a legal framework designed to ensure that a specific group which is in a vulnerable, disadvantaged or marginalized
position in society, is able to achieve equality and is protected from
persecution. The first postwar international treaty to protect
minorities, designed to protect them from the greatest threat to their
existence, was the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
To protect minority rights, many countries have specific laws and/or commissions or ombudsman institutions (for example the Hungarian Parliamentary Commissioner for National and Ethnic Minorities Rights).
In 2008, a declaration on LGBT rights was presented in the UN General Assembly, and in 2011, an LGBT rights resolution was passed in the United Nations Human Rights Council.
There are many political bodies which also feature minority group rights, which might be seen in affirmative action quotas or in guaranteed minority representation in a consociational state.
National minorities in the law of the EC/EU
The direct role of the European Union
(and also the law of the EU/EC) in the area of protection of national
minorities is still very limited (likewise the general protection of
human rights). The EU has relied on general international law and a European regional system of international law (based on the Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe,
etc.) and in a case of necessity accepted their norms. But the
"de-economisation of European integration", which started in the 1990s,
is changing this situation. The political relevance of national
minorities' protection is very high.
Now (2009), although protection of the national minorities has
not become a generally accepted legally binding principle of the EU, in
several legal acts issues of national minorities are mentioned. In
external relations protection of national minorities became one of the
main criteria for cooperation with the EU or accession.
^ The headquarters were based from 1 November 1920 in the Palais Wilson in Geneva, Switzerland, and from 17 February 1936 in the purpose built Palace of Nations also in Geneva.
The organisation's primary goals, as stated in its Covenant, included preventing wars through collective security and disarmament and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration. Its other concerns included labour conditions, just treatment of native inhabitants, human and drug trafficking, the arms trade, global health, prisoners of war, and protection of minorities in Europe. The Covenant of the League of Nations was signed on 28 June 1919 as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles,
and it became effective together with the rest of the Treaty on 10
January 1920. The first meeting of the Council of the League took place
on 16 January 1920, and the first meeting of Assembly of the League took
place on 15 November 1920. In 1919 U.S. president Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the leading architect of the League.
The diplomatic philosophy behind the League represented a
fundamental shift from the preceding hundred years. The League lacked
its own armed force and depended on the victorious First World War Allies
(Britain, France, Italy and Japan were the permanent members of the
Executive Council) to enforce its resolutions, keep to its economic
sanctions, or provide an army when needed. The Great Powers were often reluctant to do so. Sanctions could hurt League members, so they were reluctant to comply with them. During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, when the League accused Italian soldiers of targeting International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement medical tents, Benito Mussolini responded that "the League is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out."
At its greatest extent from 28 September 1934 to 23 February
1935, it had 58 members. After some notable successes and some early
failures in the 1920s, the League ultimately proved incapable of
preventing aggression by the Axis powers in the 1930s. The credibility of the organization was weakened by the fact that the United States never joined the League and the Soviet Union joined late and was soon expelled after invading Finland. Germany withdrew from the League, as did Japan, Italy, Spain and others. The onset of the Second World War in 1939
showed that the League had failed its primary purpose; it was inactive
until its abolition. The League lasted for 26 years; the United Nations (UN) replaced it in 1946 and inherited several agencies and organisations founded by the League.
The concept of a peaceful community of nations had been proposed as early as 1795, when Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch outlined the idea of a league of nations to control conflict and promote peace between states.
Kant argued for the establishment of a peaceful world community, not in
a sense of a global government, but in the hope that each state would
declare itself a free state that respects its citizens and welcomes
foreign visitors as fellow rational beings, thus promoting peaceful
society worldwide. International co-operation to promote collective security originated in the Concert of Europe that developed after the Napoleonic Wars in the 19th century in an attempt to maintain the status quo between European states and so avoid war.
By 1910 international law developed, with the first Geneva Conventions establishing laws dealing with humanitarian relief during wartime, and the international Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 governing rules of war and the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Theodore Roosevelt
at the acceptance for his Nobel Prize in 1910, Roosevelt said: "it
would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace
would form a League of Peace."
One small forerunner of the League of Nations, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), was formed by the peace activists William Randal Cremer and Frédéric Passy
in 1889 (and is currently still in existence as an international body
with a focus on the various elected legislative bodies of the world.)
The IPU was founded with an international scope, with a third of the
members of parliaments (in the 24 countries that had parliaments)
serving as members of the IPU by 1914. Its foundational aims were to
encourage governments to solve international disputes by peaceful means.
Annual conferences were established to help governments refine the
process of international arbitration. Its structure was designed as a
council headed by a president, which would later be reflected in the
structure of the League.
Initial proposals
Lord Bryce, one of the earliest advocates for a League of Nations.
At the start of the First World War, the first schemes for an
international organisation to prevent future wars began to gain
considerable public support, particularly in Great Britain and the
United States. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson,
a British political scientist, coined the term "League of Nations" in
1914 and drafted a scheme for its organisation. Together with Lord Bryce, he played a leading role in the founding of the group of internationalist pacifists known as the Bryce Group, later the League of Nations Union. The group became steadily more influential among the public and as a pressure group within the then governing Liberal Party. In Dickinson's 1915 pamphlet After the War
he wrote of his "League of Peace" as being essentially an organisation
for arbitration and conciliation. He felt that the secret diplomacy of
the early twentieth century had brought about war and thus could write
that, "the impossibility of war, I believe, would be increased in
proportion as the issues of foreign policy should be known to and
controlled by public opinion." The ‘Proposals’ of the Bryce Group were
circulated widely, both in England and the US, where they had a profound
influence on the nascent international movement.
In January 1915, a peace conference directed by Jane Addams
was held in the neutral United States. The delegates adopted a platform
calling for creation of international bodies with administrative and
legislative powers to develop a "permanent league of neutral nations" to
work for peace and disarmament. Within months a call was made for an international women's conference to be held in The Hague. Coordinated by Mia Boissevain, Aletta Jacobs and Rosa Manus, the Congress, which opened on 28 April 1915 was attended by 1,136 participants from neutral nations, and resulted in the establishment of an organization which would become the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
At the close of the conference, two delegations of women were
dispatched to meet European heads of state over the next several months.
They secured agreement from reluctant foreign ministers, who overall
felt that such a body would be ineffective, but agreed to participate or
not impede creation of a neutral mediating body, if other nations
agreed and if President Woodrow Wilson would initiate a body. In the midst of the War, Wilson refused.
The League to Enforce Peace published this full-page promotion in The New York Times on Christmas Day 1918.
It resolved that the League "should ensure peace by eliminating causes
of dissension, by deciding controversies by peaceable means, and by
uniting the potential force of all the members as a standing menace
against any nation that seeks to upset the peace of the world".
In 1915, a similar body to the Bryce group was set up in the United States led by former president William Howard Taft. It was called the League to Enforce Peace.
It advocated the use of arbitration in conflict resolution and the
imposition of sanctions on aggressive countries. None of these early
organisations envisioned a continuously functioning body; with the
exception of the Fabian Society
in England, they maintained a legalistic approach that would limit the
international body to a court of justice. The Fabians were the first to
argue for a "Council" of states, necessarily the Great Powers,
who would adjudicate world affairs, and for the creation of a permanent
secretariat to enhance international co-operation across a range of
activities.
In the course of the diplomatic efforts surrounding World War I, both sides had to clarify their long-term war aims. By 1916 in Britain, fighting on the side of the Allies,
and in the neutral United States, long-range thinkers had begun to
design a unified international organisation to prevent future wars.
Historian Peter Yearwood argues that when the new coalition government
of David Lloyd George
took power in December 1916, there was widespread discussion among
intellectuals and diplomats of the desirability of establishing such an
organisation. When Lloyd George was challenged by Wilson to state his
position with an eye on the postwar situation, he endorsed such an
organisation. Wilson himself included in his Fourteen Points in January 1918 a "league of nations to ensure peace and justice." British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour,
argued that, as a condition of durable peace, "behind international
law, and behind all treaty arrangements for preventing or limiting
hostilities, some form of international sanction should be devised which
would give pause to the hardiest aggressor."
The war had had a profound impact, affecting the social,
political and economic systems of Europe and inflicting psychological
and physical damage. Several empires collapsed: first the Russian Empire in February 1917, followed by the German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ottoman Empire. Anti-war sentiment rose across the world; the First World War was described as "the war to end all wars",
and its possible causes were vigorously investigated. The causes
identified included arms races, alliances, militaristic nationalism,
secret diplomacy, and the freedom of sovereign states to enter into war
for their own benefit. One proposed remedy was the creation of an
international organisation whose aim was to prevent future war through
disarmament, open diplomacy, international co-operation, restrictions on
the right to wage war, and penalties that made war unattractive.
In London Balfour commissioned the first official report into the matter in early 1918, under the initiative of Lord Robert Cecil. The British committee was finally appointed in February 1918. It was led by Walter Phillimore (and became known as the Phillimore Committee), but also included Eyre Crowe, William Tyrrell, and Cecil Hurst. The recommendations of the so-called Phillimore Commission
included the establishment of a "Conference of Allied States" that
would arbitrate disputes and impose sanctions on offending states. The
proposals were approved by the British government, and much of the
commission's results were later incorporated into the Covenant of the League of Nations.
The French also drafted a much more far-reaching proposal in June
1918; they advocated annual meetings of a council to settle all
disputes, as well as an "international army" to enforce its decisions.
On
his December 1918 trip to Europe, Woodrow Wilson gave speeches that
"reaffirmed that the making of peace and the creation of a League of
Nations must be accomplished as one single objective".
American President Woodrow Wilson instructed Edward M. House to draft a US plan which reflected Wilson's own idealistic views (first articulated in the Fourteen Points
of January 1918), as well as the work of the Phillimore Commission. The
outcome of House's work and Wilson's own first draft proposed the
termination of "unethical" state behaviour, including forms of espionage
and dishonesty. Methods of compulsion against recalcitrant states would
include severe measures, such as "blockading and closing the frontiers
of that power to commerce or intercourse with any part of the world and
to use any force that may be necessary..."
The two principal drafters and architects of the covenant of the League of Nations were the British politician Lord Robert Cecil and the South African statesman Jan Smuts.
Smuts' proposals included the creation of a Council of the great powers
as permanent members and a non-permanent selection of the minor states.
He also proposed the creation of a Mandate system for captured colonies of the Central Powers
during the war. Cecil focused on the administrative side and proposed
annual Council meetings and quadrennial meetings for the Assembly of all
members. He also argued for a large and permanent secretariat to carry
out the League's administrative duties.
The League of Nations was relatively more universal and inclusive
in its membership and structure than previous international
organisations, but the organisation enshrined racial hierarchy by
curtailing the right to self-determination and prevented decolonization.
Establishment
The first meeting of the Council of the League of Nations took place on 16 January 1920 in the Salle de l'Horloge at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris
The first meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations took place on 15 November 1920 at the Salle de la Réformation in Geneva
At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Wilson, Cecil and Smuts all put forward their draft proposals. After lengthy negotiations between the delegates, the Hurst–Miller draft was finally produced as a basis for the Covenant. After more negotiation and compromise, the delegates finally approved of the proposal to create the League of Nations (French: Société des Nations, German: Völkerbund) on 25 January 1919. The final Covenant of the League of Nations was drafted by a special commission, and the League was established by Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. On 28 June 1919, 44 states signed the Covenant, including 31 states which had taken part in the war on the side of the Triple Entente or joined it during the conflict.
French women's rights advocates invited international feminists
to participate in a parallel conference to the Paris Conference in hopes
that they could gain permission to participate in the official
conference. The Inter-Allied Women's Conference
asked to be allowed to submit suggestions to the peace negotiations and
commissions and were granted the right to sit on commissions dealing
specifically with women and children. Though they asked for enfranchisement and full legal protection under the law equal with men, those rights were ignored. Women won the right to serve in all capacities, including as staff or delegates in the League of Nations organization. They also won a declaration that member nations should prevent trafficking of women and children and should equally support humane conditions for children, women and men labourers. At the Zürich Peace Conference held between 17 and 19 May 1919, the women of the WILPF condemned the terms of the Treaty of Versailles
for both its punitive measures, as well as its failure to provide for
condemnation of violence and exclusion of women from civil and political
participation. Upon reading the Rules of Procedure for the League of Nations, Catherine Marshall,
a British suffragist, discovered that the guidelines were completely
undemocratic and they were modified based on her suggestion.
The League would be made up of a General Assembly (representing
all member states), an Executive Council (with membership limited to
major powers), and a permanent secretariat. Member states were expected
to "respect and preserve as against external aggression" the territorial
integrity of other members and to disarm "to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety." All states were required to submit complaints for arbitration or judicial inquiry before going to war. The Executive Council would create a Permanent Court of International Justice to make judgements on the disputes.
In
1924, the headquarters of the League was named "Palais Wilson", after
former US President Woodrow Wilson, who was credited in the memorial
outside the building as the "Founder of the League of Nations"
Despite Wilson's efforts to establish and promote the League, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1919, the United States never joined. Senate Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge
wanted a League with the reservation that only Congress could take the
U.S. into war. Lodge gained a majority of Senators and Wilson refused to
allow a compromise. The Senate voted on the ratification on March 19,
1920, and the 49-35 vote fell short of the needed 2/3 majority.
The League held its first council meeting in Paris on 16 January
1920, six days after the Versailles Treaty and the Covenant of the
League of Nations came into force. On 1 November 1920, the headquarters of the League was moved from London to Geneva, where the first General Assembly was held on 15 November 1920. The Palais Wilson on Geneva's western lakeshore, named after Woodrow Wilson, was the League's first permanent home.
Languages and symbols
The official languages of the League of Nations were French and English.
In 1939, a semi-official emblem for the League of Nations
emerged: two five-pointed stars within a blue pentagon. They symbolised
the Earth's five continents and "five races." A bow at the top displayed the English name ("League of Nations"), while another at the bottom showed the French ("Société des Nations").
Palace of Nations, Geneva, the League's headquarters from 1936 until its dissolution in 1946
The main constitutional organs of the League were the Assembly, the
council, and the Permanent Secretariat. It also had two essential wings:
the Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Labour Organization. In addition, there were several auxiliary agencies and commissions. Each organ's budget was allocated by the Assembly (the League was supported financially by its member states).
The relations between the Assembly and the Council and the
competencies of each were for the most part not explicitly defined. Each
body could deal with any matter within the sphere of competence of the
League or affecting peace in the world. Particular questions or tasks
might be referred to either.
Unanimity
was required for the decisions of both the Assembly and the Council,
except in matters of procedure and some other specific cases such as the
admission of new members. This requirement was a reflection of the
League's belief in the sovereignty of its component nations; the League
sought a solution by consent, not by dictation. In case of a dispute,
the consent of the parties to the dispute was not required for
unanimity.
The Permanent Secretariat, established at the seat of the League
at Geneva, comprised a body of experts in various spheres under the
direction of the general secretary. Its principal sections were Political, Financial and Economics, Transit, Minorities and Administration (administering the Saar and Danzig),
Mandates, Disarmament, Health, Social (Opium and Traffic in Women and
Children), Intellectual Cooperation and International Bureaux, Legal,
and Information. The staff of the Secretariat was responsible for
preparing the agenda for the Council and the Assembly and publishing
reports of the meetings and other routine matters, effectively acting as
the League's civil service. In 1931 the staff numbered 707.
The Assembly consisted of representatives of all members of the
League, with each state allowed up to three representatives and one
vote. It met in Geneva and, after its initial sessions in 1920, it convened once a year in September.
The special functions of the Assembly included the admission of new
members, the periodical election of non-permanent members to the
Council, the election with the Council of the judges of the Permanent
Court, and control of the budget. In practice, the Assembly was the
general directing force of League activities.
The League Council acted as a type of executive body directing the Assembly's business. It began with four permanent members – Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan – and four non-permanent members that were elected by the Assembly for a three-year term. The first non-permanent members were Belgium, Brazil, Greece, and Spain.
The composition of the Council was changed several times. The
number of non-permanent members was first increased to six on 22
September 1922 and to nine on 8 September 1926. Werner Dankwort
of Germany pushed for his country to join the League; joining in 1926,
Germany became the fifth permanent member of the Council. Later, after
Germany and Japan both left the League, the number of non-permanent
seats was increased from nine to eleven, and the Soviet Union was made a
permanent member giving the Council a total of fifteen members.
The Council met, on average, five times a year and in extraordinary
sessions when required. In total, 107 sessions were held between 1920
and 1939.
The Permanent Court of International Justice was provided for by
the Covenant, but not established by it. The Council and the Assembly
established its constitution. Its judges were elected by the Council and
the Assembly, and its budget was provided by the latter. The Court was
to hear and decide any international dispute which the parties concerned
submitted to it. It might also give an advisory opinion on any dispute
or question referred to it by the Council or the Assembly. The Court was
open to all the nations of the world under certain broad conditions.
Child labour in a coal mine, United States, c. 1912
The International Labour Organization was created in 1919 on the basis of Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles.
The ILO, although having the same members as the League and being
subject to the budget control of the Assembly, was an autonomous
organisation with its own Governing Body, its own General Conference and
its own Secretariat. Its constitution differed from that of the League:
representation had been accorded not only to governments but also to
representatives of employers' and workers' organisations. Albert Thomas was its first director.
The ILO successfully restricted the addition of lead to paint, and convinced several countries to adopt an eight-hour work day
and forty-eight-hour working week. It also campaigned to end child
labour, increase the rights of women in the workplace, and make
shipowners liable for accidents involving seamen. After the demise of the League, the ILO became an agency of the United Nations in 1946.
The League's health organisation had three bodies: the Health
Bureau, containing permanent officials of the League; the General
Advisory Council or Conference, an executive section consisting of
medical experts; and the Health Committee. The committee's purpose was
to conduct inquiries, oversee the operation of the League's health work,
and prepare work to be presented to the council. This body focused on ending leprosy, malaria, and yellow fever,
the latter two by starting an international campaign to exterminate
mosquitoes. The Health Organisation also worked successfully with the
government of the Soviet Union to prevent typhus epidemics, including organising a large education campaign.
The League of Nations had devoted serious attention to the
question of international intellectual co-operation since its creation.
The First Assembly in December 1920 recommended that the Council take
action aiming at the international organisation of intellectual work,
which it did by adopting a report presented by the Fifth Committee of
the Second Assembly and inviting a Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
to meet in Geneva in August 1922. The French philosopher Henri Bergson became the first chairman of the committee.
The work of the committee included: an inquiry into the conditions of
intellectual life, assistance to countries where intellectual life was
endangered, creation of national committees for intellectual
co-operation, co-operation with international intellectual
organisations, protection of intellectual property, inter-university
co-operation, co-ordination of bibliographical work and international
interchange of publications, and international co-operation in
archaeological research.
Introduced by the second International Opium Convention, the Permanent Central Opium Board had to supervise the statistical reports on trade in opium,
morphine, cocaine and heroin. The board also established a system of
import certificates and export authorisations for the legal
international trade in narcotics.
The Slavery Commission sought to eradicate slavery and slave trading across the world, and fought forced prostitution.
Its main success was through pressing the governments who administered
mandated countries to end slavery in those countries. The League secured
a commitment from Ethiopia to end slavery as a condition of membership in 1923, and worked with Liberia
to abolish forced labour and intertribal slavery. The United Kingdom
had not supported Ethiopian membership of the League on the grounds that
"Ethiopia had not reached a state of civilisation and internal security
sufficient to warrant her admission."
The League also succeeded in reducing the death rate of workers constructing the Tanganyika railway from 55 to 4 percent. Records were kept to control slavery, prostitution, and the trafficking of women and children. Partly as a result of pressure brought by the League of Nations, Afghanistan abolished slavery in 1923, Iraq in 1924, Nepal in 1926, Transjordan and Persia in 1929, Bahrain in 1937, and Ethiopia in 1942.
Led by Fridtjof Nansen, the Commission for Refugees was established on 27 June 1921 to look after the interests of refugees, including overseeing their repatriation and, when necessary, resettlement.
At the end of the First World War, there were two to three million
ex-prisoners of war from various nations dispersed throughout Russia; within two years of the commission's foundation, it had helped 425,000 of them return home. It established camps in Turkey in 1922 to aid the country with an ongoing refugee crisis, helping to prevent the spread of cholera, smallpox and dysentery as well as feeding the refugees in the camps. It also established the Nansen passport as a means of identification for stateless people.
The Committee for the Study of the Legal Status of Women sought
to inquire into the status of women all over the world. It was formed in
1937, and later became part of the United Nations as the Commission on
the Status of Women.
The Covenant of the League said little about economics.
Nonetheless, in 1920 the Council of the League called for a financial
conference. The First Assembly at Geneva provided for the appointment
of an Economic and Financial Advisory Committee to provide information
to the conference. In 1923, a permanent economic and financial
Organization came into being.
A map of the world in 1920–45, which shows the League of Nations members during its history
Of the League's 42 founding members, 23 (24 counting Free France)
remained members until it was dissolved in 1946. In the founding year,
six other states joined, only two of which remained members throughout
the League's existence. Under the Weimar Republic, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations through a resolution passed on 8 September 1926.
An additional 15 countries joined later. The largest number of member states was 58, between 28 September 1934 (when Ecuador joined) and 23 February 1935 (when Paraguay withdrew).
On 26 May 1937, Egypt became the last state to join the League. The first member to withdraw permanently from the League was Costa Rica on 22 January 1925; having joined on 16 December 1920, this also makes it the member to have most quickly withdrawn. Brazil was the first founding member to withdraw (14 June 1926), and Haiti the last (April 1942). Iraq, which joined in 1932, was the first member that had previously been a League of Nations mandate.
The Soviet Union became a member on 18 September 1934, and was expelled on 14 December 1939 for invading Finland.
In expelling the Soviet Union, the League broke its own rule: only 7 of
15 members of the Council voted for expulsion (United Kingdom, France,
Belgium, Bolivia, Egypt, South Africa, and the Dominican Republic),
short of the majority required by the Covenant. Three of these members
had been made Council members the day before the vote (South Africa,
Bolivia, and Egypt). This was one of the League's final acts before it
practically ceased functioning due to the Second World War.
At the end of the First World War, the Allied powers
were confronted with the question of the disposal of the former German
colonies in Africa and the Pacific, and the several Arabic-speaking
provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Peace Conference
adopted the principle that these territories should be administered by
different governments on behalf of the League – a system of national
responsibility subject to international supervision. This plan, defined as the mandate system,
was adopted by the "Council of Ten" (the heads of government and
foreign ministers of the main Allied powers: Britain, France, the United
States, Italy, and Japan) on 30 January 1919 and transmitted to the
League of Nations.
League of Nations mandates were established under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The Permanent Mandates Commission supervised League of Nations mandates, and also organised plebiscites
in disputed territories so that residents could decide which country
they would join. There were three mandate classifications: A, B and C.
The A mandates (applied to parts of the old Ottoman Empire) were "certain communities" that had
...reached
a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can
be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative
advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to
stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal
consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.
— Article 22, The Covenant of the League of Nations
The B mandates were applied to the former German colonies that the League took responsibility for after the First World War. These were described as "peoples" that the League said were
...at
such a stage that the Mandatory must be responsible for the
administration of the territory under conditions which will guarantee
freedom of conscience and religion, subject only to the maintenance of
public order and morals, the prohibition of abuses such as the slave
trade, the arms traffic and the liquor traffic, and the prevention of
the establishment of fortifications or military and naval bases and of
military training of the natives for other than police purposes and the
defence of territory, and will also secure equal opportunities for the
trade and commerce of other Members of the League.
— Article 22, The Covenant of the League of Nations
South West Africa and certain South Pacific Islands were administered by
League members under C mandates. These were classified as "territories"
...which, owing to the
sparseness of their population, or their small size, or their remoteness
from the centres of civilisation, or their geographical contiguity to
the territory of the Mandatory, and other circumstances, can be best
administered under the laws of the Mandatory as integral portions of its
territory, subject to the safeguards above mentioned in the interests
of the indigenous population."
— Article 22, The Covenant of the League of Nations
Mandatory powers
The territories were governed by mandatory powers, such as the United Kingdom in the case of the Mandate of Palestine, and the Union of South Africa
in the case of South-West Africa, until the territories were deemed
capable of self-government. Fourteen mandate territories were divided up
among seven mandatory powers: the United Kingdom, the Union of South
Africa, France, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia and Japan. With the exception of the Kingdom of Iraq, which joined the League on 3 October 1932,
these territories did not begin to gain their independence until after
the Second World War, in a process that did not end until 1990.
Following the demise of the League, most of the remaining mandates
became United Nations Trust Territories.
In addition to the mandates, the League itself governed the Territory of the Saar Basin for 15 years, before it was returned to Germany following a plebiscite, and the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) from 15 November 1920 to 1 September 1939.
Resolving territorial disputes
The aftermath of the First World War
left many issues to be settled, including the exact position of
national boundaries and which country particular regions would join.
Most of these questions were handled by the victorious Allied powers in
bodies such as the Allied Supreme Council. The Allies tended to refer
only particularly difficult matters to the League. This meant that,
during the early interwar period,
the League played little part in resolving the turmoil resulting from
the war. The questions the League considered in its early years included
those designated by the Paris Peace treaties.
As the League developed, its role expanded, and by the middle of
the 1920s it had become the centre of international activity. This
change can be seen in the relationship between the League and
non-members. The United States and Russia, for example, increasingly
worked with the League. During the second half of the 1920s, France,
Britain and Germany were all using the League of Nations as the focus of
their diplomatic activity, and each of their foreign secretaries
attended League meetings at Geneva during this period. They also used
the League's machinery to try to improve relations and settle their
differences.
Åland is a collection of around 6,500 islands in the Baltic Sea, midway between Sweden and Finland. The islands are almost exclusively Swedish-speaking, but in 1809, the Åland Islands, along with Finland, were taken by Imperial Russia. In December 1917, during the turmoil of the Russian October Revolution, Finland declared its independence, but most of the Ålanders wished to rejoin Sweden. The Finnish government considered the islands to be a part of their new nation, as the Russians had included Åland in the Grand Duchy of Finland,
formed in 1809. By 1920, the dispute had escalated to the point that
there was danger of war. The British government referred the problem to
the League's Council, but Finland would not let the League intervene, as
they considered it an internal matter. The League created a small panel
to decide if it should investigate the matter and, with an affirmative
response, a neutral commission was created.
In June 1921, the League announced its decision: the islands were to
remain a part of Finland, but with guaranteed protection of the
islanders, including demilitarisation. With Sweden's reluctant
agreement, this became the first European international agreement
concluded directly through the League.
The Allied powers referred the problem of Upper Silesia to the League after they had been unable to resolve the territorial dispute between Poland and Germany. In 1919 Poland voiced a claim to Upper Silesia, which had been part of Prussia. The Treaty of Versailles had recommended a plebiscite in Upper Silesia
to determine whether the territory should become part of Germany or
Poland. Complaints about the attitude of the German authorities led to
rioting and eventually to the first two Silesian Uprisings
(1919 and 1920). A plebiscite took place on 20 March 1921, with 59.6
per cent (around 500,000) of the votes cast in favour of joining
Germany, but Poland claimed the conditions surrounding it had been
unfair. This result led to the Third Silesian Uprising in 1921.
On 12 August 1921, the League was asked to settle the matter; the
Council created a commission with representatives from Belgium, Brazil,
China and Spain to study the situation.
The committee recommended that Upper Silesia be divided between Poland
and Germany according to the preferences shown in the plebiscite and
that the two sides should decide the details of the interaction between
the two areas – for example, whether goods should pass freely over the
border due to the economic and industrial interdependence of the two
areas.
In November 1921, a conference was held in Geneva to negotiate a
convention between Germany and Poland. A final settlement was reached,
after five meetings, in which most of the area was given to Germany, but
with the Polish section containing the majority of the region's mineral
resources and much of its industry. When this agreement became public
in May 1922, bitter resentment was expressed in Germany, but the treaty
was still ratified by both countries. The settlement produced peace in
the area until the beginning of the Second World War.
Albania
The frontiers of the Principality of Albania had not been set during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, as they were left for the League to decide. They had not yet been determined by September 1921, creating an unstable situation. Greek troops conducted military operations in the south of Albania. Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
(Yugoslav) forces became engaged, after clashes with Albanian
tribesmen, in the northern part of the country. The League sent a
commission of representatives from various powers to the region. In
November 1921, the League decided that the frontiers of Albania should
be the same as they had been in 1913, with three minor changes that
favoured Yugoslavia. Yugoslav forces withdrew a few weeks later, albeit
under protest.
The borders of Albania again became the cause of international conflict when Italian General Enrico Tellini
and four of his assistants were ambushed and killed on 24 August 1923
while marking out the newly decided border between Greece and Albania.
Italian leader Benito Mussolini
was incensed and demanded that a commission investigate the incident
within five days. Whatever the results of the investigation, Mussolini
insisted that the Greek government pay Italy fifty million lire in reparations. The Greeks said they would not pay unless it was proved that the crime was committed by Greeks.
Mussolini sent a warship to shell the Greek island of Corfu, and Italian forces occupied the island
on 31 August 1923. This contravened the League's covenant, so Greece
appealed to the League to deal with the situation. The Allies agreed (at
Mussolini's insistence) that the Conference of Ambassadors
should be responsible for resolving the dispute because it was the
conference that had appointed General Tellini. The League Council
examined the dispute, but then passed on their findings to the
Conference of Ambassadors to make the final decision. The conference
accepted most of the League's recommendations, forcing Greece to pay
fifty million lire to Italy, even though those who committed the crime
were never discovered. Italian forces then withdrew from Corfu.
The port city of Memel (now Klaipėda) and the surrounding area,
with a predominantly German population, was under provisional Entente
control according to Article 99 of the Treaty of Versailles. The French and Polish governments favoured turning Memel into an international city, while Lithuania
wanted to annex the area. By 1923, the fate of the area had still not
been decided, prompting Lithuanian forces to invade in January 1923 and
seize the port. After the Allies failed to reach an agreement with
Lithuania, they referred the matter to the League of Nations. In
December 1923, the League Council appointed a Commission of Inquiry. The
commission chose to cede Memel to Lithuania and give the area
autonomous rights. The Klaipėda Convention was approved by the League Council on 14 March 1924, and then by the Allied powers and Lithuania. In 1939 Germany retook the region following the rise of the Nazis and an ultimatum to Lithuania,
demanding the return of the region under threat of war. The League of
Nations failed to prevent the secession of the Memel region to Germany.
With League oversight, the Sanjak of Alexandretta in the French Mandate of Syria was given autonomy in 1937. Renamed Hatay, its parliament declared independence as the Republic of Hatay in September 1938, after elections the previous month. It was annexed by Turkey with French consent in mid-1939.
The League resolved a dispute between the Kingdom of Iraq and the
Republic of Turkey over control of the former Ottoman province of Mosul in 1926. According to the British, who had been awarded a League of Nations mandate over Iraq
in 1920 and therefore represented Iraq in its foreign affairs, Mosul
belonged to Iraq; on the other hand, the new Turkish republic claimed
the province as part of its historic heartland. A League of Nations
Commission of Inquiry, with Belgian, Hungarian and Swedish members, was
sent to the region in 1924; it found that the people of Mosul did not
want to be part of either Turkey or Iraq, but if they had to choose,
they would pick Iraq.
In 1925, the commission recommended that the region stay part of Iraq,
under the condition that the British hold the mandate over Iraq for
another 25 years, to ensure the autonomous rights of the Kurdish
population. The League Council adopted the recommendation and decided
on 16 December 1925 to award Mosul to Iraq. Although Turkey had accepted
the League of Nations' arbitration in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923),
it rejected the decision, questioning the Council's authority. The
matter was referred to the Permanent Court of International Justice,
which ruled that, when the Council made a unanimous decision, it must be
accepted. Nonetheless, Britain, Iraq and Turkey ratified a separate
treaty on 5 June 1926 that mostly followed the decision of the League
Council and also assigned Mosul to Iraq. It was agreed that Iraq could
still apply for League membership within 25 years and that the mandate
would end upon its admission.
After the First World War, Poland and Lithuania both regained their
independence but soon became immersed in territorial disputes. During the Polish–Soviet War, Lithuania signed the Moscow Peace Treaty with the Soviet Union that laid out Lithuania's frontiers. This agreement gave Lithuanians control of the city of Vilnius (Lithuanian: Vilnius, Polish: Wilno), the old Lithuanian capital, but a city with a majority Polish population. This heightened tension between Lithuania and Poland and led to fears that they would resume the Polish–Lithuanian War, and on 7 October 1920, the League negotiated the Suwałki Agreement establishing a cease-fire and a demarcation line between the two nations. On 9 October 1920, General Lucjan Żeligowski, commanding a Polish military force in contravention of the Suwałki Agreement, took the city and established the Republic of Central Lithuania.
After a request for assistance from Lithuania, the League Council
called for Poland's withdrawal from the area. The Polish government
indicated they would comply, but instead reinforced the city with more
Polish troops.
This prompted the League to decide that the future of Vilnius should be
determined by its residents in a plebiscite and that the Polish forces
should withdraw and be replaced by an international force organised by
the League. The plan was met with resistance in Poland, Lithuania, and
the Soviet Union, which opposed any international force in Lithuania. In
March 1921, the League abandoned plans for the plebiscite. After unsuccessful proposals by Paul Hymans to create a federation between Poland and Lithuania, which was intended as a reincarnation of the former union which both Poland and Lithuania
had once shared before losing its independence, Vilnius and the
surrounding area was formally annexed by Poland in March 1922. After
Lithuania took over the Klaipėda Region, the Allied Conference set the frontier between Lithuania and Poland, leaving Vilnius within Poland, on 14 March 1923. Lithuanian authorities refused to accept the decision, and officially remained in a state of war with Poland until 1927. It was not until the 1938 Polish ultimatum that Lithuania restored diplomatic relations with Poland and thus de facto accepted the borders.
There were several border conflicts between Colombia and Peru in the early part of the 20th century, and in 1922, their governments signed the Salomón-Lozano Treaty in an attempt to resolve them. As part of this treaty, the border town of Leticia and its surrounding area was ceded from Peru to Colombia, giving Colombia access to the Amazon River.
On 1 September 1932, business leaders from Peruvian rubber and sugar
industries who had lost land, as a result, organised an armed takeover
of Leticia. At first, the Peruvian government did not recognise the military takeover, but President of PeruLuis Sánchez Cerro decided to resist a Colombian re-occupation. The Peruvian Army occupied Leticia, leading to an armed conflict between the two nations.
After months of diplomatic negotiations, the governments accepted
mediation by the League of Nations, and their representatives presented
their cases before the Council. A provisional peace agreement, signed by
both parties in May 1933, provided for the League to assume control of
the disputed territory while bilateral negotiations proceeded.
In May 1934, a final peace agreement was signed, resulting in the
return of Leticia to Colombia, a formal apology from Peru for the 1932
invasion, demilitarisation of the area around Leticia, free navigation
on the Amazon and Putumayo Rivers, and a pledge of non-aggression.
Saar was a province formed from parts of Prussia and the Rhenish Palatinate
and placed under League control by the Treaty of Versailles. A
plebiscite was to be held after fifteen years of League rule to
determine whether the province should belong to Germany or France. When
the referendum was held in 1935, 90.3 per cent of voters supported
becoming part of Germany, which was quickly approved by the League
Council.
Other conflicts
In
addition to territorial disputes, the League also tried to intervene in
other conflicts between and within nations. Among its successes were
its fight against the international trade in opium and sexual slavery,
and its work to alleviate the plight of refugees, particularly in Turkey
in the period up to 1926. One of its innovations in this latter area
was the 1922 introduction of the Nansen passport, which was the first internationally recognised identity card for stateless refugees.
After an incident involving sentries on the Greek-Bulgarian border in October 1925, fighting began between the two countries.
Three days after the initial incident, Greek troops invaded Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian government ordered its troops to make only token
resistance, and evacuated between ten thousand and fifteen thousand
people from the border region, trusting the League to settle the
dispute. The League condemned the Greek invasion, and called for both Greek withdrawal and compensation to Bulgaria.
Liberia
Following accusations of forced labour on the large American-owned Firestone
rubber plantation and American accusations of slave trading, the
Liberian government asked the League to launch an investigation. The resulting commission was jointly appointed by the League, the United States, and Liberia.
In 1930, a League report confirmed the presence of slavery and forced
labour. The report implicated many government officials in the selling
of contract labour and recommended that they be replaced by Europeans or
Americans, which generated anger within Liberia and led to the
resignation of President Charles D. B. King
and his vice-president. The Liberian government outlawed forced labour
and slavery and asked for American help in social reforms.
Chinese delegate addresses the League of Nations concerning the Manchurian Crisis in 1932.
The Mukden Incident, also known as the "Manchurian Incident" was a
decisive setback that weakened The League because its major members
refused to tackle Japanese aggression. Japan itself withdrew.
Under the agreed terms of the Twenty-One Demands with China, the Japanese government had the right to station its troops in the area around the South Manchurian Railway, a major trade route between the two countries, in the Chinese region of Manchuria. In September 1931, a section of the railway was lightly damaged by the Japanese Kwantung Army as a pretext for an invasion of Manchuria. The Japanese army claimed that Chinese soldiers had sabotaged the
railway and in apparent retaliation (acting contrary to orders from
Tokyo) occupied all of Manchuria. They renamed the area Manchukuo, and on 9 March 1932 set up a puppet government, with Pu Yi, the former emperor of China, as its executive head.
This new entity was recognised only by the governments of Italy, Spain
and Nazi Germany; the rest of the world still considered Manchuria
legally part of China.
The League of Nations sent observers. The Lytton Report
appeared a year later (October 1932). It declared Japan to be the
aggressor and demanded Manchuria be returned to China. The report
passed 42–1 in the Assembly in 1933 (only Japan voting against), but
instead of removing its troops from China, Japan withdrew from the
League. In the end, as British historian Charles Mowat argued, collective security was dead:
The League and the ideas of collective security and the rule of
law were defeated; partly because of indifference and of sympathy with
the aggressor, but partly because the League powers were unprepared,
preoccupied with other matters, and too slow to perceive the scale of
Japanese ambitions.
The League failed to prevent the 1932 war between Bolivia and Paraguay over the arid Gran Chaco region. Although the region was sparsely populated, it contained the Paraguay River, which would have given either landlocked country access to the Atlantic Ocean, and there was also speculation, later proved incorrect, that the Chaco would be a rich source of petroleum.
Border skirmishes throughout the late 1920s culminated in an all-out
war in 1932 when the Bolivian army attacked the Paraguayans at Fort
Carlos Antonio López at Lake Pitiantuta. Paraguay appealed to the League of Nations, but the League did not take action when the Pan-American Conference
offered to mediate instead. The war was a disaster for both sides,
causing 57,000 casualties for Bolivia, whose population was around three
million, and 36,000 dead for Paraguay, whose population was
approximately one million.
It also brought both countries to the brink of economic disaster. By
the time a ceasefire was negotiated on 12 June 1935, Paraguay had seized
control of most of the region, as was later recognised by the 1938
truce.
In October 1935, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sent 400,000 troops to invade Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Marshal Pietro Badoglio led the campaign from November 1935, ordering bombing, the use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas, and the poisoning of water supplies, against targets which included undefended villages and medical facilities. The modern Italian Army defeated the poorly armed Abyssinians and captured Addis Ababa in May 1936, forcing Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie to flee.
The League of Nations condemned Italy's aggression and imposed
economic sanctions in November 1935, but the sanctions were largely
ineffective since they did not ban the sale of oil or close the Suez Canal (controlled by Britain). As Stanley Baldwin,
the British Prime Minister, later observed, this was ultimately because
no one had the military forces on hand to withstand an Italian attack. In October 1935, the US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, invoked the recently passed Neutrality Acts
and placed an embargo on arms and munitions to both sides, but extended
a further "moral embargo" to the belligerent Italians, including other
trade items. On 5 October and later on 29 February 1936, the United
States endeavoured, with limited success, to limit its exports of oil
and other materials to normal peacetime levels.
The League sanctions were lifted on 4 July 1936, but by that point,
Italy had already gained control of the urban areas of Abyssinia.
The Hoare–Laval Pact of December 1935 was an attempt by the British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and the French Prime Minister Pierre Laval
to end the conflict in Abyssinia by proposing to partition the country
into an Italian sector and an Abyssinian sector. Mussolini was prepared
to agree to the pact, but news of the deal leaked out. Both the British
and French public vehemently protested against it, describing it as a
sell-out of Abyssinia. Hoare and Laval were forced to resign, and the
British and French governments dissociated themselves from the two men.
In June 1936, although there was no precedent for a head of state
addressing the Assembly of the League of Nations in person, Haile
Selassie spoke to the Assembly, appealing for its help in protecting his
country.
The Abyssinian crisis showed how the League could be influenced by the self-interest of its members;
one of the reasons why the sanctions were not very harsh was that both
Britain and France feared the prospect of driving Mussolini and Adolf Hitler into an alliance.
On 17 July 1936, the Spanish Army launched a coup d'état, leading to a prolonged armed conflict between Spanish Republicans
(the elected leftist national government) and the Nationalists
(conservative, anti-communist rebels who included most officers of the
Spanish Army). Julio Álvarez del Vayo,
the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, appealed to the League in
September 1936 for arms to defend Spain's territorial integrity and
political independence. The League members would not intervene in the
Spanish Civil War nor prevent foreign intervention in the conflict. Adolf Hitler and Mussolini continued to aid General Francisco Franco's
Nationalists, while the Soviet Union, to a much lesser extent, helped
the Spanish Republic. In February 1937, the League did ban foreign volunteers, but this was in practice a symbolic move.
Following a long record of instigating localised conflicts throughout
the 1930s, Japan began a full-scale invasion of China on 7 July 1937.
On 12 September, the Chinese representative, Wellington Koo,
appealed to the League for international intervention. Western
countries were sympathetic to the Chinese in their struggle,
particularly in their stubborn defence of Shanghai, a city with a substantial number of foreigners. The League was unable to provide any practical measures; on 4 October, it turned the case over to the Nine Power Treaty Conference.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact
of 23 August 1939, contained secret protocols outlining spheres of
interest. Finland and the Baltic states, as well as eastern Poland, fell
into the Soviet sphere. After invading Poland on 17 September 1939, on 30 November the Soviets invaded Finland. Then "the League of Nations for the first time expelled a member who had violated the Covenant." The League action of 14 December 1939, stung. "The Soviet Union was the only League member ever to suffer such an indignity."
Article 8 of the Covenant gave the League the task of reducing
"armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the
enforcement by common action of international obligations".
In the 1920s little of the League's time and energy was devoted to this
goal, as many members doubted that serious disarmament could be
achieved or was even desirable.
The League scored some successes, including the 1925 Conference
for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition
and in Implements of War. It started to collect international arms data.
Most important was the passage in 1925 of the Geneva protocol banning
poison gas in war. It reflected strong worldwide public opinion, although the United States did not ratify it until 1975.
The League had numerous failures and shortfalls. In 1921 it set
up the Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments to explore possibilities
for disarmament. It was made up not of government representatives but of
famous individuals. They rarely agreed. Proposals ranged from
abolishing chemical warfare and strategic bombing
to the limitation of more conventional weapons, such as tanks. A draft
treaty was assembled in 1923 that made aggressive war illegal and bound
the member states to defend victims of aggression by force. Since the
onus of responsibility would, in practice, be on the great powers of the
League, it was vetoed by Great Britain, who feared that this pledge
would strain its own commitment to police its British Empire.
The Allied powers were also under obligation by the Treaty of
Versailles to attempt to disarm, and the armament restrictions imposed
on the defeated countries had been described as the first step toward
worldwide disarmament.
The League Covenant assigned the League the task of creating a
disarmament plan for each state, but the Council devolved this
responsibility to a special commission set up in 1926 to prepare for the
1932–1934 World Disarmament Conference.
Members of the League held different views towards the issue. The
French were reluctant to reduce their armaments without a guarantee of
military help if they were attacked; Poland and Czechoslovakia
felt vulnerable to attack from the west and wanted the League's
response to aggression against its members to be strengthened before
they disarmed.
Without this guarantee, they would not reduce armaments because they
felt the risk of attack from Germany was too great. Fear of attack
increased as Germany regained its strength after the First World War,
especially after Adolf Hitler gained power and became German Chancellor in 1933.
In particular, Germany's attempts to overturn the Treaty of Versailles
and the reconstruction of the German military made France increasingly
unwilling to disarm.
The World Disarmament Conference was convened by the League of Nations in Geneva in 1932, with representatives from 60 states. It was a failure.
A one-year moratorium on the expansion of armaments, later extended by a
few months, was proposed at the start of the conference.
The Disarmament Commission obtained initial agreement from France,
Italy, Spain, Japan, and Britain to limit the size of their navies but
no final agreement was reached. Ultimately, the Commission failed to
halt the military build-up by Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan during the
1930s.
The League was mostly silent in the face of major events leading to the Second World War, such as Hitler's remilitarisation of the Rhineland, occupation of the Sudetenland and Anschluss of Austria,
which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. In fact, League
members themselves re-armed. In 1933, Japan simply withdrew from the
League rather than submit to its judgement,
as did Germany the same year (using the failure of the World
Disarmament Conference to agree to arms parity between France and
Germany as a pretext), Italy and Spain in 1937. The final significant act of the League was to expel the Soviet Union in December 1939 after it invaded Finland.
General weaknesses
The Gap in the Bridge; the sign reads "This League of Nations Bridge was designed by the President of the U.S.A." Cartoon from Punch magazine, 10 December 1920, satirising the gap left by the US not joining the League.
The onset of the Second World War demonstrated that the League had
failed in its primary purpose, the prevention of another world war.
There were a variety of reasons for this failure, many connected to
general weaknesses within the organisation. Additionally, the power of
the League was limited by the United States' refusal to join.
Origins and structure
The
origins of the League as an organisation created by the Allied powers
as part of the peace settlement to end the First World War led to it
being viewed as a "League of Victors".
The League's neutrality tended to manifest itself as indecision. It
required a unanimous vote of nine, later fifteen, Council members to
enact a resolution; hence, conclusive and effective action was
difficult, if not impossible. It was also slow in coming to its
decisions, as certain ones required the unanimous consent of the entire
Assembly. This problem mainly stemmed from the fact that the primary
members of the League of Nations were not willing to accept the
possibility of their fate being decided by other countries, and by
enforcing unanimous voting had effectively given themselves veto power.
Global representation
Representation
at the League was often a problem. Though it was intended to encompass
all nations, many never joined, or their period of membership was short.
The most conspicuous absentee was the United States. President Woodrow
Wilson had been a driving force behind the League's formation and
strongly influenced the form it took, but the US Senate voted not to
join on 19 November 1919. Ruth Henig
has suggested that, had the United States become a member, it would
have also provided support to France and Britain, possibly making France
feel more secure, and so encouraging France and Britain to co-operate
more fully regarding Germany, thus making the rise to power of the Nazi Party less likely.
Conversely, Henig acknowledges that if the US had been a member, its
reluctance to engage in war with European states or to enact economic
sanctions might have hampered the ability of the League to deal with international incidents. The structure of the US federal government
might also have made its membership problematic, as its representatives
at the League could not have made decisions on behalf of the executive branch without having the prior approval of the legislative branch.
In January 1920, when the League was born, Germany was not
permitted to join because it was seen as having been the aggressor in
the First World War. Soviet Russia
was also initially excluded because Communist regimes were not welcomed
and membership would have been initially dubious due to the Russian Civil War
in which both sides claimed to be the legitimate government of the
country. The League was further weakened when major powers left in the
1930s. Japan began as a permanent member of the Council since the
country was an Allied Power in the First World War, but withdrew in 1933
after the League voiced opposition to its occupation of Manchuria. Italy began as a permanent member of the Council but withdrew in 1937 after roughly a year following the end of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Spain also began as a permanent member of the Council, but withdrew in 1939 after the Spanish Civil War
ended in a victory for the Nationalists. The League had accepted
Germany, also as a permanent member of the Council, in 1926, deeming it a
"peace-loving country", but Adolf Hitler pulled Germany out when he
came to power in 1933.
Collective security
Another important weakness grew from the contradiction between the idea of collective security that formed the basis of the League and international relations between individual states.
The League's collective security system required nations to act, if
necessary, against states they considered friendly, and in a way that
might endanger their national interests, to support states for which they had no normal affinity. This weakness was exposed during the Abyssinia Crisis,
when Britain and France had to balance maintaining the security they
had attempted to create for themselves in Europe "to defend against the
enemies of internal order", in which Italy's support played a pivotal role, with their obligations to Abyssinia as a member of the League.
On 23 June 1936, in the wake of the collapse of League efforts to
restrain Italy's war against Abyssinia, the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, told the House of Commons that collective security had
failed
ultimately because of the reluctance of nearly all the nations in
Europe to proceed to what I might call military sanctions ... The real
reason, or the main reason, was that we discovered in the process of
weeks that there was no country except the aggressor country which was
ready for war ... [I]f collective action is to be a reality and not
merely a thing to be talked about, it means not only that every country
is to be ready for war; but must be ready to go to war at once. That is a
terrible thing, but it is an essential part of collective security.
Ultimately, Britain and France both abandoned the concept of collective security in favour of appeasement in the face of growing German militarism under Hitler.
In this context, the League of Nations was also the institution where
the first international debate on terrorism took place following the
1934 assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseille, France, showing its conspiratorial features, many of which are detectable in the discourse of terrorism among states after 9/11.
American diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis originally supported the League, but after two decades changed his mind:
The League of Nations has been a disappointing failure.... It
has been a failure, not because the United States did not join it; but
because the great powers have been unwilling to apply sanctions except
where it suited their individual national interests to do so, and
because Democracy, on which the original concepts of the League rested
for support, has collapsed over half the world.
Pacifism and disarmament
The
League of Nations lacked an armed force of its own and depended on the
Great Powers to enforce its resolutions, which they were very unwilling
to do.
Its two most important members, Britain and France, were reluctant to
use sanctions and even more reluctant to resort to military action on
behalf of the League. Immediately after the First World War, pacifism became a strong force among both the people and governments of the two countries. The British Conservatives
were especially tepid to the League and preferred, when in government,
to negotiate treaties without the involvement of that organisation.
Moreover, the League's advocacy of disarmament for Britain, France, and
its other members, while at the same time advocating collective
security, meant that the League was depriving itself of the only
forceful means by which it could uphold its authority.
When the British cabinet discussed the concept of the League during the First World War, Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary,
circulated a memorandum on the subject. He started by saying,
"Generally it appears to me that any such scheme is dangerous to us
because it will create a sense of security which is wholly fictitious". He attacked the British pre-war faith in the sanctity of treaties as delusional and concluded by claiming:
It [a League of Nations] will only
result in failure and the longer that failure is postponed the more
certain it is that this country will have been lulled to sleep. It will
put a very strong lever into the hands of the well-meaning idealists who
are to be found in almost every Government, who deprecate expenditure
on armaments, and, in the course of time, it will almost certainly
result in this country being caught at a disadvantage.
The Foreign Office civil servant Sir Eyre Crowe
also wrote a memorandum to the British cabinet claiming that "a solemn
league and covenant" would just be "a treaty, like other treaties".
"What is there to ensure that it will not, like other treaties, be
broken?" Crowe went on to express scepticism of the planned "pledge of
common action" against aggressors because he believed the actions of
individual states would still be determined by national interests and
the balance of power. He also criticised the proposal for League
economic sanctions because it would be ineffectual and that "It is all a
question of real military preponderance". Universal disarmament was a
practical impossibility, Crowe warned.
As the situation in Europe escalated into war, the Assembly
transferred enough power to the Secretary General on 30 September 1938
and 14 December 1939 to allow the League to continue to exist legally
and carry on reduced operations. The headquarters of the League, the Palace of Nations, remained unoccupied for nearly six years until the Second World War ended.
At the 1943 Tehran Conference,
the Allied powers agreed to create a new body to replace the League:
the United Nations. Many League bodies, such as the International Labour
Organization, continued to function and eventually became affiliated
with the UN. The designers of the structures of the United Nations intended to make it more effective than the League.
The final meeting of the League of Nations took place on 18 April 1946 in Geneva. Delegates from 34 nations attended the assembly. This session concerned itself with liquidating the League: it transferred assets worth approximately $22,000,000 (U.S.) in 1946
(including the Palace of Nations and the League's archives) to the UN,
returned reserve funds to the nations that had supplied them, and
settled the debts of the League. Robert Cecil, addressing the final session, said:
Let us boldly state that aggression
wherever it occurs and however it may be defended, is an international
crime, that it is the duty of every peace-loving state to resent it and
employ whatever force is necessary to crush it, that the machinery of
the Charter, no less than the machinery of the Covenant, is sufficient
for this purpose if properly used, and that every well-disposed citizen
of every state should be ready to undergo any sacrifice in order to
maintain peace ... I venture to impress upon my hearers that the great
work of peace is resting not only on the narrow interests of our own
nations, but even more on those great principles of right and wrong
which nations, like individuals, depend.
The Assembly passed a resolution that "With effect from the day
following the close of the present session of the Assembly [i.e., April
19], the League of Nations shall cease to exist except for the sole
purpose of the liquidation of its affairs as provided in the present
resolution."
A Board of Liquidation consisting of nine persons from different
countries spent the next 15 months overseeing the transfer of the
League's assets and functions to the United Nations or specialised
bodies, finally dissolving itself on 31 July 1947.
In the past few decades, by research using the League Archives at
Geneva, historians have reviewed the legacy of the League of Nations as
the United Nations has faced similar troubles to those of the interwar
period. Current consensus views that, even though the League failed to
achieve its ultimate goal of world peace, it did manage to build new
roads towards expanding the rule of law across the globe; strengthened the concept of collective security, giving a voice to smaller nations; helped to raise awareness to problems like epidemics, slavery, child labour, colonial tyranny, refugee crises
and general working conditions through its numerous commissions and
committees; and paved the way for new forms of statehood, as the mandate system put the colonial powers under international observation.
Professor David Kennedy
portrays the League as a unique moment when international affairs were
"institutionalised", as opposed to the pre–First World War methods of
law and politics.
Decisions of the Security Council are binding on all members of
the UN, and unanimous decisions are not required, unlike in the League
Council. Only the five permanent members of the Security Council can wield a veto to protect their vital interests.
The League of Nations archives is a collection of the League's records and documents.
It consists of approximately 15 million pages of content dating from
the inception of the League of Nations in 1919 extending through its
dissolution, which commenced in 1946. It is located at the United Nations Office at Geneva.
Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project (LONTAD)
In 2017, the UN Library & Archives Geneva launched the Total
Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project (LONTAD), with
the intention of preserving, digitizing, and providing online access to the League of Nations archives. It is scheduled for completion in 2022.
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