League of Nations Founded
The League of Nations held its first council meeting in January 1920 without the country whose president had invented it. Wilson had made it the fourteenth of his Fourteen Points and had insisted that the covenant be written into the Treaty of Versailles rather than negotiated separately, which tied its fate to the treaty's. The Senate then rejected the treaty twice, chiefly over Article X, which obliged members to preserve each other's territorial integrity against aggression and which senators read as surrendering the congressional power to declare war. The League therefore began without the United States, and the Soviet Union was excluded until 1934 and expelled in 1939, and Germany joined in 1926 and left in 1933. Its structure had no army and required unanimity in the council for any action, which meant that any aggressor with a seat could veto its own condemnation. The record is better than its reputation in the parts nobody remembers: it settled the Åland islands between Sweden and Finland, arbitrated Upper Silesia, ran the Saar and Danzig, resettled some 400,000 prisoners of war, and its health, labour and refugee organisations did serious work and were carried into the United Nations. The failures are the ones that mattered. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, was condemned by a commission and walked out; Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and sanctions were applied without including oil. It transferred its assets to the United Nations in 1946. Its most quoted verdict came from Mussolini, who said that the League was very well when sparrows shouted and no use at all when eagles fell out. The verdict is fair about the institution and unfair about the members, since the League could do only what its great powers were willing to do.
- Year: 1920 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
