League Of Nations Essay

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The League of Nations has been seen as a seriously flawed international organisation and its failure to prevent World War Two has been well documented. Provide something of an alternative perspective by identifying and highlighting important policy-areas in which the League made valuable progress.
The League of Nations was an Intergovernmental Organisation which persisted from 1919 up until 1946 where it was formally replaced with the United Nations towards the end of the Second World War. Many consider the League as one of the International Systems greatest failures due to it being widely regarded as an ‘ineffective instrument to tackle aggressors’ (Catterall, 1999, p. 52) and its inherent failure to prevent international conflict. However, …show more content…

Origins for the cooperation amongst powers necessary to tackle international disputes can be traced back to the 19th century, however the formation of the League of Nations was eagerly prompted by the First World War. After the horrors in which the world observed, leaders merged together and rejoiced in the potential for a new international system. The League of Nations foremost objective was to secure peace through collective efforts of ‘peace-loving’ powers (Steans, Pettiford, & Diez, 2005, p. 31). President Woodrow Wilson was a lead proponent in the creation of such a body, suggesting it- within his message on the Conditions of Peace- as a means of ‘affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’ (Wilson, 1918). The following year a detailed scheme was presented at the Versailles Peace Conference and the league was swiftly established with the addition of a permanent secretariat in Geneva. (Catterall, 1999, p. 50). The League was very much considered the ‘most daring and innovative proposal’ (Wilkinson, 2007, p. 85) …show more content…

&., 2005, p. 67) , the United States Congress refused to cooperate with America joining the League and viewed Woodrow Wilsons idea of the League and his foreign policy as too ‘ideational’. With the absence of the US rendering the League without access to Americas forceful military and economic power- which left the Covenants ability stated within Article 16 to “institute economic or military sanctions against a recalcitrant state” (Orjinta, 2010, p. 10) considerably weaker- German, Japanese and Italian dictatorships rejected the sovereignty of the League (Wilkinson, 2007, p. 86). Yet although it can be agreed the League failed in regards to its main purpose of maintaining peace and security, it did however provide a desire among states for an Intergovernmental Organisation (IGO) to ‘recognise that it is in their [governments] national interests to obtain multilateral agreements and pursue actions to deal with threats, challenges, or problems that cannot be dealt with effectively at the unilateral level’ (Wilkinson, 2007, p. 79). From this perspective, the League of Nations opened up a place for the United Nations to thus continue on a path of maintaining peace in an improved and effective manner. It is true that the UN Charter commandeered elements of the Leagues

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