[October 24th
will mark the 75th anniversary of the official establishment of the
United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connected to
the UN, leading up to a weekend post on global interconnectedness in 2020.]
On how and why the
UN’s predecessor failed at its central mission, and how it succeeded
nonetheless.
The League of
Nations, created as part of the January 1919
Paris Peace Conference that formally concluded the Great War (later known
of course as World War I), was designed specifically to prevent future wars. The
26 articles
of the League’s Covenant went far beyond that and into many other arenas
and topics, of course, but the document’s opening phrases—“In order to promote
international co-operation and to achieve international peace and
security”—make clear the primacy of global peace as the organization’s founding
objective. And even before the Second World War put the final nail in that
objective and thus in the League itself (which ceased performing any meaningful
actions as of 1939 and was formally replaced by the 1943 vote I’ll discuss
tomorrow), a number of other conflicts (including the Chaco War, the Second
Sino-Japanese War, and the Spanish Civil War)
had demonstrated the League’s inability to achieve international peace in any
consistent way.
There were many
factors that contributed to the League’s failure, including perhaps
fundamental, unchangeable realities of human nature and society that make war
such a persistent, enduring element. Yet there’s no doubt that one prominent
factor which weakened the League from the outset of its existence was the
United States’s decision not to join the organization. President Woodrow
Wilson, whose January
1918 Fourteen Points speech had served as a launching point for the concept
of the League, spent much of 1919
working to convince Congress and the American people of its significance
and of the necessity of joining its efforts. But he did not succeed, at least
not with Congress, which, led by isolationist figures such as Senator and longtime
Wilson adversary Henry Cabot Lodge, ultimately voted not to ratify
the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations, a choice that
greatly weakened the international organization and made its chances for
success far smaller.
Yet even if the
League was unable to maintain or foster international peace—and again, it’s
quite possible that no organization could ever come close to achieving those
goals—that does not mean that this groundbreaking entity did not produce
meaningful successes. Many of them came in response to specific territorial
disputes and conflicts, such as Germany
and Poland’s hostilities over the Upper Silesia region in which the League
successfully intervened in 1921-22; this dispute might well have turned to war
without the League. And on a truly international level, perhaps the League’s
most enduring success lay in the creation of the Nansen Passport, the first
internationally recognized refugee identification and travel document. Brainchild
of the League’s High Commissioner
for Refugees Fridtjof Nansen, who along with his Nansen International
Office for Refugees received the
1938 Nobel Peace Prize, the Nansen Passport represented a vital step in
recognizing, engaging with, and ameliorating the plight of global refugees and
migrants. Throughout the 20th and into the 21st century,
long after the League of Nations ceased to exist, the UN’s own strategies for
aiding this vulnerable international community remain indebted to the
Nansen Passport, reminding us that the League’s legacy is not quite as
one-sided as it seems.
Next UN history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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