April 18 Marks End of League of Nations

On April 18, 1946, the League of Nations dissolved, ending 26 years of its existence. The organization had proven incapable of preventing World War II.

Forty-four nations signed the Covenant, joining the new League of Nations. The United States did not sign, which was a bitter defeat for President Wilson. He had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920 largely on behalf of his work in promoting League membership. At its greatest extent in 1935, the League had 58 member countries. However, by the time of its dissolution, only 23 member countries remained.

The League of Nations was similar to its successor organization, the United Nations. It maintained an executive League Council consisting of four unelected permanent members drawn from the victorious Entente. These permanent members were the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Japan. Four non-permanent member nations were elected to serve out three-year terms. 

Like the United Nations, the League had bureaus, commissions, and bodies dedicated to specific missions. These missions included disease eradication, campaigning against child labor, improving conditions for workers, curtailing human trafficking and the international drug trade, and arguing for women’s rights.

 The League of Nations was also the first international body to codify the rights of refugees, stateless individuals, and ethnic minorities, imbuing them with recognition and certain protections. At its most prolific and politically significant, the League of Nations also acted as the engine behind a series of major disarmament efforts, such as the Washington Naval Treaty and the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

However, despite the well-intended and high-minded rhetoric behind many of these and other similar League agreements, they became effectively impossible to enforce faced with the growing rearmament and the expansion of the militaries of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.

The first meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations took place on November 15, 1920, at the Salle de la Réformation in Geneva.

Throughout its existence, the League of Nations was also hindered in its lofty aspirational goals by its failure to separate the organization’s policies from the realpolitik of its permanent executive membership. Sometimes labeled as the “League Of Victors” for its exclusion of Germany (until 1926) and the Soviet Union (until 1934), the League of Nations was often seen as a little more than an instrument to protect French and British international, economic, and colonial interests. For instance, the guarantees of the right for self-determination did not extend to French or British colonial possessions in Africa or Asia. 

Nor did it extend to many former territories of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant or former German colonies in the Pacific. These lands were placed under the League Mandate System, which, in Eurocentric and ethnocentric terms, pledged to hold territories in trust until “certain communities” had “reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.” The criteria for when or how such stages of development would be achieved by these certain communities was never fully examined or explained.

Ultimately, it was the League’s failure to provide a mechanism for the enforcement of international collective security that exposed its most fatal flaws and inexorably linked it to the policies of appeasement.