# League of Nations The intergovernmental organisation created by the [[Treaty of Versailles]] and operating from Geneva from 1920, charged with preventing war through collective security, arbitration and disarmament. It is the predecessor of the [[United Nations]] and the first attempt to make the sovereignty of small states a matter of general guarantee rather than of local strength. The United States, whose president had championed it, never joined — the Senate declined to ratify, and American [[Isolationism]] became a structural feature of the interwar order rather than an American peculiarity. ## Why it is in this vault The League matters here for the specific reason that **its failure is the reference case in every subsequent argument about whether guarantees to small states are worth their cost** — an argument the American right is currently having about Ukraine in vocabulary that would have been legible in 1936. The two canonical failures: - **The [[Abyssinia Crisis]] (1935–36).** The League named Italy the aggressor within four days of the invasion of Ethiopia and imposed sanctions within six weeks — sanctions that excluded **oil**, alongside a refusal to close the **Suez Canal**. Britain and France then secretly negotiated a partition of the country under attack. Sanctions were lifted in July 1936 with Italy in possession of its conquest. Italy withdrew from the League in December 1937. - **Manchuria (1931–33).** Japan's seizure of Manchuria produced a commission, a report, a censure, and Japan's departure from the organisation — establishing that a great power could simply leave. **The historiography is not unanimous.** A.J.P. Taylor's judgment that the Hoare–Laval Pact "killed the League" is the dominant reading; Correlli Barnett's dissent holds that Anglo-French caution was rational under-resourcing given the prospect of simultaneous enemies, not moral failure. Both readings are worth carrying, because the choice between them is exactly the choice being made in contemporary arguments about deterrence and cost. > [!important] The design flaw worth naming > The League had no army and no enforcement mechanism it did not have to ask its members to supply. Its instruments were publicity, arbitration and economic sanction. The Abyssinia case is the clean demonstration that **a sanction regime designed around what its enforcers are willing to give up is calibrated to the enforcers, not to the aggressor** — Italy's war ran on oil, and oil was the item Britain and France declined to embargo. Formally dissolved in April 1946, its assets and several functions transferred to the [[United Nations]], whose Security Council veto is in part a deliberate concession to the problem that killed its predecessor: great powers that will not be bound simply leave. ## See also [[Abyssinia Crisis]] · [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Second Italo-Ethiopian War]] · [[Neutrality Acts]] · [[Munich Agreement]] · [[UN Charter]] · [[Appeasement]]