Failure of the League of Nations

In the aftermath of the Great War, the League of Nations was formulated as a constitution for governance of the world (Smith 116). The League of Nations was the first organization since the post-Napoleonic Holy Alliance to provide an organizational structure to move from a geopolitical concept based on maintenance of a balance of power between nation-states to a more cooperative structure. The main strength of the idea was in the intent, and in the precedent that the League set for future systems of international cooperation. The League provided for the voicing of national interests in an international forum and an administrative apparatus designed to implement debate (Wells 928). However, the main weakness of the League can be traced to the variety of forms that forwarding national interests in the League took. First of all, the charter provided that major decisions had to be unanimous. "To many minds it made the Covenant League rather less desirable than no league at all . . . a complete recognition of the unalienable sovereignty of states, and a repudiation of the idea of an overriding commonweal of mankind" (Wells 928). On the other hand, individual nation-states responded in terms of national self-interest. Britain wanted to carry on British diplomacy in the League, not be subservient to a supranational organization. France wanted to guarantee Germany's weakness and France's superiority, while Germany saw eventual entry into the League as a means to gain parity with Fran

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ationalist aggression, particularly in the maneuver by Hitler in the 1930s in the question of German rearmament and reacquisition of the Saar (Hayes, et al., 758-9). Collective security was the motive of a third kind of pact that emerged between the wars. This took place in the context of Hitler's repudiation of Versailles, after which, in early 1935, Mussolini invited the premiers of France and England to Stresa, Italy, to declare solidarity with the League and Versailles. By late 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, a repudiation of Stresa, leading to German support for and Britain and France's condemnation of Italy. Within months Hitler had marched into the Rhineland (Hayes, et al., 761), a specific and programmatic abrogation of Locarno, the League, Versailles, and all attendant pacts. Weapons equivalence became the basis of international arms-control agreements in the nuclear/Cold War era. The strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II) that Carter and Brezhnev signed in Vienna in 1979 was based on a concept of strategic sufficiency, the Carter administration's formulation of what the Nixon administration had formulated as nuclear parity. These concepts emerged in the context of the concept of nuclear deterrence based on anticipa

Category: Government - F