Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The domestic analogy debate: a preliminary outline
- 2 The range and types of the domestic analogy
- 3 Some nineteenth-century examples
- 4 Contending doctrines of the Hague Peace Conferences period
- 5 The impact of the Great War
- 6 The effect of the failure of the League on attitudes towards the domestic analogy
- 7 The domestic analogy in the establishment of the United Nations
- 8 The domestic analogy in contemporary international thought
- 9 The domestic analogy and world order proposals: typology and appraisal
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index of personal names
- Subject index
6 - The effect of the failure of the League on attitudes towards the domestic analogy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The domestic analogy debate: a preliminary outline
- 2 The range and types of the domestic analogy
- 3 Some nineteenth-century examples
- 4 Contending doctrines of the Hague Peace Conferences period
- 5 The impact of the Great War
- 6 The effect of the failure of the League on attitudes towards the domestic analogy
- 7 The domestic analogy in the establishment of the United Nations
- 8 The domestic analogy in contemporary international thought
- 9 The domestic analogy and world order proposals: typology and appraisal
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index of personal names
- Subject index
Summary
The League of Nations, which came into existence in January 1920, was an association of sovereign states, established ‘to promote international co-operation and to achieve peace and security’ (Preamble, The Covenant of the League of Nations). It acted also as an agency for the enforcement of certain provisions of the peace treaties and supplementary agreements (Rappard 1925; Schuman 1969, 213). Although the League, even in matters of peace and war, achieved some measure of success, especially in the first decade of its life-time, it could not withstand the worsening conditions of the 1930s. By 1940 only one Great Power was left in the League, Britain, and thirty-one smaller powers.
In the chapter entitled ‘The lessons of the League’ in his A history of the United Nations, Evan Luard remarks:
All those involved in the deliberations [on how best to structure the world after the Second World War] had lived through the painful and disillusioning history of the League. All had shared, at least in some measure, the hope that that institution, revolutionary in its original conception, would be a means of abolishing war from the earth and substituting the saner procedures of international conciliation. Instead they had seen that brief and inglorious organisation prove totally ineffectual.
(1982, 3)We need not enter the debate here as to whether the League's history truly deserves to be labelled one of ‘failure’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals , pp. 94 - 113Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989