IB History Aims Organization and Structure Notes

How the League Structured Itself to Keep the Peace

Aims: Security, Disarmament, Arbitration, Cooperation

1. Collective security: aggressor states would face the combined response of all League members, in theory making war too costly to risk.
2. Disarmament: the peace treaties had already forced Germany to disarm, and the League was supposed to oversee a matching reduction in armaments among all members.
3. Peaceful settlement of disputes: member states were expected to settle disagreements through arbitration rather than force.
4. International cooperation: specialized agencies would improve cooperation on economic, social, and humanitarian questions.

Structure: Assembly, Council, Secretariat

1. The Assembly: included all member states, each with one vote, and met annually in Geneva, where the League had begun work in 1920.
2. The Council: dominated by its permanent members, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, plus rotating seats, and handled security crises.
   1. The unanimity rule: decisions in both the Assembly and the Council required unanimity, meaning any single member could block collective action.
3. The Secretariat: based in Geneva, managed the League's day-to-day administrative operations under its first Secretary General, Sir Eric Drummond, who built a professional international civil service expected to serve the League rather than national governments.

The League's Humanitarian and Technical Agencies

1. The International Labour Organization (ILO): set minimum working standards for member states.
2. The Health Organization: the predecessor of the World Health Organization, coordinated responses to disease outbreaks, including a typhus epidemic in Eastern Europe.
3. The Refugees Commission: led by Fridtjof Nansen, organized the repatriation of 450,000 prisoners of war after 1918 and issued the "Nansen passport" to stateless refugees.
4. The mandates system: supervised former German and Ottoman colonial territories on behalf of the Allied powers, creating a framework of international accountability, however limited, over colonial rule.

The Covenant: Legal Obligations and Sanctions

1. The Covenant of the League: formed Part I of the Treaty of Versailles, so all its signatories were automatically bound by League obligations.
2. Article 10: required members to respect and preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of all other members.
3. Articles 12 to 15: required states to submit disputes to arbitration, judicial settlement, or Council inquiry before resorting to force.
4. Article 8: called for national armaments to fall to the lowest level consistent with national safety, the legal basis for the League's disarmament work.
5. Article 16: described economic sanctions, cutting trade, finance, transport, and communication with an aggressor, as the League's main response to a member that resorted to illegal war.
   1. The gap between law and enforcement: the Council could also recommend military contributions from members, but the League had no standing armed force of its own, so every sanction and every soldier depended on a national government choosing to act.
6. The World Disarmament Conference: opened in 1932 but collapsed because Germany demanded equality of armaments while France refused to reduce its own forces without prior security guarantees.

The Permanent Court and the Mandates Commission

1. The Permanent Court of International Justice: began work at The Hague in 1922, issuing judgments in disputes states chose to submit and advisory opinions to League bodies, but without universal compulsory jurisdiction.
2. Boundary commissions and plebiscites: special commissions investigated disputes and the League used plebiscites and minority petitions to settle contested territory in postwar Europe, such as Upper Silesia.
3. The Economic and Financial Organization: arranged supervised international loans that stabilized Austria from 1922 and Hungary from 1924 after their postwar economies collapsed.
4. The Permanent Mandates Commission: required mandatory powers to report on their administration of former German and Ottoman territories, and minority treaties bound several new European states to protect ethnic and religious minorities, though petitions from those minorities were handled cautiously.

Membership: Who Joined, and Who Left

1. The United States: never joined after the Senate rejected membership, even though President Woodrow Wilson had championed the League's creation, a major blow to its claim to universality.
2. Germany: joined in 1926 as a permanent Council member during the Locarno period, then announced its withdrawal in 1933 after Hitler came to power.
3. The Soviet Union: was excluded at first, joined in 1934, and was expelled in December 1939 after invading Finland.
4. Japan and Italy: Japan left after international criticism of its actions in Manchuria (1933), and Italy withdrew after the Abyssinian crisis (1937).
5. The consequence: changing membership steadily reduced the League's universality and let aggressive states escape their obligations simply by leaving.