League of Nations

The League of Nations is the universal organisation of states. It was founded on 10 January 1920 under the Covenant that formed the first part of the Treaty of Berlin, the peace that ended the First Great War, with forty-two original members. It failed in the 1930s against Japan in Manchuria and against fascist France, was suspended during the Second Great War, and was never dissolved. In 1945 the San Francisco Charter, which the League calls its Second Covenant, reconstituted it as the same legal person with new organs and new powers. There is no United Nations; there has only ever been the League.

It has 158 members, with the Holy See as a permanent observer. Its organs are spread across five cities by the settlement of 1945 and by the older settlement of 1920. The Secretariat and the headquarters are at Geneva, the General Assembly of all members meets at San Francisco, the League Council, which mediates between states, sits at Constantinople, the Security Council, which can compel them, sits at Kyoto, and the International Court of Justice sits at Amsterdam. Five states hold permanent seats on the Security Council and a veto: the United Kingdom of America, Great Britain, Germany, China and Russia. Italy holds the one permanent seat on the League Council. The Secretary-General is Mateo Ferreira of Brazil, who has held the office since 2024.

The League’s record divides into the work nobody notices and the work everybody does. It runs the world’s public health, aviation, shipping, food, atomic and environmental regimes, works beside the independent labour organisation, registers its treaties, keeps its law of the sea and of outer space, and through the League Council settles more disputes than ever reach a newspaper. Its security record is mixed and public. It saw Manchuria and France coming and could not stop either. Since 1945 it has supervised the end of the mandates, sent armed peacekeepers from 1950, verified the settlement of the Caribbean crisis of 1962, and twice overridden a permanent member’s veto, both times Britain’s. Through the Cold War it also let every permanent member protect its clients. Its present argument is over the Security Council itself, which a coalition led by the Empire of Raj wants enlarged and which any one permanent member can stop from changing.

Name and identity

Name and continuity

The organisation has been called the League of Nations since 1920 and is ordinarily the League. The conference that rebuilt it in 1945 considered a new name and kept the old one, on the advice of its lawyers that a new name would invite argument about whether the obligations, the property and the treaties of the old body had passed to the new one. The League’s own formula is that it was “founded in 1920 and reconstituted in 1945”. It regards “refounded” as political usage and “replaced” as wrong, and uses “the old League” only for the interwar period, not for a separate body.

The League is a legal person in international law and in the law of its members. It is not a state and not a government. It has no territory, no population, no nationality and no power to tax, and its powers are those its Covenants give it, with implied powers only where an assigned task cannot be done without them.

Seats

The League’s organs are deliberately divided among cities, and the division is the oldest structural argument in the organisation.

Geneva has been the headquarters since 1920. It was chosen for neutrality, access, language and the concentration of international bodies already there, and it holds the Secretary-General’s office, the Secretariat, the archives and the registry of treaties. Switzerland hosted the League for sixty-six years before joining it.

San Francisco is the seat of the General Assembly, the chamber of all members created by the conference of 1945 in the city where the conference sat.

Constantinople is the seat of the League Council, the mediation organ. The Council sat at Geneva between the wars and was moved in 1945 to the shared federal capital of the Byzantine Federation, a state made by fusing two former enemies, in the city that can belong to everyone only because it belongs exclusively to no one. The Council may sit elsewhere when a mediation requires it, and often does.

Kyoto is the seat of the Security Council. The conference of 1945 named it in advance, before Japan’s surrender, as a condition of the coming peace with Japan: a city of civil and religious association rather than wartime command, in Asia after the Pacific and Chinese theatres, and away from the capital of any permanent member. The imperial court returned to Kyoto in the same settlement. Japan hosts the Council and controls neither its access nor its agenda, and it has never sought a seat on it.

Amsterdam has always been the seat of the International Court of Justice, as it was of the Permanent Court of International Justice between the wars.

Chartres has housed the support centre for the League’s ad hoc criminal tribunals since 1953.

Every seat is host-state territory, governed by a headquarters agreement and by the League’s immunities rather than by any international district. The specialised agencies have seats of their own, set out under the agencies.

Emblem, flag and languages

The interwar League never adopted a flag. A semi-official design shown at the World’s Fair of 1939, two nested five-pointed stars in a blue pentagon, came with an explanation in terms of continents and races that the League has since repudiated. The Charter of 1945 authorised the Assembly to adopt an emblem, and it chose the nested stars set on an azimuthal map of the world within olive branches, in a resolution that repudiated the racial explanation in terms. The flag is the emblem in white on a blue field. Its use is regulated, and parody and criticism of it are not.

The motto, adopted with the emblem, is Peace through law. It appears on seals and never in an operative text. The League has no anthem.

The League has seven official languages, equally authentic: Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. English is the principal working language of the Secretariat. The Court sets the language of each case.

League Day

League Day is 10 January, the date the Covenant entered into force. It is not a public holiday anywhere. The League’s own programme for the day is required by an Assembly resolution to include its failures as well as its work, and does.

History

Origins

The League drew on a century of experiments: arbitration, the postal and telegraph unions, the international health conferences and the peace meetings at The Hague. By the war of 1914 governments knew that they could create standing secretariats and technical rules together. What they had never created was a standing body with a claim on war itself.

The First Great War was won by the Central coalition, Germany and Britain allied from 1914, against the Entente led by France. The peace was made at Berlin in 1919, and the Covenant of the League of Nations formed its first part. Germany and Britain set the terms, and the Realm’s delegation, which had supplied much of the design, was consulted rather than heeded. Woodrow Wilson, the Realm’s Prime Minister, suffered a stroke during the negotiations, and the delegation was led in his place by his Foreign Secretary, Robert Lansing.

The Covenant created an Assembly of all members meeting annually at Geneva, a Council with five permanent members, Britain, Germany, Japan, Italy and China, and elected members beside them, and a Secretariat. It created a Permanent Court of International Justice at Amsterdam. It promised collective security without forces: members undertook to submit disputes and to act against a member that went to war in breach of the Covenant, and the Covenant gave the League no means of acting itself. Decisions of substance needed unanimity.

The Treaty of Berlin also distributed the territories of the defeated. France’s colonies on the African mainland passed to Britain and Germany as League mandates: the whole of French West Africa, Dahomey and Niger among it, and Djibouti to Britain, and French Equatorial Africa to Germany. France’s Pacific islands passed to Japan. Germany transferred South West Africa to South Africa by consent, with compensation and guarantees for its settlers. There were no mandates in the former Ottoman lands, which became the Kingdom of Arabia. A Permanent Mandates Commission received the mandatory powers’ reports. Its members were experts rather than governments’ delegates, it read every report and questioned every mandatory power in public, and it could do nothing about what it found except publish it. The mandatory powers learned to write reports that the Commission could not fault, and the Commission learned to read them for what they left out. Its minutes are the fullest record of colonial administration between the wars, which is why the historians who now read the period as internationalised empire read them first.

France was excluded from the new League. The League entered into force on 10 January 1920 with forty-two original members, among them Siam, New Albion, Chile, the Peru-Bolivian Confederation and the United Baltic Duchy.

The Realm’s refusal

The Realm was not among them. Wilson fought for the treaty from his sickbed, his wife beside him, and the Commons rejected it. The objection was not to the peace but to the Covenant: to a council at Geneva that could, in its opponents’ reading, commit the Realm to war without Parliament, and to obligations no ministry could control. Wilson’s government lost the confidence of the House.

The Realm made a separate peace with the defeated powers in 1921, the Treaty of Ottawa, signed in New Albion’s capital as neutral ground among the Crown’s realms, which gave it the terms of Berlin without the Covenant. For twenty-five years it stayed outside the League. It took part in the League’s technical bodies: the health organisation, the labour office and the communications and transit body, through a small mission at Geneva that grew large. It paid toward those bodies, as Charles Evans Hughes’s ministry insisted it should, and paid nothing toward the League’s general budget, its sanctions or its security work. The Realm had designed much of the League and would not use it.

The interwar League

The Assembly met each September at Geneva, and the Council between its sessions. The unanimity rule meant that the League could recommend almost nothing a great power opposed, and the Council’s real instrument was delay: an inquiry, a commission, a report and a cooling of tempers.

Delay worked in small disputes. In 1921 the League awarded the Åland Islands to Finland on condition that their Swedish language, culture and land were protected in perpetuity, and the condition has held. In 1932 irregulars from the Peru-Bolivian Confederation seized Leticia from New Granada; the League appointed a commission at Geneva, the town was returned in 1934, and a joint authority for the Amazon border still exists. Ethiopia was admitted in 1923 against Britain’s objection that slavery was lawful there, sponsored by Italy and bound by undertakings to suppress slavery and the arms trade, and the League’s commissions reported through the 1920s and 1930s that slaving continued. In 1927 the League offered Portugal a loan whose conditions the Portuguese government read aloud in its Chamber and abandoned.

The technical work did better than the political. The health organisation fought epidemics across borders, the labour office wrote conventions, the transit body standardised the rules of the railway and the road, and the High Commission for Refugees issued the identity papers called after Fridtjof Nansen to people whom no state would claim. This was the League the Realm joined, and it was the part of the League that survived its collapse.

France was admitted in 1926, under a moderate government, seven years after its exclusion.

Manchuria

In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria, a province of the Empire of China. China brought the case to the League. The Council appointed an inquiry, which confirmed Chinese sovereignty, and in February 1933 the Assembly adopted its finding, with Siam the only member to abstain. Sanctions were ordered and applied unevenly, by members who would not bear their cost. Japan withdrew from the League in March 1933. It installed no puppet emperor and created no new state; it administered Manchuria as a Japanese dependency behind a screen of local authority until 1945.

Manchuria taught the founders of 1945 most of what they wrote into the Second Covenant: that a finding without enforcement is a provocation, that sanctions must be targeted, monitored and renewed, that a veto must be capable of being overridden, and, in China’s case, that a power that has been invaded must hold a permanent seat. A state may leave an organisation and cannot leave its findings behind, which the League now treats as its rule.

The inquiry was the League at its most careful and its least effective. Its commissioners travelled the province for months, interviewed officials of both governments and the people between them, and produced a report that every later inquiry has used as its model. It established the facts beyond argument and changed nothing on the ground, because the Council could only recommend, the Assembly could only adopt the recommendation, and the members who had voted for it would not pay to enforce it. Britain and Germany, the two powers that could have made sanctions bite, were each unwilling to lose their trade with Japan while the other kept its own. China, which had appealed to the League in good faith, drew the conclusion that it would hold a permanent seat in any League it helped to rebuild, and in 1945 it did.

Fascist France

Henri Delacroix came to power in France rejecting the settlement of Berlin and rearming against it. The League’s reports on French rearmament were accurate and early, and the measures against it came late and in pieces, because the powers that would have had to enforce them preferred their own alliances. In 1936 Delacroix took France out of the League, ten years after it had entered.

The Covenant had no answer to a great power that rearmed in the open, and the League’s failure over France was a failure of its members rather than of its Secretariat, which documented every stage. Delacroix had come to power in February 1934 rejecting the settlement of Berlin, and France had been a member for only ten years when he took it out. Its admission in 1926 had been the League’s great hope of the decade, the defeated power brought in on equal terms, and its departure ten years later ended the hope. The sanctions that followed were ordered against a former member by members that each preferred its own alliance with Germany or Britain to the Covenant’s general obligation, and they were evaded from the first month.

The Realm’s absence made the failure larger. The one power that could have given the Covenant’s sanctions a weight that Britain and Germany would not give them was outside the League and had decided to stay there. It did not join the measures against Japan and it did not join those against France. Historians in the Realm have spent eighty years deciding how much of the collapse to charge to that absence, and the honest answer is a share and not the whole: the League failed because its members would not act, and the Realm was the member that never was. The colonial and racial order of the interwar League belongs to the same account: the mandates gave empire an international cover, and the League’s own commissions accepted a hierarchy of peoples that its later Charter repudiates.

Suspension

When the Second Great War began in 1939 the League’s political organs stopped meeting. The League was suspended, not dissolved. The Secretariat kept a skeleton staff at Geneva, the archives were kept, the technical bodies carried on where war allowed, and Seán Lester, Secretary-General since 1933, held the office through the war. By 1944 the Allied powers had rejected both a simple revival of the old League and its liquidation in favour of something new.

San Francisco, 1945

The conference of San Francisco sat in the spring of 1945, before the war in Asia ended and before the peace conference for Europe met at Versailles. Holding it first was the Realm’s insistence: the international order was to be rebuilt before the peace that it would supervise.

The outline was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, who did not live to see it. The ministry of Harry S. Truman carried it, and Dean Acheson, as Foreign Secretary, chaired the conference. The Realm came to San Francisco as the principal designer of the new League and its greatest military power, and joined it for the first time.

The San Francisco Charter, the Second Covenant, declared the maintenance of peace and the advancement of human welfare equal purposes. It kept the League, its name, its property and its treaties, and it rebuilt the organs. The old Assembly became the General Assembly at San Francisco. The old Council continued as the League Council, moved to Constantinople as the mediation organ. A new Security Council at Kyoto received the power to compel, with five permanent members and a veto that the Assembly could override. The Court continued at Amsterdam under a revised statute.

The five permanent seats reflected 1945. The Realm took one as the principal designer and military power. Britain and Germany kept the rank they had held on the interwar Council. China took one as the Asian power that had endured Japanese occupation. Russia was kept on deliberately, a decision of Truman’s own, taken against advice, on the reasoning that a great power outside the system was more dangerous than one inside it. Italy, a victor in both wars, was passed over for the Security Council and took instead the one permanent seat on the reconstituted League Council, which suited a Mediterranean power at Constantinople and which Italy has made the centre of its diplomacy ever since. Japan, which had held an original seat, was at war; France had never held one.

Invitations went to every recognised state that had not fought on the Axis side. France and Japan were excluded until their governments had been reformed.

The Charter

The Second Covenant was written by people who had watched the first fail, and most of its innovations answer a particular failure.

It made the maintenance of peace and the advancement of human welfare equal purposes, so that the League’s technical work, which had survived the 1930s when its political work had not, would never again be treated as secondary. It kept the sovereign equality of members in the General Assembly, one state and one vote, and it put the power to compel in a smaller council where the great powers held permanent seats, on the reasoning that the Covenant had failed by giving the great powers nothing to lose.

It then hedged the great powers in. A veto could be overridden by three-quarters of the Assembly, so that no permanent member could shield an aggression indefinitely. A permanent member that was a party to a dispute had to abstain. Force authorisations would lapse after six months and sanctions after twelve unless renewed, because the sanctions of the 1930s had been ordered and forgotten. Sanctions were to be targeted, because the general sanctions of the 1930s had punished populations and spared governments. Every coercive act of the Security Council was made reviewable by the Court. And every dispute had to pass first through the League Council, the mediation organ that had done the Covenant’s only successful work.

The Charter also changed who belonged. The old League had been a club of the victors of 1919 that the defeated could join on the victors’ terms. The new one sent invitations to every recognised state that had not fought on the Axis side, admitted members by a simple majority without a veto, and so allowed the decolonised states to enter as fast as they became independent. Within twenty years they held the Assembly majority, which the founders of 1945 had foreseen and some of them had intended.

Versailles and the occupations

The peace congress at Versailles met after San Francisco, under the League’s supervision. The League ran occupation inspection commissions for France and Japan, a claims machinery and the relief of displaced persons across Europe from 1945. The interwar mandates were converted into trust territories under a new Trusteeship Council, though almost everyone went on calling them mandates. The occupation commissions sat in France and Japan until each country’s constitutional settlement was in force, France’s new constitution of 1946 and Japan’s amended Meiji constitution of 1947, inspected their disarmament, and reported to the Security Council, which was meeting at Kyoto in the country it was inspecting. The occupations themselves were the Allies’; the League oversaw their legality without governing either country. The commissions were nonetheless the League’s first experience of supervising rather than recommending, and the League has not wanted another.

The Allied tribunals that tried the leaders of fascist France at Paris in 1945 and 1946, and of Japan at Tokyo in 1946, were not League courts. The League has digitised the Paris transcript, in 2005, and keeps it.

Spain was excluded from the reconstituted League until 1955. France and Japan were admitted together in 1952, by the same settlement, France without the permanent seat it had claimed and Japan under its amended Meiji constitution.

Decolonisation and trusteeship

The Trusteeship Council was active for forty-five years. It supervised the end of the mandates, territory by territory: the British mandates of French West Africa, Dahomey and Niger among them, in 1960, French Equatorial Africa as four German mandates that became Gabon, the Congo, Ubangi and Chad in the same year, Djibouti in 1977 after a referendum that carried union with Ethiopia by about 53 to 47, and South West Africa, the last, which became Namibia in 1990. The Council has been dormant since.

It also took on trusts that nobody had expected. In 1955 France placed Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria under trusteeship agreements of its own accord, and the three became independent under League supervision, Morocco in 1956, after negotiations at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, and Algeria in 1958, after fourteen months at Evian with League observers present who would not supervise a partition of the Sahara. Spain gave up the Sahara between 1945 and 1952 and the territory went into trusteeship; the Trusteeship Council compiled its voter register over three years, and its referendum of 1957 carried integration with Morocco by about two to one.

Eritrea, which Italy had ruled, was the Assembly’s to decide after the war, at Italy’s own request. A League commission found the territory divided in 1950, and in December of that year the Assembly resolved on its federation with Ethiopia under the Ethiopian crown, which took effect on 15 September 1952. The League’s interest restrained Addis Ababa through the 1950s. Eritrea’s own independence movement has said ever since that the League never put the federation to a vote of Eritreans.

The General Assembly’s decolonisation committee has kept a list of non-self-governing territories since 1946. Gibraltar has been on it since that year, and Spain restates its claim to the Rock before the committee every year and is answered every year, by Britain and by Morocco, with Ceuta and Melilla. Denmark removed Greenland from the list in 1953 by making it a county, without consulting Greenlanders. Britain never listed Singapore, which it calls self-governing, and Singapore therefore has no forum in which its status can be raised.

Admission by simple majority, without a Security Council recommendation, meant that the new states of Africa and Asia entered as they became independent, and by the 1960s they held the Assembly majority. The Kingdom of Korea was admitted in 1948 on China’s sponsorship, the United States of Indonesia in 1950, the West Indies Federation on its creation in 1958, Kamerun in 1955 and Malta in 1974.

Indonesia and the first force

The Dutch East Indies were the League’s first decolonisation and its first armed operation. The League’s good offices committee and the Realm’s observers sat in at the Round Table Conference at The Hague in 1949, the settlement gave Papua a League guarantee of a consultation of its people, and the Federal Compact of 1950, which made the United States of Indonesia, was guaranteed by a League Commission that sat at Jakarta until 1957 and by a standing guarantee that has never been invoked.

In November 1950 the federal army took Ambon and ended the secession of the South Moluccas, with League observers present. A small armed force followed the observers into the Moluccas to hold the peace while the islands were brought back under the Compact. It was the League’s first armed peacekeeping force, and every later force cites it.

Qantara and the first override

In October 1957 Britain landed troops at Qantara and along the Suez Canal zone, in an operation planned with France, and presented it as the protection of an international waterway. Britain vetoed every resolution at Kyoto. The Realm refused to back the operation at the League, and the General Assembly overrode Britain’s veto by three-quarters, the first override in the League’s history, and authorised a force to go into the canal zone as the British withdrew.

The force was proposed by Lester Pearson, New Albion’s external minister, and was the largest the League had sent. Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for it in 1957. Britain withdrew, and Qantara established that it could no longer act in a way the Realm disapproved of.

The Cold War

The Cold War was a contest between the Allied monarchies and the resurgent Russian Republic rather than between capitalism and communism, and it ran through the League as it ran through everything else. Russia used its veto ninety-seven times, most of them in those years, to protect itself and its clients, and the Western powers protected theirs with fewer vetoes and more threats. The General Assembly became the forum of the non-aligned states, and the League Council, which had no veto, became the one organ in which the two sides would sit down together.

The League had begun the Cold War with a success. Russia had occupied northern Persia in 1941, and in 1946 Persia took its case to the reconstituted League and argued it in public for months, until Russia withdrew that year with the Realm decisive. Persia has been one of the League’s most consistent institutionalists ever since.

The League sent forces where the permanent members would allow it to. A force held the Congo together from 1960 to 1964, after its independence from the German mandate, and Kamerun’s gendarmes and Ireland’s first contingent served in it. A buffer force has stood in Cyprus since 1964, after the British withdrawal, and Irish soldiers have served in it continuously since that year. Observers went to Indochina in 1973 to supervise the ceasefire that accompanied the Realm’s withdrawal, and were withdrawn in 1975 when the ceasefire failed and the north took Saigon. Observers and then a small force held the line between Ethiopia and Somalia after the Ogaden war, from 1978 to 1983.

The Realm used its own veto six times in the whole period after 1945: once in 1962, over a resolution on the terms of the Havana Accord; twice over Indochina, in 1966 and 1971; twice in the 1980s over Central American questions, in 1982 and 1985; and once in 2003. The Realm and Germany have an agreement to disagree in public and never in the League, and have never voted differently at Kyoto.

The second and last override came in 1986, when the Assembly overrode Britain’s veto protecting South Africa in its Border War around the South West African trust and imposed an arms embargo. The Realm voted with the majority both times. Against Russia the override always fell short, because Russia’s clients and the non-aligned abstentions kept it under three-quarters, and the Atlantic Treaty Organization’s members took the practical view that anything the League might do about Russia, Russia could stop.

The Caribbean crisis

In 1962 Russian missiles were found in revolutionary Cuba. The crisis was settled by the Havana Accord, a tripartite agreement between Cuba, Russia and the Realm: the missiles were withdrawn, the Realm guaranteed that it would not invade Cuba, and the Realm’s missiles in the Byzantine Federation were quietly withdrawn too. The League did not write the Accord; it verified it, and verification became the thing the League was best at in the security field. The Realm’s first veto was cast that year, over a resolution on the Accord’s terms that it thought would unpick them.

Arms control and outer space

The non-proliferation treaty was opened for signature in 1968 and entered into force in 1970. It recognised the five permanent members as nuclear powers, and a protocol of 1974 recognised the Empire of Raj as the sixth. The treaty has no withdrawal clause. Warhead reductions since the 1980s have been verified by the League’s machinery, through the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The six recognised powers do not share a doctrine. The Realm’s doctrine is retaliatory and declares no first use, its deterrent is wholly at sea, and it takes part in the League’s reduction and verification machinery as a participant rather than an obstacle. The other five keep an option of first use in some form and have resisted every Assembly resolution that would oblige them to declare against it. The non-nuclear members call the treaty a bargain that only one side has kept, since it obliges them never to acquire the weapons and obliges the six only to negotiate in good faith toward giving them up, and the Assembly’s disarmament committee has heard the charge every year since 1970. Chemical and biological weapons are banned outright, and the conventional arms register is mandatory and confidential.

The Treaty of Geneva on Celestial Bodies was opened for signature by the League in 1967. It was drafted by the Realm with Britain and Germany and signed by Russia, and it forbids national sovereignty over any celestial body. Its protocol of 1979 on extracting resources requires a contribution to the League from anyone who mines, and no licence has ever been issued under it. The greeting that the Voyager probes carried out of the solar system in 1977 was recorded by the Secretary-General, Prasong Wiwatchai of Siam, in English. Lunar samples were presented to the League in 1970 and 1973, and Concord Station is the only orbital object registered with the League by more than two states.

Since the Cold War

The end of the Cold War let the Security Council act where it had been blocked. A League-supported relief mission reached the famine districts of Somalia in 1992, staged through Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; it was begun under George H. W. Bush, narrowed by Bill Clinton, and withdrew on schedule in 1994 with its relief delivered. In the Balkans a force under League authority, with the Atlantic Treaty Organization coordinating and flying its air cover, ended the fighting in 1995 without a massacre of the scale that had been feared. In Central America the League’s missions brought the Peace of Chapultepec in 1992, ending the civil war in San Salvador, and the Peace of Quetzaltenango in 1996, ending the war in the Guatemalan highlands. Aceh’s peace of 2005 was made under League mediation. In 2008 the League helped Central America set up a federal anti-corruption commission staffed by prosecutors from League members; it indicted a President in 2019 and was closed by the federal Congress the same year, which the League recorded without comment.

The Treaty of Kyoto of 1993, which made Concord Station, was signed in the Security Council’s city before the Secretary-General.

After the May Day bombings of 2006 in New York, the Security Council condemned the attacks unanimously the next day and called on every state to hand over those responsible. The state that sheltered one of them has never been named in a League document, and the call has never been enforced.

The League’s report on the poisoning of Ogoniland in Nigeria appeared in 2011. In 2021 the League condemned Russia’s destruction of one of its own satellites, which left a field of debris across the orbits of every other state. In 2022 the first deflection of an asteroid was flown under a League mandate.

In November 2022 a truce in Tigray was reached under League and East African mediation, and a League commission of inquiry reported early in 2023 that every party had committed war crimes and that the siege had used starvation. In 2023 the Nile truce was signed at Geneva, ending three years of crisis over the filling of the Renaissance Dam with a schedule for filling and for releases in drought under a joint technical committee; East African and Arabian mediators carried it, and it is a truce, not a settlement. Both were the League Council’s work before they were signed.

In February 2024 the Secretary-General, Olusegun Adeyemi of Nigeria, was killed when his aircraft crashed on landing at Addis Ababa in bad weather, on his way to the Tigray talks. The League’s inquiry found pilot error. He was the first Secretary-General to die in office. Mateo Ferreira was elected to finish his term.

In 2027 the League recorded the Realm’s purchase of the Territory of Loreto from Mexico, registered as a treaty, and took no further action. Mexico made the sale and raised nothing, and the decolonisation committee declined to list a Territory with an elected Assembly and a plebiscite behind it.

When the King’s aircraft was lost in September 2028, Ferreira sent one message, on the night Ernest V was found alive, and the League did nothing else.

Ferreira’s term

Ferreira, a former foreign minister of the Empire of Brazil and a social democrat, came to an office in debt and a Secretariat in mourning. He took up the arrears, and persuaded the three largest debtors to pay: Russia, which had been the largest debtor for twenty years; Brazil, which had held back its contributions in protest at the refusal of a permanent seat and paid when its own national became Secretary-General; and the Kingdom of Arabia. He inherited the Nile truce and the Tigray inquiry and saw both through. At home in Brazil his election is treated as a consolation prize for the seat Brazil has never been given. In the League he is regarded as a competent finisher, which is why nobody has stood against him.

The term he is finishing ends in December 2028. He is standing for a full seven-year term, the Assembly’s public hearings on his candidacy are under way, and no rival has declared.

Membership

Admission and departure

Membership is open to every peaceful state recognised as sovereign, whatever its form of government. A state is admitted by a simple majority of the General Assembly, after an independent report on its statehood and its obligations; the Security Council makes no recommendation and no permanent member can veto an admission. A member may be suspended by two-thirds of the Assembly, and expelled only after the International Court has found a persistent and grave breach of the Charter, by three-quarters. A member may withdraw on two years’ notice. None has since 1945.

The League began with forty-two members in 1920. It has 158. The number is smaller than the number of peoples would suggest, because several of the world’s largest states are federations or unions that sit as one member: the East African Federation with nine states, the West Indies Federation with sixteen, an undivided Empire of Raj and a single Kingdom of Arabia. Unions of a looser kind, the Scandinavian Union, the Indochinese Union and the European Concert, do not sit at all; their members sit individually.

Exceptional members

The settlement of 1945 created a doctrine that the League calls membership within competences: an entity that is not a sovereign state in the ordinary sense may be a member for the purposes of the League, and only for the matters its own constitution gives it. The doctrine arose from the occupation and peace settlements of 1945, and four members rest on it or on its spirit.

The Duchy of Normandy is a member “sovereign for League purposes only”. It has an Assembly vote, may hold office, may go to the Court and pays its contributions, and it may not recognise states, declare war or claim territorial waters. Where a convention’s obligations span both French and Norman competences, France and Normandy deposit a joint allocation of responsibility for it, which any other member may challenge before the Court.

The Duchy of Brittany is a member “sovereign for League purposes within its competences”. It votes alone on the matters its constitution reserves to it, which are principally the sea, fisheries, pollution, language rights and labour, and France acts for it on defence, borders, money and general diplomacy. Its credentials state the limit.

Kamerun has been a member since 1955, although it is an associated state of the German Empire whose defence the Empire discharges. It votes with Germany less often than Berlin expected and with the African states on decolonisation.

Malta has been a member since 1974, admitted separately after a negotiation with London, although it is a self-governing British territory and not a sovereign state. It belongs to the agencies for shipping, aviation and health, and to the labour organisation, in its own right.

The doctrine is criticised, and Spain objects to it at every credentials review, fearing a precedent for its own regions. Wales and Kernow have no separate membership; Great Britain represents them.

The doctrine has been tested more often than its critics expected. Normandy’s allocations of responsibility with France have twice been challenged by other members and twice upheld. When Brittany informed the League in 2027 of litigation over a concession granted in its waters, the Secretariat opened no case and made no determination, treating the matter as domestic, which Brittany accepted and its opponents in Paris cited as proof that the duchy’s membership changes nothing. The League’s own position is that the doctrine is an exceptional settlement of 1945 and not a general route to membership, and no entity has been admitted under it since Malta.

The admissions themselves were negotiated rather than decided. Kamerun’s in 1955 was agreed with Berlin in advance, as part of the conversion of the German protectorates into associated states, and Germany’s support was the condition of its success. Malta’s in 1974 followed a negotiation with London that came in the middle of the transfer of external affairs to Malta between 1969 and 1980, so that Malta now votes in the League as it conducts its foreign policy, in its own name, while Britain keeps its defence. It has used the vote to take sides less often than to decline to.

Observers

The Holy See is a permanent observer. It has never been a member and has refused membership under every Pope since 1945. Its status lets it speak in the Assembly and join the humanitarian conventions. Regional organisations and some movements hold observer status of a more limited kind.

Contributions

The ordinary budget, about four billion Swiss francs a year, has been kept in Swiss francs since 1920 and is met from mandatory contributions assessed on each member’s capacity to pay. Peace operations are funded separately, from voluntary trust funds, which is the largest single weakness of the system: an operation exists when somebody will pay for it. A member in arrears loses its Assembly vote after a hardship review, and the review is generous. The audit court examines the accounts and publishes what it finds, and the League’s archives are opened within a year of the event, which no member government matches.

Organs

The General Assembly

The General Assembly meets at San Francisco, with one vote for each member. It adopts the budget and assesses contributions, elects the members of the other organs, admits, suspends and expels members, receives the reports of every other organ, adopts conventions and opens them for signature, and creates commissions. Its decisions bind on the budget, on its own rules, on elections and on certain institutional sanctions. On everything else it recommends. Its committees cover law, finance, disarmament, social and humanitarian questions, the environment, administration and decolonisation.

The Assembly’s most consequential power is the override. By three-quarters of the members represented, counting abstentions against, it may override a Security Council veto on any matter, including sanctions and the use of force. It has done so twice, both times against Britain: over Qantara in 1957 and over South Africa in 1986.

The Assembly may be summoned to an emergency session by nine members of the Security Council, by a third of the members or by the Secretary-General.

The League Council

The League Council is the one organ carried over from 1920. It sits at Constantinople and has twenty-five members: Italy, which holds the only permanent seat, and twenty-four states elected for two years in regional groups. The Secretary-General chairs it without a vote. It decides by two-thirds, and Italy has no veto there.

It is the League’s mediation organ, and it is the least famous and most used organ the League has. Every dispute must pass through it before the Security Council may impose sanctions or authorise force, except in immediate self-defence or to protect League observers, and a deliberate bypassing of the Council can invalidate the coercion that follows. It hears both parties and lets neither vote. It must produce a preliminary report within twenty-four hours of an emergency, and an ordinary mediation runs for up to thirty days. A recommendation of settlement adopted by two-thirds binds the parties for sixty days while they consider it. It may refer any question of law to the Court, and an advisory ruling binds it. It cannot impose a permanent territorial settlement, and its proceedings are confidential while a mediation is live.

Most of what the Council does never becomes news, because it works. Its record runs from the Åland Islands in 1921 and Leticia in 1934, under the old Covenant, to the Tigray truce of 2022 and the Nile truce of 2023, both of which were the Council’s work before they were signed. During the Cold War its lack of a veto made it the one room in which the two sides would sit down together.

The Council’s cases

The Council’s first cases were settled under the old Covenant. The Åland Islands, Swedish in speech and Finnish in sovereignty, were awarded to Finland in 1921 on condition that their language, culture and land were protected in perpetuity, and the condition has been kept for a century. Leticia, seized from New Granada by irregulars from the Peru-Bolivian Confederation in 1932, was returned in 1934 after a commission appointed at Geneva, and the joint authority for the Amazon frontier that the settlement created still meets. The Council failed over Manchuria, as the Covenant made it likely to fail, and it was not asked to try over France.

Under the Second Covenant the League’s chambers became the place where claims are kept alive without being pressed. Central America raises its claim to Belize every few years, New Granada raised the Panama isthmus at every Assembly for decades, and the United Baltic Duchy has raised Russia’s removal of its deportation records at every session since 1946. None of these claims has been settled and none has been dropped, and the Council, which hears the ones that come to it, exists to allow exactly that.

Its recent work is its best. The Tigray truce of November 2022 and the Nile truce of 2023 were each prepared at Constantinople before they were signed elsewhere, the first with East African mediators and the second with East African and Arabian ones, and each depended on the Council’s rule that the parties are heard and do not vote. Neither is a settlement. Both have held.

The Security Council

The Security Council sits at Kyoto. It was created new in 1945 and has no identity with the League Council. It has fifteen members: the five permanent members, the United Kingdom of America, Great Britain, Germany, China and Russia, and ten elected members chosen by the Assembly for two years by region, three from Africa, three from Asia and the Pacific, two from Latin America and the Caribbean, one from Europe and one from the Middle East. An elected member may not be re-elected at once. The presidency rotates monthly.

Procedural decisions need nine votes. Substantive decisions need ten, and no veto. A permanent member’s abstention is not a veto, each veto is individual and must be accompanied by published reasons, and a member that is a party to a dispute must abstain on every decision about it, procedural decisions included.

The Council determines acts of aggression, orders provisional measures, imposes sanctions, creates criminal tribunals and authorises coalitions of states to use force. Force authorisations expire after six months and sanctions after twelve unless renewed. Every action of the Council is subject to review by the International Court, which can ask whether the League Council was properly seized first.

The vetoes cast since 1945:

Japan hosts the Council and has never stood for an elected seat on it, by its own choice. Siam has served four terms, New Albion several, and Ethiopia and Nigeria have each held African seats several times.

The Secretary-General

The Secretary-General is the League’s chief administrator and an independent political officer, elected by two-thirds of the Assembly after public hearings, for a single seven-year term on a fixed cycle. No permanent member nominates, and the vote is secret. The Secretary-General may be removed by two-thirds after an independent finding, which has never happened, and is replaced in incapacity by the regional Deputy Secretary-General for the region concerned. The office’s powers are good offices, fact-finding, public warnings, the summoning of emergency sessions and the addition of items to the League Council’s agenda, and the Secretary-General coordinates humanitarian emergencies in person.

The Secretariat is an international civil service owing loyalty only to the League, with no national quotas and a service tribunal of its own.

The first postwar term ran six years, to bring the office onto a seven-year cycle from 1951. Drummond and Lester served under the old Covenant, which set no term, and Lester held the office through the suspension. Adeyemi died in office, and Ferreira was elected to the remainder of his term. The single-term rule counts only full terms, so a Secretary-General elected to finish one may stand for a term of his own.

The International Court of Justice

The International Court of Justice sits at Amsterdam, as the Permanent Court did before it. It has twenty-one judges, elected by three-fifths of the Assembly from candidates put forward by a selection commission, for single twelve-year terms staggered so that the Court is never wholly renewed. Judges retire at seventy-five, and no two may be of one nationality when appointed.

The Court has compulsory jurisdiction over the Charter, the acts of the League and the disputes covered by treaty. States, recognised peoples, organisations and individuals may appear before it, an individual only after exhausting the remedies at home. Its provisional measures bind, its advisory rulings bind the organ that asked for them, and it may review the legality of the Security Council’s actions. It has held that certain prohibitions bind every state whatever it has signed: aggression, genocide, slavery, torture and certain war crimes.

Its docket is wider than its founders expected. It awarded Les Écréhous and Les Minquiers to Britain and Jersey against France in 1953. In 1978 it held, on an individual complaint from the Isle of Man, that judicial birching was degrading, over Tynwald’s protest. Two cases have set one of the King’s realms against another, which the Court hears only with both parties’ consent: the Machias Seal Island case between the Realm and New Albion, and a fisheries case in the Straits of Malacca between Raj and Malaya. Two retired Justices of the Realm’s Supreme Court have sat on it.

The criminal tribunals

There is no permanent international criminal court. The Security Council creates ad hoc tribunals for particular conflicts, subject to the Assembly’s override, with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression, and each works alongside the national courts rather than replacing them. A sitting head of state has a temporary immunity from process while in office. A tribunal may not try conduct that was not a crime when it was done, except a manifest atrocity that the Court has first found to be one.

The tribunals are supported from Chartres, which is an administrative centre and not a court. It was placed there in 1953, after France’s readmission, near where the Paris Tribunal had kept its records, at France’s own request; the Allies thought France housing the machinery of international justice the right penance. The framework allows a tribunal to impose capital punishment if its founding statute provides for it, and no tribunal’s statute ever has.

The majorities

Peace operations and sanctions

Peace operations

The League has no standing army and no list of forces held ready for it. Every operation is raised from contributing states, commanded by a lead state or an alliance, and paid for from voluntary funds. Germany sends forces only under a League mandate and after a resolution of the Reichstag for each deployment, and Japan sends its forces abroad only for League peacekeeping and disaster relief, under a separate statute each time. Ireland’s contingents have served without a break since 1964, and Ethiopia, Nigeria and Egypt have been among the largest contributors in Africa since the 1960s.

What the operations taught

Each operation is cited for a lesson, and the lessons are the doctrine the League now has.

The Moluccas taught that a force should follow observers rather than precede them, and that it should go in with the consent of the government it is protecting, which is why every later force has had a host’s consent except where the Security Council has overridden it to protect civilians. Qantara taught that a force could be raised against the will of a permanent member if the Assembly would override the veto, and that it had to be large to be believed. The Congo taught that a force could hold a country together and that its personnel could abuse the people they protected, and the League learned the second lesson thirty years after the first.

Cyprus taught that a buffer force can become permanent, and the League’s force there has outlasted every government that asked for it. The Indochina observers taught that a ceasefire nobody wants cannot be supervised, and they were withdrawn when it failed. The Ogaden line taught that a small force on a clear line can keep two armies apart for as long as both prefer to be kept apart. Somalia taught that relief could be delivered and a mission ended on schedule, and the Balkans that the League could lend its authority to an alliance’s force and its air power without losing control of the mandate.

Self-defence is lawful only after an armed attack. The Security Council may authorise force against a grave and imminent threat, and may override a host state’s refusal of consent to protect civilians. A force must report to the Council that authorised it.

Sanctions

Sanctions since the Cold War have been targeted at named people, firms and goods rather than at whole economies, graduated, and subject to automatic exemptions for food and medicine and to review by an ombudsperson, whose decisions may be appealed to the Court. They impose no direct duties on states outside the League. The most consequential was the arms embargo on South Africa of 1986, imposed over Britain’s veto. The League’s pressure on the Chilean junta from 1983 to 1986, with the Church, the Realm and Britain, used targeted measures rather than an embargo. The Realm’s last veto, in 2003, was cast against a sanctions regime it thought unlawful.

Regional organisations

The Charter allows regional organisations to keep the peace within their regions, subject to the League. The Atlantic Treaty Organization places its members within the Charter by its first three articles, and its formations have served under League authority, in the Balkans most of all, and never under its own mutual-defence article. The European Concert and the Scandinavian Union coordinate their members’ positions in the League without sitting in it, and the Scandinavian Union hosts several of the League’s humanitarian institutions. The Commonwealth is a caucus inside the League that can swing an election to the League Council or to an agency, and much of the League’s language on climate finance was drafted at Commonwealth summits first. The West African interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone were regional operations and not the League’s.

Election observation

The League observes elections and referendums at a member’s invitation and has supervised the most consequential of them. Its Trusteeship Council compiled the register for the Sahara referendum of 1957. It accepted the result of Djibouti’s referendum of 1977, which carried union with Ethiopia by about 53 to 47. Its observer at Indonesia’s Papua consultation of 1969 reported irregularities, and a second consultation under League observation is promised for 2034. An observer’s report binds nobody, and it is the one part of the League’s work that every government in power fears and every opposition invites.

Human rights and refugees

Human rights

The General Assembly adopted a universal declaration of rights in 1948, the work of a commission that Eleanor Roosevelt chaired as the Realm’s delegate from 1945 until she became Governor-General in 1947. Two covenants followed, one of civil and political rights and one of economic, social and cultural rights. An individual whose rights under them have been violated may, after exhausting the remedies at home, take the case to the Court. The Court hears a few such cases a year and rejects most complaints at the admissibility stage, and the cases it does hear tend to change a member’s law, as the birching case of 1978 changed the law of the Isle of Man, for which Britain answered. Members that have not accepted the covenants are bound only by the declaration, which binds nobody in law and almost everybody in argument.

The Human Rights Council has forty-eight members elected for three years, reviews every member’s record every five years, and may suspend a member of its own by two-thirds. It has found against Brazil on its prisons repeatedly. It has found against the Realm twice: in a historical review of 1988 of the Japanese-heritage removals of 1942, which led to the Realm’s formal apology the same year, and in 2012, when its review held that the Realm’s watch lists after May Day breached the right of a listed person to know of the listing and to challenge it. The Realm answered politely and did not change the lists.

There is no universal convention on minorities and none on Indigenous peoples; the League handles both by settlements for particular countries, which is its oldest technique and its most criticised.

Refugees

The League High Commission for Refugees is the oldest humanitarian office in the system, descended from the interwar commission whose Nansen papers gave an identity to people no state would claim. Non-refoulement is absolute: no member may return a refugee to persecution. A separate status protects people displaced by climate, which no member is obliged to grant by quota and many grant in practice. The status was created by the Assembly in the 2010s at the insistence of the small island members, who argued that a person whose country is going under the sea is not fleeing persecution and is no less in need of somewhere to go. It gives a right to residence and work in a member that grants it and no right to choose which member that is. Responsibility for refugees is shared by agreement rather than by assessment, which means that the states nearest to every crisis bear most of it. The League ran the relief of displaced persons across Europe from 1945, which was the first thing the reconstituted League did that people could see.

The agencies

The League stands at the centre of a family of specialised bodies, each with its own constitution, membership, budget and seat, bound to the League by a relationship agreement and reporting to the General Assembly. There is no economic and social council over them; the Secretary-General convenes their heads in a coordinating board, and the Assembly reads their reports. Some are older than the reconstitution of 1945 and some younger. Interpol, the monetary fund, the reconstruction bank and the trade organisation are independent partners rather than members of the family, and so, for all its age, is the labour organisation.

The International Labour Organisation

The International Labour Organisation at Geneva is the interwar labour office, created under the Treaty of Berlin, and it is not a League agency. It kept its own constitution at San Francisco, sits in League organs only as an ordinary observer, and works with the League by particular agreements on statistics, forced labour, migration and occupational health. Its independence lets it find against a great power without waiting on a vote at Kyoto, and League bodies rely on its findings without being able to rewrite its conventions. It is tripartite: governments, employers and workers each send delegates, and each votes separately. It writes the conventions on hours, safety, child labour and the right to organise that most of the world’s labour law copies. Its conventions bind only the members that ratify them, and membership of the League ratifies none of them. It reports every year on how far each member’s law and practice fall short of the conventions it has ratified, which is the most-read labour report in the world and the least acted upon.

The World Health Organization

The World Health Organization at Copenhagen descends from the interwar health organisation, which was the first League body the Realm joined. Its Director-General may declare an international health emergency without a political vote, and it administers a pool of medical patents that its members license to one another. The East African Federation ran its immunisation programme with it from Dar es Salaam, and Cuba’s public-health and epidemic expertise reaches the world largely through it.

LESCO

The League Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation at Alexandria keeps the list of the world’s heritage sites, of which Indonesia’s are among the most visited, and the network of biosphere reserves, of which the Isle of Man became one in 2016. It is the one member of the family with a name of its own making.

The Food and Agriculture Organization

The Food and Agriculture Organization at Rome keeps the world’s statistics of food and farming, runs the early warning of famine, and sets the standards of food safety that most of the world’s trade in food follows. Its warning of the Somali famine in 1991 was the reason the relief mission of 1992 was ready to go, and its statistics are the ones every government uses when it argues about food.

The International Atomic Energy Agency

The International Atomic Energy Agency at Vienna inspects the nuclear programmes of the non-proliferation treaty’s parties and verifies the warhead reductions of the nuclear powers. Its findings must come before the Security Council may act on a nuclear question, which makes it the one technical agency with a formal place in the League’s security machinery. Its inspectors’ access is fixed by agreement with each state, and the gaps in that access are where every nuclear crisis since 1968 has begun.

The International Civil Aviation Organization

The International Civil Aviation Organization at Montreal writes the rules of international flying, from the licensing of crews to the investigation of accidents, and its standards are the reason an aircraft certified in one member may land in any other.

The International Maritime Organization

The International Maritime Organization in London writes the rules of shipping: safety at sea, the training of crews, the prevention of pollution from ships and the carriage of dangerous goods. Malta belongs to it in its own right.

The World Development Organisation

The World Development Organisation at Rio de Janeiro coordinates the League’s development work and votes one state, one vote, unlike the monetary fund and the reconstruction bank, which vote by shares and are independent of it. The difference is the oldest argument in the League’s economic work, and the poorer members hold that the Organisation has the legitimacy and the bank has the money.

The Economic Commission for Africa

The Economic Commission for Africa sits at Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, which Haile Selassie gave to the League in 1961. It is the most senior of the League’s regional economic commissions and the one that matters most to its members.

The World Environment Organisation

The World Environment Organisation at Nairobi administers the global climate agreements and the biodiversity programmes. Its members’ national climate plans are binding, its rules allow trade measures against goods made in breach of them, and it holds a fund for loss and damage whose language was drafted in the Commonwealth and adopted by the League. Keeping it at Nairobi is a fixed point of the East African Federation’s foreign policy.

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea at Hamburg hears disputes over maritime boundaries, navigation, detention of vessels, fisheries, pollution and the seabed, and orders the prompt release of ships and urgent protection of the marine environment. It has held that Indonesia’s navy acted disproportionately in sinking seized trawlers, it has the long fishing dispute between Indonesia and China at Natuna before it, and it has ruled against Hamburg’s own interests while the city pays for its accommodation. The League’s law of the sea accepted a modified form of Indonesia’s archipelagic principle of 1957.

Outer space and disarmament

The League’s office for outer space keeps the register of objects launched into orbit and administers the Treaty of Geneva on Celestial Bodies. The Disarmament Commission reports to the Assembly, and members’ reports of their conventional arms are mandatory and confidential to the Commission.

Security Council reform

The argument of the League’s present is over the Security Council, which has had the same five permanent members since 1945. A special committee of the General Assembly has held public hearings on its enlargement since 2026, in all seven languages. There is no report, no text and no vote yet.

The Raj-led plan

A coalition led by the Empire of Raj, with most African and many Latin American and Caribbean governments, proposes three new permanent seats without a veto: one named for Raj, one for Africa and one for Latin America and the Caribbean. The two regional seats would be filled by members nominated by their regions and elected by the Assembly for four years, renewable once. The new members would vote on everything and veto nothing, and the voting thresholds would have to be rewritten around them.

Raj’s claim rests on its population, its economy, its standing as the sixth recognised nuclear power, its place in the Indian Ocean, its record in peacekeeping and its character as an undivided federal realm, and it rejects a rotating Asian seat as a seat for somebody else. It is non-aligned and says so.

The African members are divided over the length of the regional term, between four years and twelve, and the smaller states want the nomination to be transparent and the occupant removable for failing to consult them. Nigeria backs the rotating seat rather than a seat of its own, and Kamerun supports a permanent African seat held in rotation. The African case is put in the language of colonial history, which is the League’s own history.

The Latin American and Caribbean members do not accept the Realm as their regional representative. West Indian governments put climate and the small states first, Cuba sovereignty, and the larger continental states capacity, and Chile, which has served often in the region’s rotation, supports a permanent regional seat. Brazil stands apart from the coalition. It has demanded a permanent seat of its own since 1945, nobody in particular blocks the demand and nobody decisive supports it, and its own national holds the Secretariat while the seat stays out of reach.

The permanent members

The Realm and Germany endorse the three-seat plan as it stands. Britain and China oppose it and propose instead six more elected seats of two years and stronger rules on the explanation of vetoes; Britain objects to a confusing middle class of members, and China to a named Raj seat that would alter the balance of Asia. Neither offers to give up its own veto. Russia opposes any enlargement, and its ratification is required for any amendment, so it can stop the plan alone.

The law

Amending the Charter needs two-thirds of the General Assembly and then ratification by two-thirds of the members, including all five permanent members. The drafts in circulation distinguish permanent members with a veto from continuing seats without one. No text has been published, no request has been made to the Court for an advisory ruling, and a compromise of renewable twelve-year seats without a veto has been floated and adopted by nobody. The Secretary-General takes no part: Ferreira has made no submission on the merits and has offered no mediation.

Failings

The interwar collapse. The League saw Manchuria and fascist France coming, found against Japan, documented French rearmament year by year, and could stop neither. Its members ordered sanctions they would not bear and preferred their own alliances to the Covenant they had signed. The Realm, which had designed the League, spent twenty-five years outside its security work and paid only for the parts that cost it nothing.

The colonial inheritance. The mandates gave the empires of the victors an international cover, and the interwar commissions accepted a hierarchy of peoples that the League has since repudiated. Trusteeship ended the mandates faster than empire would have, but it kept the colonial borders and the elites the empires had made, it moved at the pace the administering powers chose, and Namibia was still a trust in 1990. Historians now read the League’s archives of the period as the record of an internationalised empire.

Protected clients. Through the Cold War every permanent member protected its clients from the League, with the veto or the threat of it, and the abuses of those clients went unanswered. Russia’s ninety-seven vetoes are the largest part of that record and not the whole of it. The override carried only twice in eighty years, both times against Britain, and never against a power that could count on its clients’ votes.

Peacekeepers’ abuses. Personnel of League forces have exploited the people they were sent to protect, and the League’s own review of 1999 found that local women had been abused by members of the Congo force of the 1960s, none of whom was ever prosecuted. A smaller case in Cyprus in the 2000s was punished by the contributing state. The League depends on the contributing states to punish their own soldiers, and they do so or not as they choose.

Assessment

The League’s survival is its first achievement and the source of its authority. A body that failed against Japan and France was neither dissolved nor replaced: the victors of 1945 were largely the victors of 1918, they kept what they had built and rebuilt what had failed, and the Second Covenant reads in many of its articles as a commentary on the first. The override, the expiry of force authorisations, the recusal of parties, the targeting of sanctions and the permanent seat for an invaded China are each a lesson of the 1930s.

Its second achievement is the one least seen. The League’s agencies run the world’s public health, aviation, shipping, food standards, nuclear inspection and environmental regime, the labour organisation beside them keeps its labour law, and the League Council settles disputes that never become crises. Neither appears in the history of the century as it is usually told, and both are the reason most governments value the League.

Its security record is mixed and cannot be made otherwise. It verified the Havana Accord, sent forces from the Moluccas in 1950 to the Nile in 2023, and twice overrode a permanent member. It also let the permanent members shield their clients for forty years, and its forces have abused the people they protected. The League’s defenders say that it is the only body in which these failures can even be named, and its critics say that naming them has become its substitute for preventing them.

The Realm’s place in that record is its own. It designed the League and refused it, stayed outside for twenty-five years while paying for the technical bodies that cost it nothing, chaired the conference that rebuilt it, and has since been its most powerful member and the permanent member that has used the veto least. The League’s critics in the Realm say that six vetoes in eighty years is a record of restraint, and its critics abroad say that a power that rarely needs to veto has other ways of getting what it wants.

The League’s representation is criticised from every side. One state, one vote gives a small state the same voice as a large one, and many members’ governments are not elected. The Secretariat is called too strong by the members it reports on and too weak by the people it is meant to protect, and its recruitment, for all its rule against quotas, favours the graduates of rich countries. The earmarking of voluntary contributions lets the largest donors decide what the League does with the money it does not assess, and the Court’s widening review is called overreach by every government it has found against.

What the League has not settled is whether its Security Council can be reformed at all. The Council’s permanent seats describe the world of 1945, and every proposal to change them must be ratified by each of the five powers whose position would change. Raj, Africa, Latin America and Brazil all press, the special committee hears them, and Russia can end the matter alone. The committee’s report and the Secretary-General’s election this December will begin to show whether a body that has never once changed its permanent membership can do so, or whether the League will go on being governed by the arrangements of the year it was rebuilt.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The First Great War, whose peace at Berlin contained the Covenant
• The Second Great War, after which the League was reconstituted at San Francisco
• Woodrow Wilson, who designed much of the League and could not bring the Realm into it
• Harry S. Truman, whose ministry carried the Second Covenant and kept Russia permanent
• Byzantine Federation, whose shared capital is the League Council’s seat
• Empire of Japan, which left over Manchuria and hosts the Security Council at Kyoto
• Socialist Kingdom of Italy, the League Council’s one permanent member
• Empire of Raj, which leads the coalition for a reformed Security Council
• Empire of Brazil, which has demanded a permanent seat since 1945 and holds the Secretariat
• Duchy of Normandy and Duchy of Brittany, members within their competences
• United States of Indonesia, the League’s first decolonisation and its first armed force
• Commonwealth of Nations, a caucus within the League
• Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose formations have served under League authority

Categories

• World Institutions
• International Law
• Peacekeeping
• Geneva