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Home , Aftermath of World War I, International community, League of Nations, League to Enforce Peace

“The League of and its Many Fathers,”

Gary B. Ostrower1

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 1 This paper appears in the Kanakadea Review, April 2015. Copyright with the author, 2014.

1" " I’ll fess up. I’m going to start this paper with a complaint. I like historian Margaret

McMillian. At the dawn of this century, she wrote a great book called Paris: 1919. At least in my not-so-humble opinion, it remains the best account of the Paris Conference (the

Versailles Conference) that we have. And she starts her chapter about the , a subject about which I’ve spent a bit of my life, this way: “Only a handful of eccentric historians still bother to study the League of Nations. Its …are largely unvisited. It’s very name evokes images of earnest bureaucrats, fuzzy liberal supporters, futile resolutions…and, above all, failure.” Wow! Eccentric historians indeed. OK, you stand warned. Even my kids think she’s on the money here.

As I prepared to write this paper, I asked my students in a Western Civ survey course and also an American history survey if they knew what the League of Nations was. Only one-third answered in the affirmative. Ouch, I thought. So at the risk of oversimplification, I’ll answer my own question: The League was created in 1919 at the Paris conference to prevent another

World . It’s all more complicated than that, but that’s its essence. It became the heart of a system of . Allow me to explain.

In a number of ways, the League is best seen as a child of the nineteenth century. You all know that the French Revolution and Napoleonic had devastated much of Europe between

1792 and Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo. When I say devastated, I refer to the fact that perhaps as many as 3.5 million soldiers and civilians (that’s a conservative figure) had died, over a half-million soldiers during a single campaign when Napoleon advanced and then retreated from Moscow in 1812. Not to mention the political dislocation, the thrones lost and recovered, the nationalistic and liberal revolutions loosened on a previously conservative continent.

Consequently, you can understand why European diplomats meeting at a post-war conference in

2" " carefully designed a system, called the Congress System, complemented by another sort of parallel plan proposed by the Russian Czar labeled the Holy Alliance, to preserve the international order. It was a far cry from the post- League, but it got the diplomatic ball rolling.

Nor was the ancestry of the League only political. The industrial revolution and its spin-off revolutions such as those in transportation and communication likewise led to organizational efforts to rationalize the developing -state system. “Rationalize.” By that, I mean to make the international system more orderly and comprehensible. The 1865 International Telegraph

Union, followed soon thereafter by the General Postal Union and organizations to regulate navigation on the Danube River, reflected European uneasiness with inter-state anarchy.

Leaders in different areas of Europe life wanted to control things in the interests of progress, a concept that, two centuries earlier, would have seemed quite foreign.

Indeed, by the turn of the twentieth-century, this impulse for order was reinforced by at least three other things.

For one, the American Civil War, which left somewhere between 620,000 and 800,000 men dead out of a total male fighting-age population of, at most, only 10 million, had reminded

Europeans of just how lethal war could be. Indeed, the Civil War had introduced, among other things, a neat firearm invented by a Maine native named Hiram Maxim that could kill soldiers at an astonishing rate. The war also hinted at new developments in naval technology enhanced by huge guns and iron-hulled ships. All this eventually led to things like super battleships of the

Dreadnought class, but an alarming naval race between England and .

3" " Secondly, the colonial rivalry of the last third of the nineteenth century resulted in renewed fears about European conflict.

And thirdly, in light of the military innovations that I’ve just noted, the decades after 1870 introduced the paradoxical belief that permanent peace was indeed attainable. Remember, there had been no general war in Europe since 1815, and so this idea seemed reasonable. It led to books by people like Norman Angel of Great Britain who argued that modern economics and global interdependence meant that war no longer made sense.2 It also led to the practical work of statesmen in Holland’s capital, , where two conferences during the first decade of the twentieth century promoted peace through —or at least arms limitations—and which would include recommendations for such things as mandatory to resolve disputes. In sum, despite a few small wars and colonial rivalries, many people on both sides of the Atlantic by 1914 believed that general war was a thing of the past.

Which is why the First World War came as both a shock and a puzzle. The carnage reminded some writers of the work of yet older writers, for the ideal of permanent peace was not so new.

Men like German philosopher during the 18th century and American William

Ladd during the 19th had flirted with organizational schemes to prevent war. They understood that modern nation-states, which dated from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, were not governed by any higher authority, and that the principle of remained sacrosanct. By the same token, they equally understood that the balance of power, indeed the balance–of-power system in which states formed alliances to insure their security-- led to war as often as it prevented war.

The system was fluid. Statesmen miscalculated their country’s own power as often as they

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 2 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: The Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (London, ).

4" " misjudged the military might of their rivals. That is at least partly why, between 1689 and 1815,

Europe experienced between seven and fourteen major wars (the number varies depending on whether wars within wars are counted). By the same token, the existence of a balance of power, refined by the Vienna Congress, helps to explain the relative peace between 1815 and 1914.

Whatever they understood by 1914, events that followed Sarajevo really gave birth to the system of collective security with the League as its centerpiece. The term “collective security” did not yet exist in 1919. It would not be coined until 1935. Nevertheless, what I will call the

“collective-security idea” emerged from the war and helps to define what a number of key statesmen proposed leading up to the peace conference.

We owe it to ourselves to understand one thing. While the American president, Woodrow

Wilson, was instrumental in fathering the League, he was hardly alone. The League had many fathers (and they really were fathers: women played almost no role in this story, though Jane

Addams had become a household name in the ). On this side of the Atlantic even before became a prominent player in this story, indeed even before 1914 when the

Europeans went to war, a number of peace advocates led by publisher Hamilton Holt and newspaper publisher Theodore Marburg were already advocating some kind of organization to insure the peace.3 Holt, Marburg, and their allies helped to organize peace societies and peace conferences. They were energized by White House support for arbitration and conciliation that reinforced their own belief that wars were not an inevitable feature of international life.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 3 Warren F. Kuehl, Seeking World Order: The and International Organization to 1920 (Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 1969, chaps. 6 and 7).

5" " One point, however, is worth noting at this juncture. Even in the pre-1914 years, American peace advocates divided over a critical issue, namely sanctions applied against a country that initiated war. Some of these advocates, led by former of State and the legalist John Basset Moore, along with the young Marburg, wanted to rely mainly on judicial procedures to resolve disputes. Others, including Marburg as he matured, believed that should states ignore judicial solutions, then sanctions—either military or economic— might legitimately be employed to keep the peace.

And it was into this debate that a key American advocate who favored the creation of an international organization to prevent war enters this story. That advocate was William Howard

Taft, Wilson’s predecessor in the White House. By 1915, Taft had agreed to head a new organization called the . Remember, this was shortly after the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat and almost two years before the US declared war on

Germany. Taft was a big guy, known not only for his physical presence but for his outsize legal skills. Raised in Ohio, he had served Teddy Roosevelt as Secretary of War. TR and Taft were close friends, a factor that contributed to TR’s decision to handpick Taft as his successor in the

White House.

Taft had been trained as a lawyer, so it’s no surprise that he thought like a lawyer about international issues no less than domestic issues. We remember President Taft as a conservative often out of sympathy with the progressivism of TR himself. Yet he might be better recognized as a nineteenth-century liberal, committed to limited , the rule of , international arbitration, and peace.4 As were many others of his generation, he was “dazed” (that’s his word)

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 4 The best political study of Taft is: Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency (Lawrence, KS, The University Press of Kansas, 2009), but Gould writes little of Taft after he left the White House..

6" " by the European slaughter that followed Sarajevo. 5 Although he, like Root and Moore, had serious reservations about using force—in other words, sanctions—to preserve peace, he came around as the corpses piled up in Europe. By 1916, he had come to believe that judicial and sanctions measures could reinforce each other. In his words, “what attracts is [the]…proposition that physical force be added to the weight of moral force in order to prevent a general war, with the hope that the threat will be enough without actual resort to military or economic means.” I will refer back to this later, but I want to add that Taft’s prestige would help not only to steer

Wilson in the direction of sanctions, but many other Americans as well. Indeed, Wilson’s own evolution in Taft’s direction can be traced to a 1916 speech he delivered to the League to

Enforce Peace.6

At the same time that the League to Enforce Peace gradually persuaded Americans that there would be no lasting peace without a postwar organization, influential English and French officials independently reached similar conclusions. In London, a group of peaceniks led by liberal aristocrats like Lord Cecil, liberal intellectuals like , and Fabian

Socialists like Philip Noel Baker argued that the old balance of power system had run its course.

Rather than rely on the traditional interests of promoting their own self-interest, they believed that catastrophe awaited the continent unless it adopted a new basis for international politics. For the most part, this meant two things: 1) that governments must trust— and therefore rely on—public opinion, for, they argued, a public that was paying such a high price for the current war would never tolerate another war if given a voice. Secondly, it meant that disarmament must be the first order of business for any future peace organization. The arms """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 5 Taft, “The Proposal for a League to Enforce Peace—Affirmative,” Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship series, Ser. 3939, p, 3. See also http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4944&context=fss_papers] 6 Kuehl, 226. The speech can be found at: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF- 8#q=Woodrow%20Wilson%20Speech%201916%20to%20League%20to%20Enforce%20Peace

7" " race, they believed, had contributed mightily to the outbreak of war in 1914. Many of these liberal peace advocates founded the League of Nations Society in 1916, the largest British pro-

League organization that, during the , would grow to a membership of over one million.

Conservatives in Britain were not of one mind. For the most part, they were less sanguine about disarmament. They understood the risks of an arms race, but they also wanted to preserve

Britain’s imperial position and therefore remained wary of any plan that might challenge British power. And yet they too understood that the old order could no longer guarantee Britain’s security. For that reason, many of them turned out to be quite receptive to the kind of thing proposed by the League to Enforce Peace in the US. Once the US entered the war in 1917, and with President Wilson throwing his weight decisively behind the League idea in his famous

Fourteen Points Address in January 1918, blessed the formation of the Phillmore

Committee which produced a report that inched toward a league with sanctions. It too would influence Wilson’s thinking. 7

Nor was it just the left-wingers and the Phillmore Committee that contributed to Britain’s receptivity to the League idea. , a brilliant, idealistic South African, as convinced of the importance of securing peace as he was of white racial supremacy and the benefits of , became equally part of this British story.8 Smuts had fought the British during the

Boer War. By 1919, however, he had morphed into an enthusiastic British imperialist even though he was not British. South , remember, was a British colony, one for which London had expended plenty of blood and treasure in the recent Boer War. As South Africa’s foreign

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 7 Peter I. Yearwood, Guarantee of Peace: The League of Nations in British Policy, 1914-1925 (New York, , 2009), 74-79. 8 A.J.P. Taylor, a sharp-tongued British historian, referred to Smut’s “fraudulent idealism.” Yearwood, 58.

8" " minister, Smuts had a platform that would guarantee him an audience. George Egerton reminds us in a terrific book about Britain and the League that many British internationalists thought of the British Commonwealth as a “league of nations” already. 9 Smuts agreed. In 1918, he produced what he called “A Practical Suggestion” that reflected both his belief that was attainable and his conviction that, together with America, a league would allow the British to preserve their imperial interests.10 He sketched out a version of the League that would become its blueprint and which powerfully influenced Wilson. Smuts envisioned an organization with a popular assembly, a small council of major powers, and an administrative wing (the secretariat). His league would focus on issues like disarmament and the administration of colonies in a way that served as a blueprint for the mandate system. We too often credit Wilson as the architect of the League. Nope. It really was Smuts more than any other single person who deserves that credit, though the League almost surely would never have seen the light of day without Wilson’s own support.

The French counted for less. The crusty and anti-clerical French premier during World War I,

Georges Clemenceau, had mixed feelings about the proposals bandied about for a league. He hated Germany and distrusted the British. He preferred to put his faith (perhaps the wrong word when writing about Clemenceau) in old-fashioned alliances. But he believed that a league might help to secure the cooperation of both the US and Great Britain in containing an inevitably aggressive Germany, and he was by no means convinced that an association of nations would fail. Unlike Wilson, Clemenceau had never led the pro-league forces in his own country. He left that to Leon Bourgeois, a liberal politician who had championed proposals for world peace ever

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 9 George Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations (New York, Oxford University Press, 1978). 10 McMillan, 89,

9" " since the first Hague Conference in 1900. Bourgeois was well known for his idealism and his enthusiasm for the work that the American League to Enforce Peace had done. However,

Margaret McMillan reminds us that he never challenged Clemenceau. John Maynard Keynes once called Clemenceau “dry in soul and empty of hope, “ a man of “one illusion, ; and one disillusion—mankind.”11 The hardheaded Clemenceau thought him a bore and a fool.12

There are many other pro-league internationalists who really deserve mention here, including

Americans like David Hunter Miller and Wilson’s chief aide Colonel Edward House. Time, however precludes attention to their contributions. What it does not preclude are a few words about the drama in Paris after the war finally ended in November 1918. Within six weeks,

Wilson, along with foreign ministers from most of the allied countries, descended on Paris to hammer out a . Wilson’s arrival was memorable. Over two million Parisians turned out to greet him. He achieved near demigod status. Some apparently thought him--and I mean this literally—the savior of the world. He became the embodiment of the League idea. Such expectations would inevitably—I stress that word “inevitably”—be disappointed. This was inevitable. The League was not only an institution but an idea. That idea became the essence of what historians would call liberal internationalism, which itself was composed of ideas that did not always accord with reality. Most important was the belief that the Hobbesian state system could be replaced by a system based on an international harmony of interests, a belief that violence was an unnatural state of affairs, and a companion belief that education and law would

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 11 Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking After the First World War, 1919-1923(Palgrave, 2008) 12 Macmillan, 92.

10" " civilize mankind in a way that would make obsolete such things as war, arms, and secrecy.

Reread Wilson’s . We call all this the New . 13

Whatever the public believed, Wilson felt powerfully about his plan. Remember: perhaps the most important reason he favored American participation in the war had been that his country— really, Wilson himself—would help to shape the peace. 14 No wonder he was so tireless in pursuit of his League. He voyaged across the Atlantic in , sailed home for a short visit in March, and then returned again to Paris in order to finish his work by June.

All historians who have written about the Versailles Conference agree on two things:

1)! That Wilson and the other representatives of the great powers conducted the real work of

the conference as the so-called “Big Five,” then the as the Italian representative

departed in April 1919 (though he returned briefly the following month).

2)! That Wilson made the formation of a League his central priority. Indeed, while the

subject of the League has generated plenty of interpretative disagreement, there is none

concerning the fact that Wilson was willing to compromise away many of his positions

on critically important subjects like reparations, disarmament, and the self-determination

principle so long as he would get his League of Nations. Why? Because he believed that

the League would eventually iron out disagreements over these other issues. Without the

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 13 Two helpful sources are: George Egerton, “The Myth of the League of Nations,” found in Zara Steiner, ed. The League of Nations in Retrospect (, New uyork, Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 98; and Arno J. Mayer’s classic Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1959). 14 This judgment is based on numerous comments from various sources, but the best summary of the matter is found in Knock, 118-120. Knock relies especially on an account by who visited Wilson on February 28, 1917 with a delegation from the Emergency Peace Foundation.

11" " League, Wilson foresaw a return to the hated balance of power system which, he

believed, would mean a second world war.

In fact, Wilson was so committed to bring into existence a political League, which is

to say a sanctionist league, that he virtually excluded from the American delegation

members of the US Senate who he distrusted because he feared they would likely favor a

more judicial organization. Even more tellingly, he insisted on chairing the all-important

League of Nations Commission that would draft the League’s constitution. Wilson, the

son of a Calvinist minister, would call that constitution a Covenant. Astoundingly, and

against all expectations, the Commission finished its work in just over two weeks. Well,

God finished the universe in just six days, so maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised (Some

truth in advertising here: my comment was influenced by the observation of a Wilson

critic who once said that that Moses had only Ten Commandments but Wilson had

Fourteen Points).

So the Covenant would turn on Wilson’s demands, however much the president had

been influenced by Smuts, Taft, and others. Wilson chaired the committee that drafted

the document with little tolerance for dissent. The Covenant allowed for peaceful

settlement of disputes by mandating arbitration procedures and by establishing judicial

procedures to resolve conflicts. But the guts of the document were found in the

paragraphs that allowed the new organization to confront an aggressor nation with

sanctions.

As Smuts had earlier suggested, the League would be composed of an administrative

Secretariat, a smaller Council composed of the major powers, and a popular assembly

12" " that initially contained 31 members and eventually included 51. Its framework therefore

resembled the present-day UN.

The heart of the Covenant is found in Articles 10 through 16. Two articles especially

bear mention. Article 10 called for each member to defend the “independence and

” of every other member. This meant that, at least theoretically, each

member might fight—as in go to war—to defend other countries including those in

which many League members might have little interest. Article 16 provided the means to

enforce Article 10. It outlined economic and, if necessary, military provisions that

constituted League sanctions. I cannot emphasize this enough. While President Taft’s

League to Enforce Peace included the word “enforce” in its title, the LEP, along with

many other supporters of a post-war organization, viewed enforcement provisions as

window dressing: important window dressing, but secondary to the League’s judicial

operations. And Wilson at Versailles did draw from their efforts, even to the point of

making a Permanent Court of International Justice—known as the World Court—a part

of the League. But Wilson, much more than Taft and other peace advocates, viewed

sanctions as central. In fact, Wilson saw them as so critical that he conned himself into

believing that Article 16 would never be invoked.

Why would Article 16 not be invoked? Because Wilson believed that what he and his

allies called “world opinion” would prevent any country from every again initiating

aggressive war. He equally believed that the collective-security idea at the heart of

Article 16, meaning that an aggressor would potentially face the combined might of every

other country in the world (or at least in the League) would be enough to deter

aggression. No government leader, Wilson believed, would be so foolish, really, so mad,

13" " to venture war under these circumstances. We call this Wilsonian idealism. It might

better be known as a Wilsonian delusion.

When Republicans and isolationists in the US criticized Wilson after he returned

home for having compromised away many elements of his pre-conference positions--

about reparations and national boundaries and self-determination and the retention by

Britain and France of their colonial empires —Wilson argued that the League would later

rectify any injustices. Conventional wisdom is correct about this matter: For Wilson, the

Covenant was everything. Indeed, he insisted that the Covenant was so central to the

peace settlement that it be included as the first 26 articles of the .

The gory details of the Covenant’s fate when the US Senate debated and then rejected

the Treaty of Versailles over the next year and a half are too well known for me to offer a

detailed account here.15 Allow me, however, to make a few observations.

For one, the president made some foolish political mistakes, the most important being

that he had not included any influential Republicans in the American delegation that

helped to draft the Treaty. Moreover, after he suffered a debilitating stroke in November

1919, he lost the ability to control the terms of the debate at home. Indeed the stroke

accelerated his tendency toward rigidity, self-righteousness, and a refusal to compromise.

Secondly, most Americans were not opposed to a post-war league. Even Wilson’s

main nemesis, Senator of Massachusetts, admitted this when he

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 15 [See especially: Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: and the Quest for a New World Order (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992; and John Milton Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York, Alfred A. Knoph, 2009)..

14" " described the American public as “fascinated” with the plan for world peace.16 To the

extent that we can chart public opinion before the age of Gallup polls, most Americans

favored a league to prevent another world war. In the , we

have exaggerated the influence of American isolationists, though it is true that their

influence grew during the 1920s when Americans became increasingly disillusioned with

the results of the war. It is worth noting in this vein that when the Senate first voted to

ratify the Treaty, the Senate majority voted yes. Unfortunately for Wilson, treaty

ratification needed a two-thirds super-majority.

And thirdly, had the Covenant reflected the judicial orientation of Taft’s League to

Enforce Peace, my guess is that the Senate would have ratified the Treaty

overwhelmingly. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the old-fashioned political animosity of

Republicans who came to detest Wilson would have doomed the Treaty regardless of the

Covenant’s provisions. Surely it’s hard for me to believe that Senator Lodge, who by

1919 was the influential chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would

have voted to ratify the treaty any more than Mitch McConnell today would be likely to

endorse Obamacare. But let’s remember that Lodge was no isolationist. He supported an

Anglo-American military guarantee to France in the wake of the Armistice. To Lodge

and many others who saw Article 10 as unconstitutional because it might commit the US

to war without a congressional resolution, a more juridical league would likely have

passed muster.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 16 William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980), 313 quotes Lodge in a letter to Senator Alfred Breckenridge dated February 18, 1919.

15" " And so the Treaty could not gather the two-thirds majority it needed, which meant that

the League, which came into existence in , would have to limp along without

US membership. Did the absence of the US cripple the League as much as has been

claimed? The answer is: You bet. With the US sitting on the sidelines, the infant

organization saw other countries whittle away at the enforcement provisions of the

Covenant. Canadians had second thoughts about committing their troops to defend

distant victims of aggression without knowing they would have the support of their

American neighbors. They therefore introduced an amendment to the Covenant to

eliminate Article 10. It was defeated, but in 1923 a companion amendment to “clarify”

Article 10 essentially gutted it, reinforced when the Assembly passed a Scandinavian

amendment allowing states to “postpone” their participation in sanctions.17 The result: a

system of collective insecurity.

This is not the place to outline the many disputes that the League addressed during the

interwar years. Suffice to say that it had a mixed record in settling disputes during the

1920s and a dreadful record during the thirties. Two conflicts virtually consigned the

organization to the collective-security trash heap. The League failed to prevent or to later

halt Japanese aggression against between 1931 and 1933. Even more damaging

was its inability to prevent ’s attack on during 1935 and 1936. However

promising League efforts against small powers when the great powers had no direct stake

in a conflict, the organization proved to be impotent when the larger powers violated the

Covenant.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 17 See my own The League of Nations, From 1919 to 1929 (New York, Garden City Park, NY, Avery Publishing Group, 1996), 32-33.

16" " And yet the League’s failure to prevent World War II is only part of the story. Yes,

collective security proved to be an abject failure. That failure, I submit, is the main

reason that the League faded into the fog of history. Nevertheless, we need to remember

that the League actually succeeded in other areas. The authors of the Covenant in 1919

gave little prominence to activity in fields such as postwar economic reconstruction (the

economic collapse of Hungary and were especially notable), prevention of

epidemics, and even colonial administration via the League’s mandate system. True, the

mandates served the colonial interests of Britain and France a helluva lot more than the

interests of the colonized, but precedents set during the interwar period would contribute

to the movement following the next war. Over all, the League’s record in

non-political activity is mixed. Efforts to protect minorities and came to little.

Health and economic projects were much more promising.

And the League—in respect to both its success and failures--helped to define the

postwar settlement in 1945. Even before the Americans declared war after Pearl Harbor,

State Department planners were considering what the League’s successor would look

like. Initially, they envisioned a reformed League, but by 1942 they—and FDR himself--

had pretty much decided on a new organization entirely. What is most notable is that

FDR’s State Department never entertained the possibility that the League’s failure made

a future world organization impractical. Planners like Undersecretary Sumner Welles

and economist Leon Pasvolsky began drafting plans for a postwar organization as early

as 1941 when the British were pre-occupied with more pressing matters and the French

endured their Vichy humiliation. The result was that by 1945, US policy-makers had

17" " taken the lead—again, as they had after the 1918 armistice--in shaping the new

collective-security organization.

Of course the UN would be designed to avoid the League’s weaknesses. Most

important were three changes. Although the US would have, as did the League, three

major units (an administrative Secretariat, a General Assembly composed of all nations,

and a great-power dominated Security Council), the Covenant’s requirement that

decisions be unanimous was scrapped in favor of a system that granted each of the five

most powerful Council members what we today call a “permanent .” And here stood

the key dilemma. The veto handcuffed the UN when any one of the five great powers

feared that its own interests—or the interests of its allies--might be threatened by

collective efforts. The USSR would cast its veto 123 times during the UN’s first twenty-

five years, the Americans not once. Those numbers were substantially reversed from

1970 to the end of the in 1990, with the US vetoing nearly 60 resolutions, and

another 30 or so since 1989. Indeed, the mere threat of vetoes has meant that many

resolutions never reach the floor for a vote.

But—and here’s my main point—the permanent veto, which turned the UN into an

international tabby cat so far as collective security was concerned, nevertheless made the

UN possible in the first place. Let me put it in another way: observing the world order

that emerged from the rubble of 1945, we can confidently conclude: no veto, no UN.

And there is one final point that I’d like to make about the UN. Yes, the UN’s ability

to end wars in Vietnam and and Bosnia may have been no more successful

than the League’s efforts in or Ethiopia. But the UN, unlike the League, did

18" " innovate in one critically important way. Beginning with the Suez Crisis of 1956, the

UN, utilizing Chapter 6 and 7 of the Charter (Chapter 7 contains the Charter’s sanctions

provisions, an echo of the Covenant’s Article 16), created a mechanism

that has occasionally been highly effective. It has involved scores of countries, hundreds

of thousands of Blue Helmets, and billions of dollars. Woodrow Wilson and Lord Robert

Cecil never dreamed of such activity. What is “astonishing” about this subject, as

historian Paul Kennedy reminds us, is that the Charter never uses the term

“peacekeeping” nor does it offer guidelines for the process.18 Some peacekeeping efforts

have humiliated the UN: think about and Rwanda and Bosnia. But in other

instances, including Egypt before 1967, as well as , Sierra Leone, and East Timor,

peacekeeping has undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of lives.

Had an international organization with peacekeeping functions existed in July 1914,

might World War I have been prevented? The question is ahistorical and perhaps

meaningless. Too many great powers were involved, too many lessons about

peacekeeping not yet learned. Nevertheless, to ask the question is to hint at the way in

which the Great War has led, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to a reshaping of

our . Maybe that could be the subject of a follow-up Utica

history conference.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 18 Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the (New York, Random House, 2006), 77.

19" "

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Now: note that the deliberations took all of two weeks, and then describe the League as it emerged from the Commission with Wilson heading the group. Then—the Senate debate.

20" "