The growth of a system

How the League would have worked with American participation remains one of the great 'what ifs' of modern history. As it was, the direction of the system was left in the hands of states - primarily Britain and France - whose altruism was questionable and whose economic resources had been crippled by the war.

'There was a widespread belief...that the League's prestige was growing incrementally'

Yet the League of Nations did work surprisingly well, at least for a decade after the war. By December 1920, 48 states had signed the League Covenant, pledging to work together to eliminate aggression between countries. A series of disputes - between Germany and Poland over Upper Silesia, between Italy and Greece, and between Greece and Bulgaria - were resolved under its auspices.

Though relatively minor, these were just the kind of incidents that had in the past triggered regional conflicts - and indeed World War One itself. There was a widespread belief, or hope, that the League's prestige was growing incrementally. Methods of investigating disputes, and helping to keep the peace, were regularised.

Another crucial function was the establishment of Mandates to bring all the territories that had been liberated from German and Turkish rule, at the end of the Great War, to eventual self-determination. In Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, the process seemed to be moving steadily forward. (In view of its subsequent history, the formal admission of Iraq to the League in 1933 was indeed premature.) The machinery of the League organisation grew more substantial, and the secretariat began to carve out the basis for a quasi-independent role, although this was unplanned and unlooked-for by the old great powers.

'...any credible system of economic sanctions was far distant'

The proliferation of League activity, however, carried risks: as one of its founders, Lloyd George, put it, 'it had weak links spreading everywhere and no grip anywhere'. 'Grip' ultimately meant the capacity to use force. When the crucial concept of collective security was put to the acid test in the 1930s, it dissolved. Once big powers started to challenge the status quo, as Japan did in Manchuria, the League found it practically impossible to reach a clear verdict on who was guilty of 'aggression'.

Or, still more disastrously, in the case of Italian pressure on Abyssinia, the guilt was clear enough but the key powers, Britain and France, were unwilling to antagonise the guilty party because of their wider strategic fears. The failed attempt to impose an oil embargo on Italy demonstrated that any credible system of economic sanctions was far distant.