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2 - The League of Nations and the Global Legal Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2025

By
Leonard V. Smith
General editor
Randall Lesaffer
Edited by
Robert Kolb  and
Momchil Milanov
Randall Lesaffer
Affiliation:
KU Leuven and Tilburg University
Robert Kolb
Affiliation:
Université de Genève
Momchil Milanov
Affiliation:
International Court of Justice
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Summary

The Paris Conference assigned the League of Nations the task of continuing to construct the new international order. This in turn would restructure the international system. Through administering institutions and adjudicating issues, the League sought to reconcile the liberalism of Wilsonianism with the realities of geopolitics. Mandates, never colonies in a legal sense, posited an alternative to colonialism, however much the mandatory powers wanted to administer them as imperial domains. Minority protection sought to re-engineer citizenship itself, so that minorities could preserve the attributes that made them minorities while enabling them to become full members of the national communities of the successor states to the multinational empires. The record of the League proved the most troubled in international security, its broadest but most ill-defined area of responsibility. In Manchuria and Ethiopia, the League proved unable to prevent determined imperial expansion on the part of Japan and Italy, two founding members. The work of the League is best assessed not in categories of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, but in the new ways it posited creating a global legal order.

Keywords

League of NationsWilsonglobal legal orderjus publicum europaeummandatesminoritiesManchuriaAbyssinia
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of International Law , pp. 41 - 67
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Further Reading

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