3 - ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ in the Era of the League of Nations

Summary

The war to end all wars destroyed the European order and its peculiar system of international law in which the theory of ‘humanitarian intervention’ had found its natural habitat. By the end of the nineteenth century, the expansion of the European empires had subjected the entire globe to one European system of international law, but by the end of World War I the European claim to moral superiority and ‘civilisation’ had been severely weakened by the horrors of war. The answer was, in the word of one of its architects, ‘a great experiment’: the League of Nations.¹ The following decade has been variously considered as the hopeful beginning of an attempt to create an ‘improved stage in the history of humanity’;² a political innovation aimed at the creation of peaceful existence under the rule of international law;³ and the ‘pathological inflation of the law’.⁴ The League of Nations represented an attempt to institute a new type of international order based on the international rule of law. Yet, rather than abandon the distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ nations, as some apparently feared,⁵ this ‘Move to Institutions’⁶ legitimised the European powers’ leading role as ‘civilisers’ through the Mandate System.⁷ Moreover, its founding treaty created the state of tension in which the League would have to operate – the commitment to both the principle of self-determination and the leading role of the ‘civilised’ states for the advancement of the law. In this spirit, the Covenant of the League of Nations and the treaties concluded in its context introduced a number of provisions for a number of states and regions that related to matters traditionally left to the ‘domaine reservé’ of ‘civilised’ states, and thus introduced local regimes of minority protection under the auspices of the League. Attempts to institutionalise a full system for the protection of minorities in all member states of the League failed, however, not least because France and the United Kingdom resisted. These powers were ‘determined to maintain control of over a minority-protection regime of which they were the principal authors’ and they were also ‘committed to making this determination known’.⁸