The League of Nations

L’étude des travaux préparatoires du Pacte de la Société des Nations invite à revenir aux origines d’une controverse qui est toujours au centre de problèmes actuels, comme celui de la réforme du Conseil de Sécurité ou celui de la focalisation de la justice pénale internationale sur les ressortissants d’Etats faibles et anciennement colonisés. Cette controverse tourne autour de la question de savoir comment assurer l’efficacité d’une organisation internationale universelle sans institutionnaliser par là un impérialisme arbitraire, ou sans faire perdre toute indépendance à des Etats représentant des peuples soucieux de s’autodéterminer. En 1919, lors de l’élaboration de l’instrument fondateur de la première organisation de maintien de la paix à vocation universelle, quelle réponse fut apportée à cette question et pourquoi ?
Le Pacte et la Société qu’il établit sont connus pour leur inefficacité à prévenir la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et il n’est pas spécialement méconnu qu’ils véhiculaient un certain impérialisme de la part des vainqueurs du premier conflit mondial. Dans un très grand nombre de travaux toutefois, le Pacte est présenté de manière plus précise comme le projet idéaliste et désintéressé du Président américain Woodrow Wilson, qui n’est malheureusement pas parvenu à imposer une organisation efficace à des partenaires plus réticents. D’origine principalement états-unienne, cette présentation consiste à dénoncer dans le conservatisme européen la source de l’inefficacité du projet porté par le Président des Etats-Unis. Une telle vision des choses est radicalement infirmée par l’examen des projets de Pacte, et par celui du contexte et du déroulement de sa négociation. En effet, plutôt qu’en une véritable concertation multilatérale, la négociation du Pacte consista grosso modo en l’imposition d’un compromis entre Britanniques et Etats-uniens aux Français, puis aux autres Etats membres de la Commission où le Pacte se négociait officiellement, et enfin aux autres Etats présents à la Conférence de Paris. En outre, les négociations montrent que la position de Woodrow Wilson était tournée vers les intérêts de son pays et même vers les siens propres, et qu’il est l’un des principaux responsables de la faiblesse des institutions de la Société. Ainsi, les défauts du Pacte et de la Société étaient déjà connus pour la plupart d’entre eux, et leurs principaux remèdes, présentés par plusieurs délégations et fermement défendus par la délégation française, ne furent pas adoptés en raison de l’opposition opiniâtre des délégations britanniques et états-uniennes. Au nom d’une certaine idée de la souveraineté étatique, celles-ci firent le choix de s’opposer aux transferts de compétences qui auraient permis à la Société de réagir efficacement en cas d’usage de la force.
Si l’inefficacité du Pacte découle des choix faits en ce sens par les Etats en position de force en 1919, l’intégration dans la Charte des Nations Unies des propositions innovantes avancées durant les négociations du Pacte (concernant l’efficacité de l’organisation, les droits de l’homme ou la justice pénale internationale) découle quant à elle du choix inverse faits par les mêmes Etats en 1945.

The internationalists of the last century are, it turns out, quite relevant to our current crisis: they helped us get here, and they offer us no way out.

A review of Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists: How A Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (Simon & Schuster, 2017).

At the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was publicly excluded from the European ‘civilizing mission’. The victorious Allies stripped Germany of its overseas empire. The German colonies were awarded to other imperial powers as mandates under the League of Nations. This action was justified by citing colonial atrocities, such as the German campaign against the Herero, which were used to label Germans as ‘exceptionally
cruel colonial masters’ and ‘unfit imperialists’. Yet, during the tenure of the League’s mandate system, several former German colonial officials rose to prominence in the League of Nations as ‘imperial experts’.
The involvement of German colonial officials in League agencies and events suggests that, although no longer part of an imperial power and officially ostracized from the ‘work of civilization’, Germans remained
adaptive contributors to international discourses on empire. In order to determine how individual Germans and lobbying interests were able to make use of the spirit of internationalism to minimize their association
with ‘unfit imperialists’ and re-establish themselves as ‘fellow civilizers’, this paper focuses on the interwar careers and interactions of two colonial officials: Dr Ludwig Kastl and Dr Julius Ruppel—former bureaucrats who had served in the African colonies, each of whom became German members on the PMC.

For nearly a century, it has been assumed that self-determination of the world's peoples through creation and territorial guarantee of independent, ethnically defined polities was central if not essential to Woodrow Wilson's vision for a peaceful world order. Nothing could be further from the truth, and failure to appreciate the integrative rather than fissiparous character of Wilson's vision has impoverished the international political imagination ever since--with disastrous consequences for peace and democracy worldwide.

At the commencement of the First World War, New Zealand military forces took control of Western Samoa, which had been under German colonial administration since 1900. From December 1920, in accordance with the provisions of the charter of the League of Nations established post-war to foster international security, New Zealand administered Western Samoa as a “Class C Mandate”. This paper draws on records in the League of Nations Archive in Geneva to examine interactions between the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) and the New Zealand government concerning the administration of these islands.  Far from delivering perfunctory oversight of annual reports submitted by the “Mandatory Power” (ie, New Zealand), the Commission scrutinized all aspects of New Zealand’s administration of Western Samoa’s government and society. Indeed, under this close scrutiny New Zealand’s attitude toward its responsibilities under the Mandate seems to have become increasingly diligent. The accountability mechanisms developed by the Permanent Mandates Commission can be regarded as an early step in the emergence of international governance.

Gustav Stresemann, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and German Foreign Minister of the 1920s, is well-known for the international cooperation of the Weimar Republic with Europe’s great powers. He simultaneously pursued a peaceful modification of the eastern boundaries of Germany, while accepting the reality of the Versailles system. This paper analyses the change in Germanys relations with her eastern neighbours, as well as Stresemann’s intentions to achieve border revisions and to support German minorities abroad. It is especially exciting to consider the purposes of the German approach to the Soviet Union in Stresemann’s program, and if this could have been used to force concessions from the West. The study also sheds light on why Stresemann overestimated the revisionist potential of the ocarno Treaties, and on the remaining possibilities of border revisions that existed at the end of his six-year tenure as Foreign Minister.

When and why do powerful countries seek to enact major changes to international order, the broad set of rules that condition behavior in world politics? This question is particularly important today, as Donald Trump's apparent disregard for the liberal international order and uncertainty over what China might seek to replace it with mean that queries about great power motives vis-à-vis order will remain at the forefront of debates over the future of world politics. In seeking to explain this phenomenon, prior studies have focused on the consensus-driven and inclusive origins of international orders. By contrast, I argue in this book that the propelling motivation for great power order building at important historical junctures has most often been exclusionary, centered around combatting other actors rather than cooperatively engaging with them. My core contention is that dominant actors pursue fundamental changes to order only when they perceive a major new threat on the horizon, a threat to their security or to their enduring primacy. When these actors-the great powers of world politics-seek to enact fundamentally new order principles, they do so for the purpose of targeting this perceived threat, be it another powerful state, a contrary alliance or a foreboding ideological movement. The goal of order building, then, is weakening, opposing and above all excluding that threatening entity from amassing further influence in world politics. Far from falling outside the bounds of traditional statecraft, order building is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, the continuation of power politics by other means.

The French movement supporting the League of Nations was the direct descendant of the legal pacifism which, prior to 1914, strove among other goals to create a “league of nations” whose birth was ultimately hastened by the advent of World War One. Despite the hostility of the French government, a movement supporting the concept of the League of the Nations slowly emerged in the midst of the conflict between 1916 and 1918, as was also the case in the United States and Great Britain. Born of the peace treaties of 1919, the nascent League disappointed its French advocates, however, who fought for its improvement by attempting to build public support. Yet unlike the British movement, French activists failed to form a cohesive organization. A disjointed series of endeavors, coupled with a limited number of devoted activists and a paucity of resources, significantly impeded the effectiveness of the movement, which was led by an elite cadre of politicians and intellectuals, the majority of whom hailed from radical movements (Léon Bourgeois, Émile Borel, Célestin Bouglé, Jean Hennessy, Joseph Paul-Boncour, Georges Scelle, Théodore Ruyssen, Jules Prudhommeaux, Robert Lange, René Cassin, Pierre Cot, etc.). After difficult beginnings, their propaganda met with greater success in the second half of the 1920s, only to decline irrevocably in the 1930s as a result of the repeated failures of the League of Nations. The original activists who survived World War Two launched a new crusade in support of the United Nations but with little success.

By turning to history, The Internationalists opens up a possible direction for American foreign policy going forward. Rather than endorse humanitarian interventions that threaten state sovereignty, Hathaway and Shapiro suggest a more modest agenda: buttress the international system as it stands. Better to uphold norms against conquest than to launch semi-conquests of our own. Yet like the liberal interventionists they seek to supersede, the authors continue to overrate American power as the guarantor of global norms. Their reclamation of past internationalists turns out, on inspection, to be suspiciously nationalist. In the name of recovering lost alternatives, they divert us from more potent replacements, then and now.

Traducido del inglés por Nélida Devesa-Gómez

La Primera Guerra Mundial figura sólo tangencialmente en la historiografía haitiana, ya que fue eclipsada por los análisis de la ocupación de Estados Unidos (1915-1934). Este silencio entre los especialistas oscurece el impacto cultural e intelectual que tuvo la Primera Guerra Mundial en Haití. Este ensayo considera un ejemplo primordial como es el indigénisme, un movimiento cultural nacionalista que emergió de los años 1920 y que buscaba identificar los elementos de la cultura haitiana pura. Si este movimiento fue catalizado como una pérdida de soberanía política bajo la Ocupación de Estados Unidos, es erróneo caracterizar la Ocupación como la única fuente de esta búsqueda de una identidad nacional. La finalidad de este estudio es reincorporar la Primera Guerra Mundial en la historiografía del periodo para poder evaluar su contribución al nacionalismo cultural haitiano.

English:
The First World War figures only parenthetically in Haitian historiography, eclipsed by analyses of the US Occupation (1915–1934). This silence in scholarship obscures the cultural and intellectual impact of the First World War in Haiti. This paper considers one such example in indigénisme, a cultural nationalist movement that emerged in the 1920s and which sought to identify elements of a purely Haitian culture.  If this movement was catalyzed by a loss of political sovereignty under the US Occupation, it is wrong to characterize the Occupation as the sole source of this quest for a national identity. This study aims to reinsert the First World War into the historiography of the period so that we might evaluate its contribution to the articulation of Haitian cultural nationalism. 

French:
La Première Guerre mondiale ne figure que très peu dans l’historiographie haïtienne, éclipsée par des analyses de l’Occupation Américaine (1915–1934). Ce silence historiographique cache cependant de vrais impacts intellectuels et culturels de la Grande Guerre en Haïti. A titre d’exemple, nous examinerons l’indigénisme, un mouvement de nationalisme culturel qui apparaît dans les années 1920 et qui cherche à identifier les éléments d’une culture proprement haïtienne. Si ce mouvement est catalysé par la perte de souveraineté sous le joug de l’occupant, on a tort de caractériser l’Occupation comme source unique de cette nouvelle quête d’identité nationale. Cette étude vise à réinsérer la Première Guerre mondiale dans l’historiographie de la période afin d’évaluer sa contribution à l’articulation du nationalisme culturel haïtien.

This chapter is an exploration of Weimar and Nazi German colonialism focusing on the Pacific Mandates. It is published as: (Un-)mixing in the Mandate: purity and persistence of ‘German-time’ in New Guinea, Norig Neveu, Philippe Bourmaud and Chantal Verdeil (Eds), Experts et expertise dans les mandats de la Société des Nations : figures, champs et outils, [The Expert in the Mandate], Inalco Presses, 2020.

“Unmixing” is a central term in the debates to bring stability and peace after WWI by ethnically homogenising regions and new nations: “… to unmix tlie (sic) populations of the Near East will tend to secure the true pacification of the Near East…” (Fritzhof Nansen, Lausanne Conference, Quoted by Sadia Abbas, Unmixing, Politicalconcepts, 2012.) So how did the nations with aspirations to ‘rule’ New Guinea deal with what could not be ‘un-mixed’: people of mixed descent, and what did this mean for German-New Guineans?
            This chapter is an exploration of Weimar and Nazi German colonialism focusing on the Pacific Mandates. It focuses on leagacies of German colonialism after the end of the formal German colonial empire. The crisis of the League of Nations destabilized the legitimacy of Mandate rule in the Pacific during the mid-1930s. Purity and persistence of Germanness became a theme for both the Mandate Administration and the Third Reich. In this chapter I explore the role and function of Germans of ambiguous racial belonging, namely mixed-race German Pacific Islanders, in a wider contest of expert advice and policy development. Racial scientists, German missionaries and ex-colonial officials all had a stake in the future of the Mandated Territories, and its mixed-race German population. Depending on the argument and on their place of residency – Germany or the Pacific – mixed-race German-Pacific Islanders were used as fellow Germans or as ‘natives’ to legitimize German claims.
This is an open book edition: https://books.openedition.org/pressesinalco/37738

"El libro que me honro en prologar es uno de los más importantes que sobre la Guerra de España se han publicado en los últimos años. Esta afirmación puede sorprender a más de un lector. El período 1936- 1939 es, en efecto, el mejor estudiado en nuestra historia contemporánea. Ahora bien, no todos los libros que se publican sobre tan dramático episodio son de igual calidad o de parecidas ambiciones. El autor de esta obra ha apuntado muy alto y ha jugado muy fuerte. David Jorge, en esta su primera gran obra, se ha adentrado en territorio muy poco explorado monográficamente: el papel de la Sociedad de Naciones en la Guerra de España. Parece mentira que hasta ahora no se le hubiese otorgado la importancia que merece. Este libro defiende, documental y teóricamente, la crucial importancia de los factores externos, exógenos, para explicar tanto la derrota de la República como el triunfo de los sublevados. La no aplicación de los preceptos del Derecho Internacional asestó un golpe mortal al gobierno republicano. Su sustitución por una política de no intervención, que siempre funcionó a favor de Franco, acentuó tal letalidad. Debo recomendar a la atención de los amables lectores esta obra y a su autor, un historiador de las nuevas generaciones nacidas en democracia, que con habilidad, destreza y maestría ejemplifica hasta qué punto la antorcha de la investigación sobre la guerra española está pasando a buenas manos".

ÁNGEL VIÑAS

"En este libro de investigación profunda y exposición lúcida, David Jorge dice la verdad al poder. Demuestra cómo durante la Guerra de España (1936-1939) las democracias occidentales -Gran Bretaña, Francia y también los Estados Unidos- desplegaron una política de ´no intervención´ cuyos efectos aniquilaron la joven democracia española asediada por el fascismo internacional. Sumamente intervencionista en la práctica, y de dudosa legalidad, la ´no intervención´ fue promovida por las élites de estos tres países porque creyeron que era la estrategia más eficaz para sus propios intereses políticos, tanto internos como imperialistas. Pero al obrar así, estas mismas democracias occidentales coadyuvaron en la liquidación de la Sociedad de Naciones, ya gravemente dañada por una serie de fracasos anteriores de los que también fueron parcialmente responsables. Es más: al echar por tierra la política de seguridad colectiva, que fue el principio clave del que nació la Sociedad de Naciones, las democracias occidentales también destruían lo único que protegía a sus propios ciudadanos ante el nuevo conflicto mundial que se avecinaba".

HELEN GRAHAM

"Este impresionante libro va a marcar un auténtico hito en la historiografía sobre los aspectos internacionales y diplomáticos de la Guerra de España. Redactado en un estilo claro y contundente, el trabajo del Dr. David Jorge no sólo se distingue por el rigor de sus investigaciones, basadas todas en una sólida labor de archivo, sino también por su originalidad -propone marcos interpretativos innovadores que cambian el campo de forma sustancial- y por la valentía con la que desafía lecturas comúnmente aceptadas".

SEBASTIAAN FABER

In recent years, the League of Nations has come back into fashion. Historians, international lawyers and political scientists no longer view this organisation only in terms of its failure to maintain peace and security after the First World War. Instead, the League is reinterpreted as a laboratory of global economic, political and humanitarian governance.Picking up on this trend, The League of Nations-Perspectives from the Present displays a wide variety of cutting-edge research on the many ways the League of Nations shaped its time and continues to shape our contemporary world. The book is an accessible and richly illustrated edited volume that offers bite-size studies into how the League affected the world around it and the lives of the people who became part of this 'first great experiment' in international organisation.Together, the many contributions demonstrate how the League of Nations served as an 'academic site' where international his-toryas a disciplinehas re-invented itself by integrating new approaches from social, cultural and media history. With an introduction by Director-General Michael Møller of the United Nations Organisation in Geneva, this work is a timely reminder of the fragile, varied and enduring history of multilateralism on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles was an extremely harsh document that demanded exorbitant reparations from the German people for a war they did not start.  The result of the harsh treatment of Germany in the peace terms gave rise to Adolf Hitler and National Socialism.

France sought to pin the entire war squarely on the shoulders of the German people.  The aim was to turn Germany into an agrarian society that would never again be able to wage war.  What the treaty accomplished was to incite anger and frustration in the German people that led to the rise of their “savior”, Adolf Hitler.

The head of the German delegation, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, stated a confession of sole guilt on the part of Germany for the war, coming out of his mouth would be like telling a lie.  While admitting that Germany bore a responsibility for the war, he noted that there were other poisonous situations that had been developing in Europe some 50 years prior to the outbreak of the World War which contributed to the conflict.  He also pointed out that the assassination of Archduke Franz Josef, the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne, was not the sole cause of the conflict. 

We can argue that the implementation of the Treaty of Versailles was one of the worst incidents in international relations.  It gave rise to an era of nationalism and hatred in Germany that could have been avoided.  Most of the Entente leaders allowed personal feelings of hate and anger to override logic and critical thinking.  Had they adhered to  Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, Germany would have had much less strife and economic woe. The lack of foresight by leaders such as Georges Clemenceau led to the eventual rise of Adolf Hitler. 

The Treaty of Versailles demanded much from Germany, not only acknowledgment of guilt for starting the war, but an enormous monetary reparation that could not be repaid for decades.  The clauses of the Treaty as well as the concessions and military restrictions it imposed forced Germany to an almost agrarian status.  Couple that with sentiments of the German military and citizenry against those thought responsible for the loss, and you have an explosive situation; a powder keg just waiting to be ignited.

The World War I marked dramatic changes in international political landscape as evidence by the catastrophic costs of the Great War and an increasing role of the U.S. in world stage. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the U.S and other victorious nations, established the League of Nations. The primary goal of the League was to prevent any future world wars, sustain world peace as well as promote international cooperation.
This article investigates the significance of the League of Nations, influenced by liberalism, on the development of international system during the interwar period. Labelled as “Utopianism” from the realist camps according to its failure to prevent the outbreak of the World War II; nevertheless, this article argues that the creation of the League reflects a significant breakthrough of the very first institutionalized international politics of the 20th century. More importantly, even the League’s actual performance was disappointing in preventing another devastating war, its legacies as well as the spirit of liberalism live on.

An assessment of the just war tradition and its applicability in the contemporary world. The three facets of just war - jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum, are analysed in context of their practical use to states in governing warfare in the 21st century. Particular focus on the erosion of ad bellum and in bello practice by the UN system and the subversion of post bellum principles by the privatisation of warfare. Published in Issue X of the Manchester Review of Law, Crime and Ethics, Nov 2021.

Over the last two decades, the "new international order" of 1919 has grown into an expansive new area of research across multiple disciplines. With the League of Nations at its heart, the interwar settlement's innovations in international organizations, international law, and many other areas shaped the world we know today. This book presents the first study of the relationship between this new international order and the new regional order in Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Habsburg empire. An analysis of the co-implication of these two orders is grounded in four key scholarly interventions: understanding the legacies of empire in international organizations; examining regionalism in the work of interwar international institutions; creating an integrated history of the interwar order in Europe; and testing recent claims of the conceptual connection between nationalism and internationalism. With chapters covering international health, international financial oversight, human trafficking, minority rights, scientific networks, technical expertise, passports, commercial treaties, borders and citizenship, and international policing, this book pioneers a regional approach to international order, and explores the origins of today's global governance in the wake of imperial collapse.

This research argues that during the inter-war years in Palestine, British power was dependent upon intelligence. Intelligence was fundamental to the security of the country, since it varyingly augmented understrength force, or supported overwhelming force. Intelligence also supported policymakers as issues of governance were debated. It allowed British decision makers to avoid making a decision on self-government during the 1920s and it supported Britain’s failed attempts to introduce a constitution during the 1930s. Intelligence also was crucial to Britain’s relations with the Arab nationalist and Zionist communities. Of particular importance was Britain’s partnership and subsequent war with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. This thesis sheds new light on the role of intelligence in British colonial policymaking, the development of the Arab-Zionist conflict, and how Britain failed to manage communal violence.
This research offers a new and improved explanation of the origins, unfolding, and defeat of the Palestinian Arab rebellion. British intelligence and policymakers failed to grasp the sophistication of the Palestinian national movement until the mid-1930s, and even then, they focused on clan competition and the politics of ‘notables’. Intelligence and military records explain how British police and military struggled, but ultimately succeeded to suppress and defeat this rebellion. Victory was made possible by innovations within the intelligence and planning staffs, as well as Zionist cooperation.
Intelligence shaped policy most clearly at the beginning and end of the period under examination. During 1918-20, the military government was administered by intelligence officers who guaranteed Britain’s future control in Palestine both domestically, and at the League of Nations. In 1939, British policy abandoned its traditional Zionist partners when the need to impose a solution on Palestine coincided with the opportunity, revealed by signals intelligence, to bolster and leverage the influence of ‘Abdul ‘Aziz ibn Sa’ud over the Arab national movement.

Цель главы - подвести баланс просчетов и достижений Лиги Наций в деле создания инструментов коллективной безопасности в Европе в межвоенный период. Глава начинается с краткого обзора точек зрения современников и исследователей, выявления тех ответов, которые давались в различные исторические периоды, на вопрос о том, почему Лига Наций, образованная по итогам Первой мировой войны, не смогла предотвратить второго разрушительного конфликта. Далее автор выявляет достижения и просчеты Лиги Наций в сфере обеспечения коллективной безопасности, обратив особое внимание на попытки сдерживания агрессии и деэскалации напряженности именно с опорой на Устав международной организации, а не на региональные или двусторонние пакты.
Подытоживая главу и взвешивая на символических весах просчеты и достижения Лиги Наций как инструмента обеспечения коллективной безопасности в Европе, И.Э. Магадеев соглашается с точкой зрения, что просчеты оказались более весомыми. Вместе с тем не стоит забывать о том, что Лига Наций не была полноценным самостоятельным актором международных отношений, а ее действия определялись констелляцией интересов ведущих держав.

Paul Valéry est, pour bien des lecteurs, avant tout l’auteur de "La Jeune Parque" et le théoricien de la « poésie pure ». Mais tout au long de son existence Valéry a aussi placé les idées politiques au centre de ses efforts expressifs, depuis ses tout premiers textes (comme « La conquête méthodique »), jusqu’à la « Crise de l’esprit » et aux "Regards sur le monde actuel" ; et il n’a pas manqué de s’investir activement dans des initiatives publiques, notamment pro-européennes, entre autres au sein de la Société des Nations.
Cette édition vise à rassembler et à présenter aux lecteurs la vaste production inédite de cet auteur ayant trait à l’actualité. Elle permet de mesurer toute l’importance du thème politique pour Valéry, et de mieux situer dans leur contexte général ses textes les plus connus sur l’actualité. Elle permet aussi et surtout de comprendre la conception que Valéry a de la Cité (de ses idéaux et de ses valeurs), ainsi que sa conception du rôle de l’homme de lettres dans le monde, sur les traces d’une définition d’«engagement » très différente des définitions arrêtées par Zola et par Sartre.
Après le Valéry formaliste des années 60 et 70, un Valéry politique s'esquisse ici, avec ses réflexions toujours d’actualité sur les difficultés, et les enjeux, du vivre ensemble dans nos sociétés.

This paper includes:
- contributions of Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Stresemann for the Weimar Republic
- data of the specific events and years from 1918 - 1929
- comparison of their contributions, failures and successes
- slight changes to points from the textbook
This paper is adapted from OCR, GCSE Modern World History, Third Edition History textbook

The paper views three major events that caused the collapse of the League of Nations, followed by the breakout of World War II. The findings of study cover the essential reasons of the breakdown of the League on the basis of analytical investigation approach to the events of 1930s Europe and Far East. The paper relies on qualitative research method along with the applied discourse analysis. The collapse of the organization resulted in the World War II, and identification of the root causes would definitely explain motives of a new world war. The research is studied based on the qualitative method through applying discourse analysis strategy.

Ce commentaire des articles 8 et 9 du Pacte de la Société des Nations met en évidence les rapports entre le désarmement et le système de sécurité collective mis en place par ce Pacte. Pilier de la Société des Nations, le désarmement n'échappe pas aux ambiguïtés et limites de l'ancêtre de l'ONU.

In 1918, some 500,000 Ottoman Armenians found themselves displaced from their homes or living in Muslim households in the Eastern Mediterranean and the South Caucasus. For most, life did not return to normal after WWI. Rather, new wars, war scares, political manoeuvrings, economic policies, famines, and epidemics during 1918–1930 resulted in a long-term refugee crisis that was responded to by a large number of Armenian and non-Armenian organizations. This article looks at one such response: the humanitarian relocation to Canada of 110 boys and 39 girls and women—all genocide refugees and most of them orphans. It traces how this relocation campaign was realized despite Canadian immigration authorities' long-standing efforts to keep Asians, the impoverished, and the stateless from entering the country. Breaking with the often simplistic and celebratory tone of the literature on humanitarian aid to Ottoman Armenians, this article discusses how the preceding fundraising campaigns of 1880–1922 were a liability for this subsequent relocation project, and it pays special attention to the people and ideas that opposed it.

Esta obra reúne resultados de investigación especializados a propósito de la participación de América Latina en los organismos internacionales del periodo de entreguerras que tuvieron como eje a la Sociedad de Naciones. Los autores invitados, todos ellos especialistas en la materia, reflexionan sobre el lugar de la región en el espacio ginebrino y profundizan en las políticas y acciones ejecutadas por actores diversos del internacionalismo en una etapa compleja de universalización. Bajo la coordinación de Fabián Herrera León y Yannick Wehrli, participan en este libro destacados estudiosos de la historia de las relaciones internacionales: Thomas Fischer, José Antonio Sánchez Román, Itzel Toledo García, Héctor Domínguez Benito, Agustín Sánchez Andrés, David Jorge, Alexandra Pita González, Juliette Dumont y Norberto O. Ferreras.

México, Dirección General del Acervo Histórico Diplomático de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2019, 373 pp. (ISBN: 978-607-446-150-3)

This article explores the role of the League of Nations in state formation in Third World or peripheral states and its legacy for contemporary understandings of Third World sovereignty. It examines Iraq under British Mandate, and UN and Coalition of the Willing interventions. This research was prompted by the international law community's outrage when the Coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003. While the invasion was seen by many as an affront to international law, there was also something familiar about the Coalition's reasoning for the invasion. This feeling of deja vu escalated once regime change was followed by lengthy nation-building. The idea of recreating Iraq was not a new one. The British were tasked with something similar under the League of Nations Mandate System. UN interventions into failed states also attempt comparable transformations. Indeed, the more one contemplates international law's interventions in Iraq, the less shocking the Coalition's invasion becomes. It starts seeming foreseeable and even inevitable.