UN successes | League of Nations failures

Successes of the UN.

Chief among these is the maintenance of some semblance of global peace. At first this was through the interposing of forces between belligerents as happened in 1956 when Anglo-French forces withdrew from Egypt and the UN placed troops between Israeli and Egyptian factions. By the 1980s and the thawing of the Cold War, the superpowers began sponsoring UN operations such as:

CEASEFIRE: Ceasefire monitoring on the Iran/Iraq border;

INSURGENTS: Disarming insurgents in El Salvador and Nicaragua;

MINES: Clearing mines in Cambodia and Angola;

ELECTIONS: Monitoring elections in Cambodia and Namibia;

HUMANITARIAN: Securing humanitarian aid for such stricken zones as Bosnia;

ENCLAVES: Protecting enclaves in Iraq and Serbia.

Flaws of the League of Nations.

Chief among the considerations of those framing the UN Charter in 1945 was to avoid the mistakes of the LoN. These were:

Intergration with the Peace Treaty of 1945 which was perceived by those who came off worst from it – notably Gremany and Japan – to have been unnecessarily punitive and therefore unfair;

Toothlessness – Despite President Woodrow Wilson being the driving force behind its inception and development, the US Senate refused to ratify its Treaties and America did not become a member thus severely limiting the LoN’s powers to act. Neither was the Soviet Union invited to Versailles and indeed, Moscow did not join up until 1934;

Undefined aims – what exactly constituted and act of aggression? The Laegue failed to punish expansionist aggressors in the 1930s, a point highlighted by Noam Chomsky, outspoken critic of America’s 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, who points to a report on humanitarian intervention by Sean Murphy showing how the concept is open to interpretation. Murphy lists three interventions between the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact of Paris outlawing war and the 1945 UN Charter – Japan’s invasion of northern China, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s march into Czechoslovakia. These interventions were at least partially supported by the US and Britain at the time, notes Murphy, but with hindsight can be seen as anything but ‘humanitarian’. Why couldn’t the LoN see they were acts of aggression?

Lack of Conviction – it was all very well to suppose that members would subordinate their own sovereignty for the greater good of all, that somehow political compromise and stability could be reached through rational discourse and the enforcement of international law, but when push came to shove, who would step forward to act? As Quintin Hogg said: ‘It is right to fight for one’s own king and country, but it is against nature to die for someone else’s.’ Reinhold Niebuhr concurred, saying it was unrealistic to think man’s natural drives of acquisitiveness and aggression could be harnessed to the goal of international peace in bodies such as the LoN. For E H Carr, the entire enterprise was flawed. In the Twenty Years’ Crisis he describes the liberal internationalist ideology behind the LoN as nothing short of ‘Utopian’.