The League of Nations

Officially, Wilson was the League of Nations’ trailblazer; but he plucked the idea from the principles of liberalism and democracy. Liberal and democratic thought has always contained the germs of pacific and internationalist aspirations. Bourgeois civilization has internationalized human life, as the development of capitalism has demanded the international circulation of products. Capital has expanded, connected, and created associations across borders, and for this reason has for some time been laissez-faire and pacifist. Wilson’s program was therefore no more than a return of bourgeois thought to its internationalist inclinations.

But the Wilsonian program found an undefeatable resistance in the conquering powers’ nationalist interests and desires, powers who consequently sabotaged and fatally frustrated Wilson’s plans in the peace conference. Wilson, compelled to compromise by the deftness and agility of the Allied statesmen, thought that the foundation of the League of Nations would compensate for the sacrifice of any of his Fourteen Points. The savvy politicians of the Entente spotted and exploited this stubborn idea.

Wilson’s project was to be shrewdly deformed, mutilated, and sterilized. An unstable, limited League of Nations was born in Versailles, in which the vanquished nations, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, etc, held no seat, and which furthermore lacked Russia, a nation of one hundred million inhabitants, whose production and consumption are indispensable to the life of the rest of Europe.

Once Harding replaced Wilson, the United States abandoned the Versailles pact. Without the United States’ intervention, the League of Nations was reduced to the modest proportions of a league of Allied powers and their small or unarmed client nations in Europe, Asia, and America. And as the very cohesion of the Entente itself was undermined by a series of rival interests, the League, within its shrunken confines, could no longer be called even an alliance or organic solidarity association.

For all these reasons, the League of Nations’ existence has been an anemic and stunted one. The economic and political problems of the peace have not been discussed within its halls except in special meetings and conferences, and the League has lacked the authority, capability, and jurisdiction to deal with them. The governments of the Entente have left to it only meager issues, and have turned the League into something of a judge of peace of international justice. Some transcendent questions — arms reductions, labor regulations, etc. — have been handed over to its dictate and vote. But the function of the League in these fields has been circumscribed to the dispersion of study materials or the recommendations which, despite their prudence and deliberation, almost no government has carried out or even heard. One of the League’s dependent organs — the International Labour Organization — has sanctioned, for example, certain labor rights, among them the eight-hour work day, while immediately afterward, capitalism has undertaken in Germany, France, and other nations a fervent campaign, ostensibly with the state’s blessing, against the eight-hour work day. As for the question of arms reductions, in which debate the League of Nations has made almost no headway, the matter was instead broached in Washington in a conference ignorant and indifferent to its existence.

On the occasion of the Greek-Italian conflict, the League of Nations suffered another blow. Mussolini boisterously rebelled against its authority, and the League was unable to reprimand or moderate this acid gesture of martial and imperialist politicking by the leader of the Blackshirts.

However, the proponents of democracy do not want for hope that the League of Nations will acquire the authority and capability it lacks. Throughout most of the world, groups charged with obtaining global acceptance and real respect for the League are producing propaganda toward these ends. Nitti advocates for its reorganization upon the following grounds: adherence to the United States, and the incorporation of the conquered countries. Keynes himself, who maintains an acutely skeptical and distrusting posture towards the League of Nations, admits the possibility that it may yet transform itself into a powerful instrument of peace. Ramsay MacDonald, Herriot, Painlevé, Boncour, place it under their protection and auspices. Democracy’s leaders say that an organization like the League can only operate effectively after a prolonged experimental period and through a slow development process.

But the concrete reasons for the League of Nations’ current impotence and ineffectiveness are neither its youth nor its incipience. They derive from a deeper cause: the decadence and erosion of the individualist regime. The historical position of the League of Nations is, clearly and precisely, the same historical position as liberalism and democracy. Democracy’s politicians work for a transaction, for a compromise between the conservative and revolutionary ideas, and the League, in congruence with this orientation, tends to reconcile the bourgeois State’s nationalism with the internationalism of the new humanity. The conflict between nationalism and internationalism is the root of the decadence of the individualist regime. The bourgeoisie’s politics are nationalist; its economy is internationalist. The tragedy of Europe consists precisely in the rebirth of nationalist passions and war-hungry states of mind, in which all projects of international assistance and cooperation on the path towards European reconstruction run aground.

Even if it were to acquire the support of all the nations of Western civilization, the League of Nations would not fulfill the role that its inventors and exponents assign to it. Within it, the conflicts and rivalries inherent to the nationalist structures of States would reproduce themselves. The League of Nations may bring the people’s delegates together, but it cannot bring the people themselves together. It would not eliminate the contrasts and antagonisms which separate and make enemies of them. Within the League, the alliances and pacts that group the nations into blocs would persist.

The far left sees the League of Nations as an association of bourgeois States, an international organization of the dominant class. But democracy’s politicians have managed to attract the leaders of the social-democratic proletariat to the League of Nations. Albert Thomas, Secretary of the International Labour Office, comes from the ranks of French socialism. The division of the proletarian camp into maximalism and minimalism has, toward the League of Nations, the same characteristic expressions as with regard to the other democratic forms and institutions.

The rise of the Labour Party to the English government injected a bit of vigor and optimism into democracy. The adherents of the democratic, centrist, evolutionist ideology predicted the bankruptcy of reaction and the right. They enthusiastically signaled the decomposition of the French National Bloc, the crisis of Italian fascism, the incapability of the Spanish Directory, and the fizzling out of the Pan-Germanists’ putschist plans.

These facts indicate, in effect, the failure of the right, of reaction, and announce a new return to the democratic system and evolutionist praxis. But other deeper, and more grave and extensive facts reveal, and have for some time now, that the global crisis is a crisis of democracy, its methods, and its institutions, and that through guesswork and contradictory movements, society’s organization might slowly adapt itself to a new human ideal.