Covenant of the League of Nations

Impact

The League of Nations described in the Covenant did, in fact, come into existence and for twenty years sought, with decreasing success, to contain the pressures leading to conflict between nations. The effects of the Covenant were immediate. In 1920 the first session of the League was held, and by the end of the 1920s it had begun to engage in several successful projects (such as halting Greece's invasion of Bulgaria in 1925, ending the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the 1930s, and initiating the World Court). League programs to abolish drug trafficking were active and even benefited from the activities of the United States, a nonmember. The League did indeed function, despite the misgivings of many. (During negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles and the League Covenant, the French premier George Clemenceau was famously skeptical of its eventual success.) Part of the League's failure must be attributed to the lack of strength given the organization as well as the absence of some sort of military option. There was no provision for an armed force or any equivalent to the peacekeeping activities that would later be performed by the United Nations.

While the Covenant and the League can be seen as failures in their inability to exercise control over the activities of aggressive nations or to prevent the outbreak of war, both did exert a positive outcome even after their demise. During World War II, the Allies, especially the United States, saw the need for an international organization. Weaknesses in both structure and organization served as a model for how things could go wrong. The League, as defined by its Covenant, was an innovation. Nothing like it had been tried before. Despite its failure, the League that came out of the Covenant demonstrated that men emerging from an old world that had been thoroughly destroyed were capable of going beyond simple revenge and made an effort to create a system to preserve peace in a new world. That they made the effort and achieved some successes were significant achievements.