Everyone of a certain age who passed through British secondary education will have spent a few months learning about the League of Nations, which, to my knowledge, is not a subject of academic study anywhere else. Created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the League was a global quasi-government with an expansive brief to abolish war and poverty worldwide. To read about its history is to follow it from one bruising failure to the next as it sought, inter alia, to outlaw the weapons of offensive war, set international standards of safety in the workplace, and constrain Mussolini on the world stage.
Here was the essential problem: even with the best will in the world, the League had no power to enforce any of its edicts. For this it had to rely on Britain and France, who were notorious flakes. The United States never even joined. And so it went on. The General Secretariat would pronounce, the Permanent Court of International Justice would rule, the levers would be pulled, nothing would happen. None of their high ideals were able to survive first contact with reality — that is to say, state expediency and national egoism. Whenever it counted the powers would look to their own alliances, their own security. Mussolini was left to annex Abyssinia in 1936 despite the League’s protests, because Britain and France were trying to court him as an ally; Japan was allowed to overrun Manchuria for similar reasons. It all seemed to carry a brute lesson: whatever the merits of internationalism and international law, the facts of life ran against them.
Why does English schooling fixate so much on the League, this odd sideshow? A corrective to teen idealism, maybe. These events, as told, seemed to be a mini fable in how the high ideas can’t compete against ordinary selfishness. It certainly had its appeal for teenage me: a smirker, an online troll.
But as a story this was over-keen and over-cynical. Too cynical, because it always underpriced the power of these ideas. “Why can’t we all just get along”, or, latterly, “global problems require global solutions” — these are powerful notions, at least among the very powerful. The armies that conquered Europe in the middle of the Forties were technically those of the United Nations, marching under its own banner of war: the “Honour Flag” — this just 10 years after the League of Nations was pronounced a dead letter. Had F.D.R. lived a little longer, something approaching a world state under the aegis of the UN would have resulted, with the planet governed as a kind of American-Soviet condominium — even Wendall Wilkie, his Republican rival, called for such a course. A lunatic idea, but not one that school-of-hard-knocks international realism can really assimilate.
Too cynical then, and too cynical now. Over the past 10 years almost everyone has again been announcing the decline of liberal international norms and the return of the nation state. Terrorism, strongmanism, populism, migration, and global diseases would force some collision with reality, the old niceties would be forgotten, and we would then revert to a harder and simpler form of rule under sovereign nations. What would this entail? Nearly every literary or political weekly at one point carried the front piece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as its cover. Even the vogue for the term “geopolitics” spoke to the new mood: a politics founded in expediency and the facts of life, not liberal ideas.
But nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever factors might be making the case for the nation state anew, the real story of the past decade has been a huge growth in the scope and depth of international law and obligation. These are advancing over the developed world much faster than they’re receding elsewhere.
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