Lost Countries by Stuart Laycock & Chris West

Author:Stuart Laycock & Chris West
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780750986809
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

WE ALL KNOW the United Nations, with its distinctive blue and white flag, and we all know some of its history. Despite all its well-known faults, it is an organisation that has since 1945 provided an ambitious framework for international cooperation and communications. It hasn’t always managed to do what it should have done, but nonetheless, the world would be a poorer and less safe place without it.

But the United Nations did not emerge from nowhere in the ashes of the Second World War. It built on an organisation much less well known today, an organisation that was, in its time, more revolutionary, more ambitious and even more flawed than the United Nations. Unlike the United Nations, the League of Nations was not an institution that had a long and distinguished history of producing stamps. It had overprints created for it, however, by the Swiss government – the league’s headquarters were in Geneva. These started in 1922 and were for use by officials working for the league. Switzerland also issued a set of commemorative stamps in 1938, celebrating the league and the International Labour Organization, also based in Geneva. These show the austere headquarters of these bodies (the league’s was called the Palace of Nations). The two showing the palace are inscribed SDN, and are sometimes confused with ‘League of Nations’ stamps – technically they are Swiss ones, unless overprinted.

For a long time before the First World War, various people had discussed the basic concept of international societies of countries that would cooperate to make the world a better and less violent place. The second half of the nineteenth century, for instance, saw the Geneva Conventions, the founding of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the first Hague Convention. The 1899 Hague Convention failed to achieve a proposed agreement on limiting armaments levels. It did, however, adopt the convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, which created the Permanent Court of Arbitration. It also agreed a ban on asphyxiating gases, on the use of expanding bullets, and on discharging projectiles or explosives from balloons. All these bans would be violated during the war that was about to engulf the globe.

Inevitably, as the full scale of the carnage that was the First World War became clear, efforts to find a path to preventing such conflicts in the future were given a huge boost. One group that promoted such ideas on both sides of the Atlantic was the Bryce Group, named after Lord Bryce, a Liberal peer and former British ambassador to the United States. Ideas from the group and others got an enthusiastic reception from the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson had been determined to end the war without actually entering it, but, in the end, German actions had forced him to take the USA into the war on the Allied side. He did not see himself as part of the old imperial European structures that had created the war; instead, he saw himself as part of a

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