The League of Nations: A League of its Own

The League of Nations has been much derided as a historical irrelevance, but it laid the foundations for an international court and established bodies that the United Nations maintains today, says Ruth Henig.

Chinese delegate addresses the League of Nations concerning the Manchurian Crisis in 1932.The conventional view of the League of Nations, which was set up by the peacemakers at the end of the First World War, is that it was a complete failure having been unable to prevent the outbreak of a second major European conflict in 1939. Some dismiss it as a total irrelevance and those who study it as ‘eccentric historians’.

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