Nothing like the Leage of Nations had ever happened before.  

There is no doubt that President Wilson and his supporters saw the League as the beginning of a new world order, not just of international relations, but of justice and society – “We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established”, wrote English diplomat Harold Nicolson in 1933. 

For these idealists, the League was “a bridge between the past and the future” and the goal was no less than the benign, liberal oversight of world affairs. 

Historians who focus on this element of the League’s nature often represent its failure as a descent ‘from Utopia to Reality’. 

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By contrast, international lawyers saw the League as the victory of Law over diplomacy and politics, with a Covenant which subjected the forces of chaos and tyranny in international relations which had led to war, to a framework of rules and international law superimposed on the old diplomatic system to bring ‘peace through law’.  For the English historian Alfred Zimmern (1939), the League’s Assembly was - yes “an instrument of cooperation” – but also “a visible manifestation of the authority of the Rule of Law in the world”. 

Lawyers writing about the League’s failure often represent it as a descent ‘from Law to Politics’. 

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But other people had other ideas, and the problem with this new, undefined, international body was that everybody defined it as what they WANTED it to be. 

•  For the British Foreign Office it was a Concert of the Great Powers – a more convenient way of doing business the way it was always done (especially the Conference of Ambassadors). 

•  For the French, it was the organisation which would enforce the Treaty of Versailles (and keep Germany in its place), and they consequently spent a lot of time trying to persuade the other members of the League to set up a League Army. 

•  The English scholar Percy Corbett (1924), who served as legal advisor to the League’s International Labour Office, thought that the League was a Confederation – such as the Confederation of German statelets before Germany united to became a nation-state. 

•  The French expert in international societies Georges Scelle (1932) – noting that it had the ability to make laws for its member states – described the League as a vast super-State organisation. 

•  The League’s own the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), in 1927, in a ruling on the European Commission for the Danube, declared that the Commission was ‘an international institution with a specific purpose and functions’, not a State. 

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And in reality, not theory?  The scope of the League’s duties or authority was never very clear.  Everybody is agreed that it was the first autonomous international organisation – to have its own ‘person’ in law. 

It had the right to declare war and enact sanctions, to make laws, to intervene in political situations, to organise conferences and international initiatives, to administer territories, to set up independent social and economic policy-making bodies.  But at the same time, in the Assembly and the Council, the members States were in principle (formally) masters of the League’s existence and developments, and in practice the decisions of the League were taken for it by the Great Powers. 

As the League began to fall apart in the late 1930s, the American political scientist Nealie D Houghton struggled to define the League’s mandate:

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As you study the League, you may wish to keep in your mind this image of a vast, straggling international organisation, yet with no real powers or budget, desperately picking its way through the crises and complexities of international diplomacy, with all the different hopes of millions pinned upon it.