Read: The Historical Context of the League

Did you ever have a sickening sense of loss when you learned something in life you wish you did not know? This is how it felt on a world-wide scale after World War I. Each nation involved in that war had its own motives and its own goals. None of the combatants expected the long and costly war that resulted, and by all accounts the price was staggering. It is said of this war that the world lost its innocence and learned lessons it wished never to know. No one could have conceived that human beings could commit acts against each other that characterized World War I, such as the horrors of poison gas and trench warfare. At the peace conference there were those who sought peace and there were those who sought revenge. The world knew it could not have both, so it built a forum in which differences could be negotiated and called it the League of Nations.

Meeting in Geneva in January, 1920, the League sought to be a congress that could facilitate discussion, debate, and resolution. When the original 42 nations met to form their charter, the union was weakened by the failure of some superpowers to participate and the absence of a vehicle by which to enforce its decisions. It could suggest a course of action, but it could not compel compliance. However, because states were desperate to find lasting peace, it was hoped that the strengths of the League would outweigh its weaknesses.

One of the transformations of war was the collapse of four empires. Peoples ruled by autocratic governments came to recognize that there were alternatives. Revolutions were launched in order to serve the needs of the great mass of people. Some in Russia believed that Communism offered the best model for future peace and prosperity. Upheavals also began to restructure China, India,  the Ottoman empire, and European colonial possessions in Africa. The fall of the Romanov dynasty in Russia was propelled by political, economic, and social injustices within, and serious mistakes in foreign policy abroad. In the 1904 Russo-Japanese war, Japan sought to gain the rich resources of Manchuria to fuel its industrialization. Russia had the same idea, but when the Japanese navy staged a surprise attack on the Russian base at Port Arthur and sank two thirds of the massive Russian fleet in 36 hours, Tsar Nicholas II was humiliated. Resulting criticism of the imperial Romanov government was harsh and unyielding. When Russia joined the Triple Entente some criticized the alliance as payback for earlier allied loans made to the Tsar’s regime. In addition, Russia could not defend its endless front against the aggression of the Central Powers—Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman empire. When the Allied Powers (Britain, France, Russia, and others) failed in an attempt to invade Turkey at Gallipoli, hopes were dashed for an Allied supply line to Russia. Workers and peasant farmers paid the greatest price when they were sent to the front in horse-drawn carts, sometimes even without weapons, to fight against Germany’s armored war machine. Russian farmers and workers were placed in situations in which they had nothing left to lose. Lenin promised “peace, land, and bread” to his Bolshevik followers. As workers’ strikes and peasant insurrections escalated the Tsar’s days became numbered. Nicholas established an elected State Assembly known as the Duma to create the illusion of popular support. The Duma, however, served at the pleasure of the crown and was soon dissolved for insubordination.

When Lenin pledged “peace, land, and bread” to his people, peace meant withdrawing from the war, which Lenin formally did in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. Lenin felt no loyalty to Russia’s former allies, Britain and France, and he made documents public which were secret until 1917. One such document was the Sykes-Picot Agreements of 1916 in which Britain and France agreed to share control of the Arab world after the war. Diplomatic embarrassment for these two countries was alarming because the agreement contradicted earlier promises made to Arab leaders. Themes of the post-war peace that U.S. President Wilson promoted included renunciation of secret treaties and calls for independence and self-determination for peoples under imperial rule.

Britain and France were the two pivotal leaders at war’s end when the League created the Mandate System in accord with Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. The U.S. and Russia were not members of the League. According to the Mandate System there were A, B, and C Level Mandates. Level A Mandates applied to lands that were to be self-governing within a short time. Until that time Palestine and Iraq were to be under British control, and Syria and Lebanon under French control. Most of Africa was in Level B, declared to be less advanced. Level C were small Pacific islands that were unlikely candidates for independence.

Newly-created states carved out of the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires after the war were given complete sovereignty and membership in the League. These included Poland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland. Imagine how news of the Mandate system was received by states of the former Ottoman empire such as Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, and how this weighed against their hopes for sovereignty. News traveled fast given new technological advancements. The masses were aware of these world events on an unprecedented scale.

If, as it is said, necessity is the mother of invention, the war pioneered new technologies that revolutionized military potential. Technological advances reached far beyond the military sphere, however. They ultimately revolutionized how humans sent messages, got places, and exchanged ideas. Technology such as the radio, telegraph, telephone, photography, movie, phonograph, automobile, and trans-oceanic flight became commonly available. These were features that made the twentieth century one world. Also, more people went abroad to study, and they came home to share new ideas they had learned.

Among the European colonies of Africa, the impact of new ideas caused both leaders and the masses to rethink traditional standards. One new idea was the notion that resources were to be used for the benefit of the people. In a continent as rich in natural resources as Africa, it was an encouraging prospect indeed. However, imperialist powers organized colonial economies in such a way that the resources flowed mostly out of the colonies and into Europe. The very nature of imperialism is built on the premise that colonies exist for the benefit of the ruling country. Telephone lines were installed in French Algeria and French Senegal, for example, but it was impossible to make a phone call between these two states without going through Paris. Railroad tracks were built in African colonies using whatever track gauge the ruling colonial power wanted. Tracks led mainly from interior points to ports where Europeans could collect precious natural resources and ship home. That is, colonial powers often did not build rail and other communications networks that linked one African colonial with another, even within a single colonial system, though such connections would have encouraged broader economic exchange within Africa.