This is a single-author lecture volume: six Williamstown Institute of Politics lectures on the League of Nations, framed by A. Lawrence Lowell’s foreword. Rappard’s scope is not a legal commentary on the Covenant but an institutional reading from Geneva, where a Swiss small-state perspective makes law, publicity, and judicial settlement appear as necessities rather than ornaments.
But the League is not a wall which limits the horizon. It is comparable rather to a prism in which the politics of the nations are reflected or to a telescope through which they may be observed and studied at close quarters.
Rappard’s argument begins from Switzerland’s vulnerability. Geneva’s internationalism is not moral vanity but political experience: small states need law because power is not on their side.
As municipal law is the sole protection of widows and orphans, so is international law, in the last resort, the sole protection of small nations.
The book’s central conceptual move is the famous division of the League into three overlapping institutions, each with different members, motives, and moral dangers.
A close analysis of this text and of the Covenant which was drafted as a result of its adoption, as well as even a cursory study of the League’s activities in the course of the last five and a half years, will show that what came into being in Paris in 1919 was not one League of Nations, but in reality three Leagues in one: a League to execute the peace treaties, a League to promote international coöperation, and a League to outlaw war.
Chapters II and III test the first two “Leagues.” The League executing the peace treaties is politically compromised because it is dominated by victors, yet Rappard refuses simple dismissal. Mandates are born from imperial compromise, but the Permanent Mandates Commission turns reports, expertise, and publicity into real restraint. Minorities protection is weaker: the Council is too political to be a court. Still, petitions, debate, and Geneva’s informal pressure moderate nationalist oppression.
For the League it is a liability, but for the peace it is, although rather heavily mortgaged, an asset.
The League of cooperation is treated more warmly. Austria’s reconstruction, customs simplification, and the drug traffic show the League’s practical method: technical committees prepare, the Council authorizes, the Assembly publicizes, and governments ratify only what they accept. Its greatest product is not command but habit.
The spirit of friendly coöperation and honest compromise which this coöperation has, in the course of the last years, very happily succeeded in fostering in Geneva, is perhaps the greatest achievement of the League.
Yet Rappard repeatedly insists that this is not a super-state. The League’s weakness is also the condition of its legitimacy.
Not being a super-State, this League cannot coerce any of its members.
Chapters IV and V turn to the League to outlaw war. Rappard traces the movement from Wilsonian hopes for a League to enforce peace toward the more modest reality of publicity, treaty revision, arbitration, sanctions, and disarmament. His deepest claim is that sanctions without judicial settlement may entrench power rather than justice; the Permanent Court is therefore the League’s most durable achievement.
The outlawry of war and the establishment of permanent peace are possible only on the basis of absolute justice.
The Geneva Protocol is admired as morally advanced but politically premature. Rappard’s preferred path is the gradual enlargement of compulsory arbitration and judicial authority.
To outlaw war definitively one must first definitively establish the reign of law.
The final chapter interprets national attitudes toward the League as three policies: France and its allies seek “Security first,” the British Empire “Peace first,” and former neutrals plus many Latin American states “Justice first.” This typology explains disputes over Article 10, disarmament, the Court, and Corfu. The book closes by arguing that American participation would strengthen the justice-first element and make the League less victor-dominated. Its lasting relevance lies in showing liberal internationalism as a practical institutional problem: peace depends not on sentiment, but on procedures, publicity, law, and the willingness of sovereign states to let justice limit power.
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