William Emmanuel Rappard, Nationalism and the League of Nations Today (1933)

William Emmanuel Rappard’s published lecture, delivered before the Geneva Institute of International Relations on August 14, 1933, diagnoses the League’s crisis through three failures: its response to Japanese aggression against China, its pursuit of disarmament, and the Monetary and Economic Conference. These are connected symptoms of a political order in which governments subordinate international obligations to immediate national advantage. Rappard defends the League without disguising its impotence: meaningful international cooperation requires a stronger common authority and a corresponding limitation of national sovereignty.

The introduction places the League’s predicament within the retreat from constitutional liberty. Security, equality, and individual freedom—the achievements of earlier revolutionary struggles—are being sacrificed to states governed by self-appointed leaders. Because the League projects principles of lawful government and cooperative welfare onto international relations, domestic authoritarianism threatens its foundations. Rappard nevertheless distinguishes institutional survival from effective action. Meetings, administrative work, and diplomatic discussion retain value, but cannot establish that the League is fulfilling its central purpose.

That the world is better off today for the League of Nations is obvious to my mind. But that the League of Nations is very badly off in a world disloyal to its Covenant and indifferent to its promises, strikes me as no less obvious.

This distinction makes his criticism a defense of the League’s unrealized possibilities. Its procedures encourage mutual understanding, while its Covenant preserves an alternative to destructive nationalism. Precisely because these resources matter, official optimism is dangerous: supporters must acknowledge failure before they can prescribe remedies.

The Sino-Japanese conflict supplies the fullest demonstration. Rappard argues that Japan violated its treaty obligations by attacking China and continuing military operations after China accepted the Assembly’s recommendations. He rejects the verbal distinction between organized military aggression and “going to war.” Yet Japan’s breach, and even its withdrawal from the League, are less damaging than the international community’s refusal to enforce the Covenant. An organization designed to confront aggression cannot regard aggression itself as an unforeseen contingency.

The second and much more serious aspect of the dispute from the point of view of the League is that Japan violated the Covenant not only, as we have seen, with defiance, but also with complete impunity, and therefore, as far as one can judge historical events which have not yet run their full course, with complete success.

Article 16 provided for economic sanctions and collective protection; other members failed to carry out these undertakings. The resulting loss of confidence extends beyond China, undermining every state’s expectation of protection. Rappard acknowledges practical impediments: China’s internal divisions and the absence of the United States and Soviet Russia made effective intervention difficult. But these circumstances do not exhaust the explanation. Britain and France privileged imperial possessions, commercial interests, and diplomatic calculations; smaller states defended the Covenant without the power to enforce it. National self-interest prevailed over collective responsibility.

His account also contains a consequential qualification. Drawing on the Lytton Report, he maintains that Japan had grievances requiring peaceful adjustment, and describes its population pressures and supposed political and administrative superiority as grounds for expansion. This hierarchical judgment sits uneasily beside his defense of China against aggression. His institutional conclusion is that peace requires mechanisms for revising treaties, not merely enforcing existing arrangements. Article 19 may be insufficient: international law needs an effective capacity for lawful change if it is to avert violent revision.

The disarmament section follows directly from the collapse of collective security. Increased military expenditure demonstrates that negotiations have not produced their intended result. Discussions and tentative agreements count as progress toward understanding the problem, not necessarily toward reducing weapons. In Europe, Rappard argues, relatively peaceful states possess stronger armaments, while Germany’s aggressive regime remains constrained by military inferiority. Equalization without reliable international protection could therefore strengthen potential aggressors.

Not peace through disarmament, as one would hope and as the authors of Article 8 of the Covenant expected, is the saving formula today.

Rappard consequently treats disarmament as dependent on the organization of peace, rather than as its automatic cause. He recognizes that unequal armaments offend justice and cannot last indefinitely; nevertheless, unilateral weakening is unsafe while collective guarantees remain ineffective. The dilemma can be overcome only through peaceful national policies or an international organization capable of defending its members.

The economic argument gives the same diagnosis a material dimension. The Monetary and Economic Conference failed to stabilize currencies or reduce tariffs, leaving relations more uncertain. Postwar policies had pursued national self-sufficiency while technological and economic development made societies increasingly interdependent. Prosperity before 1929 concealed this contradiction rather than resolving it. Technical advances in production and public health mitigated nationalism’s human costs, but a brief conference could not reverse entrenched governmental policies.

No, internationalism has not failed. What has failed is contemporary international statesmanship.

The conclusion distinguishes the failure to practice internationalism from the failure of its principles. Timid, verbal cooperation, still governed by national calculations, cannot remedy the insecurity and deprivation those calculations produce. Rappard calls for movement from a Covenant overly deferential to sovereignty toward world federation. The lecture’s enduring significance lies in connecting constitutional liberty, collective enforcement, peaceful revision, disarmament, and economic interdependence: each requires governments to accept obligations that narrow national advantage alone cannot sustain.