William E. Rappard examines the League of Nations through its constitutional foundations, institutional development, organization of peace, and prevention of war. Based on four lectures delivered at the London School of Economics in May 1931, the book investigates the tension between an organized international community and the sovereign states that sustain and restrict it.
Rappard begins by distinguishing the explanation of existing institutions from the formulation of a better international order:
Both functions of the international lawyer are legitimate, the historic-scientific and the ethical-creative.
This distinction requires separating the League’s conduct from its founders’ intentions and its advocates’ aspirations. Rappard neither dismisses international organization because it falls short of government nor treats its existence as proof that sovereignty has been overcome.
His constitutional analysis accordingly clarifies sovereignty rather than simply opposing it to international obligation:
What we mean by national sovereignty when we ask ourselves whether the existence of the present League is compatible with that notion, is therefore not the right to do as one pleases.
The question is where predominant political authority resides. States can accept obligations while remaining the ultimate centers of political decision. Unanimity, withdrawal, domestic jurisdiction, and advisory powers preserve the League’s co-operative character. Its permanent administration, budget, mandate supervision, and responsibilities for peace nevertheless give it a corporate existence distinct from its members.
Rappard traces this ambiguity through the Covenant’s drafting history. Its architects sought safeguards against war while rejecting an authority superior to national governments. A statement reproduced in this discussion exposes the resulting limits on supervision:
But our idea has constantly been to discard the conception of a super-state, and that being the case it would seem difficult to provide for certain investigations within the borders of the associated nations.
The difficulty is structural: effective common action may require precisely those powers that governments refuse to confer.
The second chapter follows this tension through membership and the Council, Assembly, Secretariat, technical organizations, and Permanent Court. Expansion and Germany’s admission strengthen the League, while the absence of major powers weakens its universal claims. American abstention particularly complicates sanctions, since enforcement may produce conflict with a powerful outsider. Rappard also questions European-union projects that might discourage wider participation or divide economic interdependence into competing continental blocs.
Institutional growth does not uniformly strengthen international authority. Regular ministerial meetings foster collective responsibility, and publicity and budgetary authority increase the Assembly’s influence. Yet the League’s growing importance also encourages governments to tighten control over representatives, officials, experts, and judicial appointments. An enlarged Council risks separating formal responsibility from effective power when decisive negotiations remain in great-power hands.
The third chapter distinguishes administering the peace settlements from promoting international co-operation. Association with the treaties alienates defeated states, but also helps establish the League and provides alternatives to outright annexation. Rappard’s criterion is impartiality: treaty administration should represent the international community rather than serve the victors. The independent membership of the Mandates Commission illustrates how institutional arrangements can restrain national antagonism.
Technical co-operation offers a related lesson. Success is easier where national benefits are immediate and measurable, as in health work, than where agreement demands sacrifices from entrenched interests, as in tariff and migration policy. Even inconclusive conferences can establish habits of consultation and relationships of trust.
The final chapter assesses law, morality, disarmament, solidarity, peaceful settlement, restrictions on warfare, and mutual protection as instruments against war. Judicial development, arbitration, treaty publication, and public deliberation constitute genuine advances. Nevertheless, governments demand security before disarming while withholding the guarantees needed to provide it. Collective enforcement also cannot command general allegiance if it merely freezes settlements regarded as unjust. Peace requires legitimate revision as well as resistance to aggression.
Rappard thus preserves the experiment’s value without identifying it with achieved international government. The League supplies a forum, administrative capacities, and a school of co-operation, but states retain ultimate authority. Impartial administration and peaceful change remain essential aims within an unresolved conflict between sovereignty and collective security.
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