Home > Student Archival Essays > In her study of the League of Nations Union in Britain, Helen McCarthy argues that “the League of Nations inspired a rich and participatory culture of political unrest, popular education and civic ritual." Was the same true in Australia?

In her study of the League of Nations Union in Britain, Helen McCarthy argues that “the League of Nations inspired a rich and participatory culture of political unrest, popular education and civic ritual." Was the same true in Australia?

by Oscar Cavarsan

Notes of Sir William Harrison Moore, 1930

General Secretary of the Australian League of Nations Union Report

Australian League of Nations Union on defence expenditure campaign

In the aftermath of the Great War and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations was created in 1920 in order to foster worldwide effort towards maintaining peace.[1] While its ultimate aim of preventing another world war was not achieved, in the inter-war period the League of Nations was an influential organisation that certainly benefited its member nations. It was hampered by a number of weaknesses, but for a first experiment in internationalism at such a difficult time, it was able to achieve much. Given the loose nature of the brief, in order to understand the efficacy and impact of the League of Nations Union in Australia, a broad conceptual framework is needed. This essay will work in a top-down fashion. First it will seek to critically examine both the strengths and weaknesses of the League of Nations as a whole organisation. Building from this, the way in which the organisation of the League and its strengths and weakness affected the Australian League of Nations Union will be examined. This essay does not attempt to investigate any specific area of the League as an organisation in great detail, but rather to critically evaluate what it achieved as an organisation, and then to link this to the local Australian Union. The Covenant of the League itself, its vague wording, and lack of instruction on how to properly deal with member state aggression was problematic. A factor that proved to be both a strength and a weakness to the League was its reliance on popular support and mobilisation to achieve its ends, a strength when things were going well for the League, and a weakness when it faced backlash over its mistakes. In terms of success, the League was responsible for passing the first minorities protection laws, and it also successfully promoted gender issues and gender equality. The Australian League of Nations Union was no different from its parent organisation in that it could both be positively and negatively affected by the League’s reliance on public support for success. It was also able to promote the move towards gender equality, with the influential Australian Women’s National League operating as its women’s branch. The League was also responsible for increased campaigning for better care of minorities in Australia by the Commonwealth Government.

The weaknesses within the Covenant of the League of Nations, whilst they may seem rather semantic on first examination; nonetheless had profound practical effects on the effective operation of the League. The Covenant set out how the League would respond to any possible antagonism between two sovereign nation-states, and it is here that the primary problem within the Covenant lies. [2] The League did not possess an army of its own to enforce peace, and while theoretically it could ask for aid from other member nations in putting down an aggressor “in certain cases”, the most it could really do was give violators a moral condemnation.[3]  Furthermore, withdrawal from the League was completely voluntary.[4] The lack of any penalty for withdrawal from the League made it very easy for any member nations facing League opposition to simply leave, completely side-stepping the League and taking away its ability for effective action.

The degree to which the League of Nations relied on popular support and mobilization was at times throughout its history a great strength, and at times a severe disadvantage.  As Pedersen points out in her review of the League, after the talks at Locarno in 1925, the optimistic “spirit of Locarno” produced euphoria in members of the League and the public alike.[5] One of Australia’s representatives to the Locarno Treaty talks, George Swinburne speaks grandiosely of the Treaty as “a definite machinery for securing the peace of Europe”.[6] Public opinion was seen as the ultimate safeguard for security, exemplified in the massive support for creating peace in the League’s first years.[7] As McCarthy points out, in Britain the League was able to mobilise huge sections of the population in support of peaceful international relations.[8] People were able to have their say over foreign policy, and were provided with a platform for debate on foreign relations.[9] Of course, this level of mobilisation and involvement meant that when things went wrong, the League would lose support. After the Locarno treaties failed to produce what some mobilised publics, such as the French and German publics, expected the people felt they had been cheated of what they were promised, and quickly became suspicious and hostile towards the League.[10] There was also a level of disconnect created between the interests that governments portrayed themselves as having at conventions in Geneva and reality.[11] For example, the British Government never believed that sanctions would work as a deterrent to aggression, but given the amount of popular mobilisation behind the League in support of them, they did not tell the public this.[12] This of course meant that when sanctions failed to deter aggressors, the public would instantly lose faith in the League, as they were fed an overly-optimistic line about the efficacy of League actions.

The League was strongly active in protecting minorities, and was the first international organisation to undertake such a task.[13]At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; in the aftermath of racial violence during the struggle for Polish independence, the League forced Poland to guarantee the rights of its minorities if it was to be recognised as independent.[14] This treaty was the first of its kind, and it provided the model for a series of minority rights treaties drawn up by the League in Paris. The League imposed similar obligations on new states such as Hungary, or older states which had acquired new territory in the war, like Romania and Greece.[15] The League also helped to give minorities increased political power via the creation of the European Congress of Nationalities, which publicised the struggles of minorities.[16] The League also attempted at the Paris Peace Conference to codify its ability to protect the rights of minorities in all member countries but unfortunately this was prevented by Great Power nations such as Britain and France.[17] Obviously with rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, and their subsequent virulently anti-Semitic policies, the League’s minorities protection scheme came under siege.[18] With a civilised state like Germany so broadly dismissing the League’s protection systems, they lost much of their validity. Given that at the time, the human rights of a nations inhabitants were almost entirely decided by the State, the League managed to provide a remarkable amount of protection for Europe’s minorities.[19] The lessons learned during this first run at protecting human rights internationally proved instrumental in setting up the post-war United Nations.[20]

During the inter-war period many feminists saw the League of Nations as a vital support in their struggle for equality, and it was able to significantly aid in promoting change in this area.[21] Many women believed that inter-governmental collaboration was needed for the overall advance of women’s rights across nations, and the League provided the perfect platform for this kind of collaboration.[22] McCarthy herself credits the League as “creating a space for female leadership and gender mixing”, and for challenging the militaristic masculinity pervading politics during the early twentieth-century.[23] The Covenant of the League of Nations itself does not explicitly mention gender issues or equality, but there were in fact many representatives of women’s international organisations present at the Paris Peace Conference of 1917 where the Covenant was drawn up. [24] The fact that the League involved these women in the decision making process helped ensure the passing of the Covenant’s declaration that all Member States should promote humane conditions for men, women and children equally, and that all positions in the League of Nations should be open equally to both genders. [25]

When the Great Depression struck during the 1930s, and reactionary ideologies such as fascism began to spring up in response, the hard-fought economic and political rights of women were sometimes besieged.[26] The League listened however, to the protests of women’s groups. Miller illustrates an example of this during the League’s Conference on the Codification of International Law at The Hague in 1930. Activists from the International Alliance of Women protested the possibility of discriminatory marriage nationality laws in this codification. The League Council responded by placing the nationality of married women on the Assembly agenda. It then went further by inviting women from eight different international women’s groups to form their own committee to advise the Codification Conference on the issue. This Committee; the Women’s Consultative Committee on Nationality, was allowed to meet in the Secretariat of the League, and had its communications distributed to the Council and to the Assembly itself. Whilst this might not seem significant given this law is fundamentally a women’s issue; these types of privileges on an international scale were completely unprecedented.[27]

In terms of public support, the Australian League of Nations Union was no different to its parent organisation; its successes or failures in having any discernible impact on the politics of the inter-war period were dictated by public opinion. As Sir William Harrison Moore lamented in his notes on the Australian Union, for the first ten years of its existence there existed in Australia a “very general public indifference to the League”.[28] He credits some of this to the fact that the Australian League of Nations Union may have been somewhat overzealous in promoting enthusiastic predictions of how the League of Nations could bring security of peace.[29] In other notes, he illustrates the Australian League’s failure to engage the general population in their activities. Sir Moore reports that many of the Union’s lectures to the public were far too general, and often failed to delve into specific political issues.[30] He also talks about the fact that many of these lectures were delivered to isolated groups of Australian’s, who didn’t have any ‘discernible impact’ on politics. The issue ran deeper than simply losing the interest of the Australian population. The League’s reliance on popular support to function effectively as an entity meant that when it made mistakes the influence and power of its local branches was severely curtailed. This is evidenced in a report by the Australian Union on their ability to publish works in the aftermath of the Leagues failure to stop the Manchuria Crisis in 1932. The report demonstrates how public opinion on the League’s failures in Manchuria had caused the Australian Unions activities to stall.[31] Essentially what this meant was that whilst the local branches of different nations may have had autonomy to do as they please in promoting the League’s works, their success was only partially reliant on the actual work they themselves achieved, and more so reliant on the overall success of the League in mediating potential conflicts. This must have been incredibly disheartening for members of the Australian League of Nations Union, particularly at times probably difficult enough already.

Similarly, the League of Nations attitudes and actions towards the protection of minorities filtered down to the Australian League of Nations Union. With the “White Australia” policy in full force around the time of the creation of the minorities protection scheme, and given Australia’s treatment of its indigenous population, Australia was not exactly a benchmark for human rights. It can be seen that the League however served as a platform for discussion on the issue of White Australia.[32] Japan issued a challenge to the White Australia policy, and whilst Sir William Harrison Moore concludes in his notes that the Japanese dispute would likely not be successful, the League did critically discuss the White Australia policy.[33] The League of Nations movement in Australia was also active in promoting the rights of Indigenous Australians- particularly the women’s branch. A proviso was included under the Covenant that all member nations of the League should do their utmost to ensure the rights of their indigenous peoples.[34] Women activists attempted to emphasise the disconnect between the responsibilities of member nations towards indigenous people and reality.[35] Indigenous Australians existed as British subjects, but not as Australian citizens, so they were fully eligible for the rights and duties of being part of the Empire, but not for citizenship rights in Australia.[36] Women activists also used the League of Nations Slavery Convention of 1926 in campaigning against the sexual abuse of Indigenous Women.[37] They pointed out that if a woman does not have control of her body then she is effectively a slave, and they reported how many settlers would uses Aboriginal women as a trading good.[38] The League in Australia provided a platform for the discussion and exposure of these issues, and ensured that Australia would have to answer for any violations of minority rights.

As it did on a more international scale, the League of Nations also helped foster advances in gender equality in Australia. The Australian Women’s National League, an organisation which had formed in 1904 to look out for Australian Women, ratified a new Constitution in conjunction with the League of Nations in October 1921.[39] This new Constitution ensured that the Council of the Women’s National League had full power to carry out the work of the League.[40] The women’s branch of the League were proud to be the first from all of the Dominions of the Commonwealth to have representatives appointed to attend League Conventions.[41]The League was also responsible for successfully pressuring the Australian Government to introduce a number of changes to discriminatory federal laws. Reports from the Australian Government to the League show that the provisions laid down in the aforementioned Hague Nationality Convention sponsored by the League were followed by the Australian Government, and that they had agreed that no woman would either lose her nationality or acquire a new one on marriage without her consent.[42] The Australian Communication to the League shows that thanks to its progressive nature, women gained “political and civil status… substantially the same as that of men”, which although not perfect, was a definite improvement.[43]

It is true that the League of Nations was a deeply flawed organisation. There were problems in its defining document; the Covenant did not clearly set out what was to be done in the event of aggression from League member states, and also allowed members to leave voluntarily. This enabled aggressors to just quit the League if they violated its terms and were forced to face consequences. The reliance of the League on public support and mobilisation was always a double-edged sword, when things went well, such as after the Treaties of Locarno in 1925, the upwell of popular support could benefit the League enormously. However, when the League failed to stymie crises, the backlash could prove disastrous for its functioning. For all that, the League did manage to achieve much during its tumultuous existence, both in Australia and internationally. It promoted gender issues and equality; women were a central part of the League, and their protests against discrimination were listened to. The League also codified the first ever international laws for the protection of minorities, and they made member nations responsible for taking care of any minorities in their country on joining the League. All of these strengths and weaknesses filtered down to the Australian League of Nations Union. It was just as reliant on popular support as the League itself, and often faced challenges with the Australian public’s general disinterest toward the League. Aside from that, the League did help Australian women in their struggle for equal rights, which is a definite achievement. It also influenced popular protest, particularly from women’s organisations, against the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous population, and placed Australia’s White Australia policy under scrutiny. This essay attempted to paint a broad conceptual picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the League at an international level, and then to investigate how these affected the local Australian League of Nations Union. It can be seen that while the League suffered from weaknesses that affected it at an international and national level, it was nonetheless able to achieve much across both fronts.