European Lives and Deaths – Atlantic Revival? The Europeanness of the League of Nations’ Protracted Demise

Abstract

In this article, we revisit the story of the League of Nations’ (1919–1946) death. Throughout its existence, the League served as an instrument for a series of important experiments in organising European politics and negotiating Europe's place in the wider global order. To understand the League's demise and legacy, we need to study these different conceptions of Europe, their shortcomings, failures and legacies. The article explores three such conceptions: (1) the Eurocentric civilisational order that played a foundational role in the early 1920s; (2) the European regional agenda that rose to prominence as a product of the French-German rapprochement of the late 1920s; and (3) the new technocratic visions of regional European cooperation that were associated with a deteriorating international political climate in the 1930s. The Atlantic heritage, with the transfer of experiences, functions and personnel from the League to the UN during and after the World War II, is addressed in the article's fourth and final sections. Our argument is that these European visions were attempts to manage the turbulent and skewed post-war world order by an Eurocentric organisation that from its very inception was hampered by the fact that one of its chief designers, namely the United States, opted not to join. In a broader perspective, we show that in order to understand how international organisations die, we should work with a deeper historical perspective that considers the effects of their various life stages.