The purpose of the League of Nations was to create an organization through which disputes between nations could be settled peacefully. The League sought to do this in several different ways. The first was to reduce international armaments by discouraging League members from producing them. This can be found in article eight of the League's charter in particular, which also mandated that League members disclose the sizes of their armies and navies. Article nine created a permanent commission to oversee these requirements. The League also created a council to be summoned when a crisis necessitated it. Member nations agreed to submit international crises to the League for arbitration. The League also strongly discouraged its members from going to war by stating in article sixteen that refusing to honor the League's mandates in a crisis, and going to war, would be "ipso facto...an act of war against all other Members of...
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the League." This would result in economic sanctions and other punitive measures against the nation in question. Article ten of the League charter left open the possibility that League members might even take military action if another member's sovereignty was violated:
The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.
This provision was the main sticking point for isolationists in the US Senate, who refused to join the League on the basis that doing so would be likely to draw the United States into yet another European conflict. For this reason and many others, the League of Nations was essentially powerless in the face of aggressor nations in the 1930s. When Japan, a League member, invaded Manchuria, the League strongly condemned the move. Japan responded by simply dropping out of the organization. The League proved similarly ineffective in stopping the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and in averting Hitler's military buildup and aggression in Europe.
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After the horrors of the First World War, the leaders of the Western democracies resolved that the recent cataclysmic conflict would be the war to end all wars. From now on, the nations of the world would live in peace and harmony, joined together by bonds of international law as administered by a new organization, the League of Nations.
Right from the outset, the League was determined to settle any international disputes by negotiation and arbitration. The days of settling disputes by force, by so-called gunboat diplomacy, were well and truly over, or so the movers and shakers behind the League of Nations sincerely believed.
These methods were explicitly set out in the League's Covenant, which enshrined the new body's principles. From now on, territorial disputes were to be referred to the League's officials and diplomats, who would attempt to resolve them by negotiating with the interested parties and acting as honest brokers between them.
The assumption behind this approach was that parties to a dispute were always amenable to a political settlement. This assumption was deeply flawed, however, as many of these disputes went back centuries, arising out of long-standing inter-ethnic tensions. It was simply too naive to expect diplomatic resolutions to such conflicts.
The legalistic approach of the League to conflict resolution was undermined by the fact that many countries refused to acknowledge the primacy of international law over their own domestic laws, and so did not feel duty bound to comply with resolutions to disputes even after they'd formally agreed to them.
As the League lacked any armed forces to enforce its decisions, any agreements reached by the methods of negotiation and arbitration were always prone to being broken as and when it suited the parties concerned.
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