League of Nations

The League of Nations was an international body formed in 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the establishment of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. Until then Canada’s foreign policy had been mainly confined to relations with Britain and the United States, and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King expected to deal with these countries directly. However, his government was faced with a request from the League to impose economic sanctions on Italy because it had invaded Ethiopia. The cabinet agreed to apply sanctions, but the discussion made it clear to King that if the League went on to propose military intervention, the cabinet and the country would be deeply divided. The request for military sanctions never came because Britain and France backed away from any confrontation with Italy’s Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. King nevertheless learned an important lesson: membership in the League might have serious political consequences for Canada. He took steps to minimize the risk. Though he affirmed, in the commons and later in Geneva, his support for the League as a necessary institution for the resolution of disputes, he bluntly rejected the idea of the League as a military alliance against aggressors. Canada, he told the League’s Assembly in 1936, did not support “automatic commitments to the use of force.” The League’s influence waned with its inability to confront the challenges of the 1930s and especially the rise of an aggressive German state. It was dissolved during the the Second World War and was succeeded by the United Nations in 1946.