Introduction | Wars between nations | Civil wars
Cold War and terrorism | Keeping the peace
A new Europe? | Did you know? | Find out more

Keeping the peace

In an era of unprecedented conflict, the community of nations tried to set up organisations that would work for peaceful resolutions of conflicts and disputes.

League of Nations

An international organisation of, originally, 45 member states, it was founded at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, with the aim – after the horrors of World War I – of peacefully arbitrating disputes between nations. Inspired by US president Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, the League was weakened from the start because the isolationist US Congress refused to ratify US membership.

Germany was admitted in 1926 and the Soviet Union in 1934, and the League successfully arbitrated in disputes between the Soviet Union and Poland (1921) and Italy and Greece (1923). Yet, in the 1930s, it was unable to prevent Japan, one of its member states, from invading Manchuria, or Italy, another member state, from attacking Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Germany and Japan both left the League in 1933, which failed to prevent Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Made redundant by World War II, the League handed over its remaining functions to the United Nations in 1946.

United Nations Organisation

An international organisation of, originally, 51 member states, it was founded in 1945. Learning from the experience of the League of Nations, it ensured that it had virtually all the major world powers as members (the People's Republic of China was not admitted until 1971), a secretary general and a Security Council with five permanent members: the United States, the Soviet Union, China (at first, Nationalist China; then, in 1971, the PRC), the United Kingdom and France.

Because of decolonisation, the membership of the UN grew – in 1996, it had 185 members, the majority from the developing world.

Although the UN included a number of specialised agencies, such as those dealing with banking, trade, children and culture, it did not have an independent army, so it was sometimes ineffective in its interventions. It often supervised peace agreements, such as those in the Middle East and Iraq, but it had less success in areas such as Bosnia and Somalia, where a lack of political will led to failure. Too often, as in the Gulf War of 1990-91, the UN seemed to be dependent on the US and thus no longer impartial.

Following the end of the Cold War, its role was uncertain because, in the absence of a rival superpower, the US no longer needed the UN for mediation and thus was unwilling to fund it properly.

Top