On October 9, 1934, an assassin shot King Alexander I of Yugoslavia as he arrived in Marseilles to begin a state visit to France. Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister, who was riding in the car beside the king, was wounded in the melee and died later. 1 Evidence quickly established that the attack was an act of state-supported international terrorism. Alexander’s murderer was a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), a separatist group that operated on both sides of the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border. 2 His three accomplices were Croatians who belonged to the Ustaša (Insurgent) Croatian Revolutionary Movement, which carried out attacks from sanctuaries in Hungary and Italy. 3 The terrorists’ ultimate goal was to destabilize the multi-ethnic kingdom of Yugoslavia and create new nation states. Before going to Marseilles, the four conspirators had met at an Ustaša training camp in Hungary. Much like the shooting of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo twenty years before, Alexander’s murder sparked an international crisis that threatened the peace of Europe. France was allied with Yugoslavia; Italy backed the Hungarians. In the background were alliances and individual states interested in either defending or changing the political status quo in Eastern and Central Europe. As Anthony Eden, soon to be Britain’s foreign minister, recalled in his memoirs, “the dangers were clear enough, all the ingredients of the fatal weeks before the first world war were there again.” 4
While these terrorist attacks had important similarities, their repercussions were very different. Europe avoided war in late 1934 largely because of the peacekeeping efforts of the League of Nations. According to the preamble of its Covenant, the main purposes of the organization were “to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security.” 5 These central aims were accomplished in 1934, an achievement that represents the League at its most effective.
Alexander’s murder caused much initial shock and confusion. Yugoslavia, joined by its allies Czechoslovakia and Romania, accused Hungarian authorities of supporting the terrorists who carried out the attack. Hungary denied responsibility and insisted on defending its honor. With strong leadership from Britain and France, the League made it possible for states to find common ground and adopt a unanimous resolution to this potentially dangerous dispute which preserved the peace that all sides wanted. 6 As part of this successful mediation, Geneva also sought to confront the serious threat of international terrorism. Guided by a proposal from the French government, jurists and officials from several countries spent the next three years drafting two international conventions. 7 The first classified specific terrorist acts, as well as conspiracies to commit them, as international crimes. 8 The second provided for the establishment of the world’s first permanent international court to punish terrorists. 9 While both conventions were examples of constructive collaboration between states, reaching agreement was complicated and deeply divisive. As political realities in Europe rapidly changed, this accomplishment became largely irrelevant, increasingly technical and symbolic. In the end, few governments supported Geneva’s anti-terrorism project in itself. In contrast to the League’s success in keeping the peace in late 1934, the collective attempt from 1935 to 1938 to combat state-supported terrorism illustrates the progressively restrictive limitations on the organization’s effectiveness.
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Scholarly interest in the history of the League has greatly increased in recent years. 10 Since the end of the Cold War, a growing number of historians and political scientists have discovered Geneva’s many and wide-ranging humanitarian, economic, social, legal, and technical activities. 11 Some are also giving attention to how the League worked in complex ways to implement as well as extend the organization’s central aims. 12 This new research has provided a much more balanced understanding of what Geneva actually accomplished, and why that mattered, than earlier works that emphasized the organization’s flaws and failures in light of the Munich agreement and the Second World War. 13
The League of Nations was designed as a permanent, peacetime world-security organization. From its beginnings, it defined “peace” and “security” in terms of the experience of the First World War. “Cooperation” in various facets of international life meant diminishing the mutual misunderstandings and unintended provocations that many assumed had brought about war in 1914. A decade after the armistice of 1918, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, often called the “war guilt clause,” was already widely, if quietly, regarded as a simplistic embarrassment. Flaws in the international system, not deliberate plotting of aggression by Germany and Austria-Hungary, had caused the “Great War.” Geneva’s perceived purpose was not to deter wars of conquest, but to provide mechanisms by which men of goodwill, such as the architects of the Locarno accords of 1925, could resolve international differences through diplomacy.
In order to achieve this peace and security as well as promote such cooperation, League member states promised not to resort to war, to foster good relations between governments, to observe international law, and to respect all treaty obligations. 14 The vast majority of the world’s sovereign states were League members by 1934. But both within and outside of the organization some observed that preventing war required an understanding of the root causes of political instability. 15 Peace depended on changing the way that states viewed themselves in relation to each other. New rules and systems for organizing international behavior were essential. This more expansive conception of global security work would require constructive conciliation, steady reform, and negotiated revision of international agreements.
Geneva addressed a wide range of daunting problems as part of this larger effort to bolster global security. The organization handled some thirty different international disputes in its first decade, several of which centered on the Balkans. 16 The League also took responsibility for controlling the international arms trade, aiding refugees, and protecting ethnic minority groups. 17 It supported humanitarian work, encouraged financial and economic collaboration, promoted public health and social welfare, fostered freedom of international transit and communications, and supervised the administration of dependent peoples in Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific. 18 Geneva mediated a number of border settlements in Europe. 19 It also championed intellectual cooperation, facilitated the codification of international law, and supported the activities of the Permanent Court of International Justice. 20 Under the auspices of the League, governments agreed to criminalize slavery and the slave trade, the commerce in certain dangerous drugs and pornography, and traffic in women and children. 21 Such tasks not only contributed to world peace and security, but also made the League of Nations central to many of the transformative forces shaping the interwar period.
Despite this global impact, the League was profoundly limited, misunderstood by scholars as well as the general public. By 1920 it had already become clear that the United States would not join the organization, and that the universalist rhetoric of President Woodrow Wilson was delusional. States instead returned to traditional forms of international relations and regarded the League as an administrative mechanism and moral force, not a panacea. Thus, from the start the organization functioned in ways that few, including Wilson himself, had predicted. 22 Other states, including Brazil and Japan, further weakened the organization when they withdrew from it. 23 After Germany announced in 1933 its intention to withdraw, it ceased to participate in any League activities. Latin American and Asian members complained about what they regarded as the predominance of European influence in the organization. Aside from the Union of South Africa (a British dominion), Liberia and Ethiopia were the only African member states in 1934. The admission of Mexico, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ecuador, and the USSR compensated for some of these defections, but did not alter the fact that the League always lacked the authority that Wilson had envisioned to enforce global peace.
The League’s influence was severely constricted in other ways as well. Geneva was not responsible for major international settlements such as the Washington Treaties of 1922 and the Locarno settlement. While some states viewed the organization’s machinery as a means to institute reform and foster peaceful revisions to settlements over time, others saw it as tool to perpetuate the postwar status quo and resist change despite altered conditions. Above all, the League did not prevent many acts of aggression, including conflicts in the Far East, South America, Ethiopia, and Spain. It obviously did not halt the outbreak of the Second World War. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the rise of Nazi Germany, a growing number of member states came to realize that the League as constituted simply could not stop aggression by a great power. None of this, however, demonstrates the organization’s unimportance. Rather, it indicates that the League was never what some of its prominent founders promised; its peacekeeping authority was always circumscribed by international power constraints beyond its control.
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The scholarly literature on Geneva’s role in ending the Hungaro-Yugoslav crisis of 1934 and the organization’s subsequent anti-terrorism work is scanty and fragmented. 24 Standard accounts of the League offer little or nothing on the matter. 25 Despite a huge amount of available archival material and published resources, there are no books on the subject. 26 More importantly, while Geneva’s contribution to peace in the 1920s is now receiving reassessment, the secondary literature still largely discounts the organization’s achievements and distorts how it actually functioned during the following decade. Many scholars continue to contend that states did not or could not use the machinery of the League to ease political tensions and address serious problems. 27 A study of Geneva’s response to the terrorist attack at Marseilles challenges such assumptions.
Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany were not the source of all of Europe’s problems during the 1930s. Much European political violence was deeply rooted in the ideological and ethnic conflicts developing in the east and southeast of the continent. 28 The creation of the League was a reaction against a world war that, whatever its long-term causes, was precipitated by chronic instability in the Balkans. Yugoslavia, along with Romania and Czechoslovakia, greatly benefitted from the peace treaties signed after the First World War. Austria-Hungary was divided...