ABSTRACT
Figure 15.1 Two plans for an international peace organization (1915-16) 181 Figure 15.2 Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (1918) 184 Figure 15.3 The preamble to the Covenant of the League of Nations 197 Figure 15.4 The states named in the Covenant of the League of Nations 197
External shock and interrupted evolution
The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 was an external shock to the evolutionary development of international organizations. The general progress in security in the form of regular Hague Peace Conferences was interrupted and the third Conference, planned for 1915, did not take place (see §7.5). Most public international unions continued, albeit that ten of the 51 that existed in 1914 (see Figure 8.2) came to an end. In the field of security the great powers now prevailed with their power politics. However, during the war the concept of international organization was not absent. It was even central to the thinking on international politics in the UK and the US. The term ‘League of Nations’ that featured in this thinking stemmed from the book La société des nations, published in 1908 by the French politician and jurist Léon
Bourgeois. The British government saw such a League as a means of involving the US in the war, while the US saw it as an opportunity to modernize international and European politics.
