League of Nations

Wilson's Fourteen Points proved quite difficult to put into action—mainly because of European conflicts that continued to threaten world peace and stability even after World War I had ended. This cartoon from 1919 shows Wilson negotiating with the warring European powers, which are portrayed as babies.

Of course, it didn’t help that delegates from the League’s other controlling nations essentially sabotaged Wilson’s efforts. This photo shows the French, British and Italian delegates, respectively. Each had his own agenda based on nationalistic objectives that would make a lasting peace very difficult to achieve.

The main reason that League of Nations failed to secure a peaceful Europe, though, was related to the pressures placed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty. The $33 billion in reparations that Germany had to pay was bad enough, but many Germans living in the territories that they were forced to surrender were not pleased with arrangement, and civil war in those regions became a constant threat.

Prussian (and later German) Chancellor Otto von Bismarck can be seen on the right in this painting from early in the war. In 1919, Von Bismarck fled to the neutral Netherlands after the German troops simply refused to fight any longer.

After the League of Nations was formed, the Germans continued to regard the territories they lost as part of their empire. Similarly, the Russians, Ottomans and British continued to solidify their spheres of influence. This map shows a 1938 propaganda image that demonstrates the failure of the League of Nations to control nationalistic sentiment.

Everywhere at the edges of the former Ottoman, German and Russian Empires, there were struggles for power. Sometimes three different nations struggled for the same adjoining territory. The efforts of Wilson to have the preferences of the residents of these territories considered generally went unheeded. This map representing the Greek proposal at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 attempts to demonstrate why Greece should be allowed to take over control of former Ottoman territory to the east.

Meanwhile, the Balkan region where WWI had begun remained something of a powder keg and was plagued by civil wars. The conflicts in Serbia and Bosnia that occurred at the end of the 20th century were a direct result of the artificial national boundaries imposed on those peoples by delegates at the Versailles Treaty.

Wilson succeeded with his original goal, which was to bring the Germans to the bargaining table by offering his 14 Points as a vision for the future. He never expected that his own country would refuse to participate in the League of Nations. Without the use of US troops to support League of Nations decisions, it was unlikely to survive for very long. Indeed, it was formed on June 28, 1919 and ceased operations on April 18, 1946.