Of all the questions on the agenda of the 1919 peace conference, the project to create a League of Nations was at once the most promising and the most innovative. It was also the matter to which Woodrow Wilson, the president of the peace conference, attached the greatest importance. In Wilson's eyes, the formation of a League of Nations, which he had proposed in his Fourteen Points war-aims address on January 8, 1918, would represent the most crucial contribution that the statesmen meeting in Paris could make to building the new international order. In effect, the League of Nations would form the keystone of the arch. It was to be a whole new concept for eliminating the recourse to war in international relations and ensuring the peace to which people fervently aspired after having been battered and shaken by the greatest martial conflict that humanity had yet known.

The Peace Conference and the Leage of Nations

The task of creating a League of Nations was not in itself half as complicated as resolving the other questions that the peace conference faced. Certainly the decisions adopted on this issue required a strong commitment over the long term. But there were no immediate disputes or conflicts of interest among the founding states of the League. No doubt these nations had quite different ideas about the structure the League should take, the optimum degree of engagement, and the powers that should be assigned to this or that branch of the new organization. But at that point everyone's attention was on the innovative nature of the scheme — and on other more pressing issues of the peace conference.