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18 results

The League of Nations

The League of Nations
  • Joseph Maiolo, Laura Robson
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
    • Element
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  • The Element challenges histories of the League of Nations that present it as a meaningful if flawed experiment in global governance. Such accounts have largely failed to admit its overriding purpose: not to work towards international cooperation among equally sovereign states, but to claim control over the globe's resources, weapons, and populations for its main showrunners (including the United States) – and not through the gentle arts of persuasion and negotiation but through the direct and indirect use of force and the monopolisation of global military and economic power. The League's advocates framed its innovations, from refugee aid to disarmament, as manifestations of its commitment to an obvious universal good and, often, as a series of technocratic, scientific solutions to the problems of global disorder. But its practices shored up the dominance of the western victors and preserved longstanding structures of international power and civilizational-racial hierarchy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Cambridge History of the Second World War
  • Volume 2, Politics and Ideology
  • Edited by Richard Bosworth, Joseph Maiolo
  • Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015
  • War is often described as an extension of politics by violent means. With contributions from twenty-eight eminent historians, Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War examines the relationship between ideology and politics in the war's origins, dynamics and consequences. Part I examines the ideologies of the combatants and shows how the war can be understood as a struggle of words, ideas and values with the rival powers expressing divergent claims to justice and controlling news from the front in order to sustain moral and influence international opinion. Part II looks at politics from the perspective of pre-war and wartime diplomacy as well as examining the way in which neutrals were treated and behaved. The volume concludes by assessing the impact of states, politics and ideology on the fate of individuals as occupied and liberated peoples, collaborators and resistors, and as British and French colonial subjects.

  • Introduction to Part III

  • from Part III - Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance and Liberation
  • Edited by Richard Bosworth, Jesus College, Oxford, Joseph Maiolo, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 377-384

  • Summary

    The rapid conquests in Western Europe of April, May and June 1940 expanded German occupation to Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands and France, countries which were not the focus of German ambitions, but which promised far greater industrial resources. The first wave of serious scholarship on occupied Europe tended to emphasize German economic exploitation and to look to the conscription of West European workers to work in Germany as a key motivation for joining the resistance. This chapter singles out food and sex as issues which crossed all national boundaries in occupied Europe, were profoundly influenced by German actions and, in turn, became key to the changing moral values and commitments of occupied Europeans. The dynamic effects of transferring both food and labour to Germany pushed the new colonial supply zones into a spiral of starvation and increasing mortality.

  • Introduction to Part I

  • from Part I - Ideologies
  • Edited by Richard Bosworth, Jesus College, Oxford, Joseph Maiolo, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 13-20

  • Summary

    In Italian and German propaganda, the 'axis' was celebrated as the joining of forces between two long suppressed but now re-emerging empires, with shared histories and superior cultures, as well as common foes who sought to prevent them from assuming their rightful place among the world's great powers. Against the background of continuing friction and half-hearted coordination between the three major Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, this chapter discusses what it was that actually held the 'axis' together. All three regimes shared a common belief in the superiority of some kind of authoritarianism over liberal democracy and the desire to create new orders, both at home and abroad, notably through an expansionist foreign policy that would revise the Paris Peace system established in 1919. In all three countries between the later 1930s and 1945, 'empire-building' played a significant role, either as a source of radicalization (as in Japan) or the result of it (as in Germany and Italy).

  • Introduction to Part II

  • from Part II - Diplomacy and alliances
  • Edited by Richard Bosworth, Jesus College, Oxford, Joseph Maiolo, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 211-216

  • Summary

    The liberal international order established at the Paris Peace Conference was overthrown between 1933 and 1939. This opened the way for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to launch wars of conquest aimed at creating empires in Europe and the Mediterranean. This chapter considers whether the outbreak of war in September 1939 should be understood as a failure of European diplomacy. Peace is considered to be the ultimate aim of all diplomatic practice, even in wartime. One of the most important legacies of the First World War was the introduction of new international norms and new standards of international legitimacy. During the 1930s, professional diplomats in Britain and France failed to provide clear and effective policy guidance to their respective governments. The foreign policies of both states were slow to adapt to the changed international circumstances of the 1930s.