League of Nations

The interwar experiment in collective security, established in 1920 after the First World War under the Covenant attached to the Treaty of Versailles, and headquartered at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It had no armed force of its own and depended on member states to enforce its decisions; Japan, Germany and Italy each withdrew during the 1930s rather than accept its rulings, and the United States never joined despite advocacy from President Woodrow Wilson himself, after the Covenant failed to win ratification in the Senate. Its failure to check the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935 to 1936 and the aggressions that followed is widely read as a central cause of the collective security collapse leading into the Second World War. It formally dissolved on 20 April 1946, transferring its assets to the newly founded United Nations, whose Charter was shaped directly by the lessons of that failure.