The League of Nations, autonomy and collective security

Abstract

This article tests the assumption that in institutional and legal design the League of Nations was incapable of providing collective security. The lens through which this issue is scrutinised is the concept of institutional legal autonomy, in other words the legal separation of the organisation from its member states. The thinking is not necessarily that the greater the autonomy the greater the potential of the organisation to fulfil its functions, but that the organisation already had sufficient autonomy in international relations to provide an effective form of ‘collective security’, a term that was not found in the Covenant but, by 1935, was being used to describe the response of the League to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. This article tests the assumption that the League did not have sufficient autonomy in terms of collective judgment and power to deliver collective security.