Ireland and the League of Nations, 1919-1946: International Relations, Diplomacy and Politcs - Michael Kennedy.
The legacy of the League of Nations on the development of Ireland's Foreign Policy is an area that is fascinating for me due to it's continuing impace on Ireland Foreign Policy outlook today. In this book I gained a great insight into what we balance an active internationalism that sees us currently having troops in Kosovo and Chad with a neutrality that isolates us in the world.
Coming out of a distracting Civil War, Ireland initially gave little attention to the League, however when Desmond Fitzgerald became Minister for External Affairs, Ireland entered the League (with the assent of Great Britain) and began defining her Foreign policy as one of internationalism, standing by the idealistic aims of the League Convention and pusing forward the rights of small nations against the Great Powers. It led the break away from the dependence that the then Dominions had on Great Britain in the League, that was typified by the election of Canada to the League Council in 1927 and Ireland in 1930. Irish diplomats (including Sean Lester, the last Secretary-General of the League of Nations from 1940-1946) played a very active role in solving many disputes in the 1920s and early 1930s.
As an interesting aside, one of the positions of the Irish delegations was maintaining the ability of under-developed States to develop some industries with protectionist tariffs, against the prevailing Free-trade agenda of the day, a policy that would be very helpful to follow today in underdeveloped countries in Africa. The inability of the League to solve the Italian-Abyssinian issue, however lead to the erosion of confidence in the League and the author traces a growing isolationism and retreat to neutrality by the Irish delegations, lead by DeVelera.
It began to become clear that Ireland would not be involved in the coming war. However the Author posits the interesting question of whether Ireland would have been involved if WWII had been a League-led war instead of a war lead by the then "Great Powers" of Great Britain, France and latterly Russia and the U.S. I feel its apparent devotion to the aims of the League would have meant that it would. However, in the end, Ireland retreated to isolationism and it was 1955 before it came onto the International stage again when it joined the U.N. It is sad to read the last 1/3 of the book as it traces the decline of the League and Ireland’s retreat into isolationism. It is interesting to see how WWII, a war I always saw as moral, was really a kind of grubby Great Powers war, leading up to which smaller powers were justifiably worried that their sovereignty being trampled upon. Our geography and neutrality meant that we were not invaded; however you had to feel sorry for active League members such as Czechlosovakia who hadn’t the option that Ireland had. I was reading it at the same time as I attended a Forum on Europe discussion lead by former President of Latvia Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga where a similar point was made that Latvia had tried neutrality but that it had led to two successive foreign occupations of her country, by German and Soviet forces. She defended Latvia’s NATO against some of the more isolationist voices in the Forum stating that NATO membership and its common defense provision was a no-brainer in these circumstances. Eventually the podcast of the debate will be at this link – if you get a chance to listen, go to the last 20 minutes which is a fascinating insight into how Latvians see the world and a strong rebuff to some of Ireland’s more idealistic isolationists.
The legacy of the balance that Ireland struck in the League between internationalism and isolationism is, I believe still defining our Foreign Policy today. Reading this book and listening to Dr. Vike-Freiberga has given me the insight me that we have been lucky in having the ability to pursue this balance.
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