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The League That Wasn't: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914-1920
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The League That Wasn't: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914-1920
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Journal Article
The League That Wasn't: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914-1920
2011
Overview
Two rival conceptions for international organization circulated in America during World War I. The first and initially more popular was a “legalist‐sanctionist” league, intended to develop international legal code and obligate and enforce judicial settlement of disputes. The second was the League of Nations that came into being. This article traces the intellectual development and political reception of the former from 1914 to 1920. Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and William H. Taft were its most important architects and advocates. Like President Woodrow Wilson, they aimed to create an international polity without supranational authority. Unlike Wilson, they insisted on the codification of law and the necessity of physical sanction: the league had to enforce its word or not speak at all. Wilson fatally rejected legalist‐sanctionist ideas. Holding a thoroughgoing organicist understanding of political evolution, he and the League's British progenitors preferred international organization to center on a parliament of politicians divining the popular will and anticipating future needs, not a court of judges interpreting formal codes of law. A flexible model of organization carried over to the United Nations, the alternative forgotten by a world leader that now found it natural to subordinate law to politics.
