From the Geneva Protocol to the Greco-Bulgarian dispute: the development of the Baldwin government's policy towards the peacekeeping role of the League of Nations 1924—1925

Abstract

The League of Nations was a new factor to be considered during the formulation of any country's foreign policy after 1919, even if it was an experiment which has often been dismissed as doomed to failure on account of the desire of the great powers to limit its evolution.1 The refusal to allow the ex-enemy states to join the League immediately, as well as the non-membership of the United States and of Russia, meant that initially Britain and France emerged as the dominant members of the League and as the leading ‘producers’ of security, and thus they have received a large part of the blame for thwarting the League's development. In particular, in the case of Britain, the Conservative Party was regarded as less sympathetic to the League than the Labour Party, and consequently a Conservative government, such as that of Stanley Baldwin from 1924–1929, which rejected the Geneva Protocol, has been interpreted as a restrictive, even harmful, influence upon the League.