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Came 1848, and both Italy and France kicked over the traces; revolt spread to Austria and Germany and Prince Metternich, for 33 years the mastermind of the Alliance, fled his country; the Unholy Alliance was dead. Yet its influence on the minds of men lived on. For this despotic use of international force by a club of contented war-winners gave the whole ideal of international police an unsavory aura which lasted well into the 20th Century.
Meanwhile, the British Navy, with the help first of France, then of the U.S. and others, began to maintain a world patrol of its own. In Mexico, Chile and Argentina, at Navarino in Greece, at Dulcigno on the Adriatic and at Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, against the Barbary pirates and the pirates of the Far East, Britain and other great powers used force or the threat of force to keep the peace.
That the peace that was thus kept involved in each case the national interests of the intervening powers, that the actions were against groups too weak to fight back was natural under such an arrangement. But that impromptu, largely naval police force could not prevent a major explosion. The big explosion came with World War I.
The Last Effort. Out of the caterpillar of war, through the cocoon of Versailles, was hatched that beautiful butterfly, the League of Nations. Ardent apologists for the League—which still exists in form and largely in exile—insist that its prime purpose was not to stop wars once they had reached or passed the boiling point, but rather to promote international cooperation. "A place for talk" is the way League-loving Sir John Fischer Williams describes it.
Yet there is no doubt that the League was sold to the peoples of the world—and turned down by the U.S. Senate—largely on the basis of Article 16 of its Covenant, which clearly contemplates the prevention of war by the use of military force. The sorry failure of the League and its members ever to resort to force made the League a laughing stock long before World War II.
It is popular today to blame the farce that the League became as a war-prevention body on the fact that it had no teeth. The fact is that it had teeth but refused to bite.
The League had no militia of its own, no bombers, or battleships to send around the world under an international flag. But its teeth consisted, precisely as the Covenant meant them to consist, of the armed forces of the member nations.
Although the use of military power under Article 16 did not purport to be compulsory, no compulsion of written words in a document could have forced the member nations, against their will, to call out their armies and navies to stop aggression. And no compulsion of written words in a document could have forced the member nations, against their will, to call out a League army and navy if a League army and navy had existed.