In August 2022, Laura Robson traveled to the Greek island of Samos for a conference that explored — among other events — a population exchange between Greece and Turkey that occurred a century prior. The forcible expulsion of peoples sent more than one million Anatolian Christians from modern-day Turkey to Greece and some 500,000 Muslim Greeks to Turkey. In a recent interview, Robson said the event was “essentially ethnic cleansing” —that, over time, had been treated in historical literature as a “well-intentioned and largely successful attempt at international stabilization.”

The exchange was supported and financed by the League of Nations, the first worldwide intergovernmental organization, established in 1920 at the end of World War I. Comprising nearly 60 countries at its peak, the League aimed to maintain “world peace” by resolving disputes through negotiation and arbitration, and also established commissions that focused on global health, labor conditions, and disarmament.

The population exchange illustrated how, as idealistic as the League seemed, the reality was far different. “How we have understood the League is entirely wrong,” said Robson, Elihu Professor of Global Affairs and History at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.

“If we look at what the League actually did, rather than what it said it was doing, we will see it as a totally different and much less admirable institution than the scholarship that we have on it suggests.”

This disconnect is the subject of a new book by Robson and Joseph Maiolo, a history professor at Kings College London, published through Cambridge University Press’ Elements series. The book, The League of Nations, reinterprets the institution not as an international cooperation effort with equal partners, but as a push by Western powers to consolidate power through resources, defense, and populations.

Robson — a scholar of international and Middle Eastern history, with particular interest in refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness — called the League of Nations “an imperial institution” that enacted colonial rule over much of the Middle East and significant parts of Africa and the Pacific following World War I.

“When we think about what internationalism means, we tend to think about what it means for Europe and for the United States and not what it has meant for the colonized world,” Robson said, “which has largely experienced it as a new form of empire — actually, a fairly brutal one.”

At the end of World War I, new countries replaced old empires. International boundaries were redrawn. And the aggressors — the Central Powers, led by Germany and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires — were going to have to pay a price.

The victorious Allies mandated the Central Powers to forfeit their colonies to them, to be overseen by the Permanent Mandates Commission, a governing body of the League of Nations. As The Covenant of the League of Nations put it, “advanced nations” would provide “tutelage” to “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.’”

A century later, Robson said, that mentality hasn’t changed much.

“The League of Nations really formalized and legitimized a system of global economic and political inequity whose consequences we can still see,” she said. “And it did that partly by introducing the idea of technocratic expertise as something that could be exercised at the international level to control state operations across the globe without reference to any political body.”

Robson said her new book details a lasting legacy of the League of Nations: wielding that “technocratic expertise” to control issues of import for the developing world — both then and now — such as economic policy, public health, and refugees.

“[The League] put those systems into place — and it did so deliberately to ensure that the imperial powers would be able to continue their governance irrespective of political decisions that might be taken on the ground by colonized populations,” she said.

Modern-day institutions like UNICEF, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — all with roots in the era of the League of Nations — still face these criticisms, she added.

“What this book does is shed light on the origins of these ideas — and it will make readers reconsider what we’ve assumed to be the good intentions behind this kind of liberal internationalism.”

In 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in large part because of his work as an architect of the League of Nations. Taught in American classrooms to this day, one of his famed 14 Points was to prevent another “Great War” from ever happening again.

The U.S., however, never joined the League of Nations. Despite Wilson’s best efforts, Congress raised concerns over national sovereignty if it joined and feared joining other countries in policing conflict around the globe. When Wilson died in 1924, the debate was essentially put to rest.

But, Robson said, the American influence was still felt on the League of Nations. “The U.S. was financially supporting many of the main institutions of the League,” she noted, including the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

There is also a direct thread, Robson argued, between America’s role in the League of Nations and its next iteration: The United Nations. She considered the UN “in many ways an American construction, imagined as a venue for the propagation of American influence and power,” and it still operates in much the same way today. With the decolonization of the world, particularly in 1960 and 70s, the UN is roughly three times larger than the League of Nations but ultimately exists to serve many the same internationalist functions.

Now 80 years into its existence, the UN faces many of the same criticisms once directed at the League of Nations: ineffectiveness in conflict resolution, excessive bureaucracy, and a financial strain on member states.

Robson adds one more familiar critique: Whose interest is it serving?

“I think we have to use a critical lens when looking at what internationalism does,” she said, “and not imagine [the UN] as a group of idealistic actors who are somehow magically independent of all of the people and money and resources that make up its constituent bodies. It is not some kind of impartial organization with its own ideas about a global order.”

“It’s worth thinking about how and when and whether these multilateral organizations produce a more or less secure world. And in terms of making it successful, the question —for any institution — should always be, ‘Successful for whom?’”