Furled Banners

Conquest A naval alliance sworn on Delos in 478 BCE against Persia, run from Athens by the 450s, and dissolved in 404 BCE when Sparta won the Peloponnesian War.

Conquest A military-religious order founded in Jerusalem around 1119 that guarded pilgrims, held nearly 1,000 commanderies, and was abolished by Pope Clement V's bull Vox in excelso on 22 March 1312.

Overreach Founded at a London meeting of about 2,000 workers in 1864, it split at The Hague in 1872 and its General Council in New York abolished itself at a Philadelphia conference on 15 July 1876.

Replaced Founded in Moscow in March 1919 to run the world's communist parties as sections of one party; its Presidium resolved to dissolve it on 15 May 1943, three years after its Bureau last met.

Replaced An association of states founded under the Treaty of Versailles on 10 January 1920, it voted itself out of existence in Geneva in April 1946, after the United Nations had already been created.

Replaced A Bangkok-based alliance of eight states, only two of them Southeast Asian, that never put a SEATO force in the field and was wound up on 30 June 1977.

Replaced The Eastern Bloc's economic council: founded in Moscow in January 1949, wound up after its last session in Budapest on 28 June 1991.

Replaced A Soviet-led military alliance of eight European states, signed in Warsaw on 14 May 1955, whose military structures were disbanded in early 1991 and whose treaty expired in Prague on 1 July 1991.