To what extent did the post-war peacemaking and peacekeeping efforts affect international relations leading up to the Second World War?

Section D- Analysis

Following the Great Depression and the breakup of the League of Nations, France was unable to intervene with the rise of Nazi Germany in any peacekeeping efforts. Numerous events lead up to the empowerment of Nazi Germany; these events include France’s initial use of pacifism after World War One through the establishment of the Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919; the establishment and failure of the League of Nations, functioning 1920 through 1939; and the world-wide shockwave created by the Great Depression beginning in 1933. (85 words)

Between the first and second world wars, the practice of “radical pacifism” appeared; inspired by Gandhi’s non-violent ways. Pacifism, meaning to oppose to war and violence, commonly due to moral or religious means, was a philosophy that most thought to be an unsuccessful means to an end. Pacifism was a much used tactic by many countries, France included, after the First World War due to the colossal loss attributed to the war. A peaceful, non-violent manner of settling disputes seemed ideal to minimalize the physical impact all the countries felt, with the loss of soldiers up in the hundred thousands in countries like France during World War One. Pacifist movements, coupled with anti-militarist movements in the early 1900’s, are faulted for having been a cause of World War Two, as they were effective at keeping France and English preoccupied in negotiating with Germany, while it was occupying places such as Czechoslovakia. They were also responsible for disarming the UK and basically opening the flood gates for Nazi Germany and World War Two. Historians say World War Two was really just a continuation of World War One after the unwarranted "peace" that France and Britain forced upon Germany via the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty was supposed to be a non-combat way of achieving peace, considering the number of soldiers lost in World War One This embarrassed Germany and also left Germany economically distressed due to the war reparations they were forced to pay. And, this so called "peace" allowed for the rise of Hitler, with promises of restoring Germany to its former glory, and his Nazi Germany, once someone had been found to blame; these people being the Jewish population. (279 words)

The Great Depression hit Germany in 1929 and as a result, Germany announced it could no longer afford the reparations it had been forced to pay after World War One. This caused issues for European economies and the USA as they relied on the reparations from Germany to fund many of their governmental operations, especially France where civil unrest was rising due to the escalating unemployment and their neighbouring country, Germany, was supporting the installment of Hitler and his Nazi party. Economies all over the world were declining, stocks falling, unemployment rising. Economies were falling to only fractions of what they had been years prior. In Germany unemployment began to take a shapt upturn and by 1932 six million workers were unemployed, approximately twenty five percent of the work force. This economic nosedive allowed Hitler and his nationalist party to “move into political center-stage”; Hitler used propaganda ruthlessly to uphold his ideas and the image that he would be the “German messiah who would lead Germany into a future of social harmony, economic well-being, and national rebirth.”  Many of the political leaders of the time were under pressure to take forceful measures to put an end the depression, so more than 60 nations met at the World Economic Conference in London in 1933, when that failed it seemed that the nations of the world were to figure out a solution for themselves. “The global economic crisis and the world's poorly organized response to it in part led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939.” There were organizations being established around this era in different countries to try to gain control of the conflicts and radically changing ideals; of these organizations, the League of Nations was one of the most important pertaining to World War Two. (295 words) 

The League of Nations, established in January 1920 by the United States Senate, was initially established to prevent a major outbreak of war. The objective of the League was also to “contain and resolve, by peaceful means as far as possible, any disputes that did break out between nations.” Britain, France, Italy and Japan were the four founding members as, ironically, the United States did not get a spot in the League of Nations. As far as the Leagues failures and successes go, this one really miscarried. Not only did the league fail in its role of peacefully resolving nation-to-nation disputes, it also failed abysmally in preventing the outbreak of World War Two. The league, already weakened by the fact that the US failed to join, was unable to attain all of the world’s major powers all at once; so it failed in its objective of including all the peace-loving states of the world as a permanent interstate conference. The League of Nations, as it was a disarmament league, failed in itself to influence the majority of its members to disarm to any excessive degree, which inevitably lead to the League being dismissed as a whole as ineffective for not being able to institute any lasting arms limitations agreement. There were, however, two major events that really sealed the League of Nation’s fate; the Manchurian dispute between Japan and China in 1931–1933, and the invasion and occupation of Ethiopia by Italian troops in 1935. In the course of these events, the league failed to prevent Japan from establishing the Manchurian in Chinese territory or remove Italy from Ethiopia. There was a half-hearted attempt to regain control on Japan and Italy that drove the two powers into allying with Nazi Germany. In 1933 when a German rearmament went underway, Eastern European league members became threatened. Austria was seized by Germany in 1938, and then the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia, six months later, was surrendered to Hitler only to have the rest of it taken in March 1939 when German troops invaded. The league was obviously powerless when faced with the renascent Germany and that September World War Two broke out after Poland was invaded by the German troops. Ultimately, the League of Nations was a failure, but the “wide ranging expertise and specialist networks” established in Geneva at this time have most defiantly exercised influence well beyond World War Two, as well as resulted in today’s United Nations. (407 words)

Section E- Conclusion

It is evident that not much was done at all to prevent the outbreak of World War Two, from the opposition of other countries to the intervention of institutes like the League of Nations. And what little was done to try and contain the spark was very ineffective. France’s use of pacifism did little more than aggravate and embarrass Germany into accepting the man who would lead them into a losing war; the feeble attempts on behalf of the League of Nations was easy enough to brush off and the Great Depression just added fuel to the fire for Hitler to use as leverage for his campaign and as a result all the major powers of the world underwent the most horrific period in history; the Holocaust. As previously stated, each of these events I turn actually did more harm than good at contributing to the start of the Second World War. (152 words)