“Ever since its creation in 1920, the League of Nations was destined to fail.” Discuss.
The League of Nations came into being after the end of World War One in January 1920. The League of Nation's task was to ensure that war never broke out again. After the turmoil of the Versailles Treaty, many looked to the League to bring stability to the world. . It was an international body whose sole purpose was to maintain world peace and which would resolve global political, economic, social, humanitarian, and technical problems as and when they occurred. It was these hopes that were invested in the League, despite its flawed establishment at the Paris Peace Conference and the absence of the United States and many other important countries such as Russia and Germany from its membership, which made failure seem inevitable from the start.
The League of Nations was doomed from the start because of many factors such as three of the world’s most powerful nations, America, Russia and Germany, played no part in supporting the League. America didn’t want to join because she had desire to have an isolationist policy throughout the world. Russia was not allowed to join because of the fact that she had a communist government and in 1918 the royal family had been murdered. Germany were not allowed to join the League of Nations because she had started World War One according to Versailles. The two most powerful members of the League were Britain and France who had both suffered financially and militarily during the war and so were not enthusiastic to get involved in disputes that did not affect Western Europe. This basically meant that the League had no army or muscle to enforce policies, so the worst it could do was to create economic sanctions which did not work! It was also very slow to make decisions as it met so infrequently and they had to wait until everyone agreed before making any progress. In addition to this, there was a lot of pressure on the League of Nations after the Treaty of Versailles, which was seen to be too harsh on Germany. They had to uphold the treaties at the start, which further annoyed Germany and so was one of the causes of the League failure. Finally, the League was destined from the beginning because it had internal conflict present in it. The permanent members were having disputes over land with temporary members and getting the benefit of the doubt. However, when the temporary members did the same, they were punished such as the Greece was. There was an ulterior motive present in the League of Nations, which doomed it from the start. As well as this there were many problems that the League faced from 1929 onwards, which caused it to fail.
