When the league was first set up there were forty two countries ready to join. The four main contenders were Britain, France, Italy and Japan. But any action by the League had to run past both the French and the British prior.
After the war, much of the German empire was given away to weaken it, this meant that there would be some new states and changed other sates borders. But when it came to dividing the land some people were not happy, there were many disputes like this, so the League was called in to help sort out the arguments.
However there were so many disputes, the Conference of Ambassadors was asked for help. One of the First disputes was “Vilna”. In the new state of Lithuania, Vilna was the capital. Yet the main population was Polish. Then in 1920 a private Polish army merely took control of it. Lit6huania appealed to the League, this would be their crucial “first task” as a League.
The League sent a protest to Poland, but they ignored it, so according to the Leagues guidelines, they should have sent French and British troops over there to remove the Poles. But the French did not want to upset a future ally against Germany, and the British were not going to send their troops half the way across Europe. So in the end the League just left it, under the control of the Polish. This was not was not a good result for the League, from this point on it was downhill.
There were other disputes that came later on, but the League solved where able to solve this situations without to much of aggression from either side. For example the Upper Silesia, this was an area with both Polish and German population. Both counties wanted control of the state, because of it’s rich iron and steel industry.
So the League comprised a vote, the population would vote on which country they wanted to rule it. The industrial area mainly voted for Germany, and the rural area wanted Poland, so the league divided the state along those bounders.
But they also built in safeguards in between the zones. This allowed for railways to run smoothly and water and power supplies go from one boarder to the other. This was the result the League had been waiting for.
It was not just boarder disputes that League dealt with, in 1922 during the Turkey crisis the League set up refugee camps where hundreds of thousands of refugees were homed. Yet they were at risk of cholera, smallpox and dysentery, so the League set about stamping it out, which was successful.
In 1921, USA, Britain, France and Japan all agreed at the Washington Conference, to limit the size of their navies, and that was as far as global disarmament went, so another down fall for the League. This angered the Germans, they were the only country to disarm, and so they believed they were vulnerable to other countries.
I believe the League’s ten years were not up to their previous expectations. They were unable to complete any of their aims successfully. There was still quite a bit of aggression between states, the League failed to settle many of the disputes, and were unable to get any one to disarm.
Although they did improve living and working conditions, they had not completed it in the global scale they wished to. After the war countries began to lose trust within each other so very little trading in was going on.
The League of Nations was losing it’s respect all round the world. They began to slacken off, the tension they had once held, in Germany plots to abolish the Treaty of Versailles were being spoken yet no action was taken to stop them in their tracks. The League was it’s own downfall.
