China appealed to the League. Japan claimed it wasn’t invading as an aggressor but simply settling a local difficulty. The Japanese argued that China was in such a state of anarchy that they had to invade in self-defence to keep peace in the area. For the LoN this was a serious test, because Japan was a leading member of the League, it needed careful handling.
After a long and frustrating delay, an inquiry commission send by the League blamed the Manchuria Incident on Japan, and in 1933 the League Assembly requested that Japan stop hostilities in China. The Japanese government instead announced that it was going to withdraw from the League.
3.Disarmament Conference
The next big failure of the League of Nations was over disarmament. The Conference failed for a number of reasons. Some say it was all doomed from the start. No one was very serious about disarmament anyway. But there were other factors at work.
It didn’t help that Britain and France were divided on this issue. By 1933 many British people were beginning to feel that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair. In fact, to the dismay of the French, the British signed an agreement with Germany in 1935 which allowed Germany to build up its navy as long as it stayed under 35 per cent of the size of the British navy. Britain didn’t consult either its allies or the League about this, although it was also in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
4.Italian invasion of Abyssinia
The origins of this event lay back in the 19th century. In 1896 Italian troops had tried to invade Abyssinia but had been defeated by a poorly equipped army of tribesmen. Mussolini wanted revenge for this humiliating defeat. He also had his eye on the fertile lands and mineral wealth of Abyssinia. However, most importantly he wanted glory and conquest. His style of leadership needed military victories and he had often talked of restoring the glory of the Roman Empire.
In December 1934 there was a dispute between Italian and Ethiopian soldiers at the Wal-Wal oasis – fifty miles inside Abyssinia. Mussolini took this as his cue and claimed this was actually Italian territory. He demanded an apology and began preparing the Italian army for an invasion of Abyssinia. The Abyssinian emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League for help.
The League condemned Italy and introduced economic sanctions; however, this didn’t include exports of oil, coal and steel to Italy. So half-hearted were the sanctions, that Italy was able to complete the conquest of Abyssinia without too much inconvenience (May 1936). A few weeks later sanctions were abandoned, and Mussolini had successfully flouted the League. Again Britain and France must share the blame for the League’s failure. Their motive was the desire not to antagonise Mussolini too much, so as to keep him as an ally against the real danger – Germany. But the results were disastrous:
- Mussolini was annoyed by the sanctions anyway, and began to draw closer to Hitler;
- Small states lost all faith in the League; and
- Hitler was encouraged to break the Treaty of Versailles.
After 1935, therefore, the League was never taken seriously again.
The real explanation for the failure of the League was simple: when aggressive states such as Japan, Italy and Germany defied it, the League members, especially France and Britain, were not prepared to support it, either by decisive economic measures or by military action. The League was only as strong as the determination of its leading members to stand up to aggression – unfortunately, determination of that sort was sadly lacking during the 1930s.
