Germany, Italy, and Japan were among those who did not honor their promises. (Gerald Leinwand 592). However, Germany was not allowed after WW1 to join the League, which was a major bias, because if it wants to keep peace, it shouldn’t exclude any country, especially a major power which could’ve helped them. Furthermore, most countries just joined the League so that they can feel superior and important, because a few major powers were part of it; otherwise in general, they showed no interest in the League and never took it seriously.
However, even if the League had included in its membership all the great powers, or a substantial majority of them, as was achieved in the United Nations in 1945, they would not have necessarily co-operated in support of the Covenant or act as a united League, because It was quite impossible for the United States, after its losses in the First World War and its disillusionment with the peace treaties, to send its forces all over the world in defense of those treaties. (Northedge 285)
Furthermore, another weakness was that, the League only had two effective members of the Entente Powers, which were Britain and France, and they themselves were recovering from the First World War. Divided from the start in their conceptions of what the League was supposed to do, Britain wanting to use the League to revise the excesses of the peace treaties of 1919, France seeking to use it to defend and enforce them, the two democracies were further divided by the absence of the United States and later by the withdrawal of the totalitarian countries. (Northedge 285) Moreover, F.S. Northedge questions,
“If a whole coalition of Allied and Associated Powers barely sufficed to defeat the Central Powers in 1918, how could Britain and France alone be sufficient to overcome an even larger group of revisionist states in the 1930s?” (285) The League of Nations contained' peace-loving' states which were regarded too weak to fight back against the aggressors. All that the 'peace-lovers' could do was to fight the law-breakers.
Additionally, the organization did not have an army of its own to take effective action against the aggression, because of the British and British Commonwealth, who were partly blamed for this, because they went against the French proposal in 1919 for forming an international force in the form of a military alliance with the nations to support the League’s decisions.
Because the League of Nations was often ineffective, the nations of the world looked for other ways in which to solve the problems of world peace. A race for military superiority had been one cause of World War 1. During this postwar period, the league, therefore tried to limit the production of land and sea weapons, such as airplanes and battleships. Most of these efforts, however, were not successful. (Gerald Leinwand 592). More production of weapons raises the chances of war.
The League’s Covenant article 10 was supposed to preserve the world’s territorial and political status quo. Most of the nations who benefited from the 1919 peace settlement liked that position. However those who suffered from peace settlement, which were likely the defeated powers of WW1. Moreover, some of the countries who have the highest responsibility of defending the status quo would fall, would be regarded Article 10 impossible to implement or as a threat to peace, because those not favored by existing status quo would never reconcile themselves. However, Article 19, which gave the right to make recommendations for a peaceful change, thus weakening clause 10 was separated from it and thus weakening the force. Therefore, which means that the league members states and world opinion was divided into two groups, a pro-article 10 group and an opposing pro-article 19 group.
The pro-Article 10 group seemed to think that any modification of the established order in the world would open the road to ruin; the pro-Article 19 section believed that keeping the road to change permanently closed meant pushing problems underground, where they would fester and, at some future time, explode. The obvious tactics for any revisionist faced with these two groups was to play off one against the other. Germany gave France to think that Britain was secretly promising Berlin advantages at France's expense, while telling Britain that, if it were not for French intransigence, the whole problem of Germany's reintegration into Western Europe, with her rights respected, would be solved. (F.S. Northedge)
Germany wished to reduce most League member states to laborers in the Nazi system. The balance of the forces between that system and the status quo was such that, stopping some major changes in Hitler’s policies, a violent clash between the two cannot avoid the League’s total collapse. The status quo countries led by Britain were willing to make concessions with Germany when it was strong as a country in the 1930’s. The policy – ‘appeasement’ which Britain and France led failed when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
Conclusion
The League of Nations did have good intentions to begin with and to say that it was a complete failure to solve the post WW1 problems would be wrong, because they had reduced much pain and sorrow after the events of World War I. The League of Nations magnificently contributed to satisfy basic human needs. However, they failed to maintain world peace because, despite its numerous ideas to ensure international peace and collective security, which failed during the time the League of Nations was active in that of the UN.. It failed to keep a standing army and could not do anything substantial to stop nations from going to war. The maintenance of peace has, on the whole, returned to traditional balance-of-power practices, which the world-wide organizations like the League were intended to supersede. The political work of the League in the field of improving international relations, with all its tragedies, came and went, as did the League itself.
Citations of Sources
[According to Northedge, “The deep mistrust between Russia and the West showed that it was not the former's membership of the League, but the lack of the will to work together for the common good which decided the League's fate”(286)].
[According to Gerald Leinwand, “Germany, Italy, and Japan were among those who did not honor their promises” (592)]
[According to Northedge, “It was quite impossible for the United States, after its losses in the First World War and its disillusionment with the peace treaties, to send its forces all over the world in defense of those treaties.” (285)]
[According to Northedge “Divided from the start in their conceptions of what the League was supposed to do, Britain wanting to use the League to revise the excesses of the peace treaties of 1919, France seeking to use it to defend and enforce them, the two democracies were further divided by the absence of the United States and later by the withdrawal of the totalitarian countries.” (285)].
[F.S. Northedge questions, “If a whole coalition of Allied and Associated Powers barely sufficed to defeat the Central Powers in 1918, how could Britain and France alone be sufficient to overcome an even larger group of revisionist states in the 1930s?” (285)].
[According to Gerald Leinwand, “Because the League of Nations was often ineffective, the nations of the world looked for other ways in which to solve the problems of world peace. A race for military superiority had been one cause of World War 1. During this postwar period, the league, therefore tried to limit the production of land and sea weapons, such as airplanes and battleships. Most of these efforts, however, were not successful.” (592)]
[According to F.S. Northedge “The pro-Article 10 group seemed to think that any modification of the established order in the world would open the road to ruin; the pro-Article 19 section believed that keeping the road to change permanently closed meant pushing problems underground, where they would fester and, at some future time, explode. The obvious tactics for any revisionist faced with these two groups was to play off one against the other. Germany gave France to think that Britain was secretly promising Berlin advantages at France's expense, while telling Britain that, if it were not for French intransigence, the whole problem of Germany's reintegration into Western Europe, with her rights respected, would be solved.”]
Works Cited
"League of Nations." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, 29 Oct. 2010. Web. 01 Nov. 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations>.
Gerald Leinwand. The Pageant of World History. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1994.
F.S.Northedge. "The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920-1946." Questia School - The Online Library for Students and Educators. Holmes & Meier, 1986. Web. 01 Nov. 2010. <http://www.questiaschool.com/read/78758682>.
