How successful was the League of Nations?

        Another failure of the League was when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. The only action the League took was to send the Lytton Commission and morally condemn Japan. However, Japan just walked out of the conference and completed their conquest of Manchuria. The League obviously failed on this occasion as it was reluctant to use collective security or economic sanctions. France did not want to send its troops to the Far East of Europe and nobody wanted to impose a trade boycott of Japan as they were still suffering from the economic trauma of the Great Depression. On this occasion, the desire to protect their own self-interest caused the League to fail.        

        Due to the League’s failure to stop Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, Mussolini attacked Abyssinia in 1935 to build its new Italian empire. The League applied the economic sanctions on Italy but did not include steel, copper, iron and oil as part of the sanctions as they were afraid that a strong action against Italy would turn them into Germany’s ally. In the end, Italy was offered a large amount of Abyssinia’s land if she stopped fighting. However, the other countries learnt of this secret deal and they became less interested in sanctions. Hence, the League’s attempts to prevent a powerful nation from attacking another country proved to be fruitless.

        The League’s only successes came in resolving disputes among the smaller countries. For example, they resolved the Aaland dispute in 1920 between Finland and Sweden where the Aaland islanders wanted to be part of Sweden because of their cultural ties. The League decided that the islands should remain part of Finland but the Swedish culture of the islands be closely safeguarded. On this occasion, there was a successful resolution of a territorial dispute through peaceful means and solution appeased both countries and proved to be long lasting.

        Another success of the League of Nations was the Greek-Bulgarian crisis from 1928-1936. After fighting on the border, Bulgaria took a few kilometres of Greek territory. As Greece had a strong army, they advanced 5km into Bulgaria. After Bulgaria’s appeal to the League, the League acted firmly and called for a cease-fire. They used the threat of economic sanctions backed by the successful naval demonstration to pressure Greece. In this case, the threat of economic sanctions was effective as Greece gave in because it risked having its economy badly hit. This was a case of the League acting firmly in dictating peace terms to small states.