The second failure was the conflict between Poland and Lithuania for the city of Vilna. The city on the Polish-Lithuanian border and its population was made up of mostly Polish even if it was on the Lithuanian side. The Polish army decided to take it over with the use of force. The city stayed under Polish control until the beginning of WW2. The League of Nations didn’t do anything about it. The use of violence was applied by the Polish and so the League should have intervened. It was the League’s job to stop this aggression from happening.
One of the greatest failures of the League concerning its objectives is the Disarmament Treaty. This treaty involved all the member countries of the League of Nations. It tried to make all the countries reduce their armies so that wars could be prevented in the future. Important member countries such as Germany and France disagreed with the terms of the treaty. France didn’t want to disarm because it had a very strong power and wanted to keep its army as something to boast. The same happened to the English with their Navy. The British Navy was very important at the time. When Germany found out that the other countries were reluctant to disarm, it also refused to disarm by saying that it was unfair that Germany had no armed forces and sought that they could have rearmed. The League was incapable of controlling its member countries. Eventually in May 1937, it ceased to meet. (1)
Probably the greatest failure of the League was that the creator itself, The United States of America hadn’t joined the League in the beginning. Woodrow Wilson was the man who had the idea to create it after seeing what had happened during WWI. The American population didn’t want to suffer more casualties. This was known as Isolationism. The Senate was also scared that if the USA helped the European states financially it could have caused trouble in the American Economy. (2)
The League faced two main crisis’; The Manchurian and the Abyssinian. The first one was a complete failure because the League lacked in speed. It took too long to make decisions and also tried to make up excuses. Britain wanted to keep good relations with Japan. After a year, The LONS came to a decision saying that Japan was wrong. Immediately after Japan resigned. Sources suggest that this crisis led to others because it gave a bad example to rulers such as Mussolini and Hitler. This was probably the beginning of the end of the League of Nations. The great powers and the great members of the League were susceptible to any other great members decision.
The second crisis, the Abyssinian war between Italy and Abyssinia was the final stage before failure. Italian leader Mussolini took the idea of expanding its empire from the Japanese emperor and started to invade Abyssinia. Its main motives were that Italy had to expand its frontiers and try to distract the population from the economic recession it was suffering. The League attempted to impose its sanctions but without much success. This was because USA didn’t want to stop the oil export and actually made it increase. The members of the League were incapable to do anything about this because they didn’t want to break their relationships with the USA. This showed how powerless the members of the LONS had become at this stage and how the League was being crippled by large powers such as Italy and Japan. German NAZI party took this crisis as an opportunity to invade the Rhineland. This was the end of the League of Nations which couldn’t handle two things at once. The League only officially stopped meeting at the end of WWII. (3)
As well as failures came small successes for the league. Many small crisis’ such as the Aaland and the Upper Silesian had been solved by the League of Nations.
The Aaland crisis was probably the easiest conflict the League came across. Sweden and Finland wanted to gain control of these small islands located at equal distances between each other. These islands belonged to the Finns and so the League cam to the decision that they should remain to them. Both sides also agreed on the fact that no weapons should ever be kept there. Sources suggest that this reason was a sage one to avoid conflicts and also trying to accomplish two aims in one; to discourage aggression from any nation and o encourage nations to disarm. (4)
The other important success was the Upper Silesia conflict between citizens of this piece of land located between Poland and Germany. Half of the population wanted to belong to German territory and half to Polish. Riots began and both countries appealed to the League. The League decided that the country should be split in half and that half should go to German and half to Poland. This decision was acclaimed by the population and gave the LONS more admiration.
The League also tried to help refugees and people living in poor conditions. A committee was set-up to try and solve these problems. This was almost certainly the most efficient section of the LONS.
In conclusion to this essay, all the information provided from the sources suggest that the League wasn’t a complete failure and that it was criticised too much. It accomplished some main objectives such as the Upper Silesian crisis and very importantly, the Aaland by achieving two aims in one.
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(3) GCSE modern history-Ben Walsh---John Murray Ltd. 1996
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