Was the League of Nations a complete failure?

Authors Avatar

Luca Galbiati        05.12.02

Class 10        History

Was the League of Nations a complete failure?

This essay will try to define whether the League of Nations was or wasn’t a complete failure. By complete we mean that no successes were achieved and only failures were.  

The League of Nations was set-up initially with four main aims:

  • To discourage aggression from any nation
  • To encourage other countries to co-operate
  • To encourage nations to disarm
  • To improve living and working conditions of people in all parts of the world

The League of Nations did attempt to achieve all these objectives in different ways, always trying no to use violent methods. Only half of these aims were achieved partly. The main successes and failures concerned all the crises such as the Corfu and Manchurian crisis. Other failures such as the Disarmament Pact will also be described in this essay.

Since the Failures were more important than the successes, it is important to begin and describe in detail in a chronological.

The first one was back in 1919 when Italian nationalists took over the small port of Fiume in Yugoslavia. They thought that it belonged o Italy and that the Treaty of Versailles pact was broken. The Italian government didn’t accept this and so bombarded the port. The League of Nations didn’t do anything about this. The League was just set-up and probably inexperienced. This was probably the first of many failures.

Join now!

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.  

...

This is a preview of the whole essay