Why did collective security fail to keep the peace between 1920 and 1935?

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Gino Saad

Mr. McMahon

IB History 2

Why did collective security fail to keep the peace between 1920 and 1935?

Collective security was a system of maintaining world peace and security by joint action on the part of the nations of the world. The League of Nations used it as a tool to prevent another outbreak of war. At the very beginning of the League it seemed that the policy of collective security was a good and easily achievable policy of how to keep countries inline and not to take action, which might possibly cause another war. During the 1920’s the structure of the idea of collective security was tested. This began in 1920 with the Aaland Islands and it ended in 1935 with the Abyssinia crisis. The idea of collective security was not thought out as well as it should have been considering it effected the whole world and it would dictate many countries decisions about what to do during a crisis.

        The League of Nations failed to meet its goal of becoming an organization that was able to have a certain amount of power over all countries. As all organizations do the League had its weaknesses. The US and Russia never did join the League and Germany didn’t join until 1926. This was not a problem in the 1920s, when the League dealt mainly with small countries like Sweden and Finland (Aaland Islands, 1921), Turkey (Mosul, 1924) and Bulgaria and Greece (1925).  League was too weak without the support of the USA, Russia, and Germany to make a big country do as it wished (for instance, Italy over Corfu in 1923).  Another weakness was that the League’s structure was a complete mess.  The Assembly could only make a decision by a unanimous vote and all of the permanent members had a veto. Due to the structure of the League when there was a crisis, no one could agree. Finally, the League’s greatest weakness came from the fact that it was set up by the Treaty of Versailles.  The Treaty had many problems but the League was supposed to enforce it.  Also, the Treaty was hated, especially by the Germans and the Americans. This caused the League to be hated to the fact that it was born from an event that was hated by many of world powers.

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        The League was undermined by the fact that many countries conducted their politics outside of the League. This caused for many agreements to be made that the League was unable to veto or deny. This caused for a serious problem of countries beginning to sign agreements that effected the global society (i.e. the naval conferences) this allowed countries to act in self-interest which was a serious problem at the time because with more and more countries acting in self interest there was bound to be more confrontations. These confrontations would occur between member states, which would then bring up the ...

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