The League of Nations was Doomed To Failure From the Start
Many may believe that the League of Nations was doomed to failure as soon as the doors of their Geneva headquarters were opened; many may say that it was built on unstable foundations; that the very idea of it was a grave misjudgement by the powers that were. Indeed it is true that the League of Nations, when it was set up was marred with many fundamental flaws. In January 1920 when the League officially began work, it was not sufficiently complete in that all the foundations were not yet in place for it to be built up properly, however is started.
The League had a Geneva headquarters, in Switzerland, which has had a long history
…show more content…
And also the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which tried to improve international standards of work. Both of these organisations were influential in improving the standards of life in some of the poorest stretches of the world.
These early success in the setting up of the leagues showed it as being committed to improving standards in the world' on the political stage and on the humanitarian stage also, for the time being this merely glossed over the fundamental flaws that were yet to appear in the League which was at this point still in its infancy.
However if one looks carefully enough it is possible to pinpoint the very earliest failings of the league, right at the beginning it is clear that the people who joined or rather did not join are the people who cracked the foundations before they were put into place each of the countries had differing reasons for not joining, but their lack of membership inflicted massive harm to the League.
America
The first of these countries and possibly the most influential was America's lack of attendance. Although the previous President had thought the league up in the first place the current U.S president
…show more content…
Now most of these countries had vast imperial assets in Africa and elsewhere, also they were white Christian countries, which ruled over their colonies with and air of superiority. This meant that it would not be in their interest to criticise either Racism or Imperialism.
Throughout the 1920's the league faced many border disputes, which the league treated with varying levels of success. The first major dispute was over Silesia an Industrial region on the Polish/German border; both Germans and Poles inhabited it. An election was held over which country it should go to. The voting was split and in the end so was the region; it was a success for the league. Another success for the league came in the same year and was over the Aaland Islands; which both Sweden and Finland claimed as their own, again the land was split.
Two years later, Mussolini wanting to flex his political muscles. With the excuse of a disagreement between Greece and Albania, he invaded the Island of Corfu killing 15. Although he was forced to pull out, this showed Mussolini the inconsistency of the League. This led to Mussolini looking to gain power in the world; he dreamed of a
These documents show that the League of Nations was responsible for WWII because they did not take threats seriously and did not respond to the problems quickly enough. However, instead of appeasement, collective security was the answer to quell Hitler. The League of Nations was not an effective solution to the arguing and warfare that broke out during the early 20th century. Also, appeasement did nothing for the Allied Forces, and Germany had gained a lot of both land and power than if the Allies had not chosen to try and win Hitler over. Collective security successfully defeated Hitler and the Nazi party for the Allied Forces, and also got rid of Hitler’s influences all over the European front. WWII was an overall success for the Allied Forces due to collective security methods in place, in order to obliterate the Nazi Party.
The League of Nations was created shortly after World War One and had a similar purpose to the Treaty of Versailles - to keep peace between the countries. However, the League was too apathetic and in the long run, was full of failures. The League had many instances in which they weren 't able to keep the peace between countries. Examples of these failures are when Italy attacked the port of Fiume which was given to Yugoslavia, or when France and Belgium invaded Germany’s biggest industrial zone, Ruhr. For both of these
They say time is a great teacher. How true. History has taught us that peace must be kept at all costs. The tragic story of the League of Nations centers around the man who conceived it and offered it to the world. The man who developed its charter and who died from exhaustion after his own country, the United States, refused to ratify it in the senate . On November eleventh, 1918 an armistice was declared in Europe. The President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, saw this as an opportunity to form an international organization of peace. The league was brought forth to provide security against future wars. However, the league did not fulfill the hopes of it's founders, it did not enforce the Versailles treaty, and did not protest injustices. The League took no steps to protect Ethiopia from the advancing Italians until it was too late. They did nothing to stop the German troops from rearming, even though the Versailles treaty was meant to keep Germany from rearming. Another example of the League of Nations failure is when they failed to act against the Japanese advance into Manchuria. At a time of such military aggression throughout Europe and Asia, the League had a chance to limit the activity of potentially harmful nations. With the United States not helping, the League of Nations not acting, the world was left vulnerable for another war and the eventual demise of the League of Nations.
America failed to join the League of Nations for several reasons, but the one to blame is mostly the creator Woodrow Wilson. He couldn't compromise with his Congress to pass through his longed dreamed League. If Wilson would have just let some of the senators changes pass the League of Nations would have been created a century ago, but it had to wait for the United Nations to be created for America to finally join an international committee based on world peace.
Imagine this: a child starts a fight on the playground in elementary school. After a nasty scuffle he is caught and brought into the principal’s office for punishment. Present in the office is the mother of a child whose arm was broken in the fight. She wants the child punished severely as restitution for hurting her son. Next is one of the children who stepped in to defend the victim. He wants the child punished, but not as harshly as the mother. And, of course, the principal. He stepped in at the end of the fight and broke it up. His only goal at this point is to make sure another fight does not occur. Welcome to the situation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 at the close of World War I. Germany had started a major war, and it was up to the leaders of France, the mother country whose children were hurt the worst in the war; Britain, a major player in the fighting; and America, the authoritative party that stepped in at the close of the war to end it, to determine what punishment to inflict upon the aggressor. The result of these differing views is the Treaty of Versailles. But the results of the Treaty of Versailles were less than successful at promoting peace, to say the least. The effects of the treaty on Germany coupled with the American policy of isolationism at the time resulted in the rise of a terrible dictator and the beginning of a war even worse than the first. The United States’ approach to the Treaty of Versailles was shortsighted.
&., 2005, p. 67) , the United States Congress refused to cooperate with America joining the League and viewed Woodrow Wilsons idea of the League and his foreign policy as too ‘ideational’. With the absence of the US rendering the League without access to Americas forceful military and economic power- which left the Covenants ability stated within Article 16 to “institute economic or military sanctions against a recalcitrant state” (Orjinta, 2010, p. 10) considerably weaker- German, Japanese and Italian dictatorships rejected the sovereignty of the League (Wilkinson, 2007, p. 86). Yet although it can be agreed the League failed in regards to its main purpose of maintaining peace and security, it did however provide a desire among states for an Intergovernmental Organisation (IGO) to ‘recognise that it is in their [governments] national interests to obtain multilateral agreements and pursue actions to deal with threats, challenges, or problems that cannot be dealt with effectively at the unilateral level’ (Wilkinson, 2007, p. 79). From this perspective, the League of Nations opened up a place for the United Nations to thus continue on a path of maintaining peace in an improved and effective manner. It is true that the UN Charter commandeered elements of the Leagues
...democracy and made the world safer for it. The League of Nations allowed countries to debate over territorial matters, and other political problems. It would have been a great start for the progressivism of democracy and the spread of modernism throughout the world.
Japan was strongminded to get new and fresh territories. Once the league decided to take action against Italy this is when the decided enough was enough and they left the league continuing its spiral of failure. These was almost a sense of loss of faith within the league as many of the nations no longer thought they could rely on the system in many different aspects. Clearly the military proneness was one of the major reasons as these countries soon realized there was no presence within that category. Overall in the end, these were all of several reason the League of Nations failed as a power and countries all left on their own. So in conclusion, because not all countries joined, their lack of military, and their inadequate ability to act was the reasoning for the failure to stop an additional world
The League of Nations sounds like a superhero team and in a sense, the goal that The League was trying to achieve could have been something straight out of a comic book. Originally proposed by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, The League was born after some alterations. The League of Nations’ main intention was to bring an end to the war and prevent another one of the same atrocious proportions from happening in the future. Forty zealous countries joined this fight, but the most powerful country of all was not among them: The United States of America. While many Americans agreed with the goal of The League, many did not and those that did not were ones in power. The portion of the “mission statement” for The League that caused
After the cease-fire of World War I brought the great war to its conclusion, all of the countries involved with the war got together to determine and to negotiate the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The conditions of this treaty were decided by the “winners” of the war, but was initially planned to be an agreement structured along the lines of President Woodrow Wilson’s term peace without victory; however, the meeting to negotiate the terms of surrender after the ceasefire quickly turned into peace with total victory. The events that led up to the Treaty of Versailles into having such a high impact on all countries that were involved was. Because of the following events; The failure of Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points, Germany’s defeat,
However, the treaty, which was designed to maintain world peace, was seen as a diplomatic verbiage. In addition, there was no stability, or binding force in the treaty. At the conference the League of Nations was created, but also seen as a diplomatic verbiage because it was designed in the same way as the treaty. Nevertheless, the most binding and central provision of the treaty, is an unrecorded clause, which states that the Allies tried to suppress Soviet Russia.
With the conclusion of the First World War the League of Nations was founded in the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. It was the first intergovernmental organization that would keep peace and settle world disputes.
The Failure of League of Nations was aspect that was a cause of some parts of World
Alan Sharp, ‘Peacemaking after World War I’, in G. Martel (ed.), Companion to Europe 1900-1945, Blackwell, Oxford, 2006, pp. 261-75.
The League of Nations was an international organisation formed in 1920 with its primary objective being to uphold world peace and promote collective security. This was based on the idea that if one of the League’s members was invaded, the other countries would stand up against the aggressor together. The League had a variety of successes, including settling the Aaland Islands dispute between Sweden and Finland, as well as failures, such as the Corfu incident between Greece and Italy.