The League of Nations – A Force Quite Easily Reckoned With.

“Okay kids, so here’s the plan.

You do A-Level History right? All about “Saving Europe at a cost”, right?

No? What? Oh…. Erm…. Then I guess just carry on with whatever you were doing.”

Oh, you do? Good good.

Come with me.

Right, where was I?
Ah yes, for the next two weeks, the Wiggle is now a HISTORY REVISION SITE! *ta-da*

Sounds fun right? No? Oh okay, well we liked the idea…

ANYWAIS.

Less chit chat, more revision.

And our first port of call?

THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES

Background Info:

• It was signed on 28th June 1919. After a lot of debate between the ‘Big Three’.

“Wait, what? Who are the Big Three? It rings a bell…. I think Evans mentioned them once….”

The Big Three: -David Lloyd George (Britain) ‘They need punishing, but y’know not too much.’
-Georges Clemenceau (France) ‘Stick it to ‘em hard! We’re in trouble! Erm….Zut alors!’
- Woodrow Wilson (USA) ‘Clearly I don’t think like George Bush, cause I actually want to prevent wars.’

• So basically, USE has come up with these 14 points, right?  And during WW1 they’d offered them to Germany as a form of truce. But Germany had been all “Hell no!”, which kind of sucked for them ’cause then when they lost the war (woo!) the allies refused to let them base a peace settlement on them. Sucks to be you, eh Germany? Cause yeah, those points would’ve been quite nice on Germany really.
• But nooooooo, the Treaty of Versailles was created instead. I’ll touch on this in more detail later, but yeah basically Germany lost a lot of land, and were told to admit they’d started the war and to pay a lot of money to all the countries they’d messed around with that little war of theirs.

“Sophie? Yeah, hi. I’m not sure where this is going… I thought you were going to talk about the League of Nations. I mean, that’s what we’re all here for.”

“Cool it, kid. I’m getting there, okay? Geez. You try and help people….”

• And from the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations was born. Happy now?
• The League of Nations started work in January 1920.

This brings us to our second stop on this fun revision cruise of ours:

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Remember those 14 points I was talking about earlier? Well the League of Nations was based on them. Basically, they wanted to stop all the fighting by disarming, and encourage people to get on. And just generally improve lives and what-not. Blah blah blah. But yeah, people had high hopes of the League actually, they thought it had some good ideas, which is fair enough really.

But just how well did they live up to these expectations?

The Positives:

• They did actually sort out some disputes without fighting, believe it or not. Need an example? How about the dispute over Upper Silesia in 1921 between Germany and Poland.
• It helped refugees after the First World War. Good stuff L. of N. Smiley face for you.
• Although it was working to avoid wars, it did fight against diseases such as Malaria using inoculations. Hurrah!
• And it worked against slavery, ’cause of it’s whole ‘better working conditions’ ideology.

“Sounds good right?”

“Right.”

“Shut up.”

Of course things weren’t that great, there were some major issues too.

The Problems:

• The USA didn’t join - They thought the Treaty of Versailles was too hard on the Germans, and so didn’t like the League either. Also, due to their Isolations attitudes (this means that they wanted to focus on their own problems rather than get involved with other countries), they thought the League was too expensive and that actually it was un-democratic. A biiiig no-no there for Woodrow.
• It wasn’t powerful enough – It didn’t have the USA behind it to ’scare’ weaker countries into submission, therefore any sanctions imposed were going to fail. Simple. Due to it’s whole ‘war is bad’ outlook, it had no army behind it, this means they got ignored… By Italy as much as anyone actually. Although Britain and France were ‘big bosses’, they were both pretty crappy after the war and so didn’t really do that much. In fact, the whole organisation of the League was a shambles… There was no real agreement. Sad face there. Oh, and did I mention that Germany and Communist Russia weren’t allowed to join at first? Although Germany became a member in 1926 that still made the League pretty weak and generally shit to start off with.
• Corfu (1923) – To put it simply, an Italian diplomant was murdered. Bad times for Mussolini. So as usual, what does he do? He occupies the Greek island of Corfu and demands compensations of course! Not the League really mess up big time here, and start demanding that the money’s given to them instead. I mean, what the hell?! And Mussolini, not being a pushover, has this decision overturned and gets both the money AND a ’sorry’. And the League? Well, they’re left looking pretty weak aren’t they. Gutted.
• French Occupation of the Ruhr (1923) – So Germany couldn’t afford to pay for the £6600 million reparations they were told to, not surprising really is it, what with their economic crisis and all… So yeah, to fight back French decide to do the civilized thing and INVADE, Good one. :/ Basically they just barged into the Ruhr, the industrial region of Germany,  and occupied it. And the League? They did nothing. NOTHING. Eugh. So guess who ended up having to fix things? The US of course, they helped fix it with the Dawes Plan, this made the reparations easier for Germany to deal with and stabilised their currency etc. (though this did cause a great reliance upon the US which meant that when the Great Depression struck, Germany was still in the shit). This eventually lead to France leaving the Ruhr in 1923, and really only made the French look nasty and the Leagur look weak. Bad stuff.
• The Great Depression – In the 20’s the US was the ‘most prosperous’ country in the world with high wages and mass production and all that. But pride comes before a fall, right? So then suddenly there was too much supply and not enough demand (cause all the other countries were too poor and already relying on American loans), so there was the Wall Street Crash of 1929. This meant that everyone realized companies were in trouble and started selling their shares for low prices as quickly as possible. This caused the Great Depression. Bad times. Suddenly, instead of lending money out to other countried, the USA started calling in all it’s loans, which cause real problems for other countries. Want some unemployment statistics? By 1932 over 12 million were unemployed in the USA, 2.5 million in Britain and more than 6 million in Germany. This caused the League a lot of problems, suddenly Britain and France wanted to concentrate on their own economic problems rather than looking after the rest of the world. Also, the fact thst suddenly everyone was broke meant that people turned to support extreme right-wing leaders, hoping that they’d be stronger. *ahem* Hello Hitler.
• The Manchurian Crisis – Although Japan has become stonger during the First World War, the depression hit them hard, leaving military leaders to call for expansion in order to strengthen them again. So in September, it sent troops to take Mukden, and overrun Manchuria. Except it made it look as though they’d given Manchuria their independance by putting a weak leader in charge so they could control him. Sneaky, eh? So the League rushed in to help right? Wrong. They send one man, ONE MAN, to assess the situation and blame Japan. And then? They did nothing. The failed to confront Japanese agression. Big time. And how did that make them look? Weak my friend, very weak. This lead to a treaty between Japan and Germany in 1936, whi started to invade China in 1937. Once again, the League did F-all.
• The Invasion of Abysinnia – You knew Italy was controlled by the Fascist dictator Mussolini during this time didn’t you? Oh good. But you knew that in the early 30’s he was generally on Britain and France’s side right? Godd, just checking. Well basically, you know that little country just about Kenya? Abysinnia? Never heard of it? No, I hadn’t either, it’s called Ethiopia now-a-days for the record, I’m sure you’ll have heard of that. But yeah, he invaded it in 1935. As dictators tend to. Basically, following a previous defeat by Abysinnia, Mussolini wanted revenge and a big empire, so encouraged by the Leagues lack of action with Manchuria etc. he went for it. Fair enough really. So yeah, Mussolini sends in his troops, and Abysinnia asks the League for help. What do they do? They impose ‘economic sanctions’. Sacry stuff… What Britain and France failed to do was close the Suez canal which would have stopped the Italian ships getting through. This meant that the sanctions were pointless and by May 1936 Mussolini was in charge of the whole of Abysinnia. Good one League… Good work there. :/ (Note the sarcasm). So yeah, once again the League looked weak and generally ineffective. And this once caused both Germany and Italy to become more confident, wtih Italy and Germany signing the Pact of Steel in 1939. Good move.

Overall:

• The League’s main aim was to prevent agression and encourage co-operation. FAILED.
• Although it succeeded in improving the lives of some eg. slaves, this wasn’t it’s main aim. :/
• It did provide the groundwork for the United Nations though, which is good I guess.
• It can also be argued that it wasn’t their fault that the Usa didn’t join, and that their problems were made worse by the Great Depression, which was also out of their control.
• BUT, they could’ve done more to prevent the weak and inneffective impression they gave out. They didn’t oppose any agression, and so the agressors won easily every time.
• They failed to force countried to disarm and instead allowed secret alliances to be formed once more.
• To put it plainly, the League of Nations did nothing really to prevent the Second World War.

Epic Fail.