‘The League of Nations failed to achieve its objectives of maintaining international peace and security.’ Analyse the major factors responsible for its failure during the period 1919-1946.

Structural defects.

• Absent great powers. The United States never joined, the Senate having rejected the Treaty; Germany was admitted only in 1926 and left in 1933; the USSR joined in 1934 and was expelled in 1939. A body missing the strongest states could not enforce anything.
• No armed force. The League could recommend but not compel; Article 16 sanctions depended on members choosing to apply them.
• The unanimity rule in the Council and Assembly allowed any interested party to block action.
• Birth defect. The Covenant was Part I of the Treaty of Versailles, so the League was identified with a settlement its critics regarded as unjust, and defending the treaty became indistinguishable from defending the League.

Political failures — the three tests.

• Manchuria, 1931. Japan invaded; the Lytton Commission reported in 1932 that aggression had occurred; the League adopted the report and Japan simply withdrew in 1933, without consequence.
• Abyssinia, 1935. Sanctions on Italy excluded oil and left the Suez Canal open, and the Hoare-Laval Pact revealed that Britain and France were privately prepared to reward the aggressor. This destroyed the League's credibility.
• The Rhineland, 1936, and Austria and Czechoslovakia thereafter, went unchallenged.

The underlying causes. The World Disarmament Conference of 1932-34 collapsed. The Great Depression turned states inward towards autarky and tariffs. Britain and France pursued national policies — appeasement and security respectively — through the League when convenient and around it when not.

What it did achieve. It settled the Aaland Islands, Upper Silesia and the Mosul dispute; the Nansen passport system aided refugees; and the ILO and its health and social work survived it, passing into the United Nations, which was designed specifically to correct its defects — universal membership, great-power engagement through the veto, and enforcement powers in the Security Council. The League was formally dissolved on 18 April 1946.