The Failure of the League of Nations

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The Failure of the League of Nations

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 Corfuand 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.

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.

One of the greatest failures of the League concerning its objectives

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