Failure Of The Leaque Of Nations

9 Pages 2253 Words

"Ineffectiveness in Action: The Failure of the League of Nations"
by John Parks
“A living thing is born.”1 With these words, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson laid out the first draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations before the Paris Peace Conference. At the end of the first World War in 1919, the entire globe was war weary and in need of relief system that could keep the peace, and Wilson’s ambitious idea to set up a League of Nations seemed almost too good to be true: it was to be an association of states designed to replace traditional power politics in an organization that would use peaceful negotiation to maintain international peace and security. The unifying principle of the League was the shared belief that acts of aggression and war were crimes against humanity and that it is the interest and the duty of every Member State to join in preventing it.2
While an excellent idea in theory, the League met with repeated problems in keeping its Member States in line with this one principle, the central point of League’s Covenant, simply because the nations had not adapted their foreign policy to change from a standpoint that they only had themselves to look after, instead of looking after the interests of the League as a whole working unit. Following several years of successful, though rough, interventions, including the aversion of war in the Greco-Bulgar Crisis in 1925 and several disarmament agreements, the whole world soon began to watch as Woodrow Wilson’s “living thing” slowly began to die. Japan invaded Manchuria and left the League, Germany, too, resigned from the League and proceded to rearm itslef, and the League’s advice at the World Economic Conference in 1927 was blatantly ignored, proving that harldy anyone gave the League any mind as true force of global power. However, the event that truly marked the demise of the League of Nations as a successful keeper of international peace and security was it...