‘The main reason why the League of Nations failed to prevent WWII was because of how it was organised.’ How far do you agree with this statement?

Most textbooks give up trying to describe the organisation of the League and rely on a diagram.  It includes two organs: the Assembly (of all member nations, which met once a year) and the Council (of key members which met 4-5 times a year and in crises).  Somewhat to the side, because not officially a part of the League, they put the Conference of Ambassadors, ad hoc informal meetings of the more important countries.  Beneath these three bodies, they place the PCIJ and a bewildering array of temporary and permanent committees – the ILO, the LNHO, plus commissions for the Mandates; slavery; economic matters; Drugs; Intellectual Cooperation; Communication & Transit; Traffic in Women & Children et al.  At the centre of this web, chronically under-staffed and under-funded, a Secretariat was meant to coordinate all the different bodies and functions. 

The Refugees Commission is an example of the problem.  Originally it was an aid fund set up by Fridtjof Nansen, which the League appropriated, first as a partner organisation, then in 1921 established as a Permanent Commission.  When Nansen reported in 1927 that he expected the Commission to complete its work in the next ten years, the League abolished it, setting up instead the Nansen International Office as an arms-length body to be slowly wound down by 1937 … until, that is, German Jews started fleeing Hitler, when the League set up a separate Commission for Refugees (Jewish and other).  This body, however, failed to make any progress (because the German delegation to the LoN objected), so the League increasingly allowed an American organisation, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, to take over the work. 

It has been argued that the organisation of the League contributed hugely to its failure: 

Historians are generally agreed that “one of [the League’s] biggest weaknesses was that the Organisation of the League was a muddle” (johndclare.net).  “The machinery of the League of Nations was not suited for enforcement of the obligations” concluded Oboka et al.  (2005).  “The overall machinery was unsuited to prompt and effective action since even the smallest state had the power of simple veto over the collective voice of the League” commented PJ Larkin (1965).  And Kelly & Lacey (2001) declared the organisation “too large to react quickly to international crises”. 

The organisation’s slowness to action is highlighted by many – “the League met too infrequently and decisions took too long to make.  The need for all members to agree on a course of action undermined the League's strength” judged Ferriby et al.  (2003).  Bureaucratic procedures and endless complex consultations, we are told, delayed the League’s responses to crises that needed a much faster reaction.  To this, we might add the inability of the League to change as circumstances changed; a Reform Committee was set up in 1937 after the disaster of Abyssinia, which asked members for ideas of what might be done … but it disbanded when it became clear that suggestions were so wildly contradictory that there was no basis for discussion, never mind agreement. 

Indeed, the Assembly’s unanimity rule made decisive action difficult, and effectively gave even the smallest member power of veto over any collective action of the whole League; action was all-but-impossible when an offending state (such as Japan in 1931-32 or Italy in 1935) was a member. 

If the Assembly’s operations were slow, those of the Council were conflicted, as the League’s most powerful members found the League’s interests frequently conflicted with their own.  Italy and Japan, of course, resigned from the League altogether.  But Britain and France, too, often found themselves at odds with the League – for instance, when members were calling for action against Italy at a time when they wanted Italy’s support against Hitler.  Britain and France ignored the Mandates Commission altogether, preferring to try to absorb Germany’s former colonies into their own empire, and they systematically fobbed off and even lied to the Slavery Commission in order to cover up the slavery in their empires.  With friends like that, the League did not need enemies. 

Meanwhile, Norman Lowe (1988) called Conference of Ambassadors an “embarrassment”.  Supposed to disband after the Treaty of Versailles, it continued meeting and – since it included the most powerful members – interfered regularly and even overturned League decisions over Vilna (1920) and Corfu (1923). 

The Secretariat, too, has been criticised.  It had no power to initiate action and could only act when asked, which meant that the League’s policies were reactive and lacked consistency.  Seriously underfunded (the League depended on its members for funding, making it difficult to make unpopular decisions) and understaffed (the Secretariat had fewer than 700 staff at the end of the 1920s to run a multi-functional international organisation – compared to the tens of thousands of United Nations staff today) the Secretariat therefore struggled to keep up with the demands made upon it.  This, and lack of clarity about the roles of the Secretariat (administrative) and the Assembly (political) created inefficiencies and delays – most obviously seen in the year it took the League to organise the Lytton Commission and Report about Manchuria (1931-32).  Similarly, there were overlaps in the work of the Commissions – for instance, between the Refugees Commission and the ILO over finding jobs for refugees, and between the LNHO and the Drugs Commission over Opium controls. 

Most of all – and arguably its fatal flaw – in the organisation of the League was that it was consensual not hierarchical.  It was set up as a forum for international discussion, not as an international government for action.  It could debate issues, even declare decisions, but it had no authority, never mind the mechanisms, to enforce those decisions.  The PCIJ could only rule on a matter where both parties agreed to accept its judgement.  League arbitration only worked where both countries (eg over Teschen, the Aaland Islands and the Stray Dog War) accepted its decision.  “The League,” wrote Hugh Brogan in 2001, “depended on the goodwill of the nations to work, though it was the absence of goodwill that made it necessary.”

So we can see how it might be argued that the organisational limitations of the League seriously hampered its effectiveness, and contributed to its failure. 

But was the League’s organisation the MAIN reason it failed?  There were other factors involved in the League’s failure.  How does its inefficient organisation measure up against them as a cause of its failure? 

One HUGE weakness of the League was that it had no power to enforce its decisions.  Though Article 16 expected member states to supply troops if necessary, a resolution of 1923 ruled that each member would decide for itself whether or not to fight.  An attempt by the British government to change this (the Geneva Protocol, 1925) was overturned by … the British government! Even sanctions proved impossible to organise effectively against either Japan or Italy because they would have harmed the enforcing nations as much as the target nation. 

Some historians have argued that the League was doomed from the start by its association with the Treaty of Versailles … which everybody, including its authors, condemned.  One of the reasons the British government refused to accept the Geneva Protocol was because it was not prepared to go to war to enforce provisions of the ToV with which it disagreed; and of course Hitler used this antipathy towards the Treaty to drive a wedge in between Britain and the League in the 1930s. 

Another problem was that the absence of key nations – Germany, Russia and, in the 1930s, Italy and Japan – meant that the League of Nations was only a League of some Nations.  Historians have particularly cited the absence of America – though, since the USA worked closely with the League throughout the 1930s, and the League still failed, this may not have been as significant a factor as they suggest.  What was the deciding factor, however, was not the presence or absence of the USA, but its unpreparedness to intervene against Japan, Italy or Germany.  Worse can be said of Britain and France, who not only failed to stand up to these aggressive dictatorships when they defied the League, but actively stabbed the League in the back (most notably, in the Hoare-Laval Pact of 1935).  After Abyssinia, Neville Chamberlain openly abandoned the ‘collective security’ of the League in favour of appeasement. 

Against these weaknesses, moreover, there were in the 1930s two ‘unstoppable forces’ which would have taken the world to war even against an immovable object.  Firstly, the world-wide Depression of the 1930s made many countries anxious to get more land and power (such as Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere and Italy’s annexation of Abyssinia), but EVERY government was more worried about themselves and their nation’s interests, than about world peace.  Secondly, of course, after 1935 the world was faced by three powers, allied together in the Anti-Comintern Pact (1937), who were determined to go on seizing power and land even if it meant war. 

And finally, a last reason for the failure of the League was the League’s failure.  The more the League failed, the less people trusted it; in the end, everybody just ignored it and nations went back to building up their armies and making alliances.  “The League died in 1935,” wrote AJP Taylor in 1966.  “ One day it was a powerful body imposing sanctions, the next day it was a useless fraud, everybody running away from it as quickly as possible.”

By contrast, as for the League’s organisation, we have to be careful not to over-egg the so-called organisational weaknesses of the League.  The League was never set up to be an imposing world government – it was set up to be a place where nations could talk rather than war.  The historian and Cabinet member HAL Fisher realised this when he wrote in 1935 about the structure of the League: “The League of Nations was to be … a permanent organ, supported by national governments, for the transaction of international affairs… Of this carefully planned machinery for world government the nations were free to make as much or as little as they chose.” And to criticise as ‘inefficient’ a Secretariat of 700 staff who organised the Assembly and Council meetings; administered multiple commissions; set up Conferences on Economics, Disarmament, Slavery, Health and others; got home 428,000 prisoners of war and found homes for millions of refugees; coordinated the weekly sharing of quarantine information; and published a weekly report of what the League was doing – to call that work ‘inefficient’ is just wrong!

So, how far might we agree that organisational weakness was the main reason the LoN failed to prevent war?  We have seen that the League was BY DESIGN slow, consensual, and complex, so it is perhaps unsurprising that this impaired its ability quickly to impose its will upon recalcitrant nations.  But we have also realised that the League was never intended to be a world dictator, and we deny that the Secretariat was inefficient. 

We have also seen that the League, especially in the 1930s, faced other powerful forces undermining it – the unwillingness of its friends to enforce its decisions (and even to betray them); the absence of key countries; a worldwide Depression which changed all the rules of international relations; and the presence of ‘big bully’ nations determined to build an empire by military action.  Faced by such developments, how the League was organised was almost an irrelevance: “League or no League,” commented HAL Fisher in 1935, “a country which is determined to have a war can always have it.”. 

Therefore we can say with surety that the organisation of the League was NOT the main reason why it failed to prevent WWII … and was probably, actually, the least of its problems. 

Going Deeper

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How to do this AQA ‘How far do you agree’ question