Cambridge (CIE) IGCSE History
To What Extent was the League of Nations a Success?
🎯 The Big Idea: The League of Nations was a genuinely good idea — the world's first attempt at an international peacekeeping organisation — but it was built with fatal design flaws (no army, no USA, slow decision-making) that meant it could win small, cheap disputes between minor powers in the 1920s, yet completely collapsed the moment a determined, powerful nation (Japan, then Italy) called its bluff in the 1930s.
📋 Summary — What This Chapter Covers
Origins
Wilson's 14 Points → the League's birth in 1920, and why the USA never joined.
Structure
Assembly, Council, Secretariat, Court — and the weaknesses built into each.
1920s Diplomacy
Washington, Rapallo, Locarno, Dawes & Young Plans — treaties made outside the League.
Peacekeeping Disputes
Vilna, Aaland Islands, Upper Silesia, Corfu, Bulgaria — mixed results in the 1920s.
Humanitarian Work
Refugees, Health, Labour (ILO), and Slavery Commissions — the League's quiet successes.
Collapse in the 1930s
The Depression, Manchuria, and Abyssinia — how the League's failure became inevitable.
Quick-fire overview:
- The League was born from Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points speech (Jan 1918) and officially opened on 10th January 1920.
- Its aims: solve disputes peacefully, achieve world disarmament, encourage free trade, and improve living standards.
- The USA never joined — a fatal blow to its authority and military credibility from day one.
- In the 1920s, it had some genuine peacekeeping successes (Aaland Islands) but also embarrassing failures (Vilna, Corfu) when powerful countries were involved.
- Its humanitarian commissions (Refugees, Health, ILO, Slavery) were consistently its strongest area of work.
- The Wall Street Crash (1929) and Great Depression fuelled extremism and militarism worldwide, undermining the League's entire purpose.
- The League's failure to stop Japan in Manchuria (1931–33) and Italy in Abyssinia (1935–36) destroyed its credibility for good.
- It formally dissolved in April 1946, handing its powers to the newly created United Nations.
1️⃣ Why was the League of Nations Created?
To understand the League, you first need to understand the sheer scale of the trauma that created it. World War One (1914–1918) killed around 8.5 million soldiers and 13 million civilians — a death toll made horrifying by brand-new technology (machine guns, chemical weapons, artillery) being used with old-fashioned battle tactics. After that kind of catastrophe, world leaders genuinely wanted to find a way to stop it ever happening again.
Think of it like this: imagine a school where two kids get into a massive, destructive fight that wrecks the whole classroom. Afterwards, the head teacher doesn't just punish the two kids — they set up a "peace committee" so that next time two students disagree, there's a proper system to sort it out before it turns into a fight. That's essentially what the League of Nations was meant to be for countries.
Woodrow Wilson and the 14 Points
Woodrow Wilson 8th January 1918
- Self-determination — every national group should get its own country
- Disarmament
- discuss issues openly
- remove trade tariffs