League Successes and Failures

Sparrows and eagles

In October 1925 Greek troops crossed into Bulgaria after a border shooting. The League Council met within days, ordered both sides to stop, sent observers, and told Greece to withdraw and pay compensation of around 45,000 pounds. Greece obeyed. The Council had settled a war between two small states in under a fortnight, and it had done the same over the Aaland Islands in 1921 and would do so over a dozen smaller disputes. Two years earlier, in August 1923, an Italian general surveying the Greek frontier had been murdered on Greek soil. Mussolini demanded 50 million lire and an apology, and when Greece appealed to the League he bombarded and occupied the island of Corfu, killing around fifteen people. The League Council condemned him; Mussolini said that the League had no business in the matter and threatened to leave it; the great powers, meeting as the Conference of Ambassadors outside the League, then ordered Greece to pay Italy the full sum, after which the Italians withdrew on 27 September. Greece had done what the Covenant asked and been punished; Italy had done what the Covenant forbade and been paid. The two cases are the whole story of the League in the 1920s: it could settle a quarrel between states that would accept its ruling, and it could not restrain a great power that would not. AQA asks you to use the named crises, Aaland, Upper Silesia, Vilna, Corfu and Bulgaria, as evidence for a judgement about why, and to set beside them the diplomacy that happened outside the League at Locarno and Paris. This module gives you the cases with dates and the shapes to argue them in.

Five words the examiners use

Each definition ends with the moment it mattered, because a bare definition earns nothing in a source answer.

The League in the 1920s, in order

Put these six events in the order they happened.

• A Polish general seizes Vilna from Lithuania and the League fails to make him leave
• The League awards the Aaland Islands to Finland and Sweden accepts the ruling
• Mussolini bombards and occupies Corfu, and the Conference of Ambassadors makes Greece pay
• Germany, France and Belgium guarantee their borders at Locarno
• The League orders Greek troops out of Bulgaria and Greece complies
• Sixty-five states renounce war in the Kellogg-Briand Pact

Why did the League succeed with some disputes and fail with others?

The Council settled Bulgaria in a fortnight in 1925 and could not shift Italy from Corfu in 1923. Which explanation best accounts for the difference?

• The League had no army and no members willing to use theirs, so it could enforce a ruling only against a state too weak to refuse; it depended on Britain and France, who would not risk a great power such as Italy leaving in 1923 and preferred to settle Corfu through the Conference of Ambassadors; the absent United States meant that sanctions under Article 16 could never be complete; and its procedures were slow, so that a dispute settled by a commission over months, like Aaland, suited it and one made by force in days, like Vilna or Corfu, did not.
• The League was lucky with small countries and unlucky with large ones.
• The League army was too small to fight Italy.
• The United States vetoed action against Italy.

The record, case by case

The judgement question wants the named crises as evidence. One line per case, with the date, what the League did, and which structural weakness the outcome shows.

Question 1: how do you know?

Source A: a description of a cartoon by Leonard Raven-Hill published in Punch on 10 December 1919. A stone bridge is being built across a river; its arch is complete except for the keystone in the centre, which is missing. The finished stones are labelled England, France, Italy and Belgium; the missing keystone lies on the bank labelled USA, and a figure of Uncle Sam lounges beside it. The bridge is captioned League of Nations Bridge, and the title reads: The Gap in the Bridge. AQA Question 1 says: Source A is critical of the United States. How do you know? Tap the TWO details that show the criticism most directly.

• The one stone missing from the arch is the keystone labelled USA, so that the cartoonist presents the League as a structure that cannot bear weight without America.
• The bridge crosses a river.
• Uncle Sam lounges on the bank beside the stone he has not put in place, which presents the American refusal as idle and deliberate rather than a misfortune.
• The stones carry the names of countries.
• The cartoon was published in December 1919.

Diplomacy outside the League

Select the THREE statements that are true of the agreements made outside the League in the 1920s and what they showed.

• At Locarno in October 1925 Germany, France and Belgium accepted their borders as permanent with Britain and Italy as guarantors, which was negotiated by foreign ministers outside the League and then allowed Germany to join it with a Council seat in September 1926.
• The Kellogg-Briand Pact of August 1928, signed eventually by 65 states including the United States, Germany, Italy and Japan, renounced war as an instrument of policy but contained no sanctions and no way of enforcing itself.
• Both agreements showed that the great powers preferred to settle serious questions among themselves, which strengthened the peace of the late 1920s while confirming that the League was not where the decisions were made.
• Locarno gave the League an army to enforce its rulings.
• Locarno guaranteed the borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia.
• The Kellogg-Briand Pact brought the United States into the League.

Question 2: how useful are two sources?

AQA Question 2 gives you two sources and asks how useful they are to a historian studying one thing, for 12 marks. The two below are described for this module; the exam prints the real text. Enquiry: how effective the League of Nations was in the 1920s. Source B. From Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, 1919, which states that a member resorting to war in breach of its promises shall be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other members, who undertake immediately to cut off all trade and financial relations with it. Source C. From the decision of the Conference of Ambassadors on the Corfu incident, September 1923, which required Greece to apologise to Italy, to hold a funeral for the murdered Italian officers, and to pay Italy 50 million lire in compensation, after which Italian forces would leave Corfu. The method is the same for both: content (what it says about the enquiry), provenance (who, when, why, and what that does to its value), and own knowledge to test it. Source B is useful for what the League was designed to do and the confidence of 1919, and its provenance is its value: it is the promise itself. Its limit is that it shows intention, not practice; own knowledge of Corfu and Vilna tests it and finds that Article 16 was never applied in the decade. Source C is useful for practice: an act of war by a member was settled not by the League but by the great powers, in favour of the aggressor, so that it shows exactly the gap between the promise and the outcome. Its provenance, an official decision, makes it reliable for what was done and silent on why. This meant that B is useful for the design and C for the failure of the design, and a top-level answer uses them together for that enquiry rather than judging each alone.

In the shoes of the League Council

Four decisions between 1920 and 1925. Choose what was actually decided, and notice what each choice told the world about the League.

• October 1920. A Polish general, Zeligowski, has seized Vilna, the capital Lithuania claims. Lithuania appeals to you. Poland is the ally of France against Russia and Germany. What do you do?
• June 1921. Sweden and Finland both claim the Aaland Islands; the islanders speak Swedish, the islands were Finnish under Russia. Both governments have agreed to accept your ruling. What do you do?
• September 1923. Italy has bombarded and occupied Corfu after the murder of General Tellini. Greece has appealed to you. Mussolini says the League has no right to interfere and will leave if it does. What do you do?
• October 1925. A frontier shooting has killed a Greek soldier and Greek troops have entered Bulgaria. Bulgaria appeals to you and orders its army not to resist. What do you do?

From cause to consequence

Because the Covenant gave the League no army, it could enforce a ruling only against a state too weak to refuse, which is why _____ withdrew from Bulgaria in 1925 and Poland kept Vilna. Because the United States never joined, the sanctions promised in Article _____ could never be complete. Because Britain and France would not risk a great power walking out, they moved Corfu to the Conference of _____ and made Greece pay Italy 50 million lire. Because the powers preferred to settle serious questions among themselves, the most hopeful treaty of the decade was signed at _____ in 1925 outside the League. And because the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 had no _____, it was a promise of the same kind the Covenant already contained.

Membership of the League

The League had 42 member states at its first Assembly in 1920 and 58 at its largest, in 1934. By how many states had membership grown?

Question 1: how do you know, marked

AQA Question 1 asks: Source A (the Punch cartoon The Gap in the Bridge) is critical of the United States. How do you know? It is marked for 4 on identifying the message and supporting it from the source with own knowledge. Which answer scores all four?

• I know because the cartoonist draws the League as a bridge whose only missing stone is the keystone labelled USA, with Uncle Sam idling beside it, which presents the American refusal as the one thing that leaves the whole structure unable to stand. That fits the moment: Punch published it in December 1919, a month after the Senate had first rejected the Treaty of Versailles and with it the League that Wilson himself had designed, so a British magazine was blaming America for abandoning its own creation.
• The cartoon shows a bridge with a stone missing and a man lying next to it.
• Punch was a British magazine and Britain was in the League.
• The cartoon praises the League because the bridge is nearly finished.

Question 3: an account, marked

Question 3: Write an account of how the Corfu incident of 1923 became a crisis for the League of Nations. The incident began on 27 August 1923, when the Italian general Tellini and four of his staff, surveying the disputed border between Greece and Albania for the Conference of Ambassadors, were murdered on the Greek side of the line. Because Mussolini, in power for less than a year, wanted to show Italy as a great power, he blamed the Greek government, demanded an apology and 50 million lire, and when Greece could not meet every term within his deadline he bombarded and occupied Corfu on 31 August, killing around fifteen civilians. This led Greece to appeal to the League under the Covenant, which was exactly what the Covenant was for, and the crisis then became the League itself, because Mussolini declared that the matter was not the business of the League, threatened to withdraw Italy if the Council acted, and Britain and France, unwilling to lose a great power from the League in its fourth year, agreed to let the Conference of Ambassadors decide instead. As a result the Conference on 27 September ordered Greece to apologise and pay Italy the full 50 million lire, after which the Italians left Corfu. The account shows the crisis in two stages: first an act of aggression by a member, which the Covenant had foreseen, and then the refusal of the League to apply its own rules to a great power, which it had not. What earned the marks: a sequence of events with dates and figures; each linked to the next by because, this led and as a result, so that the account explains how the incident became a crisis rather than describing it; and a closing sentence that says what the chain shows about the League. That structure, sustained, is what reaches the top level of the 8-mark account.

Question 4: the 16-mark judgement

"The League of Nations was a success in the 1920s." How far do you agree with this statement? Explain your answer.

• One paragraph on the successes with dated evidence: Aaland in 1921, Upper Silesia in 1921, Bulgaria in 1925, and the work of the agencies with figures
• One paragraph on the failures with dated evidence: Vilna in 1920, Corfu in 1923, the Ruhr, and disarmament, and name the structural weakness each one shows

Question 4: the judgement, tested

A student has argued that the League was a success in the 1920s because it settled Aaland, Upper Silesia and Bulgaria and its agencies helped millions. Which is the strongest point to set AGAINST that judgement, in the way the top level of Question 4 requires?

• Every success was against a state too weak to refuse and every failure was against a power that could: Sweden, Finland and Greece in 1925 accepted rulings because they had to, while Poland kept Vilna and Italy was paid for Corfu because France and Britain would not act against them; so the record proves the League could arbitrate but not enforce, and a body founded to stop aggression by great powers had shown by 1925 that it would not, which is the weakness Manchuria and Abyssinia exposed in the next decade and the reason the successes do not add up to the word success.
• The disputes it settled were small, so they do not count.
• The United States never joined, so the League was doomed from the start.
• Nansen returned 427,000 prisoners, so the League was a success.