The League of Nations

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A is the dispute over Upper Silesia between Germany and Poland, settled in 1921. B is the Greek invasion of Bulgaria in 1925.

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Source A criticises the way the Corfu crisis was handled because it shows Mussolini as a huge, bullying figure with his boot planted on Corfu, while the League of Nations is a tiny, nervous figure who can only hold up a paper saying 'Please?'. This suggests that the League was too weak to stand up to a great power. The men in top hats from the Conference of Ambassadors hand Mussolini a bag marked '50 million lire', showing that the aggressor was rewarded rather than punished. The caption, 'Keeping the peace', is ironic. This matches what happened. After the Italian General Tellini was murdered on Greek soil in August 1923, Mussolini demanded an apology and 50 million lire in compensation. When Greece could not meet all his demands, Italy bombarded and occupied Corfu. Greece appealed to the League, but Mussolini refused to accept its involvement. The League suggested that Greece's compensation should be held by the League until the killers were found, but the Conference of Ambassadors overruled it and made Greece pay the money directly to Italy. The cartoon was published in a British magazine in September 1923, when many British people were angry that a great power had bullied a small one and got away with it.

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Source B is useful because it shows the central aim of the man who did most to create the League. In the last of his Fourteen Points, Wilson called for a 'general association of nations' bound by 'specific covenants' to guarantee the 'political independence and territorial integrity' of 'great and small states alike'. This is the idea of collective security: nations would promise to protect each other instead of relying on secret alliances. It became the basis of the League's rules, which were even called the Covenant, and Article 10 repeated the promise to protect members' independence and borders. The provenance adds to its value, because Wilson went on to chair the League of Nations Commission at Paris. However, it was a public speech to Congress during the war, setting out idealistic war aims partly to rally support and appeal to people in enemy countries. It tells us about Wilson's aims, not those of Britain and France, and it gives no detail about how the League would enforce its guarantees.

Source C is useful because it shows that the founders did not all share Wilson's aims. The French delegate wants a League with 'an international force under its own command' because 'a League without an army is a court without police'. This reflects France's main aim of security against Germany, which had invaded France in 1870 and 1914 and still had a much larger population. It also shows the disagreement with Britain and the USA, who relied on 'the power of world opinion'. This matches what we know: the French proposal for an international army was rejected, and the final Covenant relied on moral condemnation and economic sanctions under Article 16. As a private memorandum written for the commission that drafted the Covenant, C is likely to reveal real French thinking rather than public propaganda. However, it is the view of one delegate and shows nothing of the British aim of a looser League for discussion.

Overall, the two sources are most useful together. Source B shows the shared ideal behind the League, while Source C shows the conflicting national interests that turned that ideal into a compromise without an army. An historian would still need British evidence, but these sources explain why the League began with high ideals and weak powers of enforcement.

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The Corfu crisis was a very serious failure for the League in the 1920s, because it showed that a great power could defy the League and be rewarded. However, there were other failures, such as Vilna and the lack of progress on disarmament, and it is important to compare them. I will argue that Corfu was the most serious failure of the 1920s because of what it revealed about the League's ability to deal with great powers.

The Corfu crisis began on 27 August 1923, when the Italian General Tellini was murdered on Greek soil while marking the Greek-Albanian border. Mussolini demanded an apology, 50 million lire in compensation and the execution of the killers. When Greece did not meet all his demands, Italy bombarded and occupied Corfu, killing civilians, many of them refugees. Greece appealed to the League, but Mussolini argued that the League had no right to deal with the matter and threatened to leave. The League suggested that Greece should pay compensation to be held by the League until the killers were found, but the Conference of Ambassadors overruled this and made Greece pay the full 50 million lire directly to Italy. This was very serious, because the aggressor was a Great Power with a permanent seat on the Council, and it was rewarded for using force against a member state. Britain and France were not willing to confront Mussolini, and small countries learned that the League might not protect them.

However, the dispute over Vilna could be seen as an even more serious failure. In 1920 Polish troops seized Vilna, the historic capital of Lithuania. The League asked Poland to withdraw, but it refused, and France, Poland's ally, would not put pressure on it. In 1923 the Conference of Ambassadors recognised Vilna as Polish. Unlike Corfu, where Italy withdrew after a month, the result of Vilna was permanent: a state had changed a border by force and kept its gains. On the other hand, Poland was not a great power, and the crisis happened in the League's first year, before its methods were established.

There were also failures of a different kind. The Covenant required members to reduce their armaments, but the League made little progress on disarmament in the 1920s. In 1923 France and Belgium, two leading members, occupied the Ruhr without the League acting. In 1925 Britain rejected the Geneva Protocol, which would have strengthened the League's system for settling disputes. These failures showed that the leading members would not let the League restrict their own actions.

In conclusion, I largely agree with the statement. Vilna had a more permanent result, and the lack of disarmament weakened the League in the long term, but Corfu was the most serious failure because it showed openly that a Great Power could ignore the League, have the League's decision overruled and be rewarded. The League's success over Bulgaria in 1925 restored some confidence, but the lesson of Corfu was not forgotten, least of all by Mussolini, who invaded Abyssinia in 1935.