League of Nations
Uploaded by litlmutt on Apr 05, 2001
What were the League of Nations and the peace Treaty of World War I?The League of Nations was an alliance created to unite all indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere into one confederation. It was Woodrow Wilson’s attempt at unity, peace and prosperity in Europe. It lasted from the 1920s to 1946. The League of Nations pushed for “peace without victory.” Woodrow wanted to redraw the map of Europe so that each nationality had its own country. He also wanted freedom of the sea and an end to secret diplomacy. The treaty of Versailles was what set the League of Nations in motion. The duty of the League of Nations was to enforce the Treaty of Versailles as well as other treaties.
The League succeeds in many areas. One of them was settling Swedish-Finnish dispute over the Aland Islands, guaranteeing the security of Albania, rescuing Austria from economic disaster, settling the division of Upper Silesia, and preventing the outbreak of war in the Balkans between Greece and Bulgaria. In addition, the League extended considerable aid to refugees; it helped to suppress white slave and opium traffic; it did pioneering work in surveys of health; it extended financial aid to needy states; and it furthered international cooperation in labor relations and many other fields. However although it had its success’s it also had its failures.
Most of the failures behind the League of Nations was due to the fact that the United States did not join. The Paris Peace Conference adopted the constitution of the League of Nations in April 1919. The League's headquarters were in Geneva and its first secretary-general was Sir Eric Drummond. As a result of the decision by the US Congress not to approve the Versailles Treaty, the United States never joined the League of Nations. Within years of its creation, the League of Nations had many disagreements in which member withdrew. France saw the League mainly as an instrument to maintain the territorial settlement and arms restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I. The Germans resented the League because it seemed to them, too, that this was the League's real purpose. British leaders saw it as a meeting place for powerful nations to consult in the event of a threat to peace. Japan withdrew from the League in 1933 because the League refused to recognize its conquest of Manchuria. Germany, admitted to the League in 1926, withdrew...