By the 1930s the League of Nations had failed to stop Japan in Manchuria and Italy in Abyssinia. Yet away from the headlines, many parts of the League carried on with useful work. This lesson looks at two of them, and then weighs up the League's record as a whole.
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Unlock This CourseThe League did not only deal with quarrels between countries. It also set up agencies to tackle problems that no single country could solve alone. These agencies did not need an army or sanctions. They needed information, expert advice and the co-operation of member states, and they were less affected by the Great Powers' quarrels. That is why many of them kept going through the 1930s.
After the First World War many children in Europe were hungry, orphaned or homeless. In 1924 the League adopted the Declaration of Geneva, which said that children must be fed, cared for when sick or orphaned, helped to earn a living and protected from being exploited. It was drafted by Eglantyne Jebb, who had founded the charity Save the Children.
The Child Welfare Committee, set up in the 1920s, collected information from member states about how children were treated. It studied problems such as child neglect and young people who got into trouble with the law, and it encouraged governments to improve their laws.
It could advise and report, but it could not force a government to act. Success depended on states choosing to follow its ideas.
Its lasting importance was the idea that children have rights. The Declaration of Geneva became the model for later statements of children's rights, including one adopted by the United Nations in 1959.
Slavery and the slave trade were still found in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East in the 1920s. In 1924 the League set up a Temporary Slavery Commission to find out how much slavery there was. Its work led to the Slavery Convention of 1926, signed at Geneva on 25 September 1926. In it, states promised to prevent and punish the slave trade and to work towards ending slavery in all its forms.
The work did not stop in the 1930s. A committee of experts on slavery went on gathering reports from governments and pressing them to act. The League also took up the problem of forced labour. In 1930 the International Labour Organisation, a League body, drew up a Forced Labour Convention.
Liberia was an independent African country and a League member. Reports said that officials were forcing people to work and were involved in sending workers abroad. The League set up an international commission of inquiry. Its report in 1930 criticised the government, and the Liberian president and vice-president resigned. This was a clear case of League pressure making a government change.
The limits were just as clear. The Slavery Convention depended on states obeying it, and the League had no power to enter a country and free people. Slavery was not ended by 1939, but the League had made it an international issue.
In the 1920s the League's successes in settling disputes and its agencies' work seemed to promise a new age of co-operation. By the late 1930s its peacekeeping role had collapsed, but the agencies carried on. What stayed the same throughout was that the League could achieve things only when its members were willing to co-operate.
How significant was the work of the League's specialised agencies in the League's record in the years 1919-39? [16 marks]
You may use the following in your answer:
You must also use information of your own.
The specialised agencies were a significant part of the League's record because they achieved real, lasting results at a time when its peacekeeping work was failing, although they could not make up for those failures.
The agencies helped very large numbers of people. The Refugee Committee, led by Nansen, sent about 450,000 prisoners of war home from 1920 and later gave stateless refugees papers that let them travel and work. The Child Welfare Committee gathered information on children's treatment, and the Declaration of Geneva of 1924 set out children's rights. The slavery commissions led to the Slavery Convention of 1926, and in 1930 an inquiry into Liberia led its president and vice-president to resign. These agencies carried on in the 1930s, when the League's Great Power members were quarrelling, because they needed co-operation rather than an army.
However, the agencies' impact was limited. They could advise and report but could not force states to act, and slavery continued in 1939. More importantly, the League was created to keep peace, and here it failed. It could not stop Japan taking Manchuria in 1931-33, and over Abyssinia in 1935-36 its sanctions left out oil, so Italy won. Germany and Japan left in 1933 and Italy in 1937. These failures, caused by the lack of an army, the absence of the USA and Britain and France's self-interest, did far more to shape how people judged the League than its agencies' work.
Overall, the agencies were significant because they were the League's most lasting success and many of their ideas were passed on to the United Nations. Yet they were not the most significant part of its record, because it was judged mainly on whether it kept peace, and it did not.
What lifts this to the top level: it covers three aspects (the agencies' successes, their limits and the peacekeeping failures), uses facts beyond the bullets, and ends with a judgement based on what the League was set up to do.
For a "how significant" question, decide your criterion before you write. Here it is "what the League was created to do". Then use it in your conclusion to justify your judgement.