The League of Nations and the system of collective security, including the major crises of the 1930s (Manchuria 1931, Abyssinia 1935, Rhineland 1936) and the reasons for the League's failure

A 5-mark "how does Source A provide insight" requires source analysis plus own knowledge.

Step 1: Read the source

Section I sources on the League are commonly David Low political cartoons (the "Doormat" cartoon, October 1933, showing the League being trampled by Japanese militarism; or "The Doormat," July 1936, on the failures of collective security). Note the date, the artist, and the visual rhetoric.

Step 2: What the source shows

A Low cartoon typically depicts the League as weak, hollow, or absurd: a small figure beside large aggressors; an empty chair; a doormat. The source captures contemporary British opinion turning against collective security.

Step 3: Own knowledge of why authority was lacking

Three structural reasons. (1) Absent great powers: the US never joined, the USSR was excluded until 1934, Germany joined 1926 and left 1933, Japan left 1933, Italy left 1937. (2) No standing army: Article 16 mandated economic sanctions only; military enforcement was voluntary. (3) Unanimity rule: Council decisions required unanimous agreement, paralysing response.

Step 4: The crises that exposed it

Manchuria (1931-1933), Abyssinia (1935-1936), Rhineland (March 1936). The League condemned, but did not enforce.

F.S. Northedge (The League of Nations, 1986) attributes the failure to great-power unwillingness. Markers reward source description plus three to four substantive structural points.

A band 6 response for 8 marks needs four substantive causes, source integration, and historiography.

Cause 1: Structural weakness

The League had no standing army. Article 16 of the Covenant required member states to apply economic sanctions; military enforcement was voluntary. Decisions in the Council required unanimity, paralysing responses to aggression.

Cause 2: Absent great powers

The US Senate (led by Henry Cabot Lodge) refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, so the US never joined. The USSR was excluded until 1934 and expelled (December 1939) after invading Finland. Germany joined in 1926 and left in 1933. Japan left in 1933 after Manchuria. Italy left in 1937.

Cause 3: Manchuria (September 1931)

Japan invaded after the Mukden Incident. The League's Lytton Commission (October 1932) condemned the invasion. Japan rejected the report and withdrew from the League (March 1933). No sanctions followed.

Cause 4: Abyssinia (October 1935 to May 1936)

Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia). The League imposed limited sanctions but excluded oil, coal, and steel, and left the Suez Canal open to Italian shipping. The Hoare-Laval Pact (December 1935), a secret Anglo-French plan to partition Abyssinia in Italy's favour, leaked and discredited collective security entirely. Italy completed conquest by May 1936.

Historiography

F.S. Northedge (The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1986) argues the League was undone by the unwillingness of Britain and France to risk their own resources for collective security. Ruth Henig (The League of Nations, 2010) emphasises the League's positive achievements (refugee work, health, labour) and argues its failure was political rather than institutional.

Conclusion

The League failed because no great power was willing to enforce its decisions against another great power. Markers reward specific dates, all three crises, and a named historian.

A 5-mark "assess the value" requires source analysis plus own knowledge of the UN's foundation.

Step 1: Likely sources

Section I sources on the UN are typically the Atlantic Charter (August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill), the UN Charter preamble, photographs of the San Francisco Conference (April to June 1945), or extracts from speeches by Roosevelt or Truman.

Step 2: Value of the source

The source captures the wartime intent: a new collective security organisation that would not repeat the League's failures. The Charter (signed 26 June 1945) established a Security Council with five permanent members (US, USSR, UK, France, China), each with veto power, a standing peacekeeping role, and General Assembly with universal membership.

Why establish the UN

Three reasons. (1) The League's failures over Manchuria, Abyssinia, and the Rhineland in the 1930s. (2) The need to coordinate post-war reconstruction. (3) The Allied wartime alliance (the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, August to October 1944, drafted the Charter). The UN was deliberately designed with great-power consent built in (the veto), unlike the League's unanimity rule.

Limitations of the source

A single declaration or photograph cannot capture the negotiating compromises at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta. The veto power, in particular, was politically contested.

Markers reward source description, three or four substantive points on UN origins, and at least one named reason for the new design.

A 5-mark "explain" needs three significances developed with evidence.

Failure of collective security

Article 16 sanctions were imposed (November 1935) but deliberately excluded oil, coal, and steel, and the Suez Canal was left open. Italy continued the conquest.

Hoare-Laval Pact (December 1935)

Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval secretly agreed to partition Abyssinia in Italy's favour. The plan leaked in the French press. Hoare was forced to resign. The episode showed Britain and France were unwilling to risk Italian friendship to defend a member state, in clear violation of Articles 10 and 16 of the Covenant.

End of credibility

Italy completed the conquest by 9 May 1936. Mussolini withdrew from the League in 1937. Hitler drew the lesson that the democracies would not enforce their commitments and remilitarised the Rhineland (7 March 1936) in the middle of the crisis.

F.S. Northedge described Abyssinia as the moment the League "ceased to be a serious factor in world affairs." Markers reward the sanctions detail, the Hoare-Laval scandal, and the link to Hitler's foreign policy.

A 4-mark "outline" rewards a clear, organised description of the parts and their functions (roughly one mark per accurate, developed point).

The League was established by Part I of the Treaty of Versailles; its Covenant came into force on 10 January 1920, with headquarters in Geneva. It had four main organs.

• Assembly: all member states, one vote each, meeting annually. It set general policy and admitted new members.
• Council: the executive body, with permanent members (initially Britain, France, Italy, Japan; Germany joined 1926, the USSR 1934) plus rotating non-permanent members. It handled disputes and crises.
• Secretariat: the permanent civil service that ran administration between sessions.
• Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ): sat at The Hague and ruled on legal disputes between states.

One specialised agency: the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which set international standards on working hours and conditions. Other acceptable answers: the Health Organisation, the High Commissioner for Refugees (Nansen), the Mandate Commission.

Marking criteria: full marks need the four organs named with a function each, plus one correctly identified specialised body. A bare list with no functions caps at 2.

Collective security is the principle that aggression against any one member is treated as aggression against all, so that the combined response of the membership deters or punishes any aggressor. It replaced the pre-1914 system of rival alliances with a single global guarantee.

The two articles:

• Article 10 committed members to respect and preserve one another's territorial integrity and political independence against external aggression.
• Article 16 obliged members to apply economic and financial sanctions against any state that resorted to war in breach of the Covenant; military force was permitted but never compulsory.

The weakness, which you should flag even in a 4-mark answer, is that enforcement depended on members volunteering their own forces, and Council decisions required unanimity.

Marking criteria: 2 marks for a correct definition with the "one for all" idea, 2 marks for naming Articles 10 and 16 with their content. Naming the articles without explaining them caps at 3.

A 5-mark source question rewards integration of the source with own knowledge, not a retelling of one or the other.

Use the source

Source A shows the League's own commission formally judging Japan the aggressor and dismissing Manchukuo as a puppet ("cannot be considered ... genuine and spontaneous"). The source is therefore evidence that the League could correctly identify aggression - its problem was enforcement, not diagnosis.

Own knowledge of the weakness exposed

After the Mukden Incident (18 September 1931) the Kwantung Army overran Manchuria and set up Manchukuo (February 1932). The Lytton Report appeared in October 1932; the Assembly endorsed it 42 votes to 1 in February 1933. Yet Japan simply withdrew from the League (27 March 1933) and no Article 16 sanctions followed.

Why this exposed the League

Three structural failures combined: the unanimity rule and distance made action slow; there was no standing army to compel withdrawal; and in the depths of the Great Depression neither Britain nor France would risk a Pacific war over China. Condemnation without enforcement became the League's signature.

Historiography

F.S. Northedge (1986) treats Manchuria as the first proof that the great powers would not pay the price of collective security.

Marking criteria: full marks require explicit use of Source A, at least three accurate own-knowledge points (dates, the Lytton Report, no sanctions), and a clear link to League weakness. Source-only or knowledge-only answers cap at 3.

"Assess the usefulness" requires a judgement framed by origin, purpose, perspective and corroboration, not just description.

Origin and purpose

Source B is the Ethiopian Emperor's address to the Assembly in June 1936, after Italy had completed the conquest (Addis Ababa fell 5 May 1936). Its purpose is to shame the membership into honouring Articles 10 and 16. This gives it a clear perspective: the victim of aggression.

Usefulness

It is highly useful as evidence of the moral case for collective security and of how its failure was understood at the time - the warning "it will be you tomorrow" reads as an accurate prophecy of 1938 to 1939. It is a first-hand account by a central participant.

Limitations

As advocacy it cannot, on its own, explain WHY collective security failed; it states the betrayal but not its mechanics. For that a historian needs the sanctions detail (the November 1935 sanctions excluded oil, coal, steel and left the Suez Canal open) and the Hoare-Laval Pact (December 1935), which a single speech does not supply. Its emotional force may also overstate the League's potential capacity.

Judgement

Useful as a record of perspective and contemporary judgement, and reliable as to authorship, but partial; it must be corroborated with policy evidence and historians such as Zara Steiner (2011), who locates the failure in Anglo-French unwillingness to act.

Marking criteria: a sustained judgement on usefulness (not just reliability), explicit use of origin/purpose/perspective, own-knowledge corroboration, and recognition of limits. Description with no judgement caps at 3.

This is a "weigh two causes" essay. The command word "evaluate" demands a sustained judgement, not a list. Argue that structural weakness and great-power conduct were intertwined, but that great-power unwillingness was decisive - the structure only failed because no power chose to make it work.

Band 6 PLAN

• Thesis: The League's structural flaws (no army, unanimity, voluntary enforcement, absent members) were real, but they became fatal only because Britain and France refused to risk their own resources for collective security; structure set the limits, the great powers chose the failure.
• Argument 1 - the structural case (concede its force): No standing army; Article 16 made military enforcement voluntary; Council unanimity paralysed responses; the US never joined, the USSR was absent until 1934, Germany and Japan left in 1933, Italy in 1937. By design the League could only act with great-power consent.
• Argument 2 - but structure did not have to be fatal: The 1920s show the same structure working (Aaland Islands 1921, Upper Silesia 1921, the Greek-Bulgarian crisis 1925) because the great powers backed it. The problem was political will, not blueprint.
• Argument 3 - the great-power case (the decisive factor): Manchuria (1931 to 1933) - no sanctions because Britain and France would not risk a Pacific war in the Depression. Abyssinia (1935 to 1936) - sanctions deliberately excluded oil, coal, steel and left the Suez Canal open; the Hoare-Laval Pact (December 1935) tried to hand Italy two-thirds of Abyssinia. Rhineland (March 1936) - France did not move though Hitler's force was under orders to retreat.
• Historiography: Northedge (1986) - failure was great-power unwillingness, not institutional design. Henig (2010) - the political failures should not erase real technical achievements, so the institution was not inherently doomed. Steiner (2011) - Abyssinia exposed Anglo-French refusal to act against a fellow great power. Pedersen (2015) reframes the mandates as the League's lasting structural legacy.
• Judgement: Structure and politics were inseparable, but agency lay with the powers; the same machinery that settled disputes in the 1920s was abandoned in the 1930s. Great-power choice, not blueprint, decided the outcome.

MODEL PARAGRAPH (Argument 3)

Abyssinia is the clearest proof that the League failed by choice rather than by design. When Italy invaded on 3 October 1935 the machinery worked exactly as written: Article 16 sanctions were voted on 18 November 1935. Yet Britain and France hollowed them out from within, excluding oil, coal and steel and leaving the Suez Canal open precisely so as not to drive Mussolini from their camp. The secret Hoare-Laval Pact of December 1935, which would have ceded two-thirds of Abyssinia to Italy, revealed that the two surviving great powers preferred Italian friendship to the Covenant they had signed. The structure permitted action; the great powers declined to take it. As Northedge argues, the League was undone not by its blueprint but by the unwillingness of Britain and France to spend their own strength on collective security - a verdict Steiner sharpens by showing Abyssinia as the moment the democracies chose a fellow great power over a member state. The lesson was not lost on Hitler, who remilitarised the Rhineland on 7 March 1936, mid-crisis, and met only condemnation.

Marker's note: Top-band answers sustain a clear thesis across the whole essay, deploy specific and accurate evidence (exact dates, the sanctions exclusions, Hoare-Laval), weave in named historians as part of the argument rather than as bolt-on quotes, and reach a judgement that genuinely weighs the two factors. Narrating the crises in sequence without returning to the question is the classic band-3 to band-4 trap.

The quotation is a deliberately extreme proposition. "To what extent" invites you to reject it as overstated while conceding the political failures of the 1930s. Argue: the claim is inaccurate because the League's humanitarian and technical work, and its 1920s settlements, were genuinely valuable; it is partly accurate only about collective security after 1931.

Band 6 PLAN

• Thesis: The assessment is largely inaccurate. The League achieved real and lasting value in humanitarian, technical and institutional work, and in the 1920s in dispute settlement; the claim holds only for the narrow field of collective security in the 1930s.
• Argument 1 - technical and humanitarian achievement: The ILO set labour standards; the Health Organisation tackled epidemics; the High Commissioner for Refugees under Fridtjof Nansen created the Nansen Passport (1922) for stateless people. Henig (2010) argues these are routinely and unfairly underrated.
• Argument 2 - 1920s dispute settlement and institutional legacy: Aaland Islands (1921), Upper Silesia (1921), the Greek-Bulgarian border (1925); Locarno (1925) and German entry (1926). Pedersen (2015) shows the mandate system shaped modern international institutions, and the UN (1945) inherited the League's machinery.
• Argument 3 - concede the political failure: Manchuria (1931), Abyssinia (1935 to 1936) and the Rhineland (March 1936) show collective security collapsing. This is where the claim has force - but it is one field, not "nothing of value".
• Historiography: Henig (2010) for achievements; Northedge (1986) for why the political role failed; Pedersen (2015) for institutional legacy. Use them to draw the line between "failed at collective security" and "achieved nothing".
• Judgement: The claim is an overstatement that mistakes one area of failure for total failure; the League's value was real even though its deterrent power was not.

MODEL PARAGRAPH (Argument 1)

To call the League's work valueless ignores the humanitarian record that outlived the institution itself. Under the High Commissioner for Refugees Fridtjof Nansen, the League devised the Nansen Passport in 1922, giving hundreds of thousands of stateless refugees a recognised travel document and a route to resettlement - a genuine innovation in international protection. The International Labour Organisation set common standards on working hours and conditions, and the Health Organisation coordinated responses to epidemics across borders. As Ruth Henig argues, these technical achievements are routinely erased by a narrative fixated on the crises of the 1930s, yet they represented exactly the kind of cooperative internationalism the League was built to foster. That the ILO survives within the United Nations today is itself evidence that the work had lasting value. The claim that the League "achieved nothing" therefore collapses on its humanitarian record alone, before its political failures are even weighed.

Marker's note: Markers reward an essay that refuses the false binary, using the achievements to disprove "nothing of value" while honestly conceding the collective-security failures. Specific named programmes (Nansen Passport, ILO), named historians used analytically, and an explicit final judgement on "to what extent" separate band 6 from a one-sided list of successes.