The Collapse of the League: Manchuria and Abyssinia
Three Blows in Five Years
By 1936 the League of Nations had effectively ceased to be a serious instrument of international peace. It was killed not by a single event but by three blows landing in quick succession. First, the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed wrecked the cooperative international economy on which the League depended. Second, the Manchurian Crisis of 1931-33 showed the League could do nothing about Japanese aggression on a distant continent. Third, the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935-36 destroyed what remained of the League’s moral authority by exposing Britain and France privately offering Mussolini what he wanted.
Three blows destroyed the League: (1) the Great Depression from 1929, undermining cooperative economic action; (2) the Manchurian Crisis 1931-33, exposing the League’s impotence in Asia; (3) the Abyssinian Crisis 1935-36, destroying the League’s credibility through the Hoare-Laval Pact.
The Effects of the Depression
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 sent shockwaves through Europe. American loans — the lifeblood of Weimar Germany since the Dawes Plan — dried up overnight. Unemployment soared: by 1932 about one in three German workers and one in four British workers had no job. France, less industrialised and less exposed to American loans, was hit later and far less hard. Governments responded by raising tariffs to protect domestic industry. International trade collapsed by around 65% between 1929 and 1932. This economic nationalism destroyed the cooperative habits the League had relied on. Politically, the Depression also pushed several countries towards extremism — most fatefully Germany, where Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933.
The Manchurian Crisis, 1931-33
In September 1931 Japan’s Kwantung Army staged the ‘Mukden Incident’ — a small explosion on a Japanese-controlled railway line in Manchuria. Japan blamed the Chinese, used the ‘attack’ as a pretext, and invaded the rich resource-bearing province of Manchuria. By February 1932 the whole of Manchuria was under Japanese control and was renamed Manchukuo. China appealed to the League.
The League’s response was the Lytton Report, commissioned in December 1931 and published in October 1932. After more than a year of investigation in Manchuria, the report concluded that Japan’s action was unjustified and recommended that Manchuria become an autonomous region under Chinese sovereignty. In February 1933 the League Assembly voted 42-1 to adopt the report. Japan’s response was to walk out and resign from the League the following month. There were no economic sanctions; there was certainly no military action. Japan kept Manchukuo for the next twelve years.
Several practical reasons explain the failure. Manchuria was thousands of miles from Britain and France, and neither had the will or capacity to send a fleet. The USA, the only Pacific power capable of constraining Japan, was not a League member. The Depression made any disruption of the limited Japan trade politically toxic at home. Japan was a permanent Council member, and any sanction would have required — under the unanimity rule — Japan to vote to sanction itself. Lord Lytton’s report was a serious diplomatic document, but the League had no instrument to enforce it.
The Abyssinian Crisis, 1935-36
If Manchuria exposed the League’s impotence at distance, Abyssinia destroyed it on Europe’s doorstep. Mussolini wanted to add Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) to Italy’s African empire as a matter of nationalist prestige and as revenge for Italy’s humiliating defeat at Adwa in 1896. A border incident at Wal Wal in December 1934 gave him a pretext. In October 1935, Italian forces invaded from Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Emperor Haile Selassie’s troops, equipped largely with rifles and spears, were no match for Italian tanks, aircraft and mustard gas.
The League acted faster than over Manchuria, but more weakly. It declared Italy the aggressor and imposed economic sanctions in November 1935 — a ban on arms exports, financial loans and certain raw materials. Crucially, the sanctions excluded oil, coal and steel, which Italy needed most. The Suez Canal, run by a British-French company, was kept open for Italian troopships. Britain and France were unwilling to push Mussolini into the arms of Hitler — a calculation that destroyed the League’s credibility.
In December 1935, while sanctions were nominally in force, British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister Pierre Laval secretly negotiated a deal that would have given Mussolini roughly two-thirds of Abyssinia. The plan was leaked to the French press and the public outcry forced Hoare’s resignation, but the damage was done. The League’s two leading powers had been caught privately offering an aggressor most of what he wanted while publicly imposing sanctions on him. Mussolini drew the obvious lesson and continued the conquest. By May 1936 Italian forces took Addis Ababa; Haile Selassie went into exile and made his famous speech to the League Assembly in Geneva, warning ‘it is us today; it will be you tomorrow’. Sanctions were lifted in July 1936.
Why It Mattered
It is worth distinguishing the two crises clearly: in Manchuria the League had little leverage over a great power on a distant continent; in Abyssinia the League’s leading members were exposed as more interested in keeping Mussolini away from Hitler than in defending the Covenant. Hitler watched both episodes carefully. Within a year of the Abyssinian collapse he had remilitarised the Rhineland (March 1936), formed the Rome-Berlin Axis (October 1936), and concluded that the League was a paper tiger. The road from Geneva 1936 to Munich 1938 to Warsaw 1939 was short.
Manchuria and Abyssinia are different kinds of failure. In Manchuria the League had little practical leverage over a distant aggression. In Abyssinia the League had real leverage but Britain and France chose appeasement of Mussolini over enforcement — the Hoare-Laval Pact destroyed the League’s credibility.