ABSTRACT

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that international security established in the 1920s was something of a facade. The fragile safeguards that the League of Nations had implemented to secure peace were increasingly undermined by a series of challenges to its authority. In 1931 Japan seized Manchuria, an important economic region in north-east China. Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in October 1935 and in the same year Hitler announced the introduction of conscription and embarked on a heavy rearmament programme. The failure of the League to respond to these acts of international aggression persuaded Hitler to take a calculated risk and, in March 1936, he ordered his troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, which had been demilitarised since 1919. Despite the fact that his earlier actions had repudiated both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact (1925), Hitler justified the reoccupation of the Rhineland by arguing that the Franco-Soviet Pact (1935), in which each side pledged to aid the other in case of attack, was a direct threat to Germany’s security. The failure of the League to check unprovoked aggression and the repudiation of its Covenant, irrevocably undermined its authority.