League of Nations

League of Nations An international organization of originally 45 members founded at the Paris Peace Conference on 24 April 1919 to enable collective security, arbitration of international disputes, and disarmament. It was inspired by the failure of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 and President Wilson's Fourteen Points. From the start, the League was fundamentally weakened by the refusal of any isolationist Congress to ratify the USA's entry. Germany was admitted in 1926, the Soviet Union in 1934. It supervised the administration of Mandates, as well as the city of Danzig and the Saarland. It helped decisively in the settlement of refugees from Russia and Turkey during the 1920s, and it arbitrated successfully in territorial disputes between the USSR and Poland (1921), and Italy and Greece (1923). Yet it was unable to prevent aggression between its member states, notably the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (Manchukuo), the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Abyssinian War, 1935–6), and Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia (1939). During the second half of the 1930s it became all but redundant, as Japan and Germany left in 1933, and Italy in 1937. The USSR was expelled in 1939 following its invasion of Finland in the Winter War. In 1946 the League handed over its remaining functions to the UN.