While the League of Nations could celebrate its successes, the League had every reason to examine its failures and where it went wrong. These failures, especially in the 1930’s, cruelly exposed the weaknesses of the League of Nations and played a part in the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. During the 1920’s the failures of the League of Nations were essentially small-scale and did not threaten world peace. However they did set a marker – that the League of Nations could not solve problems if the protagonists did not ‘play the game’.
Article 11 of the League’s Covenant stated: "Any war or threat of war is a matter of concern to the whole League and the League shall take action that may safeguard peace."
Therefore, any conflict between nations, which ended in war and the victory of one state over another, had to be viewed as a failure by the League.
The first crisis the League had to face was in north Italy In 1919, Italian
