By early March 1938, League of Nations diplomacy was visibly failing to restrain Axis expansion, with Austria's independence hanging by a thread just days before the Anschluss. The period exposed the collective security system's inability to deter aggression, foreshadowing the catastrophic diplomatic failures that would culminate in the Second World War.
By the spring of 1938, the League of Nations, founded after the First World War to prevent exactly this kind of crisis, had become a byword for impotence. Adolf Hitler's Germany was preparing to annex Austria within days, Italy had already conquered Ethiopia with barely a diplomatic slap on the wrist, and Japan's invasion of China ground on despite condemnations from Geneva.
Small and mid-sized nations watched anxiously as the great powers postured without acting. France and Britain, still scarred by the losses of the First World War and gripped by pacifist sentiment among their electorates, chose appeasement over confrontation at nearly every turn. The result was a demonstration effect: aggressive states learned that international condemnation carried no real cost.
Within days of this period, German troops marched into Austria unopposed, completing the Anschluss on March 12. The pattern would repeat with the Sudetenland later that year and Czechoslovakia in 1939. Historians often point to this stretch of the late 1930s as the moment the international order genuinely could have altered its course through decisive action, and did not.
Key people: Adolf Hitler