'Collective security institutions often fail when major-power admission is treated as a bargaining chip.' Discuss with reference to the League of Nations' experience in 1926.

Collective security rests on the premise that membership is a rule-bound entitlement, not a prize to be traded. The League of Nations' handling of Germany's admission in 1926 — where a permanent Council seat became the currency of great-power bargaining — shows how such transactional entry corrodes an institution's legitimacy even as it appears to widen its reach.

Admission as a bargain: the 1926 episode

• Article 10 of the Locarno Treaty (1925) made the pact's entry into force conditional on Germany "becoming a Member of the League of Nations" — converting membership itself into a quid pro quo for a regional security settlement [1].
• The special Assembly of March 1926 collapsed when Brazil's veto blocked Germany's entry, with Spain and Poland pressing parallel claims; Lord Parmoor warned in Parliament against treating seats "as a matter of a bargain on the occasion of the entry of Germany" [2].
• The September 1926 compromise granted only one new permanent seat (Germany's) while inflating elected seats from six to nine, a numerical payoff rather than a principled rule of representation [3].

Why bargaining weakened collective security

• Legitimacy deficit: rewarding a former aggressor while denying parity to loyal members made status appear negotiable; Brazil withdrew from the League.
• Fragile commitment: Germany's adhesion, hailed as proof of the League's "central role," was reversed within seven years when Nazi Germany withdrew in 1933 [4].
• Institutional paralysis: a Council built on bargains could not act on Manchuria (1931) or Abyssinia (1935), marking "the collapse of the collective security system" [4].

Yet the thesis must be calibrated: admission-by-bargain did buy the Locarno decade of détente. The failure lay not in accommodation but in the absence of objective, codified criteria for elevated status. The UN's ongoing intergovernmental negotiations on equitable representation and Council enlargement [5] carry the same lesson — reform anchored in transparent, rule-based representation, rather than ad hoc deals, is what converts membership into genuine collective responsibility.