The Story of International Relations, Part Three: Cold-Blooded Idealists (Palgrave Studies in International Relations) 3030318265, 9783030318260

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PSIR · PALGRAVE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The Story of International Relations, Part Three Cold-Blooded Idealists

Jo-Anne Pemberton

Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series Editors Mai’a K. Davis Cross Northeastern University Boston, MA, USA Benjamin de Carvalho Norwegian Institute of International Affairs Oslo, Norway Shahar Hameiri University of Queensland St. Lucia, QLD, Australia Knud Erik Jørgensen University of Aarhus Aarhus, Denmark Ole Jacob Sending Norwegian Institute of International Affairs Oslo, Norway Ayşe Zarakol University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Palgrave Studies in International Relations (the EISA book series), published in association with European International Studies Association, provides scholars with the best theoretically-informed scholarship on the global issues of our time. The series includes cutting-edge monographs and edited collections which bridge schools of thought and cross the boundaries of conventional fields of study. EISA members can access a 50% discount to PSIR, the EISA book series, here http://www.eisa-net.org/ sitecore/content/be-bruga/mci-registrations/eisa/login/landing.aspx. Mai’a K. Davis Cross is the Edward W. Brooke Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. Benjamin de Carvalho is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway. Shahar Hameiri is Associate Professor of International Politics and Associate Director of the Graduate Centre in Governance and International Affairs, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia. Knud Erik Jørgensen is Professor of International Relations at Aarhus University, Denmark, and at Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey. Ole Jacob Sending is the Research Director at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway. Ayşe Zarakol is Reader in International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College, UK. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14619

Jo-Anne Pemberton

The Story of International Relations, Part Three Cold-Blooded Idealists

Jo-Anne Pemberton School of Social Sciences University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia

Palgrave Studies in International Relations ISBN 978-3-030-31826-0 ISBN 978-3-030-31827-7  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31827-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I am considerably indebted to a number of people who have supported me in preparing this manuscript. I would like to thank Mark and Sally Pemberton, Gail Pemberton, Gregory Pemberton and Christian Pemberton. Many thanks to Peter Carman and Jean-Michel AgeronBlanc, president and chef d’enterprise respectively of the Paris American Academy for their generous assistance during my stays in Paris. I am especially grateful to the following archivists: Jens Bol, Alexandre Coutelle, Mahmoud Ghander and Steve Nyong. Their help and expertise made it possible for me to access archival records and other materials of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s held in the UNESCO Archives in Paris. I would also like to express my gratitude to Richard and Yvonne Fordham, Alison and Christopher Hodel, Martin and Tina Leggett and Cecily Lilian Steptoe for their support and encouragement and for the great interest they have shown in this project throughout.

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Contents

1 Peaceful Change or War? 1 2 Paris, 1937: Colonial Questions and Peace 87 3 Conferences at Prague and Bergen and the Looming War 239 4 Intellectual Cooperation in War-Time and Plans for Reconstruction 351 5 The Post-War Decline of the International Studies Conference 427 Index 499

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Abbreviations

BCCIS British Coordinating Committee for International Studies CFR Council on Foreign Relations CISSIR Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations GRC Geneva Research Centre IIA International Institute of Agriculture ICIC International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation ICO Intellectual Cooperation Organisation IICI Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle IIEC International Institute of Educational Cinematography IIIC International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation ILO International Labour Organisation IPC International Peace Campaign IPR Institute of Pacific Relations IPSA International Political Science Association ISC International Studies Conference LNU League of Nations Union LON League of Nations LSE London School of Economics and Political Science OJ  Official Journal (of the League of Nations) RIIA Royal Institute of International Affairs RUP Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix SDN Société des Nations UA UNESCO Archives

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CHAPTER 1

Peaceful Change or War?

A Study of History Arnold J. Toynbee’s multi-volume work A Study of History, the first three volumes of which appeared in 1934, drew inspiration from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918), a two-volume work which Toynbee had read in 1920 in the course of elaborating a philosophy of history.1 Yet despite it being a source of inspiration, Toynbee was critical of Spengler’s effort, later observing that while the pages of Decline of the West teemed with ‘firefly flashes of historical insight,’ Spengler’s account of the geneses of civilisations was ‘unilluminatingly dogmatic and deterministic’.2 Toynbee observed that for Spengler, civilisations emerge, flourish and then decline ‘in unvarying conformity with a fixed time-table’ and that the latter considered this civilisational trajectory to be simply a law of nature, requiring no further discussion. Yet it was precisely the question of why civilisations rise and fall that Toynbee wished to open up for investigation and in relation to this question he proposed that where the ‘German a priori method drew blank..English empiricism’ might succeed.3 1 William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 98–99. 2 A. J. Toynbee, ed., Civilization on Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 9. 3 Ibid., 10.

© The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part Three, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31827-7_1

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Yet irrespective of the massive amount of historical data on which Toynbee drew in charting the course civilisations, his own approach was hardly in conformity with the approach that one typically associates with the expression ‘English empiricism’. Indeed, Toynbee’s A Study of History was greatly informed by a notion derived from the theory of creative evolution elaborated by the French philosopher and first president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) of the League of Nations (LON) which many of Toynbee’s English peers viewed saw as loose, speculative and even mystical: the élan vital (life-force).4 According to Bergson, it is the élan vital which explains the onward rush of life: although life’s particular articulations may become immobile and decay, life itself rushes ever forward. Alongside this forward movement an ‘essential’ feature of the élan vital concerns, as Bergson explained, the ‘unforseeability of the forms that life creates’.5 Bergson was fond of saying that the future lies in our hands and more particularly, that our future trajectory greatly depends on our ability ‘to open what was closed’.6 Here, it is important to note that for Bergson, it is ‘human individuals and not human societies that “make” human history’.7 Bergson stated in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion), that history only takes a forward leap when society ‘allows itself to be convinced’ or ‘shaken’ and that the ‘shake’ which propels society forward must ‘always be given by someone’.8 For Bergson, the someone in question concerns the one or several individuals possessed of moral genius: he states that it is ‘only to the thrust of genius’ that the ‘inertia of humanity has ever yielded.’9 According to Bergson, society will remain caught in a ‘vicious circle’ until that time

4 Toynbee,

A Study of History, vol. 3, 125. Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 58th ed. (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1948), 62, http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bergson_henri/deux_sources_morale/deux_sources.pdf. See also Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 125. 6 Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 164. See also Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 125. 7 Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 231. 8 Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 40. See also Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 231. 9 Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 92. See also Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 237. 5 Henri

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when ‘one or several privileged souls, having dilated in themselves the social soul, have broken the circle in drawing society after them.’10 Toynbee assimilated Bergson’s theory of creative evolution to his civilisational template. What this theory suggested when imported into an account of the history of civilisations is the following: whereas some civilisations fall prey to ‘arrested’ development and ‘perilous immobility’ and then go into decline, other civilisations surge ahead. Impelled by an élan, some civilisation thrust onwards, managing through innovative adaptations to overcome the almost insurmountable obstacles that they find in their path.11 Following Bergson, Toynbee contended that the élan by means of which civilisations grow is conveyed by ‘creative pioneers,’ that is, by ‘superhuman souls that break the vicious cycle of primitive social life’ through bringing about in their social environment the ‘mutation’ which they have realised within themselves. Crucial to this transformative process is the coming into play of what Toynbee referred to as the ‘faculty of sheer mimesis’: creative minorities are imitated by the ‘uncreative rank and file’.12 According to Toynbee, the social dynamic at the heart of the relation between a creative minority and the uncreative majority is what drives the growth of societies, this growth being in the direction of ‘progressive self-determination or self-articulation’.13 Societal growth involves a process by which a civilisation becomes less and less concerned with responding to challenges issuing from the ‘external environment’ be it ‘physical or human,’ and more and more concerned by challenges issued ‘by itself to itself’ in its own ‘inner arena’.14 In respect to civilisational decay, Toynbee cited militarism as the main cause, the origins of which concerned a ‘loss of creative power of creative individuals or minorities’. Due to their loss of creative power, the individuals or minorities in question are increasingly unable to sway the masses. In ‘rage and panic,’ they transform themselves into a ‘dominant minority’: they begin to rule

10 Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 40. See also Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 231. 11 Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 3. 12 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement of vols. 1–6 by D. C. Somverville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 212–13, 216. 13 Ibid., 189. 14 Ibid., 208.

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by the whip within their own domain while periodically turning their ­batteries on their neighbours without.15 Toynbee stated that militarism has been by far the greatest cause of the breakdowns of civilizations during the last four or five millennia….Militarism breaks a civilization down by causing the local states in which the society is articulated to collide with one another in destructive fratricidal conflicts. In this suicidal process, the entire social fabric becomes fuel to feed the devouring flame in the brazen bosom of Moloch.16

Naturally given Europe’s own recent experience of fratricidal conflict, the possibility of European decline was at the forefront of Toynbee’s mind during the time in which he was preparing the first three volumes of A Study of History. This was evidenced by his meditations on the destiny of European culture in a paper he gave at a conference in Copenhagen under the auspices of the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations (CISSIR) in 1931, by which time he had been working on the various volumes of A Study of History for some years.17 That said, it should be noted that Toynbee did not directly confront the question of the possibility of European decline in the first three volumes of A Study of History. In the case of the fourth volume however, it was a different matter altogether. The preface to this volume was dated March 31, 1939, and therein Toynbee confessed that in light of the ‘catastrophe’ that might descend upon his world at any moment, he had felt at times that in writing the book, the ‘painfully appropriate’ themes of which, he observed, were ‘breakdown’ and ‘disintegration,’ he was ‘tempting Fate’ and ‘wasting effort.’ He openly wondered whether the ‘paroxysm’ of nationalism that had engulfed the Western world in the previous year suggested that ‘our parochial national states might have to pass through further bouts of internecine fratricidal warfare’ 15 Ibid.,

190, 245–46. 190. 17 Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ International Affairs 10, no. 6 (1931): 803–26, 819. While Toynbee accepted that Europe would decline in political and economic importance in the future, he warned that if its cultural lights ‘were to be extinguished, the rest of the world would surely find itself going intellectual and aesthetically stale…Therefore we must exert ourselves to safeguard the position of Europe in the new international society—and this not just in the interests of us poor Europeans, but in the interests of mankind at large’ (ibid.). 16 Ibid.,

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before they would ‘enter into an effective social contract or else submit to the terrible alternative of being unified by force’.18 In contrast with the sense of foreboding conveyed in the preface to the fourth volume of A Study of History, the preface accompanying the first three volumes, which was dated May 16, 1933, saw Toynbee offer a broadly optimistic appraisal of the international situation. He observed therein that whereas in the age now past national communities aspired to be ‘universes in themselves,’ in the so-called ‘new age, the dominant note in the corporate consciousness of communities is a sense of being parts of some larger universe’. Toynbee maintained that this sense of corporate consciousness grew out of the feeling on the part of national communities that they could no longer ‘stand by themselves’ and that because of this feeling, states had adapted their sovereign independence to the LON and to other international instruments such as the Pact of Paris: what was formally known as the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, a treaty which was signed in August 1928 by fifteen countries.19 As Toynbee’s biographer William H. McNeill argues, if the principal message of A Study of History concerned the ‘demotion’ of Western civilisation to one civilisation amongst many, it was a message that was ‘softened’ by suggestions that this civilisation ‘might yet be saved and that God or His secularized equivalent, élan vital, was still in charge.’20 McNeill further argues that to the extent that A Study of History reflects Toynbee’s concern for the peaceful progress of Western civilisation and the international order of which it was the chief author, it may be seen as a ‘grandiose background argument for the advocacy of collective security.’21 Yet at the same time and for the very same reason, A Study of History may be seen as a grandiose background argument for the advocacy of peaceful change, a cause that Toynbee would champion in the years after 1933.22

18 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), viii–ix, 3. 19 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), viii, 14–15. 20 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 164. 21 Ibid., 160. 22 Ibid., 163.

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Peaceful Change or War? An Address at Chatham House Toynbee was very disturbed by Italy’s violation of the Covenant of the LON in the form of its ongoing aggression against Ethiopia in the wake of the Walwal incident of December 5, 1934. It was in view of that aggression that Ethiopia had lodged a formal appeal to the LON Council under Article 15 of the covenant on March 17, 1935: it had given notice to the council of the existence of dispute likely to lead to a rupture, thereby calling into play council intervention. In a letter written to Ivison S. Macadam, the secretary of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) on September 15, 1935, Toynbee urged that Britain should ‘take the risk’ of a ‘lesser war, in a good cause, against the least formidable of the predatory Powers.’23 While Toynbee regarded the Italian aggression as an evil in itself, he also stressed the necessity of action in order to forestall a major conflagration in which he expected the so-called have-nots, namely, Germany, Italy and Japan, to align themselves against the so-called haves, namely, Britain and France. Should such a conflagration occur, he advised Macadam, ‘we shall…be fighting for our lives’ with the ‘big prize’ being the British Empire.24 23 Arnold J. Toynbee, 1935, quoted in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 169. The first paragraph of Article 15 declared the following: ‘If there should arise between Members of the League any dispute likely to lead to a rupture, which is not submitted to arbitration or judicial settlement in accordance with Article 13, the Members of the League agree that they will submit the matter to the Council. Any party to the dispute may effect such submission by giving notice of the existence of the dispute to the Secretary-General, who will make all necessary arrangements for a full investigation and consideration thereof.’ The fourth paragraph of Article 15 stated the following: ‘If the dispute is not thus settled [by the Council], the Council either unanimously or by a majority vote shall make and publish a report containing a statement of the facts of the dispute and the recommendations which are deemed just and proper in regard thereto.’ ‘Appendix 3: The Covenant of the League of Nations, 29 April 1919,’ The United Nations Library at Geneva, The League of Nations Archives, The League of Nations 1920–1946: Organization and Accomplishments, A Retrospective of the First Organization for the Establishment of World Peace (Geneva: United Nations, 1996), 164. 24 Ibid. McNeill records that Toynbee told his father-in-law Gilbert Murray, who was Bergson’s successor as president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, on October 21, 1935 the following: ‘Personally, I should like to close the [Suez] Canal and I would dare Italy to go to war with us. I find I very hard to stomach allowing a very horrible war in East Africa when we could stop it in this way in a moment.’ He further records that when it became clear in April 1936 that Britain and France were not going to sanction Italy, Toynbee stated: ‘The whole thing is so infantile, as well as so evil, that it makes me sick to think about it.’ Toynbee, 1935, and Toynbee, 1936, quoted

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On the evening of December 17, 1935, Toynbee presented a paper at a general meeting at Chatham House in St. James’s Square, the home of the RIIA. The paper was entitled ‘Peaceful Change or War?’. Early in his address, Toynbee explained that he had written the paper less than three weeks before the date on which it was delivered: before the public revelation of what he referred to as the events of December 7 and 8. The events in question concerned a supposed plan of conciliation between Italy and Ethiopia devised by the French premier Pierre Laval. This plan had been devised in view of the fact that the LON was shortly due to make a final decision on a proposal to add an oil embargo to the range of economic sanctions it had imposed on Italy under Article 16 of the covenant in light of the council’s lack of success in effecting a settlement of the dispute that Ethiopia had submitted to it.25 At a meeting in Paris on the evening of December 7, Laval had warned the British foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare, that oil sanctions would spell war and that ‘if so, he could not guarantee France keeping her word [to assist Great Britain if Mussolini attacked it], unless terms were put to Mussolini with which he might be expected to agree.’26 Following Laval’s acceptance of certain adjustments to his plan in Ethiopia’s favour, the foreign secretary

in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 169. On the potential alliance of have-not states, see Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ International Affairs 15, no. 1 (1936): 26–56, 30–1. Toynbee stated the following in a letter to the Times: ‘The Abyssinians to-day are dying painfully because they have the courage to fight to the death against an aggressor who is overwhelmingly stronger than they are, and who is using a devilish weapon which he has sworn to renounce. We Europeans (as Mr. Baldwin told one European last Saturday) are perhaps going to die the same painful death to-morrow because some of us have not scrupled to commit a double breach of faith and morality by making an aggressive war and waging it with poison gas, while the rest of us have not dared to carry out more than a fragment of our covenant, for fear of the immediate risks to which we might expose ourselves by keeping faith completely…. If we Europeans persist in our present course, we are going to turn our arms against one another and then die in droves, like sheep penned in slaughter-houses, from the poison which European airmen will spray her European cities. If our death is to be a premature and painful one anyway, which matters more? To make sure of dying it to-morrow instead of to-day? Or to make sure of dying it with honour instead of which dishonour?’ Arnold J. Toynbee, letter to the editor, Times, April 22, 1936. 25 Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 26n, 28. 26 Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), 272–3.

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approved Laval’s scheme, albeit on a provisional basis. Known as the Hoare-Laval plan, when stripped of its euphemistic clothing as an ‘Exchange of Territories’ and a ‘Zone of Economic Expansion and Settlement,’ [it] meant the buying off of Signor Mussolini by conceding to him territory and virtual control of far wider extent than he had so far won by the sword. As an attempt to reduce Abyssinia from complete annihilation, it might perhaps have been justified, but in fact it was put forward at a time which no such débâcle was anticipated. Sir Samuel [Hoare] himself predicted a long and indecisive struggle, followed by a compromised settlement. The proposal was obviously put forward in the interests of Powers pledged to the maintenance of Ethiopian integrity, rather than in those of Abyssinia.27

On December 8, Hoare and Laval signed a communiqué which declared they had the basis for a settlement of the dispute, following which the plan was communicated to the British cabinet for its consideration. Although disliking its terms, the British cabinet gave the plan its seal of approval on December 9. However, in the wake of the publication on that same day of the broad outlines of the plan in the French press, which, according to a number observers, was the result of a leak orchestrated by the French Foreign Ministry or even by Laval himself, a furious public backlash arose in view of which Hoare tended his resignation. The Hoare-Laval plan, which was widely seen as the betrayal of the LON’s system of collective security, was no more.28 Speaking two days before Hoare’s resignation, Toynbee told his Chatham House audience that before the news of the events of December 7 and 8 became public, he had assumed that the British government was ‘set upon the hard but hopeful path of collective security’ and that therefore the time was ‘ripe’ to ‘explore simultaneously the parallel path of peaceful change.’29 However, as he also told his audience, 27 G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 1920–1939, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 416. 28 ‘The Plan created a great commotion among all the countries applying sanctions and was generally regarded as a breach of faith toward the League.’ Anique H. M. van Ginneken, Historical Dictionary of the League of Nations (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 112. 29 Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 26n., 28.

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the events of the previous ten days had cast doubt on his assumption that there was a strong desire to attain the ideal of inaugurating in international relations ‘the reign of justice through a combination of peaceful change with collective security’ on the understanding that the alternative to this was social collapse. In view of this, Toynbee stated the following: ‘To-night, I am afraid, after what has been happening during the last ten days, we have to ask ourselves a preliminary question: does the British Empire want an orderly world? That is, want it at the necessary cost of taking the risk involved in collective security and making the sacrifices involved in peaceful change?’.30 In commencing his presentation and before moving on to make observations additional to those made in his paper as it was originally drafted, Toynbee insisted on the dual nature of the task that had been thrust upon world actors in light of current international conditions, stating in this regard the following: In a number of recent pronouncements and discussions, official and unofficial, on the present critical state of international affairs, it has been pointed out that if we are to avert a catastrophe, we have to achieve two things simultaneously. We have not only to establish and maintain a system of ‘collective security’ which will safeguard the existing international order against attempts to change it by violence; we have also, pari passu, to work out some method of ‘peaceful change’ as an alternative to the violent method of change which, in the international field, has hitherto been provided by war.31

Toynbee went on to observe that an ‘insistence upon the twofold nature of our task’ had been a prominent feature of a speech delivered by Hoare at the assembly on September 11 as well as of an address given by the foreign secretary at the annual dinner of RIIA on November 26. Toynbee added that the same insistence had appeared in an address given by Sir Herbert Samuel at Chatham House on October 17 and ‘in the scientific study of international affairs’ being undertaken by the International Studies Conference (ISC) in which, Toynbee was pleased to note, the RIIA was an active participant.’32

30 Ibid., 31 Ibid., 32 Ibid.

27–8. 26.

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The ISC was an organisation which had its origins in a meeting of savants interested in the study of international affairs in Berlin in March 1928. The inspiration for this meeting largely came from Alfred E. Zimmern, the deputy director of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) in Paris from 1926 to 1930. A creature of French law, the IIIC was an institution that had been placed at the disposition of the LON by the French government in 1925 in order that it might serve as the executive arm of the ICIC. The French government’s gesture in respect to the IIIC had been made in view of the fact that since its establishment by the council in 1922, the ICIC had been starved of finances not least because certain members of the LON, most notably those members who also happened to be members of the British Empire, were sceptical of the idea that the LON should interest itself in intellectual and cultural policy. The IIIC, which was largely funded by the French government, would also serve as the secretariat of an association created under its auspices: the ISC. Against a background of concern about the role played by the Paris-based institute in the direction of the ISC’s work and about the political implications of the ISC’s association with the LON by virtue of its association with the IIIC, the IIIC had declared in 1934 that the ISC was an autonomous and independent organisation. Nonetheless, the ISC remained institutionally linked to the IIIC and thus the LON until 1946, the year in which the existence of the LON and the IIIC was terminated. Zimmern, in his capacity as deputy director of the IIIC, was keen to promote the study of international relations in educational contexts. More particularly, he was keen to promote instruction in the aims and activities of the LON. Zimmern was assisted in the task of organising the conference in Berlin by Toynbee whose father-in-law, Gilbert Murray, the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford who had been appointed vice-president of the ICIC in 1922. Following Bergson’s retirement from the role president of the ICIC on the ground of ill-health in December 1925, Murray became president of the ICIC. Like Murray, Zimmern and others involved in preparations for the Berlin meeting, Toynbee would have been conscious of the symbolic significance of holding it in Berlin: it could only serve to heighten the developing atmosphere of political and intellectual rapprochement with Germany. Elaborating on the remark he had made concerning the ISC’s adoption of the dual task of promoting the maintenance of a system of collective security and of working out methods of peaceful change, Toynbee

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pointed out in his Chatham House address of December 17, 1935, that at its General Conference on the Study of ‘Collective Security’ in London in June, the ISC had decided that its next two-year study cycle would be devoted to the topic of peaceful change and that preparatory work in this regard was currently underway.33 Toynbee might usefully have added that the proposal that the ISC should study the topic of peaceful change for the duration of its 1935 to 1937 study cycle had been brought to the conference by the American unit of the ISC, that is, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He might also have usefully added that the American proposal had been supported by Charles K. Webster in his role as representative of the British unit of the ISC, namely, the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies (BCCIS) and in his capacity as a member of the conference’s programme committee. Webster was at that time the Stevenson Professor in International History at the University of London. In 1919 he had served as secretary of the military section of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. In the years 1922 and 1923, he occupied the role of Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. Webster was Toynbee’s old friend. In the context of the ISC’s programme committee, it was Webster and Philip C. Jessup, the latter being an American international legal scholar based at the University of Columbia and a representative of the CFR at the conference, who were chiefly responsible for the selection of the topic of peaceful change and for the preparation of a formula defining the scope of the study of it.34 It should be noted that in a weighty memorandum published by the CFR for the benefit of the ISC’s 1935 session and which had been distributed in advance of it, Jessup had beseeched the states of Europe to adopt a policy of peaceful change and had cautioned against inflated expectations of what the United States was prepared to do in respect to

33 Ibid.,

26–27. Chalmers Wright, ed., Population and Peace: A Survey on International Opinion on Claims for Relief from Population Pressure (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1939), 20n., 330. For Toynbee’s relationship with Charles K. Webster, see Arnold J. Toynbee, Acquaintances (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 276. 34 Fergus

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the stabilisation of peace in Europe.35 Also notable in this regard was an inaugural address delivered at that session by Allen W. Dulles, partner in the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, legal adviser to the American delegation to the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments in Geneva in 1932 and 1933 and chair of a committee on collective security that had been appointed by the CFR prior to the conference in London for the purpose of organising American submissions to it. In his address, Dulles, who served as chair of the conference’s study meetings, advised that one of the reasons why many of his compatriots wanted the United States to more completely isolate itself from European problems was the ‘apprehension’ that American assistance was being sought in order to ‘to help maintain a particular status quo rather than to maintain the peace’ and warned that the majority of them were not ‘sufficiently convinced’ that the American ‘national interest and possibly national safety may depend upon keeping other people from going to war.’36

United Behind the League? Hoare’s speech at the Sixteenth Assembly had caused a sensation because of its affirmation of ‘the interest of the British people in collective security.’ This affirmation caused a sensation because many had long doubted, and with good reason, the strength of the British commitment to the security system of the LON. As Hoare acknowledged in his speech, even Britain’s ‘kinder critics’ felt that Britons held themselves ‘remote’ from questions which were of ‘vital interest’ to other countries. As for the country’s harsher critics, Hoare observed that the British ‘attitude has given a pretext for more bitter charges.’37 Yet is important to note that Hoare qualified His Majesty’s Government’s commitment to the maintenance of the covenant in two ways even if only as a matter of inference. Firstly, in what was an 35 Philip C. Jessup, The United States and the Stabilization of Peace: A Study of Collective Security (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1935), 148, 152. 36 ‘Addresses Delivered at the Inaugural Meeting,’ in Maurice Bourquin, ed., Collective Security: A Record of the Seventh and Eighth International Studies Conference, Paris 1934—London 1935 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1936), 43–4. 37 League of Nations [hereafter LON], special supplement, Official Journal [hereafter OJ], no. 138 (1935), 43.

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obvious reference to the situation created by threatened Italian aggression against Ethiopia, a situation which he addressed elsewhere in his speech, Hoare stated, echoing a point he had already made in the House of Commons, the following: if ‘the burden [of collective security] is to be borne, it must be borne collectively,’ thereby begging the question as to what Great Britain would do should collective action ‘prove impossible’.38 Secondly, Hoare, having earlier noted in his speech that collective security was designed to operate in a context in which the possibility was open ‘through the machinery of the League for the modification, by consent…of international conditions whose continuance might be a danger to peace,’ declared that it was not enough to legislate that there shall be no war and that should war occur then it will be brought to an end by common action: ‘[s]ome other means than the recourse to arms must be found for adjusting the natural play of international forces.’39 In regard to the latter point, Hoare was careful to insist that in order to meet with a positive response, demands for changes to the status quo must be ‘justified by the facts and based on the free discussion of those facts’. In this connection, Hoare observed that the ‘justice of a claim is not necessarily in proportion to the national passions which are aroused in support of it,’ noting that it he considered ‘one of the most dangerous features’ of the modern world to be the ‘artificial excitement of national feeling’ by means of government propaganda.40 Having added these cautions, Hoare went on to cite the current distribution of the world’s economic resources as an example of a status quo situation that required adjustment because it contained within it the seeds of trouble. Hoare acknowledged that problem of the world’s resources was exaggerated by some and that it could be exploited in order to further other agendas, nonetheless, he was insistent that the fact remains that some countries, either in their native soil or in their colonial territories, do possess what appears to be a preponderance of advantage and that others less favoured view the situation with anxiety. Especially as regards colonial materials, it is not unnatural that such a state of things should give rise to fears lest exclusive monopolies be set up at 38 Ibid., 44, and Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Britain Demands League Act Against Aggression and Pledges Her Support,’ New York Times, September 12, 1935, 3. 39 LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 138 (1935), 45. 40 Ibid.

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the expense of those countries that do not possess colonial empires….[A] s the question is causing discontent and anxiety, the wise course is to investigate it, to see what the proposals are for dealing with it, to see what is the real scope of the trouble, and if the trouble is substantial, to try to remove it….The view of His Majesty’s Government is that the problem is economic rather than political or territorial. It is the fear of monopoly— of the withholding of essential raw materials—that is causing alarm….The Government that I represent will…be prepared take its share in any collective attempt to deal in a fair and effective way, with a problem that is certainly troubling many people at present and may trouble them even more in the future.41

Hoare recommended that the emphasis of the terms of reference of the inquiry into the world’s economic resources that he proposed should fall on the ‘free distribution’ of raw materials ‘from colonial areas, including protectorates and mandated territories….among industrial countries which require them,’ a recommendation that served to indicate which particular countries were the source of the discontents to which he had earlier alluded.42 In an echo of a caveat he earlier had issued, Hoare ended his discussion of potential changes to the economic status quo in stating that the inquiry he proposed required ‘calm and dispassionate consideration’ and that as such it could only be undertaken once ‘the clouds of war’ had been ‘dispelled.’43 Having addressed the question of removing the causes of war, Hoare then proceeded to conclude his speech, returning in this context to its main theme, namely collective security. The final paragraph of his speech was as follows: In conformity with its precise and explicit obligations, the League stands, and my country stands with it, for the collective maintenance of the Covenant in its entirety, and particularly for steady and collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression….There, then, is the British attitude towards the Covenant. I cannot believe that it will be changed so long as the League remains an effective body and the main bridge between the United Kingdom and the Continent remains intact.44

41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.,

46. Emphasis added.

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As suggested above, Hoare’s speech made a deep impression and this was in almost all quarters. The New York Times, which published the full text of Hoare’s speech on September 12, featured on its front page on that same day a report by its Geneva correspondent Frederick T. Birchall, in which it was recorded that the speech was listened to with ‘rapt attention’ in the assembly and that enthusiastic applause followed its peroration.45 Birchall noted that the speech had brought joy to the hearts League enthusiasts ‘because of its whole-hearted endorsement of the League’ and that ‘[l]iberal elements in the delegations, and especially those representing the smaller nations, saw it as the most notable and most outspoken utterance’ on the part of a British statesman since the foundation of the LON.46 Amidst all the applause, however, one figure ‘sat motionless’: the Italian foreign minister Pompeo Aloisi. The Italian foreign minister’s behaviour would have caused little surprise given the speech’s implicit naming of Italy as an aggressor. More interesting, however, was the fact that Laval’s reaction to the speech, according to close observers, was ‘decidedly less enthusiastic’ that that of two of his compatriots, namely, Ḗdouard Herriot and Joseph Paul-Boncour. Herriot, the French minister of state who had served on three occasions as prime minister, and Paul-Boncour, permanent delegate to the LON from 1932 to 1936, minister of war in the Herriot cabinet of 1932, prime minister from December 1932 to January 1933 and foreign minister from December 1932 to January 1934, were League loyalists of long-standing. Birchall suggested that Laval’s response to the speech was informed by its final sentence: that Britain’s attitude to the LON would not change so long as the League remained an effective body and the main bridge between the United Kingdom and the Continent remains intact. With these words, Birchall stated, Hoare issued a ‘distinct warning’ to France. The Geneva correspondent of the New York Times added that this warning served to reinforce the messages conveyed by other ‘less obvious references’ made earlier in the speech.47 Among these references was doubtless Hoare’s insistence that as the LON was not a

45 Birchall, ‘Britain Demands League Act Against Aggression and Pledges Her Support,’ 1, 3. See also ‘Text of Sir Samuel Hoare’s Address to League Assembly,’ New York Times, September 12, 1935. 46 Birchall, ‘Britain Demands League Act Against Aggression and Pledges Her Support,’ 3. 47 Ibid., 1.

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‘super-state’ and as its members had not abandoned their sovereignty, the LON depended for its success on the ‘will and the power’ of its members to fulfil in combination their obligations and that ‘[i]f risks for peace are to be run, they must be run by all.’48 As Birchall stated, Laval and the country he served knew well what was the main bridge between the United Kingdom and the Continent and doubtless they well understood what Hoare meant in employing the description effective body.49 The New York Times’ Geneva correspondent further suggested that Hoare’s putative warning may have caused Laval to reflect on ‘certain commitments he somewhat unwittingly incurred in Rome long ago.’50 Here presumably, Birchall was referring to conversations held in Rome at the beginning of 1935 between Mussolini and Laval against a background in which it seemed expedient for France to forge a friendship with Italy given a resurgent Germany and given Italy’s recent flirtation with this peril to France. What was later described in the House of Commons as ‘the secret Rome accord’ between France and Italy, that is, the FrancoItalian Agreement, was not registered with the LON, however, its formal terms had been known to the British government since January 1935.51 According to G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, in the course of the conversations in Rome, the Duce ‘obtained at least an assurance that the direct interests of France would not stand in the way of the establishment by Italy of a predominant economic influence in Abyssinia’ and perhaps even, despite Laval’s assertion to the contrary in a speech to the French Senate on March 26, some indication that French ‘interests were no bar to his [more ambitious] plans’ in respect to that country.52 In view of the commitments he incurred in Rome and the reasons why these were incurred, and in view of the supposed warning to France issued by Hoare in his speech at the Sixteenth Assembly, the questions playing on Laval’s mind at the assembly on September 11 were very likely as follows: ‘Should he throw over the Italian friendship he acquired at great pains and abandon Premier Benito Mussolini; will the British replace Italian aid in Austria and the Balkans

48 LON,

special supplement, OJ, no. 138 (1935), 44. ‘Britain Demands League Act Against Aggression and Pledges Her Support,’ 1.

49 Birchall, 50 Ibid.

51 309 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), February 24, 1936, 10–1, and Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 392–3. 52 Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 393–4.

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when the time comes? Will Britain reinforce France throughout Europe if Germany and Italy again come close together?’53 Hoare’s contribution on the topic of collective security was not without its critics in Geneva and even in Great Britain. Some Britons asked themselves what was new in the foreign secretary’s speech in terms of Britain’s commitment to collective action. Birchall noted that in a previous speech given in the House of Commons, Hoare had stated that he stood for collective action ‘with the added emphasis, “and when I say collective action I mean collective action.”’ Meanwhile in Geneva, the question being asked was as follows. ‘If collective action proves impossible, what will Britain do?’. According to Birchall this question remained ‘unanswered’ and had given rise to the speculation that Britain would ‘gradually lose interest in the…[League]…and retire to comparative isolation, making such preparation for the evil days to come as she is able to do.’54 In respect to the foreign secretary’s discussion of the need to address the question of the removal of the causes of war and his proposal in that regard for an inquiry into the prospect of making certain changes to the economic status quo, most observers in Britain responded favourably to Hoare’s insistence in that context that demands for change would not be considered when made in the shadow of menaces of war.55 The Daily Telegraph, drew attention to Hoare’s caveat, after having stated that the proposed inquiry at least offered an opportunity for those powers who nourished a feeling of grievance to publicly present their case. The newspaper noted that although Hoare’s offer of an inquiry did not carry with it the suggestion that there would be ‘any approaching transfers of territory, nor even that any ultimate change of sovereignty must follow,’ it did at least open ‘the field for investigation when conditions allow “calm, dispassionate consideration,”’ thereby giving a ‘friendly hint that claims are heard best when they are not shouted in war-like tones.’56 The Morning Post welcomed the fact that the proposed inquiry would not be commenced at a time when bellicose noises were being emitted by Rome. At the same time, it expressed its dismay at the fact that 53 Birchall, 54 Ibid.,

‘Britain Demands League Act Against Aggression and Pledges Her Support,’ 1.

3.

55 Ibid. 56 Ferdinand Kuhn, ‘Britain Is United Behind the League: Few Notes of Dissent Mingle with Widespread Praise of Statement by Hoare,’ New York Times, September 12, 1935, 2, and Daily Telegraph (London), 1935, quoted ibid.

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some were willing to give consideration to ‘not merely the distribution of raw materials but of colonial and mandated territories, under threat of force’; like other opponents of what was called colonial appeasement, the newspaper opined that it would be grave mistake ‘to give out of our weakness.’57 The only note of dissent in the British press in respect to the proposed inquiry featured in the Daily Mail, a newspaper owned by the pro-Fascist Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, whose papers were known for their applause for the actions of Japan and Italy in China and Ethiopia respectively which they painted as civilising missions.58 In terms of the British press, The Daily Mail was on its own in uttering ‘a shrill warning against being drawn into sanctions against Italy,’ asserting that when it came ‘to the point of enforcing sanctions, “the burden might well fall upon Britain alone.”’59 The actual thinking behind the Daily Mail’s opposition to sanctions was revealed by its insistence, in an echo of the Italian press, that the inquiry proposed by Hoare was an exercise in futility: ‘for what the hungry nations want is territory, “and only by satisfying this desire can the problem be solved.”’60 Reflecting a common American viewpoint in respect to European politics, a London correspondent for the New York Times, namely, Ferdinand Kuhn, observed that Hoare’s speech suggested that it had finally begun to penetrate the British ‘conscience that some gesture must be made toward appeasing the “hungry nations” that are now clamoring for a share of the world’s economic advantages.’61 Having said this, Kuhn went on to note that hardly anyone in London had a clue as to how a policy of sharing resources such as suggested by Hoare could be realised and that it was generally believed that the British government 57 Morning Post (London), 1935, quoted in Kuhn, ‘Britain Is United Behind the League: Few Notes of Dissent Mingle with Widespread Praise of Statement by Hoare,’ 2. 58 Kuhn, ‘Britain Is United Behind the League: Few Notes of Dissent Mingle with Widespread Praise of Statement by Hoare,’ 2. On the support for Japanese and Italian aggression on the part of the newspapers of Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere’s newspapers see William Arnold-Forster, ‘The Elements of World Order,’ in The Problems of Peace, Tenth Series: Anarchy or World Order (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), 23. 59 Daily Mail (London), 1935, quoted in Kuhn, ‘Britain Is United Behind the League: Few Notes of Dissent Mingle with Widespread Praise of Statement by Hoare,’ 2. 60 Kuhn, ‘Britain Is United Behind the League: Few Notes of Dissent Mingle with Widespread Praise of Statement by Hoare,’ 2. 61 Ibid.

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itself had ‘the faintest idea’ about how to proceed in this matter.62 Kuhn then pointed out that [b]ecause of the Statute of Westminster, there was no way that this country could compel Canada to share her nickel or South Africa her gold, or Australia her wool. In the case of the crown colonies, with their vast resources of tin, rubber and other commodities, there are other obstacles. Japanese goods, for example, were recently shut out from Malaya and other British colonial markets, yet the Japanese could hardly buy raw materials freely from these colonies without selling their manufactured goods in return.63

Kuhn’s observation that Hoare’s speech signalled that the British government now recognised the need to make some attempt at pacifying the colonial have-nots was open to question. Fergus Chalmers Wright was a Briton who had become an official in Paris of IIIC at the beginning of 1931. He worked there for much of the 1930s albeit with a ‘couple of interludes,’ the first of which saw this graduate in economics from London University ‘seconded to the…National Economic Council of China as foreign person assistant to’ the Chinese finance minister, namely, T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen), a post which Soong held from late October 1928 to early November 1933.64 Chalmers Wright would later compile a substantial survey on behalf of the IIIC and the organisation for which it served as a secretariat: ISC. The survey Chalmers Wright compiled, which went under the heading of Population and Peace: A Survey on International Opinion on Claims for Relief from Population Pressure and which appeared in 1939, was commissioned by the IIIC against the background of the ISC’s discussion of the demands for outlets for the putative surplus populations of colonial have-not states at its annual sessions dating from 1934 to 1937. Chalmers Wright, who by virtue of his position as chief of the 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Chalmers-Wright, Fergus Camille Yeatman (Oral History), Imperial War Museum (production company), Laurie Milner (recorder), Chalmers-Wright, Fergus Camille Yeatman (interviewee/speaker), no. 1, 1984–1985, Imperial War Museum, Sound Archive, Catalogue no. 8188. For the dates bookending T. V. Soong’s period as finance minister, see ‘Foreign News: Chiang’s Cabinet,’ Time, October 29, 1928, and ‘CHINA: Soong Out,’ Time, November 6, 1933.

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International Relations and Social Sciences Service of the IIIC was also the ISC’s secretary, observed in Population and Peace the following: that the presumption that Hoare’s proposal in regard to the distribution of raw materials was an ‘“official pronouncement” by Great Britain on the subject of “the prevailing discontent,”’ as it was described in a submission to the 1937 conference ISC by the RIIA and by which was meant an official pronouncement on the colonial claims of the dissatisfied powers, was ‘perhaps warranted in fact, but perhaps not warranted in fact.’65 As we have seen, far from making a pronouncement on the grievances of the colonial have-nots, Hoare had proposed that a commission of inquiry be established whose terms of reference would include an investigation of the factual basis of these grievances and, as we have also seen, had insisted that this commission of inquiry would only be established once all threats of war had ceased. In light of this and assuming for the moment that the government of Britain was in fact willing to consider it, it was hardly to be expected that the British government would have given any consideration to the question of how to redistribute British imperial resources prior to Hoare’s speech. Further to this, it should be recalled that Hoare had stressed in his speech at the Sixteenth Assembly that what he proposed was a collective attempt to deal with a problem which he framed, notably, as a fear of monopoly of essential raw materials rather than as unfulfilled territorial aspirations. The qualified nature of Hoare’s proposal was reaffirmed by Anthony Eden, Hoare’s replacement as foreign secretary following Hoare’s resignation from the position, in the House of Commons on February 24, 1936. After having reaffirmed the British government’s support for the LON and, more specifically, for Article 16 of the covenant, Eden stated the following: The other matter to which I want to make reference is the question of access to Colonial raw materials, which were more recently discussed in this House. I must make it clear that His Majesty’s Government have in no way withdrawn from the proposal of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea (Sir S. Hoare) on this subject. They are perfectly willing at any time to enter into an examination of this subject, and they think that such an examination could usefully be held at Geneva. The appropriate moment, however, for such an examination must clearly depend on many

65 Chalmers Wright, ed., Population and Peace: A Survey on International Opinion on Claims for Relief from Population Pressure, 25n.

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factors, including the attitude of other Powers towards the proposals. Useful though we believe such an examination would be, I think that the House would be mistaken if we were to imagine that from a pursuit of it we should discover some magic touchstone for all our ills. Clearly, that is not so. The international situation is much more complex than that, but this problem may be an element in our difficulties, and therefore, I repeat, His Majesty’s Government are willing at any time to enter into an examination in an attempt to solve it.66

Two days later Eden was asked in the House of Commons, after he again had affirmed the government’s support for collective security, whether he would considered proposing to the LON that Germany be ‘invited at an early date to put before the League her territorial grievance arising out of the Treaty of Versailles,’ and also to convey Germany’s thoughts on the whole question of access to the world’s raw materials. Eden’s reply to the first part of the question was a straightforward no. In regard to the second part, he simply stated that one would know from recent statements that the general question of colonial raw materials was under consideration by the government.67 In any case, one of the outcomes of Hoare’s proposal, which according to Bryce Marian Wood in Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem (1940), a study focussing on the debate on colonial appeasement as it unfolded in Great Britain in the 1930s, caused a ‘great sensation,’ was that the Council of the LON appointed what was named the Raw Materials Committee. This committee met a number of times in 1937 and issued a report, although as it turned out nothing came of it in terms of policy.68 Another outcome was a request addressed by the British and French governments in the spring of 1937 to Paul Van Zeeland, the prime minister of Belgium. Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons in April 1937 that they had ‘inquired of the Belgian Prime Minister whether he would be willing to undertake preliminary informal 66 Anthony Eden reaffirmed his government’s support for the collective security in addressing in the House of Commons the question of imposing an oil sanction on Italy. 309 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), February 24, 1936, 76–83. Two days later, Eden stated in the House of Commons the following: ‘Every nation has a responsibility to aid in the scheme of collective security.’ 309 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), February 26, 1936, 425–26. 67 309 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), February 26, 1936, 427. 68 Bryce Marian Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 98.

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investigations in various countries as to the possibility of securing a general relaxation of quotas and other obstacles to international trade,’ although he added that no international conference involving the British, Belgian and French governments on the subject was ‘at present envisaged.’69 Van Zeeland’s report, which was based on inquiries throughout Europe and America, appeared on January 28, 1938. According to the Labour parliamentarian Arthur Henderson, the son of the Labour parliamentarian who had served as secretary of state for foreign affairs from 1929 to 1931 and as president of the Disarmament Conference in 1932 and 1933, namely, Arthur Henderson senior, it put forward ‘concrete proposals’ in respect to tariffs, quotas, exchanges, raw materials, colonies and immigration and urged that ‘the representatives of the principal economic Powers, the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy, should come together to take soundings and prepare the ground.’70 Unsurprisingly, it too came to nothing in policy terms. In the context of a debate concerning what various speakers labelled economic appeasement, on April 8, 1938, Richard Austen (Rab) Butler, the under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, relayed Van Zeeland’s observations that it would be futile to pretend that one could ‘artificially’ isolate the mission of finding practical solutions to economic problems from the surrounding political conditions and that an ‘improvement in economic conditions depended on least a certain degree of confidence, good will, sincerity, order and security prevails in international relations.’71 Echoing these observations, Butler stated that a ‘certain degree of confidence in the political sphere’ was essential if any progress in the economic sphere was to be made ‘particularly if we are to try to persuade those who have set up barriers, with which to insure their own economic self-sufficiency, to pull them down.’72

69 322 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), April 8, 1937, 342. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 98. 70 336 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), June 3, 1938, 2481. Wendy Way observed of Van Zeeland’s report the following: ‘it was to prove disappointingly lacking in practical proposals for joint action when it was produced’ in early 1938. Wendy Way, A New Idea Each Day: How Food and Agriculture Came Together in an International Organisation (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013), 200, http://epress.anu.edu.au. 71 Paul Van Zeeland, 1938, quoted ibid., 2496. 72 336 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), June 3, 1938, 2496. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 98–99.

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A good part of the reason why the various proposals which arguably had their origins in Hoare’s speech at the Sixteenth Assembly went nowhere was because there was growing opposition to ‘yielding colonially to Germany.’73 Speaking in the debate of April 8 prior to Butler’s discussion of the Van Zeeland report, Josiah (Colonel) Wedgewood noted that ‘[s]peech after speech’ in the debate had ‘turned on the question of appeasement’ both economic and political, adding that it was crucial to consider ‘at whose expense that appeasement is to be made.’74 Having observed that there was much talk of territorial revision, Wedgewood stated that it would be a ‘monstrous perversion of justice’ to return colonies to Germany, adding that ‘there ought to be an international trust in charge of those colonies, throwing them open to trade, but with the main duty of looking after the interests and development and freedom of the native inhabitants of the colonies in question.’75 Claiming that one of proposals in Van Zeeland’s report was that money be advanced to Germany and Italy by United States, Great Britain and France in order to stabilise them economically, Wedgewood asked why the British taxpayer should pay money to dictators in order that they could ‘build more aeroplanes and make more bombs—so that…they can deal with us as they dealt with the Spaniards and as they would deal with the Czechs.’76 According to Wedgewood, guaranteeing universal respect for the international rule of law was ‘the only possible economic or political method of appeasement’ and the only possible means of restoring confidence and that guaranteeing this respect hinged on the method of collective security: the massing of sufficient force in the form of an extensive alliance system.77 Wedgewood’s stance on the question of yielding colonially to Germany was reflective of the outlook of many members, of the party to which he was affiliated: the Labour Party. A pamphlet prepared by an advisory committee of the Labour Party in 1936 put forward the argument, one which, according to Wood ‘may be taken as fairly representing the Party’s views,’ that the ‘transfer of either sovereignty or mandatory responsibility’ should be resisted ‘because it would amount 73 Wood,

Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 99. Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), June 3, 1938, 2487. 75 Ibid., 2488. 76 Ibid., 2489. 77 Ibid., 2487, 2489. 74 336

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to paying blackmail’; as Wedgewood would have it, it would amount to buying the colonial have-nots off with Danegeld.78 Further to this and giving expression to a view that would be increasingly articulated as the debate concerning colonial appeasement continued to unfold, the pamphlet advised that such a transfer would ‘perpetuate the notion that colonial “swag” is a legitimate possession, only needing distribution among the robbers. The ending of all imperial domination should be preferred to a division of its “privileges and causes.”’79 Anticipating one of the key objections as to why there was opposition to yielding colonially to Germany, Toynbee insisted in his December 17 address that a policy would see the weak thrown to the ‘wolves’ in order avoid war among the great powers should be rejected. Recent history had shown the futility of such a policy: certain ‘violent changes at the expense of the weak by collusion between the Great Powers’ had done nothing to avert a general war among those powers in 1914. Toynbee then put the question as why it was that a policy of ‘throwing the weak to the wolves only whets the wolves appetite instead of taking the edge off it?’ A key answer to this question according to Toynbee, was that such a policy serves notice to the ‘have-not Powers’ that they have the ‘have Powers on the run’ and that knowing this the former will not ‘forbear to attack the haves’ no matter how much ‘plunder they [the havenots] have already taken from the weak.’ Adding flesh to this last point, Toynbee observed that the ‘pickings’ of Ethiopia and even Manchuria were ‘trifling’ in comparison with the ‘loot that there is to be won’ in the French and British Empires.80 78 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 99. Josiah Wedgewood stated in the House of Commons the following: ‘There will always be a demand from Germany, from Italy and from Poland for foreign money; and just as, when the Norse pirates came over to England, we always bought them off with Danegeld year by year in order that they might go away again, so these people who have no money say they are going to be nasty as long as we do not pay them.’ 336 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), 3 June 1938, 2489. 79 British Labour Party Advisory Committee, The Demand for Colonial Territories and Equality of Economic Opportunity, 1936, quoted in Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 99. Wood pointed out that the pamphlet prepared by the advisory committee concerning the demand for colonial territories was prepared ‘at the request of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, which, however, is not bound by all the committee’s recommendations’ (ibid., 99n.). 80 Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 31, 45–6.

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Despite these cautionary notes, Toynbee appeared to accept that the material grievances of the so-called have-not powers, such as their exclusion from colonial markets and sources of supply, were justified to some extent. Above all, he appeared to be struck by what he described as the psychological demands of these powers: their demands for equality of status which Toynbee described as the most ‘insistent and formidable, as well as the most elusive and difficult’ of all their demands.81 Addressing the issue of demands for equality in relation to the distribution of colonies, or what he and others referred to as the colonial problem, Toynbee underlined the point that in regard to ‘any attempt to provide for peaceful change between the sated and the hungry Powers in the colonial field,’ what was of greatest importance were ‘native rights.’82 The principle of trusteeship, he insisted, made it imperative that these rights be considered. Yet Toynbee also observed that the principle of trusteeship and ‘native rights’ were ‘sometimes exploited…as a stalking horse from behind whose noble-seeming form a hypocritical imperialist can slyly shoot and kill the whole idea of peaceful change in so far as it is applicable to colonial territories.’83 Toynbee’s conclusion in regard to the principle of trusteeship and ‘native rights,’ was that out of concern for the interests of local inhabitants, it would be best that any transfers of sovereignty over colonial territories be kept to a minimum. Nonetheless, he also suggested that a partial internationalisation of the administration of colonies, as well as an ‘equitable apportionment’ of any ‘legitimate’ profits derived from the colonies as between the ‘present sated and present hungry Powers,’ might go far in helping to avert a ‘catastrophic conflict’.84

An Alternative to War At the outset of his paper on December 17, Toynbee treated peaceful change as a policy to be pursued in tandem with a policy of collective security. He framed the policy of peaceful change in terms of justice and insisted on constitutional means of treaty revision no less than he insisted

81 Ibid.,

41. 44–5. 83 Ibid., 46. 84 Ibid., 44, 47–8. 82 Ibid.,

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on constitutional means of law enforcement.85 Yet in the view of Sir James Arthur Salter, the former director of the Economic and Financial Section of the LON who was among the members of the audience at Chatham House on the occasion of Toynbee’s presentation, Toynbee was in fact advocating that having failed to secure peace by means of collective security as most recently demonstrated by the Italian aggression, the alternative route of peaceful change must be followed.86 Salter was correct in his assessment that Toynbee was putting forward peaceful change as an alternative to change wrought by violent means rather than as an expression of good-will in response to requests for changes to the status quo which are reasonable and have justice on their side. This is demonstrated by the fact that although Toynbee described Bulgaria, Hungary and Lithuania as dissatisfied by states in his paper, he chose to ignore their grievances therein because unlike Germany, Italy and Japan they lacked the ‘strength to bring about violent changes by their own unaided efforts.’87 In countering Toynbee’s approach to the question, Salter insisted that while peaceful change was ‘necessary supplement to collective security… it was no substitute’: peaceful change is ‘subsequent rather than prior to collective security’ as it presupposes the renunciation of violence.88 Salter declared that to undertake change in order to placate those who would otherwise engage in acts of violence, was to trample all over the collective security system and the principle on which it was based: there shall be no wars of aggression. Echoing an observation that Toynbee himself 85 Ibid., 27. See also Esko Anatola, ‘Theories of Peaceful Change: An Excursion to the Study of Change in International Relations in the 1930s,’ Cooperation and Conflict 19, no. 4 (1984): 235–50, 240. 86 James Arthur Salter, 1935, quoted in Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 50. 87 Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 38. 88 Salter, 1935, quoted in Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 50. In a discussion of the future of the LON at Chatham House in 1936, Elsewhere Salter endorsed the general idea of peaceful change: ‘As the world and its conditions change it is perfectly clear that no system for the collective restraint of aggression can possibly stand the strain to which it will be subjected unless there is going on all the time a process by which the resulting strains can be eased by modifications of the status quo.’ James Arthur Salter, 1936, quoted in C. A. W. Manning, ‘Some Suggested Conclusions,’ in C. A. W. Manning, ed., Peaceful Change: An International Problem (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 171. Reprint of the 1937 edition.

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had made and which had much currency at the time, Salter warned that ‘[t]o make gifts—whether of one’s own possessions or those others— under pressure, and to a country full of aggression, would whet rather than satisfy the aggressor’s appetite and stimulate that of others’.89 Referring to the Ethiopian crisis, Salter stated that if the British government had defected a week ago from the policy it had espoused for the last three months, the proper thing to do was to resume that policy and ‘to press it to its conclusion’. Salter contended that it was only after this had been achieved, that the approach advocated by Toynbee could be considered. He added that he thought Toynbee attached too much importance to the supposed sense inferiority of Germany, Italy and Japan.90 Salter conceded that Japan had not been always treated as an equal in the past, as exemplified by the rejection of its proposed racial equality clause at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and that a more ‘understanding attitude’ towards Germany might have ‘prevented the development of dangerous forces there.’ However, Salter maintained that in the face of the ‘menacing arrogance’ that these states now displayed, the ‘first goal of policy must be restraint.’ Salter stated that restraint must also be the first goal of policy towards Italy the arrogance of which, he observed, caused it to believe that fear and weakness among the supporters of peace would allow it to exact ‘claims exceeding all the bounds of justice and moderation’. Referring to the ‘illegal and unjustifiable war’ Italy had so brazenly launched and which was still in progress, Salter declared that what had happened in the past week was a ‘tragic blunder, a betrayal of the League and a humiliation—a triple disaster without precedent in recent history’.91

A Meeting in Berlin Against the background of growing European tensions, Toynbee continued his campaign concerning changes to the administration of the colonial regime, insisting that it was ‘up to Great Britain to take action’ because Britain was the leading colonial power and action on its part 89 Salter, 1935, quoted in Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 51. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 51.

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would ‘move the others to go with her.’92 Toynbee himself would take action on Britain’s behalf, albeit in a non-official capacity, during a visit to Germany in February 1936. A pretext for Toynbee’s visit to Germany was an invitation issued to him to give a lecture on the topic of peaceful change at the Institut für Auswärtige Politik (Institute for Foreign Policy) in Hamburg. This institute had been founded on February 1921 under the directorship of Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a research professor in foreign and international law at the University of Hamburg. As a research institute devoted to the study of international affairs, the Institut für Auswärtige Politik was comparable in nature to the RIIA and the CFR and had developed a respectable reputation. As with RIIA and CFR, its origins lay with the Paris Peace Conference in 1919: the creation of a Hamburg-based foreign policy institute was originally proposed on May 27, 1919, by the authors of a document entitled the Memorandum of War Responsibility, Mendelssohn Bartholdy being among them.93 After 1933, Mendelssohn Bartholdy was compelled to resign his position as director and subsequently went into exile in Great Britain where he acquired a fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1935, the international legal expert Fritz (Friedrich) Berber was appointed acting director of the now nazified institute in Hamburg.94 It is noteworthy that the ‘confiscated libraries and files’ of this institute passed to the Büro Ribbentrop or Dienststelle Ribbentrop, a ‘quasiofficial apparatus’ that provided Joahcim von Ribbentrop with foreign policy advice thereby rendering him ‘relatively independent of technical advice from the foreign office.’95 In addition to his Hamburg role, Berber was a member of staff, the only remaining ‘pre-National Socialist member of the staff’ according 92 Toynbee,

‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 56. Acquaintances, 277, and Muriel K. Grindrod, ‘The Institut für Auswärtige Politik, Poststrasse 19, Hamburg,’ International Affairs 1, no. 22 (1931): 223–29, 223. The Hamburg Institute for Foreign Policy was also referred in English as the Hamburg Institute of International Affairs. 94 For Berber’s appointment to the Institut für Auswärtige Politik, see Katharina Rietzler, ‘Counter-Imperial Orientalism: Friedrich Berber and the Politics of International Law in Germany and India, 1920s–1960s,’ Journal of Global History 11, no. 1 (1916): 113–34, 121. See also Toynbee, Acquaintances, 277. 95 Paul Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse: A Study of German Diplomats Under the Nazi Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 52–3. 93 Toynbee,

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to a letter dated October 1934 that Toynbee sent to Henri Bonnet the director of the IIIC, at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (German Academy of Political Science).96 A private institution founded in 1920 which was a German equivalent of the École libre des sciences politiques in Paris and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and which had strong connections with the Weimar Republic’s political establishment, the academy had been the venue for the meeting of savants which had laid the basis for the foundation of the CISSIR. The CISSIR had been renamed on June 1, 1933, the International Studies Conference at the CISSIR’s sixth session. It was at this session, which, following its inauguration at the LSE was convened at Chatham House, that representatives of the German unit of the ISC, namely, the Ausschuss für Auswärige Angelegenheiten, announced that the teaching department of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik which had served as that unit’s headquarters since 1928, had been nazified and placed at the disposition of Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.97 It was on Toynbee’s initiative, following a meeting that Toynbee held with him in Berlin in June 1934, that Berber was issued a personal invitation to attend the ISC’s conference on collective security in London in the following year. Toynbee hoped that as a result of this invitation, Germany would be bought back into relations with the ISC: the Ausschuss für Auswärige Angelegenheiten, or what remained of it since nearly all of its principal figures had by then gone into exile, had formally terminated its membership of the conference following Germany’s 96 Arnold J. Toynbee to Henri Bonnet, 10. October 1934, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, 1er juillet-30 novembre 1934, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.n, UA. 97 ‘Collective Security: A Preliminary Study Conference: IV Opening Meeting,’ Intellectual Co-operation: Monthly Bulletin, nos. 5–6 (1934): 152–55, 153; Alfred E. Zimmern, Report on the Administrative Meeting of the Sixth Session of the International Studies Conference (1), May 29–June 2, 1933, June 1, 1933, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, publications (préparation): Lexique des termes politiques, 1929–1933, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.b, UA; C. A. W. Manning, ‘Observations sur l’enseignement universitaire des relations internationales,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 68–69 (1936): 52–7, 54; Société des Nations, Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, Seizième session de la Conférence des institutions pour les études scientifique des relations internationales: Rapport sur les activités du Ausschuss für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten de Berlin en 1932–1933, présenté par le professeur Otto Hoetzsch, président du Ausschuss, and Enrst Jäckh (address, Sixth Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations, London, June 1, 1933), Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales—Institutions nationales, Allemagne, 1926–1935, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA.

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announcement of its withdrawal from the LON in October 1933 on the ground of the ISC’s institutional connection to the LON.98 In any case, it was Berber who invited Toynbee to speak in Hamburg and it was also Berber who issued—or rather ‘conveyed’—another invitation to Toynbee: an invitation to speak on peaceful change at the Nazicontrolled German law society, that is, what was called the Akademie für Deutsches Recht (Academy of German Law).99 Berber was politically well connected: in addition to being selected to represent ‘the Third Reich in intellectual international relations,’ as Toynbee informed Bonnet in October 1934, he had become by February 1936 the speechwriter of his patron Joachim von Ribbentrop. It is worth noting in this context that on June 2, 1935, Ribbentrop, in his capacity as ambassador at large, arrived in London in order to commence negotiations on the Anglo-German Naval Agreement which the German leadership hoped would be a prelude to a special Anglo-German relationship. It is also worth noting that on June 3, Berber participated in the inaugural meeting at the LSE of the ISC’s 1935 session. It is reasonable to presume that Berber’s participation in this meeting as well as in the conference’s subsequent study meetings on collective security had been authorised, at least in part, on the ground that he had been identified as a useful instrument of the German policy of forging a special Anglo-German relationship. According to a letter sent to Bonnet in October 1936 by Halfdan Olaus Christophersen, a Norwegian who had been appointed by the ISC to the role of secretary-rapporteur on colonial questions, Ribbentrop’s appointment as German ambassador at London in late 1936, would see Berber make regular trips to England. It should be noted that in his role as secretary-rapporteur, Christophersen, who, dating from 1936, served as secretary of the Institut des hautes études internationales in Paris, was required to consult with members, Berber among them, of the two German colonial study groups one of which was based in Hamburg, the other of which was based in Berlin. This consultation was conducted 98 Toynbee to Bonnet, 10 October 1934, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.n, UA; League of Nations, International Institute of International Cooperation, The International Studies Conference: Its Origins, Functions, and Organisation (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1937), 44; and Toynbee, Acquaintances, 277. 99 Toynbee, Acquaintances, 277. See also Leo Gross to Chalmers Wright, 9 January 1936, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Peaceful Change, janvierfévrier 1936, AG-IICI-K-I-15.b, UA, and McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 171.

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with a view to the preparation of documentation concerning the German attitude towards the post-war distribution of colonies for the benefit of the ISC’s 1937 conference on peaceful change.100 Toynbee’s lecture at the Akademie für Deutsches Recht took place on February 28. In the course of his lecture, Toynbee told his Berlin audience that peaceful change, that is, peaceful revision of the status quo, was a topic on which the British were now focusing their attention: the British were ‘beginning to think very hard about possible ways and means of arriving at some peaceful adjustment between “have-nots” and “haves”—of whom we [Great Britain] are the chief.’101 According to an account of his speech in the Times, Toynbee presented the following case in support of peaceful revision: He said the question was whether relations between States were to be governed by law or by might and violence, as hitherto had almost exclusively been the case. He distinguished between the repressive side of law which sought to prevent violent alterations of the status quo, and the constructive side, which envisaged peaceful alteration of the existing condition of things. Those Powers which were wealthy and satisfied with their present position concerned themselves more with the repressive side of law, that was, with collective security; the poorer and unsatisfied Powers with peaceful revision. Great Britain and the other satisfied countries—for example, France, the United States, Canada, and Russia—must attempt to meet the demands of the unsatisfied countries—Italy, Japan, Hungary, and Bulgaria—by the method of peaceful revision. Unless the law provided for change by orderly, peaceable means, the law would sooner or later be set aside by alterations of a violent, revolutionary character, which, in view of modern technical developments, would be the destruction of civilization.102

100 Toynbee to Bonnet, 10 October 1934, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.n, UA, and H. O. Christophersen to Henri Bonnet, 29 October 1936. Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Groupe international d’études pour les questions coloniales, du 1er September 1936 au 1er janvier, 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA. Christophersen reported to Bonnet that Fritz (Friedrich) Berber had recently told him that he would be visiting England on a bi-weekly basis. 101 Toynbee, 1936, quoted in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 171. 102 ‘Unsatisfied Nations: Professor Toynbee on Peaceful Revision,’ Times, February 29, 1936.

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Having identified certain general rules of state behaviour, Toynbee turned his attention to the concrete grievances expressed, albeit not through official channels, by the unsatisfied nation whose disposition most concerned him. Toynbee made note in his lecture of the German for ‘demands for “liberation” of the districts outside the Reich’ in which were housed minorities who spoke German and identified politically as German: the liberation of Germany’s terre irredente as he had referred to such districts in his address at Chatham House on December 17 1935. Toynbee stated in relation to these districts that ‘he thought some kind of territorial revision in this apparently important and difficult field must be sought.’103 Toynbee then raised the colonial question: the German demands for the retrocession of Germany’s former African colonies which had been lost to Germany under the Treaty of Versailles. Responding to German complaints regarding its need for sources of supply and population outlets, Toynbee stated that there were ‘only dim, limited, and diminishing possibilities of white settlement in Africa and the German requirements in tropical raw materials far exceeded the productive capacity of her former colonies.’104 Nonetheless and broaching another point he had raised at Chatham House in the previous December, Toynbee observed that there was more to the colonial question than this: there was more to it than bare economic or demographic considerations. As we saw, Toynbee was conscious of what he called the psychological demands of the so-called have-not powers: ‘the craving for equality of status with one’s peers.’105 It was with this craving in view that he had told his Chatham House audience in December 1935 that for reasons of prestige, the have-not powers would not be satisfied by a mere economic response to the colonial question:

103 Ibid. Andrew Crozier states that in respect to ‘the problems of German minorities populations in Europe,’ Toynbee thought there was ‘little prospect of their being solved by incorporation of the territories concerned into the Reich without recourse to war. The solution appeared to be some kind of autonomous status.’ Andrew Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ in Andrea Bosco and Cornelia Navari, Chatham House and British Foreign Policy, 1919–1945 (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1994), 228. 104 Times, February 29, 1936. 105 Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 41.

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[W]e should be forgetting our own warning not to neglect the psychological factor if we flattered outselves that economic justice, by itself, would suffice to extinguish the hungry Powers’ grievances in the colonial sphere. The Italian, German and Japanese spokesmen would object, and this with sincerity, that Man does not live by bread alone, and that it is therefore not enough for the non-colonial Powers to be assured of an equitable share in the markets and sources of supply and other economic assets of the colonial Powers’ colonies. ‘We are not content,’ they will tells us, ‘simply to draw our fair share in the colonial profits under sufferance. We want, in addition, to have our fair share in the management of the Pan-European colonial firm. And our grievance will not be satisfied till you have given us our seats on the board of directors, as well as our tranche of the annual dividends.’106

In Berlin on February 28 at the Nazi law academy, Toynbee, alluding to the long-stated German sense of injustice at being dispossessed of its colonies and indignation about the slurs that had been cast on German colonial administration against the background of this dispossession, said that he and most of his compatriots could understand and were sympathetic to the German view that the return of its colonies was a matter of honour. Having said this however, Toynbee pointed out that when it came to the question of colonial retrocession in respect to Germany, British honour was no less at stake. Taking care not to be seen as impugning the Reich’s capacity for reputable colonial administration, Toynbee declared the following: The British felt that it would not be honourable to transfer native peoples to another sovereignty without regard for their wellbeing, as if they were not human beings but goods. The British did not say: ‘We know the Germans would treat the natives worse than we do.’ What they said was: ‘Before we transfer a native anywhere from British rule to that of another Power, honour demands hat we ascertain in advance that the natives will suffer no injury from the change of sovereignty.’ He felt that it was possible to harmonize the German and English standpoints on the question of honour.107 106 Ibid.,

47. February 29, 1936. Crozier notes that Toynbee argued that Germany’s ‘economic problems could be relieved by the establishment of the open door principle in non-self-governing African colonies and by the opening up of states on the American continent to German immigration. Germany should also be allowed some colonial territory of 107 Times,

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The question of German honour was also raised in a private interview which Hitler conducted with Toynbee at the Chancery in the Wilhelmstrasse on the day before Toynbee’s lecture at the academy.108 During the meeting, which lasted one and three-quarter hours and which was conducted in German, Hitler told Toynbee that Germany’s ‘honour could only be restored by a symbolic act of a concrete kind’ and this meant that ‘[s]he must have her colonies back’.109 If Britain gave Germany back her colonies, Hitler suggested speaking to Toynbee as if the latter were Britannia herself, then Germany would be Great Britain’s ‘friend against Japan’; he further suggested that Germany would be a more useful friend to Great Britain in terms of British interests in the Asia-Pacific than its current friend against Japan, namely, Russia. If there were any ‘trouble’ with Japan, Hitler declared, he would provide Britain with ‘six divisions and some warships at Singapore’.110

British Reactions to Toynbee’s Berlin Visit Not surprisingly, Toynbee’s lecture at the Nazi law academy, which was delivered in English but of which copies in German had been circulated in advance by the German Foreign Ministry, was very well received by his Berlin audience. A British diplomat stationed in Berlin informed Toynbee that it ‘was an eager topic of discussion everywhere’.111 By contrast, some of Toynbee’s colleagues at home were greatly dismayed by this attempt at conciliating Anglo-German relations. Webster was a friend her own in Africa.’ Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 228. McNeill points out that what Toynbee had in view was ‘to return former German colonies to a German administration, subject, however, to the terms of a “deed of trust” and “international inspection.” He went on to propose internationalization of administrative personnel for such technical services as communications and health throughout tropical Africa “on the model of the China Maritime Customs.”’ McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 171. 108 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 172, and Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 229. For the location and other details concerning Toynbee’s interview with Hitler, see Toynbee, Acquaintances, 279. 109 Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 230. On the length of the meeting see McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 317. 110 Toynbee, Acquaintances, 279. See also Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 229–30. 111 Tracy Philipps, 1936, quoted in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 171. See also Toynbee, Acquaintances, 286.

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of long-standing. As Toynbee later reported it, Webster, who had had a somewhat terse exchange with Berber at the ISC’s 1935 conference over the question of why there was no large German presence at the conference and the question of why Germany would not join a regional security pact, told him that in accepting the invitation to lecture at the academy Toynbee was ‘condoning the Nazi’s atrocities.’112 Philip Guedella, who chaired Chatham House’s South American Study Group and who was of Jewish background, was similarly disturbed. On seeing a report on Toynbee’s Berlin speech published in the Times on February 29 which referred to Toynbee as ‘Director of Studies in the Royal Institute of International Affairs,’ Guedella lodged a complaint. He demanded that the RIIA publicly disassociate itself from Toynbee’s views.113 This it did in the form of a statement penned by Macadam in the name of the RIIA and which appeared in the Times on March 2. The statement declared that in his lecture in Berlin, Toynbee was ‘expressing his own personal views, and was not speaking as a representative’ of the RIIA ‘which by its charter is precluded from expressing a point of view on any aspect of international affairs.’114 Toynbee himself defended his action, later recording that he had told Webster that studying the Nazis was a key part of his responsibilities at Chatham House. In defence of his action Toynbee posed the following questions: how could ‘I study them without meeting them? And I could not meet them without entering into human relations with them to some extent.’115 Toynbee’s reasoning in regard to his visit to Berlin is perhaps better reflected in an observation which, as recorded by Andrew Crozier, he conveyed to Macadam: ‘the plain fact is that we have either to reach an understanding with these people or have a row with them.’116 Thomas Jones, a deputy secretary to the cabinet, was among a party staying at Blickling Hall, an estate north of Aylsham belonging to 112 Toynbee, Acquaintances, 276. For Webster’s exchanges with Berber at the 1935 session of the ISC, see ‘Repression of War: Discussion,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 388, 393–96. 113 Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 228–9. 114 ‘Professor Toynbee’s Lecture,’ Times, March 2, 1936. See also McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 317. Crozier notes that Philip Guedella was apparently ‘mollified’ by Macadam’s statement in the Times. Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 229. 115 Toynbee, Acquaintances, 276. 116 Toynbee, 1936, quoted in Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 229.

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Philip Kerr, the 11th Marquess of Lothian, not long after Toynbee’s return from Germany. Among others, the party included Lord Lothian, Norman H. Davis and Mrs. (McPherson Paschall) Davis, Lord (Waldorf) Astor and Lady (Nancy) Astor, Sir Walter and Lady (Eleanor) Layton and Toynbee himself. In a letter dated March 8 which commenced with the observation that at Blickling Hall Hitler ‘holds the stage and it’s a long way to Abyssinia’ and which noted that ‘Layton and Astor are more pro-French than the rest of us,’ Jones recorded that he had gone for walk that morning with Toynbee while most of the others went to play golf. Having noted that Toynbee had recently had an interview with Hitler lasting one and three-quarter hours, Jones pointed out that Toynbee had told him that he was ‘convinced’ of Hitler’s ‘sincerity in wanting peace in Europe and close friendship with England, regarding France as something rather secondary, and opposition to Bolshevism as a role he must play for domestic Nazi consumption if for no other reason.’ Jones stated in his letter that on hearing this he had asked Toynbee to write down his ‘impressions’ and had told him that he would have them typed immediately and would ‘hand them to S.B. [Stanley Baldwin] and Eden first thing in the morning.’117 In the memorandum that he prepared in response to Jones’s request, Toynbee stated that his overall ‘impression’ was that Hitler had become sensitive to the ‘danger’ of Germany becoming embroiled in a military conflict with Russia should the German leader continue in his role as ‘champion against Bolshevism’.118 In order to avoid such a conflict, Toynbee stated, Hitler was anxious to adopt a new role. Toynbee explained this role as follows: [H]e is eager…to appear as ‘the good European’ and ‘the associate of England’—allowing his anti-Russian role to fall into the background. This would be an alternative way, for him, of getting the prestige and justification on the home front that he simply must have, in some form or another. If he can get it in a way that might lead to peace instead of war, I believe he would be vastly relieved. I therefore believe that any response from the English side…would produce an enormous counter-response from Hitler.119 117 Thomas Jones, A Diary and Letters 1931–1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 179–81. 118 Toynbee, 1936, quoted in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 173. 119 Ibid.

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Why the Wilhelmstrasse Interview? McNeill maintains that Hitler’s meeting with Toynbee was part of the German leader’s effort to ‘conciliate (and confuse)’ French and British opinion in the lead up to the planned remilitarisation of the Rhineland.120 On February 21, Hitler had conducted a similar interview with the French journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel, during the course of which Hitler explained that the ‘bad things’ that he wrote about France in Mein Kamph should be viewed in the context of his then imprisonment and the fact that France and Germany were enemies at the time. According to Jouvenel, Hitler stated in the interview that he wished to succeed in bringing about Franco-German rapprochement but also warned that if the prospective Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance was ratified by France, a new situation would be created. Appended to this warning, again according to Jouvenel, was the observation that there were ‘other great nations which are less immune to the bacillus of Bolshevism than we.’ Jouvenel recorded that the German chancellor finished by declaring that in respect to Franco-German relations that ‘he was speaking for the whole German people when he said…that France herself, if she only wished, could put an end forever to the “German peril” because the German people had the fullest confidence in is leader and its leader desired peace with France.’121 McNeill points out that it was a week after Hitler’s interview with Jouvenel that Toynbee was identified by Hitler or by one of Hitler’s advisers as a ‘suitably influential shaper’ of British opinion.122 Toynbee’s own explanation as to how the meeting came about concerns remarks he had made in the annual Survey of International Affairs which he produced along with Veronica Boulter on behalf of the RIIA. Therein Toynbee addressed what he described as the fourth in a series of shocks

120 McNeill,

Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 172. given by Chancellor Hitler to M. Bertrand de Jouvenel, February 21, 1936,’ in F. J. Berber, ed., Locarno: A Collection of Documents (London: William Hodge, 1936), 181–3. The Franco-Soviet Assistance Pact was ratified by the French Chamber of Deputies on February 27. See also Bertrand de Jouvenel, ‘“Soyons amis”: Interview avec Adolf Hitler,’ Paris-Midi, February 28, 1936; Daniel Knegt, Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 58, and McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 172. 122 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 172. 121 ‘Interview

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that had been produced abroad as a result of events in Germany. Toynbee wrote in the Survey for 1934 that the first of these shocks was the ‘suddenness and unexpectedness of Herr Hitler’s actual advent to power’; the second, the ‘“raging tearing” campaign of brutal violence in which the victorious Nazi Movement swept all its political opponents or rivals in Germany away’; and the third, the announcement of Germany’s intention to withdrawn from the LON. The fourth shock in question was the following: ‘the sudden shooting of an unknown number of Germans— both Nazis and non-Nazis—by German hands on the 29th and 30th, June 1934.’123 Toynbee observed that it was shocking for Europeans to see a head of state, even one who was the head of a triumphant revolutionary movement, shoot ‘down his own former henchmen in the style of an American “gangster”.’124 Many years later in his book Acquaintances (1967), Toynbee pointed out that the Survey for 1934 had appeared after Berber had issued Toynbee with his invitation to speak in Berlin at the Akademie für Deutsches Recht. According to Toynbee, following its appearance, Berber, fearful for his future, went to see Hitler to explain the situation and to show him what Toynbee had written, a report of which had just been published in the Swiss press. According to Toynbee, Hitler’s response to Berber’s brief was to firstly observe that the gangster analogy was ‘unfair’ as American gangsters kill ‘for money’ and he did not and secondly to ask Berber to arrange for him to ‘see the Englishman’ on his arrival in the capital.125 Toynbee claimed in Acquaintances that he was informed by Berber of the interview only on the first day of his official visit to Berlin: unknown to the authorities, or so he thought, Toynbee had arrived there a week earlier in order to meet with opponents of the regime. Toynbee recorded in Acquaintances that after telling him that Ribbentrop was aware of his meetings with members of the anti-Nazi opposition and that Ribbentrop was greatly displeased by this, Berber, using a ‘flat’ tone, stated the following: ‘You are going to see Hitler.’ Toynbee recalled that on learning of this he became ‘excited:’ having studied its opponents he was now being afforded the

123 Arnold J. Toynbee and V. M. Boulter, Survey of International Affairs, 1934 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 324. 124 Ibid., 325. 125 Toynbee, Acquaintances, 283–5.

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opportunity ‘to study the National Socialist movement at its source.’126 On the day of the scheduled interview, Toynbee was escorted by Berber to the Wilhelmstrasse where he was greeted by a party that included Ribbentrop (whom he had already met on a number of occasions), the foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath, and Hans Dieckhoff, this last being permanent under-secretary of state at the Foreign Ministry and someone whom Toynbee described as an old friend. According to Toynbee, the presence of these three men, whom he characterised as the ‘principal foreign affairs authorities in Hitler’s set-up,’ showed that the ‘occasion was being taken seriously.’127 In respect to McNeill’s interpretation of the actual purpose of the interview, Crozier argues that it is equally plausible that Hitler was making use of Toynbee in order to effect ‘the special Anglo-German relationship which he deemed so critical to the realisation of his long term plans: the destruction of the Soviet Union and the establishment of Lebensraum in the Ukraine.’ Crozier points out that by 1936, Hitler was having serious doubts as to whether such a relationship could be effected and that it was against this background that the demands for the return of Germany’s former colonies began to be issued: these demands were part of a strategy aimed at pressuring Britain into accepting the kind of relationship that Hitler so wanted.128 These two interpretations of Hitler’s motives in inviting Toynbee to an interview are not mutually exclusive. Beyond this, it should be noted that Crozier, whose view as to why there had been a resurgence in German colonial propaganda around the time of Toynbee’s interview with Hitler had currency among many contemporary observers, and McNeill are both agreed on the point that Toynbee’s report did not greatly impact on British policy. McNeill points out that the British position on Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland had been determined on March 7, the very day the Rhineland was invaded, adding that at best Toynbee’s report ‘may have reinforced the readiness of Baldwin and Eden to acquiesce’ in Germany’s action.129 Crozier similarly suggests that Toynbee’s report served only to reinforce an already existing

126 Ibid.,

276, 278. 278–9. 128 Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 231. 129 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 172. 127 Ibid.,

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consensus in Britain: that an understanding with Germany was desirable even if that involved conceding to some of its demands for changes on the economic front or in the administration of colonies or mandates.130 Buoyed by his visit to Germany, Toynbee was optimistic for a time that a revision of the Treaty of Versailles might soon eventuate. On March 20, he wrote to Albert Dufour-Feronce, a former member of the German Foreign Office who had served between 1928 and 1932 as one of three under-secretaries general at the LON and who had been retired from diplomatic service in 1933 following a brief period as Germany’s ambassador at Belgrade. In his letter, Toynbee told Dufour-Feronce the following: ‘I hope and believe that the result may be something in the nature of a new peace conference…at which a negotiated settlement will be substituted for a dictated one.’131 Toynbee was also doubtless buoyed by the thought that German participation in the study meetings of the ISC on peaceful change which were scheduled for May 1936 and mid-1937 was a distinct possibility. As recorded by Leo Gross in a letter to Chalmers Wright on January 9, 1936, it was with a view to realising this possibility that Toynbee laid plans to open conversations with German scholars during his visit to Hamburg and Berlin in the following month.132 On November 27, 1935, Bonnet sent a letter to Maurice Bourquin, professor of contemporary diplomatic history at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales), professor of international law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Geneva and Belgian delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, to the LON Assembly and to the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments. Bourquin had served as general rapporteur of the ISC’s 1934 and 1935 conferences on collective security and was its general rapporteur for its upcoming conferences on peaceful change. In that letter Bonnet told Bourquin he was pleased to inform him that the Rockefeller Foundation, which had in the past supported the work of the IIIC’s International Relations and Social Sciences Service, a service which acted as the ISC’s international secretariat, had ‘generously decided to accord to the Institute a subvention which…[would]…permit it to give effect

130 Crozier,

‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 230–31. 1936, quoted in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 173. 132 Gross to Chalmers Wright, 9 January 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-15.b, UA. 131 Toynbee,

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during the two years to come to the propositions of the Conference’ in respect to peaceful change.133 Bonnet went on to tell Bourquin that ‘unfortunately’ Chalmers Wright was going to quit his position as chief of the International Relations and Social Science Service and therefore his position as secretary of the ISC at the end of the year.134 Against this background and in view of the growing number of members of the ISC and the IIIC’s desire to assist in the creation and development of institutions for the scientific study of International relations, Bonnet explained that he was going reorganise the International Relations and Social Sciences Service: in future the service would be confided to three functionaries. Two of these functionaries, Bonnet was please to report, had already been appointed: Leo Gross, an Austrian national, and Jiri F. Vranek, a Czechoslovakian national who had previously occupied the role, as had his wife Lilian F. Vranek, of lecturer in international politics at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, an institution which he had represented on the BCCIS.135 Bonnet told Bourquin that while Vranek would occupy himself with certain of the special activities of the service,

133 Henri Bonnet to Maurice Bourquin, 27 November 1935, Rapporteur général. Prof. Bourquin, 15 octobre 1935, AG 1-IICI-K-I-5.b, UA. See also International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation: Ninth International Studies Conference, Madrid May 27–30, 1936, Notes on the Agenda of the Administrative Meeting, AG 1-IICI-K-IX-1. 134 Bonnet to Bourquin, 27 November 1935, AG 1-IICI-K-I-5.b, UA. See also International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation: Ninth International Studies Conference, Madrid, May 27–30, 1936, Notes on the Agenda of the Administrative Meeting, Neuvième conférence des hautes éudes internationales tenue à Madrid, 27–30 mai 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-IX-1, UA. 135 Bonnet to Bourquin, 27 November 1935, AG 1-IICI-K-I-5.b, UA. See also International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation: Ninth International Studies Conference, Madrid, May 27–30, 1936, Notes on the Agenda of the Administrative Meeting, AG 1-IICI-K-IX-1. According to a document submitted to the administrative meeting of the ISC’s 1936 session, the third functionary or secretary appointed to assist in the IIIC’s International Relations and Social Sciences Service was a Frenchman named F. Max. See further International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies: Proceedings of the Tenth International Studies Conference, Paris, June 28th–July 3rd 1937 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938), 633. It should be noted that the list of participants in the 1937 conference of the ISC records the participation of the following secretaries of the IIIC: Leo Gross; Oliver Jackson, Jiri F. Vranek; and Alfred R. Max. See also League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The International Studies Conference:

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Gross would be specially charged with developing the liaisons between the institutions represented in the conference.136 Gross’s letter of January 9 to Chalmers Wright, who did not in fact resign from the IIIC until January 1936 and who returned temporarily in the spring of that year in order to assist in the preparations for the ISC’s 1936 session which was to be held in Madrid, was by way of a report on a meeting of the BCCIS the previous day.137 As a result of his presence at that meeting, Gross was able to tell Chalmers Wright that Toynbee was very much interested in having the ‘Colonial Problem’ studied by groups in both ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ countries with the assistance of groups in neutral countries. Gross told Chalmers Wright that Toynbee hoped ‘very much’ that German collaboration would be possible in a study which Toynbee wanted confined to ‘Central Africa…i.e. the black country leaving out of consideration Egypt and North Africa as well as the Union of South Africa.’ Gross informed Chalmers Wright that the international study group on colonies seemed to be ‘very close to the heart of everybody at Chatham House,’ adding that Toynbee and Macadam were ‘extremely anxious to get the study started in an international plan’ and that the latter had proposed Chatham House as the group’s centre.138 In this context, the adjective international in the formula international plan appeared, above all, to refer to Anglo-German cooperation. In regard to this, it should be noted that the Rockefeller Foundation had agreed to fund the expenses of a statistician to undertake research work on the economic value of colonies. Having learnt of this, Toynbee told the aforementioned secretary-rapporteur on colonial questions, that is, Christophersen (who would later become a key figure in the Norwegian

Origins Functions Organisation, 67. The record of participants in the ISC’s sessions and meetings in the above account of the origins, functions and organisation of the ISC lists a Frenchman named F. R. Max who is described therein as a secretary at the IIIC and as a participant in the conference on peaceful change in 1937. 136 Bonnet

to Bourquin, 27 November 1935, AG 1-IICI-K-I-5.b, UA. Institute of Intellectual Cooperation: Ninth International Studies Conference, Madrid, May 27–30, 1936, Notes on the Agenda of the Administrative Meeting, AG 1-IICI-K-IX-1; Gross to Chalmers Wright, 9 January 1936. AG 1-IICI-K15.b, UA, and Chalmers Wright to Oliver Jackson, 28 March 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-15.e, UA. 138 Gross to Chalmers Wright, 9 January 1936. AG 1-IICI-K-15.b, UA. 137 International

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resistance movement during the German occupation of Norway), that while he considered it expedient that an English person be appointed to this role, he ‘preferred to discuss the appointment with Dr. Berber of the German group before making a final decision.’139

Berber’s Scientific Work In 1936, a book edited by Berber entitled Locarno: A Collection of Documents (Locarno: eine Dokumentensammlung) was published both in German and English under the auspices of the Institut für Auswärtige Politik in Hamburg and the Research Department of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. On the title page of the book, Berber was described as the director of the Research Department of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik and director of studies at the Institut für Auswärtige Politik.140 More than half the documents reproduced in Locarno: A Collection of Documents concerned the first few months of 1936, among them being the interview given by Hitler to Jouvenel on February 21. Evidencing Berber’s role as his confidant and advisor, the preface to the book, which was dated May 19, 1936, was authored by Ribbentrop in his capacity as ambassador extraordinary and

139 H. O. Christophersen to Henri Bonnet, 29 March 1936. Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Groupes internationaaux d’études, AG 1-IICI-K-18.b, UA. Christophersen met with Fritz Berber and the two German Colonial Study Groups in Berlin and Hamburg in October and November 1936. See Christophersen to Dr. Gormsen, 28 October 1936, Christophersen to Margaret Cleeve, 5 November 1936, and Fritz Berber to Henri Bonnet, 26 November 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA. 140 Berber, ed., Locarno: A Collection of Documents. See also Fritz Berber, ed., Locarno: eine Dokumentensammlung (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1936). In the biographical notes appended to the proceedings of what was called the ISC’s General Conference on Collective Security in 1935, Fritz Berber is described as follows: ‘Privatdozent at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, Berlin; Referent at the Institute fũr Ausländisches Offtenliches Recht und Vōlkerrecht, Berlin.’ ‘Biographical Notes on the Delegates and Participants at the Conferences at Paris and London and on the Authors of Memoranda submitted in 1934 and 1935,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 493. In the list of participants in the 1936 conference of the ISC published in the ICIC’s monthly bulletin, Berber is described as the ‘chef de Section’ at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. ‘Liste des participants,’ Intellectual Coopération (a), nos. 68–69 (1936): 5–8, 7. See also Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse: A Study of German Diplomats Under the Nazi Regime, 52–3. Paul Seabury notes that the research department of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, along with the Geopolitisches Institut in Munich, assisted the Dienststelle Ribbentrop.

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plenipotentiary of the German Reich. Therein Ribbentrop stated that in contrast with the ‘obvious and regrettable tendencious documentary selections’ appearing in other countries, the documentary selection that Berber had compiled ‘clearly and irrefutably’ showed how France, although a signatory of the Locarno Treaty, by which he meant the principal treaty negotiated at Locarno in 1925, namely, the Rhineland Pact, had deliberately set out to undermine the security system established at Locarno.141 Ribbentrop observed in the preface to the book that instead of disarming, the armies of France and Europe ‘surrounding a defenceless and disarmed Germany, equipped with the most modern weapons grew stronger and stronger’ and that it was ‘not till Germany [had] restored her own military sovereignty’ that the ‘military equilibrium’ in Europe had been ‘re-established.’ Although the fabled spirit of Locarno was supposed to result in a ‘general moral disarmament,’ Ribbentrop declared, this had not happened because France had shown itself hostile and had pursued a policy of military alliances against Germany, irrespective of Germany’s ‘friendly approaches’ to France.142 The culmination of this policy, Ribbentrop affirmed, was the ‘Franco-Russian military alliance’ by which he meant the Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance of May 2, 1935. The terms of this alliance, Ribbentrop stated, saw France and Russia abrogate to themselves the ‘right to define the aggressor’ in the case of ‘any disturbance of the peace without a decision by the League of Nations.’ The conclusion of this alliance, Ribbentrop opined, had completely destroyed the equilibrium in Europe envisaged by the creators of the Locarno Treaty. He stated that an exposed Germany confronted by hostile forces had no choice but to defend its frontiers through reoccupying the Rhineland on March 7, adding that this was exactly what Berber’s ‘completely unbiased selection of historical documents’ proved.143 Appearing to strike a conciliatory note, Ribbentrop stated that with German sovereignty now restored, the conditions had been established for the creation of a new system of pacification in Western Europe. 141 Joachim von Ribbentrop, preface to Berber, ed., Locarno: A Collection of Documents, v–vi. See also F. J. Berber, introduction to Berber, ed., Locarno: A Collection of Documents, xiv. Berber’s introduction to the book is dated July 1936. 142 Ibid., v. 143 Ibid.

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In this regard, he drew attention to the ‘great Peace Plan’ which the German leader had offered Europe on March 31, 1936, insisting that the German people desired nothing more than to see its realisation. Germany’s ‘sincerity on this issue,’ Ribbentrop declared, was demonstrated by Berber’s collection of documents: the collection showed how consistently Germany had pursued peace and how it had been effectively forced to reassert its rights because others had failed to fulfil their obligations. Ribbentrop concluded the preface in stating that he wished for Locarno: A Collection of Documents the ‘largest possible circulation both at home and abroad’ and in regard to this wish, it may be worth noting that although the English edition of Locarno: eine Dokumentensammlung was released by a British publisher, it was made and printed in Germany by the long-established printing firm J. J. Augustin which was based in Glückstadt and Hamburg in Germany and which had an office in New York.144

The Madrid Conference: University Teaching The Federación de Asociaciones Españolas de Estudios Internacionales (Federation of Spanish Associations for International Studies), which had been admitted to direct membership of the ISC in 1933, had been keen to host the meeting of the ISC in 1936 at its headquarters in Madrid. However, a governmental crisis which saw the Spanish cabinet fall on December 30, 1935, put the staging of the event into doubt. José Martinez de Velasco, who had been foreign minister before the cabinet fell and who would later fall victim to Spain’s civil war, was a personal friend of the chair of the federation, namely, José Gascón y Marín (the latter being a former minister of education), and a key supporter of its 144 Ibid., vi. In his introduction to Locarno: A Collection of Documents. Berber pointed out that among the collection of documents that he had compiled there were a few French documents for which there was no English text available and that these had been reproduced in the original French. He stated in this connection that ‘every Englishman who is interested in foreign politics may be assumed to have a knowledge of French’ (ibid., xiv). The printing firm J. J. Augustin, ‘founded in 1632,…was one of the primary printing plants for the German navy; it issued the only local newspaper and produced mailorder catalogues and textbooks, including the books of papers of many prominent American anthropologists for distribution in the United States.’ Donald Kuspit, Jimmy Enrst, Louise Svendsen, Sandra Gair and Phyllis Braff, Jimmy Enrst (New York: Hudson Press, 2000), 143.

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work. As the federation needed a government subvention in order to stage the conference everything depended, according to Gascón y Marín, on whether Martinez de Velasco was reappointed foreign minister or on Gascón y Marín’s relations with his replacement. As in late 1935, the prospect of holding the conference in 1936 was shrouded in such uncertainty, the Spanish group suggested that they should instead stage the conference in 1937.145 This proposition did not appeal to the IIIC as this body greatly preferred that the 1937 meeting be held in Paris. In 1937, Paris was to host the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne and in the IIIC’s view this would render that city the more attractive location for the conference. In addition, as the ‘smooth working’ of the 1937 conference was seen as so important to the ISC’s future, it was considered desirable from an administrative perspective that the meeting be held in Paris where the proximity of the IIIC would help ensure its ‘sound conduct’.146 Gross was instructed not to mention these considerations to the Spanish group when visiting Spain in late 1935 for the purpose of assessing the Spanish situation. Rather, he was told to simply stress that Spain was ‘now..the only country,’ apart from those countries in which the conference had already been convened, which possessed an institution ‘of sufficient standing’ and which was ‘sufficiently penetrated with the spirit of the Conference to ensure that the critical 1936 meeting’ would be conducted under the ‘most suitable auspices.’147

145 See the December 1935 report prepared by Leo Gross on the Spanish situation. Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Liaison avec les Institutions, jusqu’au 1er janvier 1938, AG 1-IICI-I-17.a, UA. The Federacion de asociaciones españolas de estudios internacionales was founded on October 28, 1932. For details of the Federación de Asociaciones Españolas de Estudios Internacionales, see International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions Organisation (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1937). This booklet was compiled by Fergus Chalmers Wright in his capacity as secretary of the ISC. 146 Jiri F. Vranek to Leo Gross, 5 December 1935. Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Liaison avec les institutions, jusqu’au 1er janvier 1938, AG 1-IICII-17.a, UA. 147 Ibid.

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In the end, the Spanish group received the necessary support from the reconstituted Spanish cabinet and thus the Madrid conference went ahead as planned, its meetings being held at the Palacio de Hielo, the headquarters of the Federation of Spanish Associations for International Studies, from Wednesday May 27 until Saturday May 30. At the inaugural meeting, Gascón y Marín and Augusto Barcía Trelles, the latter having been appointed foreign minister on February 19, 1936, delivered welcoming addresses in which they reminded their audience that they were in the country of such moral geniuses as Francisco de Vittoria and Francisco Suárez. In Barcia Trelles’s words, these noted figures in the history of international law had ‘established a doctrine which affirmed the existence of ecumenical norms…superior to the private interest of each country,’ a doctrine which, Barcia Trelles pointed out, was embodied in the constitution of the Spanish Republic.148 In relation to the doctrine of Vittoria and Suárez and in view of the ‘development of pacific means of solving international conflicts,’ Barcia Trelles observed, in the course of a discourse which the Gheorge Vlădescu-Răcoasa (Georges Vladesco-Rocoassa), a professor of sociology at the University of Bucharest, described as ‘captivating,’ that it was very important that the study of international relations give expression to the ‘thought and sentiment of democracy’.149 Barcía Trelles words were recorded by Vlădescu-Răcoasa in an article on the Madrid conference appearing in late November in Adevărul, a ‘grand quotidian du soir’ of Bucharest, as Vlădescu-Răcoasa put it in a letter to Bonnet to which the article and a French translation of it was attached. Doubtless Vlădescu-Răcoasa saw great poignancy in them when penning his article given that they were uttered, as the Romanian sociologist noted therein,

148 ‘Conférence Préliminaire sur le Règlement Pacifique des Problèmes Internationaux,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 66–67 (1936): 1–43, 3, 5. 149 Augusto Barcia Trelles 1936, quoted in G. Vlădescu-Răcoasa, ‘Conferința permanantă de Inalte Studii Internationale: Insemnǎrl despre ultima sessiune,’ Adevărul, November 26, 1936. Georges Vladesco-Rocoassa (Gheorge Vlădescu-Răcoasa) to Henri Bonnet, 9 December 1936, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Peaceful Change, du 1er juin 1936 au 1er janvier 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-15.d, UA. The title and name of the author of the article appeared in the French translation of Vlădescu-Răcoasa’s article on the conference in Adevărul as follows: ‘“Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Impressions de la dernière session” par G. Vladesco Rocoassa’ (ibid.).

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at a conference held in Madrid ‘a month and a half before the launching of a military rebellion which since then…[had covered]…Spain with blood.’150 In addition to an administrative meeting and a preliminary study meeting on peaceful change, the agenda of the Madrid conference encompassed a study meeting consecrated to the subject of university teaching of international relations. According to the IIIC, ‘the importance’ of this subject would not ‘escape those who interested themselves in the new forms of instruction in knowledge in a world in transformation.’151 The study meeting on instruction in international relations was held on the first day of the conference with Zimmern (who had become in 1931 Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University and who remained director of the Geneva School of International Studies, a school which he had founded in the same year that he was appointed as chief of the IIIC’s Section of General Affairs, that is, in 1925), serving as its general rapporteur. It was in that role that Zimmern opened the in the context of which he made the point that because international relations involved the study of society and not only the study of the policies of governments, that it should be approached from a sociological perspective. He then stated the following: ‘But the society which makes the object of this study is the entire world, which implies the extension of the domain of sociological research beyond conventional limits.’152 There was general agreement at the meeting that international relations encompassed an ensemble of evolving social relations and that however much it was necessary to isolate different elements contained within this ensemble, its synthetic character should always be kept in view. There was also general agreement that international relations belonged to the field of the social sciences. Where opinion diverged was

150 ‘Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Impressions de la dernière session’ par G. Vladesco Rocoassa, AG 1-IICI-I-15.d, UA. 151 ‘Note,’ Intellectual Coopération, nos. 68–69 (1936): 1. See also the following: Liste des delegues et participants, Neuvième conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, Madrid, 27–30 mai, 1936, AG 1-IICI-IX.1, UA. Approximately sixty scholars attended the conference, including representatives from Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. 152 ‘Comptes rendu des débats: Première séance,’ Intellectual Coopération (b), nos. 68–69 (1936): 8–16, 9.

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on the question of whether instruction in international relations should be concerned solely with description or whether it should aim to promote certain ideals.153 José Yanguas Messia, a professor of private international law at the University of Madrid and a former minister of foreign affairs, argued that international relations should base itself not only in facts, but also in the ‘great rules and traditions’ of humanity.154 Similarly, a paper submitted to the meeting by Antoni Deyring, a professor constitutional law at the University of Lublin, discussed the study of international relations in connection with the ‘actualisation of the law of nations in the interior opinion of societies’: the internationalisation of international norms.155 Joseph van Kan who had been a member of the Netherlands India Council between 1930 and 1935 and was currently dean in the Faculty of Law at Batavia was a delegate at Madrid of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The IPR was an unofficial body established in Honolulu at a conference held between June 30 and July 15, 1925, the object of which was ‘to study the conditions of the Pacific peoples with a view to the improvement of their mutual relations.’156 It is worth noting here that the IPR was the chief model on which the CISSIR-ISC was based when the latter organisation was converted into a study conference after 1931, a development which came about partly under the inspiration of John Bell Condliffe and Edward C. Carter. Condliffe was a New Zealand economist who served as the IPR’s research secretary at the International Secretariat of the IPR in Honolulu from 1927 to 1931 before going on to join the Financial Section of the LON Secretariat where he would compile from 1932 to 1937, the annual World Economic Survey on behalf of the League’s Economic Intelligence Service. At the time when moves were being made to convert the CISSIR-ISC into a study conference, Carter was secretary of American Council of the IPR. It is also worth noting that the LON sent 153 Ibid.,

11. 10. 155 Antoni Deyring, ‘L’enseignement universitaire des relations internationales,’ Intellectual Coopération, nos. 68–69 (1936): 28–34, 30. 156 ‘Appendix 3: Constitution of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in J. B. Condliffe, Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Honolulu, Hawaii, July 15 to 29, 1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 607. 154 Ibid.,

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observers to every IPR conference during the period of the LON’s existence with the exception of the IPR’s founding conference in 1925 and that the IPR participated in every conference held under the rubric of the CISSIR-ISC in the period dating from 1929 to 1949.157 At the Madrid session of the ISC, Kan spoke of the urgent necessity of propagandising in favour of the ‘pacifist idea’ because, due to the ‘brutality…of events,’ the minds of the masses and even those of a ‘delicate’ disposition were increasingly inclined towards ‘scepticism’.158 Others present at Madrid revealed themselves to be a somewhat more cautious in regard to the question of the ends to which the teaching of international relations should be directed. Louis Eisenmann, professor of history and civilisation of the Slavs at the University of Paris, secretary general of the Commission française de coordination des hautes études internationales and member of the governing body of the Centre d’études de politiques étrangère, stated that he agreed with Yanguas Messia on the need to give due consideration to the ‘moral forces’ at work in society. However, Eisenmann also stated that one should not as a teacher seek to impose an ‘international orthodoxy,’ adding in an attempt at levity, that he did not ‘want to risk being burnt—since we are in the country of the Inquisition—for having spoken badly, by hypothesis, of the League of Nations’.159 Even more cautious was Charles Anthony Woodward Manning, professor of international relations at the LSE, a former officer of the International Labour Office and former personal secretary to Sir Eric

157 J. B. Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Généralities, 1929–1947, AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA; Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, June 8–10, 1931, Appendix IA: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, Conférence des institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales (aprés la Conférence), AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA; Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, June 8–10, 1931, Appendix 1B: Fifth Meeting of the British Coordinating Committee of International Studies, June 17, 1931, and Appendix 1A (1): Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference at Copenhagen, June 8–10, 1931, Quartrième Conférence des institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales (aprés la Conférence), 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 158 ‘Comptes rendu des débats: La deuxième séance,’ Intellectual Coopération (c), nos. 68–69 (1936): 16–23, 21. 159 Ibid., 11.

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Drummond, the latter being Joseph Avenol’s predecessor as secretary general of the LON. Manning stated that he agreed with those who maintained that the teaching of international relations should be ‘positive and not normative’ and drew a contrast between a social scientific approach towards the subject and a philosophical approach, identifying himself with the former and Zimmern with the latter. Manning argued that as social scientists, teachers of international relations should have as their guiding principle the exposure of the truth and that they should not indulge in political opportunism or preaching.160 In his report to the administrative meeting of the Madrid conference, Zimmern noted that although the discussion of university teaching of international relations was too detailed to give a wholly satisfying account of it, certain particular notions were apparent in a large number of discourses: ‘the feeling that the problem of the methodology of the social sciences’ had a great bearing on the discussion; the ‘necessity of a scientific preparation’ for the study of international relations; and the ‘importance attached to analysis and interpretation as opposed to ‘simple description.’161 In this context, Manning stated that although he thought it preferable that teaching of international relations should be positive and not normative, he had to protest against the charge levelled at him by Zimmern that he neglected the philosophical aspects of the subjet on the ground that it was inexact. Having noted that Zimmern 160 Ibid., 12, 17, and Manning, ‘Observations sur l’enseignement universitaire des relations internationales,’ 55. 161 ‘Séance administrative; Rapport de Sir Alfred Zimmern,’ Intellectual Coopération, nos. 68–69 (1936): 24–5, 24, and Jacques Lambert, ‘Organisation d’enseignement des relations internationales,’ Intellectual Coopération, nos. 68–69 (1936): 45–6, 46. Stanley Hartnoll Bailey, a lecturer in international relations at the LSE, was the author of International Studies in Great Britain, a book which was the outcome of a survey organised by the BCCIS in response to a resolution of the third annual session of the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations at Copenhagen in 1931. This resolution asked ‘for the study of educational activities carried on by the Institutions represented, in so far as they deal with international affairs and with the League of Nations.’ S. H. Bailey, International Studies in Great Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), xi. Bailey stated at the Madrid conference during the discussion of the organisation of instruction in international relations that it would be a ‘error to envisage the question [of whether the study of International relations is a descriptive or interpretative science] from a point of view too rigorously materialist. The climate is an element of which it is always necessary to hold account and in the social milieu the climate, formed of opinions and ideas, evolves also.’ Intellectual Coopération (c), nos. 68–69 (1936), 20.

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taught at Oxford within the framework of a programme of philosophy and politics, Manning pointed out that as an instructor in London in a school of the social sciences, he was far from neglecting the existence of moral facts: international relations, considered as an aspect of real life, that is, as ‘an aspect of social life such as we support it on this planet in current conditions,’ necessarily encompasses moral facts. Indeed, he stated that it is ‘the duty of savants to underline their existence’ and their generally controversial nature, albeit adding that one would render oneself guilty of a breach of one’s duty if in the course of instruction one advanced one’s personal opinions and sentiments.162

The Madrid Conference: The Study Meeting The framing of the debate on peaceful change well illustrated the common understanding that in the context of the study of international relations, non-material factors were of paramount importance. As Bourquin noted in the introductory report he issued as general rapporteur of the study meeting on peaceful change, the analysis of the economic, social and territorial problems giving rise to demands for changes to the status quo, required a ‘double effort’: one of ‘measure’ and one of ‘comprehension’ of both the ‘needs’ for and ‘resistances’ to changes to the status quo.163 In noting this, Bourquin was drawing attention to the fact that while population pressures, opportunities for migration, the distribution of colonies, and access to markets and raw materials were all susceptible, in one way or another, to measurement, ‘psychological factors’ involved in demands for and resistance to territorial changes are not: they require understanding.164 Bourquin stated that what members of the conference needed to investigate was the extent to which those desirous of maintaining the status quo and who, therefore, resist demands for its transformation, were simply preoccupied with their economic well-being or whether their resistance was driven, in whole or in part, by such factors as a ‘care for prestige, the action of certain ideologies, or reasons of an order psychological or moral.’ Equally, Bourquin added, the attitudes and not just the 162 Intellectual Coopération (b), nos. 68–69 (1936), 12, and Manning, ‘Observations sur l’enseignement universitaire des relations internationales,’ 53. 163 Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 66–67 (1936), 9–10, 13. 164 Ibid., 9.

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material needs of those making demands for change needed to be investigated: one needed to ask, for example, whether such demands were manufactured to suit the interests of a particular political movement or whether they stemmed from a disturbing imperialism.165 While Bourquin argued that the conference must strive for ‘maximum objectivity,’ he noted that this objectivity had its limits, not least because many of those present were from countries directly implicated in the question of peaceful change.166 In relation to this, he warned that if those concerned with this issue remained ‘hermetically’ sealed within their own point of view, without paying heed to the ‘preoccupations of others, without being ready to consent to the minimum of sacrifices for the common good,’ they would remain locked in a ‘vicious circle’ until the day that this circle was broken by force.167 Among those from countries directly implicated in the question was Berber, whose main contribution at the study meeting was to press for the issue of national and ethnical unity to be included on the program for the 1937 conference. This problem was described by Berber as a ‘fundamental aspect of the subject’ of peaceful change: the problem of individuals being ‘subjects of a nation State whose nationality they do not possess’.168 More specifically, Berber, who described himself to the amusement of some at the meeting as ‘a representative of “National Socialist Science”,’ demanded that ethnical and national aspirations should be studied because he and the ‘doctrine he represented’ considered them to be of ‘fundamental’ importance. Vlădescu-Răcoasa who later noted that it was thus that ‘a breath of national–socialism’ was brought to the conference.169 Vlădescu-Răcoasa, a graduate of the Institute of International Studies in Geneva, in addition to his academic and journalistic roles was the 165 Ibid.,

13. 8. 167 Ibid., 9. 168 Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 66–67 (1936), 30, and International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change, 166–7. 169 Malcolm W. Davis, ‘The League of Minds,’ in Harriet Eager Davis, ed., Pioneers in World Order: An American Appraisal of the League of Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 240. For Berber’s demand that national and ethnical problems be addressed by the conference address see ‘Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Impressions de la dernière session’ par G. Vladesco Rocoassa, AG 1-IICI-I15.d, UA. 166 Ibid.,

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Romanian representative of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the former secretary and now director and international representative of the Romanian Social Institute (Institutul Social Român). The Romanian Social Institute had been founded in Bucharest in 1921 by the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti and was a ‘private scientific institution’ which had as its object the study of political, economic and social problems of both a national and international dimension.170 VlădescuRăcoasa noted that the discussion in which Berber intervened in regard to the programme of the 1937 conference was presided over by the Canadian-born James T. Shotwell, a professor of history at the University of Columbia and director of the economic, political and historical division of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who at the Paris Peace Conference had assisted the American Commission to Negotiate Peace in the creation of the ILO.171 Vlădescu-Răcoasa further noted that upon Berber’s intervention, the discussion ‘became lively and passionate’. He added that the German delegate did not hesitate to inject into the discussion ‘political accents’ that were ‘rather strong’ and of ‘prophetic allure.’ As Vlădescu-Răcoasa pointed out, as a result of Berber’s efforts, the concluding part of the discussion, in the course of which Berber’s demand was leant support by Malcolm W. Davis, assistant director of the European Centre of the Division of Intercourse and Education of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former director of the Geneva Research Centre and of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, saw the inscription of ‘les problems ethniques’ and national in the order of the day of the 1937 conference.172 170 D. Gusti and G. Vladesco Rocoassa [Gheorge Vlădescu-Răcoasa] to the director of the IICI (Henri Bonnet), 21 October 1930, Centres de documentation internationale ne dépendant pas de partis politiques (préparation), jusqu’au 31 décembre 1930, AG 1-IICIK-II-2.a, UA. 171 ‘Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Impressions de la dernière session’ par G. Vladesco Rocoassa, AG 1-IICI-I-15.d, UA. For James T. Shotwell’s role in relation to the creation of the ILO see Charles DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Relations,’ Political Science Quarterly 89, no. 2 (1974): 379–95, 385. 172 ‘Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Impressions de la dernière session’ par G. Vladesco Rocoassa, AG 1-IICI-I-15.d, UA. For Malcom W. Davis’s intervention in support of Berber’s demand regard the agenda of the 1937 conference, see Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 66–67 (1936), 30. Davis stated that the American National Committee would ‘undertake a study of certain ethnic questions raised by M. Berber’. See

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What would be a major area of controversy at the 1937 conference and, indeed, in the wider public arena in the same year, was addressed in a speech at Madrid by Webster, albeit somewhat obliquely: the question of the transfer of colonies or mandates to imperial have-not states. Webster was a proponent of peaceful change, albeit a very cautious proponent. He was deeply concerned by the nature of the peaceful change proposals being advocated at the time, expressing the view that there was ‘a readiness on the part of some people to adopt any measure that would seem to postpone war or at least turn it in a direction which would not involve themselves.’173 Webster was also concerned by the fact that the supporters of peaceful change in Great Britain were heavily focused on the transfer of colonial territory. Such a measure, he pointed out at the Madrid conference, almost entirely concerned Africa: the reawakening in Asia of ‘ancient nationalities’ which were now ‘asserting their claims to control of their own destinies’ meant that transfers in that region were out of the question.174 Webster was not alone in expressing concerns about colonial revision. As he noted, it was because of the considerable dismay that proposals for the transfer of African colonies and mandates caused, that proponents had tried to make the proposed transfers sound ‘palatable by speaking of an extension of the mandate system.’175 Webster also pointed out at that apart from three representatives of the ‘Japanese Empire,’ the conference participants at Madrid were all ‘European of race’. He therefore advised participants that in trying to find solutions to the question of peaceful change, they must not neglect their responsibility for protecting the interests of those ‘millions of individual humans’ not represented among them. Webster underscored his point in noting that those assembled were meeting in the European country closest to Africa and the country in which the doctrine of

also Fritz Berber to Henri Bonnet, 12 May 1936. Conférence permanente des études internationales: Peaceful Change, mars-avril 1936 jusqu’au 1er juin, 1936, AG 1-IICI-I-15.c, UA. Berber went to Madrid via Paris where he had an appointment at the European headquarters of the Carnegie Dotation pour la Paix. 173 Charles. K. Webster, ‘What Is the Problem of Peaceful Change,’ in Manning, ed., Peaceful Change, 7. 174 Ibid., 9, 17. 175 Ibid., 9.

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imperial trusteeship had first been elaborated, namely, by Vittoria and Dominique Solo.176 Zimmern was similarly appalled by the idea that African colonies or mandates should be transferred to so-called unsatisfied countries. He observed in regard to this that it appeared that a ‘sense of equal relationship between the white and the non-white peoples,’ the development of which he described as the ‘last great task of the movement for freedom,’ was now rejected by a ‘large part of European public opinion’. Its rejection, Zimmern insisted, was a further sign that Europe was no longer a civilised continent and had morally regressed. More specifically, Zimmern was dismayed because as a liberal imperialist he upheld the principle of trusteeship. He declared in a lecture delivered in August 1935 at the annual session of the Geneva Institute of International Relations that to treat Africans as mere things to be bartered, as Webster also suggested, rather than as ‘human beings of the same species as ourselves’ in order to save white skins would be an unforgivable breach of this principle.177 Giving vent to his indignation, Zimmern stated the following: Not only are ‘colonial wars’ spoken of quite naturally as a sort of up-to-date form of hunting, but there is talk in many quarters of handing over nonwhite populations as a sort of compensation or Dane-geld to unsatisfied rulers and peoples. To the so-called Liberals who sponsor methods of this kind the reminder is due that they should pay the price demanded of them in their own substance and not in that of others. Let them hand over, for instance, the South Wales coalfield with its inhabitants thrown in, or at the very least the British Government holdings in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, rather than interfere with the work of British administrators who are devoting their lives to single-minded services on behalf of the African peoples.178 176 Ibid., 6–7. See also Intellectual Coopération (a), nos. 68–69 (1936), 8. The Japanese participants in the Madrid conference were Tachi Sakutarō, a professor of law at the Imperial University of Tokyo who defended the Japanese policy in north China; Kōtarō Tanaka, dean of the Faculty of Law at of the Imperial University of Tokyo; and Sato Junzo, the former secretary of the Japanese National Committee of Intellectual Cooperation and Japanese delegate to the International Conference of Museums and to the Congress of Libraries. 177 Alfred E. Zimmern, ‘Liberty, Democracy, and the Movement Towards World Order,’ in Problems of Peace, Tenth Series: Anarchy or World Order (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), 149–50. 178 Ibid. See also Sir Alfred Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), 174–6.

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According to Zimmern, territorial revision, whether in Africa or Europe, was not a policy; it was not an alternative to sanctions. As he had indicated at the 1935 ISC session in London, he saw proposals for territorial revision as nothing but surrender to ‘blackmail,’ a point echoed in the above passage as indicated by Zimmern’s employment of the word danegeld.179

A Conference at Yosemite The question of peaceful change was also debated at the sixth conference of the IPR which was held between August 15 and 29, 1936, at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. That the Yosemite conference was to address the question of peaceful change was the official pretext for Bonnet’s attendance as an observer on behalf the IIIC and indeed, while at the conference, he would serve as one of four chairs presiding over the conference’s discussion at its fifth and final round table of the following topic: changing Balance of Political Forces in the Pacific and Possibilities of Peaceful Adjustment.180 It should be noted that within a few years of its establishment in 1925, the IPR had developed an impressive reputation as ‘a fully cooperative international organization

179 ‘Prevention

of War: Discussion,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 280. the name of the hotel at which conference participants were accommodated, see Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2002), 200. For Bonnet’s attendance at the 1936 and role in the 1936 conference of the IPR, see William O. Scroggs to Leo Gross, 10 September 1936. AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA, and ‘Appendix 1: Conference Membership and Committees,’ in W.L. Holland and Kate L. Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936: Aims and Results of Social and Economic Policies in Pacific Countries, Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Yosemite National Park, California, 15–29 August 1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 440– 1. William L. Holland and Kate L. Mitchell were assisted by Harriet Moore and Richard Pyke in the production of this sixth record of the proceedings of the IPR. Moore was one of three research associates and Pyke one of three research assistants at the International Secretariat of the IPR. The conferences of the IPR were at first held on a biennial basis. However, after 1933, they were held on a triennial basis. In this regard, the preface to the proceedings of the Yosemite conference stated the following: ‘More than ever before, the Yosemite Conference represented for most of its members not an isolated episode but rather the extension and culmination of a long period of preliminary study and organized discussion with other members of their own National Councils. In this the conference had 180 For

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for mutual study,’ as evidenced by the generous support that it received for its research activities from the Rockefeller Foundation.181 As its reputation grew, so did its membership: as Kan’s status as a delegate of the IPR at the Madrid conference might indicate, what began as a gathering of nations bordering the Pacific later expanded to include representatives of European powers with imperial interests in the region. Against a background of rising anti-imperial sentiment in China, a sentiment which the Chinese delegation at its first conference in 1925 did not hesitate to air, the British were quick to see the utility in joining the IPR. Thus, in 1927, the RIIA was admitted to the IPR as the British unit of the IPR, a development which saw fourteen Britons participate as full members in the IPR’s 1927 conference, which, like the IPR’s first conference in 1925, took place in Honolulu. It was in part due to the British presence that the 1927 conference focussed on China’s international relations more than anything else. Webster was among the members of the British delegation in Honolulu in 1927. He was also among the members of the British delegation on the occasion of the IPR’s 1929 conference when it met in Nara and Kyoto. Toynbee was also a member of the British delegation to the IPR’s 1929 conference, serving in that context as a member of its programme committee.182 By contrast and despite its interests in China and elsewhere in the region, France’s presence at the IPR in its first four years of existence was

an advantage over former meetings separated by an interval of only two years and thus having much less time available for thorough preparation. The advantage was implicitly recognized in the decision of the Pacific Council to continue the three-year period and hold the next (seventh) conference in 1939.’ Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, vii. See also Bruno Lasker and William L. Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933: Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Banff, Canada, 14–26 August 1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), ix, xiii. Note that according to the preface to the proceedings of the IPR’s fifth conference in 1933, the IPR’s next conference was expected to take place in 1935. 181 J. B. Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ Pacific Affairs 3, no. 3 (1929): 103– 15, 103. 182 ‘Appendix1: Members of the Conference,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 590; ‘Appendix 1: List of Conference Members, Observers and Staff,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1929, 624; and ‘Appendix 7: Officers of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Lasker and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, 480.

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limited to one representative in the form of an observer in the case of the 1929 conference.183 Although no French representative attended the IPR’s 1931 conference which took place from October 21 to November 2 in Shanghai and Hangkow (Hankou), against the background of the ‘grave events in the Far East,’ that is, against the background of the Manchurian explosion of 18 September and its aftermath, a group in Paris took the first step in the direction of French membership of the IPR by constituting the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique. The chair of the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique was Paul Painlevé. A mathematician and former prime minister of France, Painlevé was at this time a member of the ICIC and, on the basis of an informal agreement concerning the role of the French member of the ICIC, chair of the IIIC’s governing body. Like Painlevé, the vice-chairman of the Comité d’études, namely, Albert Sarraut, was an homme d’État: he had twice served as governor-general of French Indochina; had been the minister for the colonies from 1920 to 1924. He had also served on two occasions as prime minister of France, most recently from January 24 to June 4, 1936.184 There was a connection between Bonnet as director of the IIIC and the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique that might be taken to suggest that Bonnet’s presence at Yosemite in 1936 was not solely driven by the professional interest he had in the topic of peaceful change as a result of the IIIC’s institutional link to the ISC. The connection between Bonnet and the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique was explained by Bonnet in a letter he sent to Shotwell in February 1932. Bonnet was acquainted with Shotwell through the latter’s intellectual and other activities in the international sphere, for example, his participation in the American Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and in the ISC. In the aforementioned letter, Bonnet informed Shotwell, who was destined to become the American member of the ICIC in the following

183 ‘Appendix 1: List of Conference Members, Observers and Staff,’ in J. B. Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1929: Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Nara and Kyoto, October 13 to November 9, 1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 629, and ‘Appendix 1: List of Conference Members, Observers, Staff, and Committees,’ in Lasker and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, 454. 184 ‘Culture générale,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, no. 42 (1934): 322–23.

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year, that he had attended the second meeting of the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique and had found it ‘exceedingly interesting.’185 Bonnet’s interest in the committee was very likely piqued by his participation in the LON’s Mission of Educational Experts to China in November and December 1931, a mission which had come about as a result of a Chinese request for the League’s assistance in the reorganisation of the education in China. Bonnet had been sent to China by the ICIC with a view to exploring the possibility of closer collaboration between China and Geneva in the intellectual and cultural spheres.186 Following what he told Shotwell was as an ‘extremely interesting but, as one might well guess, difficult visit’ and partly as a consequence ICIC’s policy of political neutrality (or perhaps what is better described in this instance as its policy of political even-handedness), Bonnet spent a week in Tokyo where he consulted with Japan’s foreign and education ministers, representatives of its national committee on intellectual cooperation and its League of Nations’ association and various other dignitaries.187 In any case, as Bonnet also told Shotwell, Bonnet found the meeting of the Comité d’études so interesting that he felt impelled to place an office within the confines of the IIIC, the offices of which were located in the rue de Montpensier wing of the Palais Royal. These offices had been loaned to the IIIC by the French state for so long as the institute existed.188 Shotwell had an involvement with the IPR that dated back to its formative stages: he was among ‘forty-one well-informed people on international and Pacific affairs’ who met at the Yale Club in New York on February 22, 1925, and who spent the afternoon considering the 185 Henri Bonnet to James T. Shotwell, 3 February 1932, Conférence des institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales, 1er octobre 1931–31 mars, 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA. 186 ‘Note,’ Bulletin de la Coopération Intellectuelle 1, no. 13 (1932): 573–5; and ‘La Coopération Intellectuelle et la Chine,’ Bulletin de la Coopération Intellectuelle 1, no. 13 (1932): 585–6. 187 Bonnet to Shotwell, 3 February 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA, and Bulletin de la Coopération Intellectuelle 1, no. 13 (1932), 575. 188 Bonnet to Shotwell, 3 February 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA. See also ‘Appendix 5: National Councils and Secretaries of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Problems in the Pacific, 1936, 455. Note that according to the record of the Yosemite conference, the address of the secretary general of the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique was as follows: 2 rue du Four, Paris.

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plan for the IPR to be held later that year.189 At the IPR’s second conference, Shotwell, in the course of a round table discussion on diplomatic relations in the Pacific, had presented a ‘definite constructive proposal’ that he had prepared in association with his colleague of at Columbia, namely Joseph P. Chamberlain. This proposal was prepared in response to a declaration issued on April 6, 1927, by the French foreign minister Aristide Briand in order to mark the tenth anniversary of the entry into the war by the United States: ‘that France would welcome a specific engagement with the United States providing for the settlement of international difference without recourse to war.’190 Briand’s declaration was made against the background of an interview Briand had conducted with Shotwell on March 22 in which it emerged that the foreign minister had been looking at a way of giving expression to the ‘feeling of solidarity in fundamentals’ between the two ‘great democracies,’ namely, France and the United States, ‘in spite of all the technical difficulties which might arise’ and in fact were already arising ‘over the question of disarmament.’ In light of this conversation, Shotwell arrived at the view that Briand’s declaration of April 6, which was generally received well in the United States, was ‘in reality a serious offer’ rather than a mere expression of friendship and that it thus called for some form of definite understanding between the two countries. Shotwell and Chamberlain thus proceeded to draft the terms of such understanding. However, based on the knowledge that the American government desired an understanding concerning the peaceful settlement of international disputes that extended to the Pacific region, the outcome of their efforts was an instrument capable of being extended by the United States to any number of powers.191 Hence, it bore the title

189 Institute of Pacific Relations, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925: History, Organization, Proceedings, Discussions and Addresses (Honolulu: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1925), 19–21. 190 Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 172, and ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States of America and….,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 503, 506–7. 191 Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 173, and ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States of America and….,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 503, 507.

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‘Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace between the United States of America and….’.192 The wording of the draft, which Shotwell hoped would receive an especially favourable response from the Japanese delegation in Honolulu, was based in part on the Rhineland Pact, otherwise known as the Locarno Treaty, that had been signed by Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Italy in 1925, Article 2 of this pact provided for the renunciation of force, albeit without impairing ‘the exercise of the right of legitimate defence.’ Indeed, the commentary that Shotwell and Chamberlain appended to the draft treaty bore the following title: ‘American Locarno.’193 The wording was also based on treaties concerning the peaceful settlement of disputes that the United States had already signed, namely, the Bryan treaties, with a view to circumventing objections to the proposed treaty in the event that it was presented to congress for its ratification.194 Shotwell’s hope that the spirit of Locarno would extend itself to the rest of the world was fulfilled August 27, 1928: on the day that the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy was opened for signature at the Quai d’Orsay. Informally known as the Pact of Paris or Kellogg-Briand Pact, the latter title marking the fact that its two principal sponsors were Frank B. Kellogg, the secretary of state of the United States, and Briand, the wording of the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument

192 Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 173, and ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States of America and….,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 503, 506. 193 Traité entre l’Allemagne, la Beligique, la France, la Grande- Bretagne et l’italia, fait à Locarno le 16 octobre, Société des Nations 100, 4/26 (Lausanne: Imp. Réunies S. A., 1925), https://www.wdl.org/en/item/11586/, and ‘Section  27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States of America and….,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 503. 194 ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States of America and….,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 506. The Bryan treaties of 1913 and 1914, which were named after Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, were a set of bilateral engagements that the United States entered with various other powers aimed at the peaceful settlement of international disputes.

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of National Policy was little different from that of the Shotwell and Chamberlain draft.195 It was doubtless with Shotwell’s close association with the IPR in mind that Bonnet told Shotwell in February 1932, that he hoped to see the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique ‘take a very active share in the work of the Honolulu Institute’.196 Indeed, the Comité d’études would be represented at the IPR’s next biennial conference when it met in Banff in 1933, a conference which Shotwell would also attend. According to the preface to the conference’s proceedings, although ‘a French National Council of the Institute… [was]…still in the process of formation’ at the time, the representatives of the Comité d’études were ‘recognized as members in full standing.’197 One of these representatives was Roger Lévy, secretary general of the Comité d’études and editor of the Pacific section of the Parisian publication L’Europe Nouvelle, a weekly review of French and international politics founded in 1918 by Louise Weiss which promoted the cause of international rapprochement under the aegis of the LON. The other French participant at Banff was Étienne Dennery. A geographer, Dennery was the author of Foules d’Asie. Surpopulation japonaise, expansion chinoise, émigration indienne (1930) which was published in English under the heading of Asia’s Teeming Millions: And Its Problem for the West (1931) and which was based on demographic research Dennery had conducted in China, Japan and India. Dennery had been among the expert advisors, a number of whom had IPR connections, to the League of Nations’ Commission Enquiry (the Lytton Commission) to the Far East in 1932 which had been established in order to determine the causes of the invasion of Manchuria by Japanese forces following the so-called Mukden Incident of September 18, 1931. However, in the list of members and observers appearing in the proceedings of the Banff

195 ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States of America and….,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference, 503–12, and ‘Appendix 4: Minutes of Meetings of the Pacific Council, Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1929, 646. 196 Bonnet

to Shotwell, 3 February 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA. and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, x, and ‘Appendix 1: List of Conference Members, Observers, Staff, and Committees,’ ibid., 454, 457. 197 Lasker

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conference, Dennery was simply described as professor of economics at the Institute des hautes études internationales in Paris.198 In the preface to the conference’s proceedings, Bruno Lasker and William L. Holland, the latter being Condliffe’s successor as research secretary at the International Secretariat of the IPR, observed that the presence of French members and that of Dutch members, the Netherlands-Netherlands Indies Council having just been admitted as the Dutch national unit of the IPR, had clearly highlighted at the conference the new pattern of cooperative economic relationships between groups and nations that had emerged across the Pacific region: The first appearance of two new member groups of the Institute helped to throw into sharper relief than had been possible at previous conferences this pattern of economic relationships: both France and the Netherlands are not only great colonial powers in the Pacific area, but, in addition, have historical and material interests in other sections of that area, particularly the Far East. In both cases a single group represented the mother country as well as the dependency—French Indo-China and the Netherlands East Indies. It so happened the two French and four Dutch members also brought to the conference a truly scholarly temper and knowledge, extending far beyond their own national interests, of the affairs of the Pacific as a whole.199

Whatever issues there may have been regarding its earlier eligibility, recalling here the fact that the preface to the record of the proceedings at Banff stated that the French national committee was still in the process of formation, at Yosemite on August 12, 1936, the IPR’s governing body, namely, the Pacific Council, ‘unanimously voted to grant 198 ‘Appendix 1: List of Conference Members, Observers, Staff, and Committees,’ in Lasker and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, 454; ‘Appendix 1: Conference Membership and Committees,’ in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 436, and ‘Appendix V: National Councils and Secretaries of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 455. See also Étienne Dennery, Foules d’Asie. Surpopulation japonaise, expansion chinoise, émigration indienne (Paris: A. Colin, 1930); Étienne Dennery, Asia’s Teeming Millions: And the Problem for the West, trans. John Peile (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931), and Charles Robequain, review of Foules d’Asie. Surpopulation japonaise, expansion chinoise, émigration indienne, by Étienne Dennery, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 30, nos. 1–2 (1930): 182–4, www.persee.fr/doc/befeo_0336-1519_1930_num_30_1_3195. 199 Lasker

and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, viii, x, 454.

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the application for membership which had been made by the Comité d’Études des Problems du Pacifique of Paris.’ The preface to the record of the proceedings of the Yosemite conference noted that the admission to the IPR of the French group was ‘celebrated by the attendance…of an authoritative and distinguished group under the leadership of M. Albert Sarraut’ who had, it should be noted, succeeded Painléve as chair of the Comité d’études following the latter’s death in October 1933.200 There were four other members of the French delegation to the Yosemite conference: Jean Laurent, André Touzet, Dennery and Lévy. Laurent was a former secretary to Raymond Poincaré (who was both a former prime minister and former president of France), and director of the Bank of Indochina. Touzet had been aide-de-camp and chef du cabinet of the governor-general of French Indochina from 1916 to 1919 and chef du cabinet of the Ministry of the Colonies from 1920 to 1924. His formal title now was as follows: Assistant Director of Finances of Indochina.201 At the time of the Yosemite conference, Touzet was preparing a study comprised of four volumes under the general heading of Le problème colonial et la paix du monde. The first v­ olume in the series was published in 1937 and was dedicated to Sarraut who had been Touzet’s chief both in his role as governor-general of French Indochina and as minister of the colonies. Entitled Les revendications colonials allemandes, it examined the German colonial propaganda and the calculations and supposed grievances behind it. The second ­volume, also published in 1937, examined the motives behind the Italian colonial expansion and what Touzet called the Japanese paracolonisation of East Asia. The third volume, which appeared in 1938, sought to lay bare the ‘sophisms’ in the colonial propaganda of the ‘puissances “non satisfaits”,’ such as their claims that they were suffering from over-­ population. The fourth volume, which also appeared in 1938, considered possible means of conciliating the unsatisfied powers (puissances).202 200 Holland

and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, viii. 436. 202 The publication details of the four volumes prepared by André Touzet on the colonial problem are as follows: André Touzet, Le problème colonial et la paix du monde, vol. 1, Les revendications colonials allemandes (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1937); André Touzet, Le problème colonial et la paix du monde, vol. 2, L’Expansion colonial italienne: Paracolonisation nipponne de l’Asie orientale (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1938); André Touzet, Le problème colonial et la paix du monde, vol. 3, Les sophismes de la pétition 201 Ibid.,

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At the time of the Yosemite conference, Dennery was secretary general of the Centre d’études de politique étrangère, an organisation which he had co-founded in 1935. He was also at this time the ISC’s secretary-rapporteur on ‘Raw Materials and Markets’ in which capacity he had charge of overseeing the preparation and submission of documentary materials on the subject of access to raw materials and markets for the benefit of participants in the ISC’s study conference on peaceful change in 1937.203 At the time of the Yosemite conference, Lévy, in addition to being the secretary general of the Comité d’études des problems du Pacifique, was the author of Extrême-Orient et Pacifique (1935) and co-author of Les conséquences du développement économique du Japan pour l’empire français (1936), the latter work being the result of a collaboration between the Céntre d’études de politique étrangère and the Comité d’Études des Problems du Pacifique.204 Given the official pedigree of certain of its members, the following observation of Condliffe should be of little surprise: remarking on the French involvement with the IPR, Condliffe stated that although the French Council of the IPR, namely, the Comité d’études des problems du Pacifique was ostensibly a private organisation, he was ‘certain that on many occasions’ it enjoyed the ‘direct support,’ by which he meant financial support, ‘from the French Foreign Office.’205 In terms of the IPR’s membership, the Yosemite conference was notable for two further reasons. Firstly, it saw the admission to full membership of the IPR of the ‘U.S.S.R. Council.’ In the preface to

coloniale (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1938), xiii; and André Touzet, Le problème colonial et la paix du monde, vol. 4, Recherche d’une solution de conciliation (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1938). 203 Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 436. As was the case with Bonnet, Étienne Dennery’s participation in the French delegation was prompted by the fact that the subject of peaceful change was on the agenda at Yosemite. See Scroggs to Gross, 10 September 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA. 204 Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 436. See also Roger Lévy, Extrême-Orient et Pacifique (Paris: A. Colin, 1935), and Céntre d’études de politique étrangère, Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique, Les conséquences du développement économique du Japon pour l’empire français (Paris: Paul Harmann, 1936). 205 ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Paul Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations: The Memoirs of William L. Holland (Tokyo: Ryukai Shysha, 1995), 223.

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the conference’s proceedings, Holland and Kate L. Mitchell, the latter being one of three assistant secretaries at the International Secretariat of the IPR (the activities of which, Tomoko Akami points out, were transferred in stages by Carter from Honolulu to New York in the years 1933 to 1936 as ‘part of his design to make the IPR a world organization’), reported that the Soviet unit of the IPR was ‘formally constituted on June 28, 1934, as the Pacific Institute of the U.S.S.R.’ On August 6 of that year, the USSR Council informed Carter, who had been elected to the position of secretary general of the IPR in August 1933, of its wish to accept the invitation issued to it in 1931 by the Pacific Council to become a full member organisation.206 Holland and Mitchell further reported that since the time of its constitution, ‘the Soviet Council’ had played ‘an active and valuable part in the general activities of the Institute, especially in research and publications’ and that it had arranged to submit to the IPR’s 1936 conference a series of data papers ‘on Soviet policies and progress in its Far Eastern territories.’207 The Pacific Council’s invitation to the USSR Council issued from a unanimous decision taken at Hangchow to offer of the then Pacific Committee at Moscow membership of the IPR with a seat on its governing body. According to Lasker and Holland in the preface to the proceedings of the Banff conference, the Moscow group had earlier expressed a desire to participate in preparations for the Banff conference and to at least send an observer to it. However, they added, the fact that the governments of Canada and the United States did not

206 Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 173, and Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, vii. The name of the Russian unit of the IPR is listed in an appendix to the published record of the proceedings at the Yosemite conference as follows: ‘U.S.S.R. Council, Institute of Pacific Relations.’ Printed below the name of the USSR Council is the following entry: ‘Pacific Institute, 20 Razin St., Moscow.’ ‘Appendix 5: National Councils and Secretaries of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 455. For Edward C. Carter’s election as secretary general of the IPR, see Lasker and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, xi. For the roles of Holland and Mitchell at the International Secretariat of the IPR see ‘Appendix 1: Conference Membership and Committees,’ Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 441. 207 Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, vii. For Edward C. Carter’s election as secretary general of the IPR, see Lasker and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, xi.

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recognise the Soviet government and that passport regulations fell ‘short of according visitors from the Soviet Union complete equality with representatives of other countries prevented this proffered cooperation from materializing.’208 The situation in respect to the participation of the Moscow group was a source of deep regret to the Pacific Council which regarded the USSR as a very important Pacific power, as had, according to Akami, IPR members from the outset. The council thus expressed its unanimous intention to ensure that the choice of the location of the next conference would take into account the interests of the Moscow group.209 At the council, Carter stated the following: It must be clear that one of the most important determinants of the place of the next conference should be this. The conference must be held in a country where the Soviet members of the Institute of Pacific Relations may freely come in accordance with the law of the land and not in violation of it. One of the first duties of the Secretary-General will be to arrange for an early personal presentation in Moscow of the results of Banff, the consensus of opinion with reference to Soviet participation, and the studies proposed for the next conference.210

Carter duly fulfilled the promise he made at the Pacific Council: in 1934 he journeyed to Moscow in order to make a personal presentation. As a consequence of his journey, Akami points out, ‘the Pacific Ocean Institute, a branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences,’ that is, what Holland and Mitchell called the Pacific Institute of the USSR, ‘became the Soviet unit of the IPR.’211 Akami observes that the fact that the Soviet national unit of what was an unofficial organisation was a governmental body was not of particular concern to Carter, noting in this connection that Carter travelled to Moscow again in 1936 in order to urge Soviet participation in the Yosemite conference. Although he obviously was successful in that particular endeavour, as it turned out and leaving aside the presence of a Russian observer at the 1929 conference, Yosemite was the only occasion on which the USSR would participate in 208 Lasker

and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, viii. viii–ix; and Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 173. 210 Lasker and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, ix. 211 Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 173. 209 Ibid.,

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a conference of the IPR. Indeed, Akami points out that members of the Soviet group were critical of the IPR because ‘of its imperialistic nature’ and maintains that they in fact contributed little to it.212 The second reason why the Yosemite conference was notable in respect to the IPR’s membership was that it was the last IPR conference, up until its conference of 1954, at which Japanese delegates would be present. That this was to be the case was a consequence of the SinoJapanese War which broke out in 1937 and the Pacific War (or wider Pacific War), that followed.213 In the preface to the conference’s proceedings, Holland and Mitchell observed that as at Banff, the Yosemite conference had taken place amidst ‘surroundings of great natural beauty’. They went on to suggest that these surroundings, combined with the ‘pleasant informality’ of the living arrangements (members spent the duration of the conference ‘housed in cabins and tents around Yosemite Lodge’), and the careful preparation for the conference on the part of national councils and the International Secretariat, had ‘fostered a spirit of frankness, tolerance, and mutual confidence.’ Notably, they added that this spirit endured throughout despite the ‘acute political controversies’ that the conference addressed.214 When speaking of the conference many years later, Holland, had a rather different recollection of the atmosphere at Yosemite. He observed that the atmosphere was particularly ‘tense’ and that this was precisely because of the looming Japanese threat.215 This would have been especially so given that, as Akami points out, the Japanese unit of the IPR had now adapted its views so as to accord with the outlook

212 Ibid. Tomako Akami points out that the USSR members were critical of the IPR’s periodical Pacific Affairs because in their view it ‘defended Japanese actions in China’ (ibid.). See also Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1929, 629. 213 Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 200. Akami notes that in addition to being last conference until after the war at which a Japanese delegation would be present, the Yosemite conference was the ‘last to follow the established format, the last to be open to the public and the press, and the last to be held on the Pacific coast’ (ibid.). 214 Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, vii. 215 ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 19. See also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 287. At the International Secretariat of the IPR, Holland served as research assistant in the years 1928–1931; acting research secretary in the years 1931–1933; and research secretary in the years 1933–1946. In 1946, Holland became the IPR’s secretary general.

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of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Indeed, Akami notes that against a background of the growing political crises in Asia and Europe, there had emerged a greater alignment between all the IPR branches and their respective states. She further points out that the heads of a number of the national IPR delegations were by this time well-known political figures both past and present, as evidenced by Sarraut’s role as leader of the French delegation. While this development was spurred significantly by the desire of Carter to see the IPR enjoy a higher profile in political circles, it was also spurred by governments themselves: they recognised the IPR’s standing and wanted to exploit it for their own purposes.216 Yosemite was not the first time the theme of peaceful change had been addressed at a conference of the IPR. For example, Lasker and Holland noted the following in concluding their introduction to the proceedings of the Banff conference: [A]s Japanese members have pointed out (not only at Banff but also at former Institute conferences), the great need is not for treaties guaranteeing a fixed condition in political or economic relations, but for new machinery permitting a periodic review and adjustment of existing conditions to national economic needs and opportunities. As long as there is a class of ‘have nots’ in the community of nations, the mere maintenance of the status quo will never be a workable principle for diplomatic machinery.217

Indeed, according to Henry Forbes Angus, a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia and a member of the Canadian unit of the IPR, namely, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, the general topic of peaceful change had had a bearing on the research work sponsored the IPR from the very beginning. Angus illustrated this point about the research work of the IPR in naming a book he authored 216 Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 201–3, 207. For Edward C. Carter’s role at Copenhagen, see Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, June 8–10, 1931, Appendix 1B: Fifth Meeting of the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies, June 17, 1931 and Appendix 1A(1): Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference at Copenhagen, June 8–10, 1931, Quartrième Conférence des institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales (aprés la Conférence), 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 217 Lasker and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1933, 13.

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which appeared in 1937 as follows: The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area: A Study of the Work of the Institute of Pacific Relations and its Bearing on the Problem of Peaceful Change. From its inception, as Angus noted, the IPR had inquired into the ‘demands for the restoration of sovereign rights’ which had been ‘impaired’ and demands ‘for changes which would give new rights to certain states, and correspondingly diminish the existing rights of others.’ According to Angus, ‘[m]ost of the claims of the Chinese…[fell]…into the former category’ whereas ‘most of the Japanese claims [fell] into the latter.’218 At the same time as he further noted, the IPR’s exploration of the theme of peaceful change had not been confined to an examination of particular demands but had broached a much broader question: ‘whether the rights of nations may not, in the future, be standardised at something much less than national sovereignty, either by the creation of some over-riding political organization, or by the recognition that there is such a thing as abuse of a right giving rise to some sort of equitable claim against the country guilty of the abuse.’219 Inquiries into particular demands for change on the part of certain states in the Pacific and the discussion of the more general question of the application of the ethical standard to the conduct of international affairs, Angus pointed out, were pursued by the IPR because its members considered international war to be an abomination and thus hoped that means could be found by which disputes in the Pacific region could be settled peacefully. Indeed, he stated that ‘for many the belief that informed discussion will facilitate the peaceful adjustment of apparently conflicting interests…[was]…the main reason for membership in the Institute.’220 Angus pointed out that in addressing the question of peaceful adjustments to the status quo, the IPR had mainly focussed on the possibility of the kinds of changes on which reasonable actors might be expected to agree. It had not, he added, given the same attention to cases in which actors behave unreasonably, by which he largely meant cases in which demands for change are accompanied by the suggestion of force. 218 Henry Forbes Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area: A Study of the Work of the Institute of Pacific Relations and Its Bearing on the Problem of Peaceful Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 3–4. 219 Ibid., 4. 220 Ibid., 9–10.

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When demands for change are made against a background of threatening behaviour, Angus observed, the spectre of collective security looms into view. The question of collective security comes to the fore when it seems necessary that ‘dissatisfied’ and rather impatient nations should be convinced that some at least of the changes which they demand can be secured without the use of force. To guarantee the status quo by a system of collective security would preclude any changes except those made by mutual consent way implies that some standard can be found by which the moral right of a nation to insist on the observance of the full legal rights can be limited. At this point, an awkward question must be answered. ‘Is this new standard to be a purely moral standard, or it is to be a political standard which, in some ingenious way, mixes justice and force?’…. [T]he research work of the Institute has been able to keep clear of this troublesome question. It is concerned with establishing facts, not with reaching agreement as to international standards of morality. But in presenting the results of the research this warning must be given emphatically in order not to turn aside attention from an issue which must be basic in any thorough-going study of peaceful change.221

The discussion of peaceful change at Yosemite followed more or less the same lines as did discussions of the topic elsewhere at the time. The leader of the Australian group at Yosemite, namely, F. W. Eggleston, a former attorney-general of Australia, told the conference that the ‘main problem in the Pacific, as in other parts of the world, is change and the adjustment to change’ and that ‘the difficulties of adjustment’ in this regard were ‘almost insuperable’ because of the ‘rapid increase in the tempo of change’ in the Pacific as elsewhere.222 Eggleston observed that the ‘doctrine collective security’ raised the question as to whether or to what extent ‘the desire for security was compatible with the necessity for change,’ suggesting in this regard that the balance between the two imperatives was at that moment weighted too heavily in favour of the desire for security.223 221 Ibid.,

10. Emphasis added. and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 182. 223 An Australian member (F. W. Eggleston), 1936, quoted in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 182. For Eggleston’s various roles and the verification of his identity as the Australian member in question, see ‘Appendix 1: Conference Membership and Committees,’ and ‘Appendix 3: Conference Programme,’ in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 435, 448. 222 Holland

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He went on to warn against falling into the trap of conflating the idea of collective security with the preservation of the status quo, stating that ‘[u]nless collective security is accompanied by some means by which change can be promoted and rendered safe, it may easily become a menace.’224 Eggleston’s defence of peaceful change was qualified in that he insisted on the international regulation of changes to the status quo and that any sacrifices made in the name of peaceful change ‘must be voluntary.’225 Nonetheless, the majority of members at the conference, while accepting the importance of instituting means by which the status quo might be peacefully revised, felt it necessary to urge the greater importance of organizing an effective system of collective security. Unless there is some collective pooling of defensive power, weaker nations will be unable to resist changes to the status quo demanded by stronger nations for the enhancement of their national power or prestige. Without adequate provision for collective resistance against an aggressor, ‘peaceful change’ might in reality come to mean the legalization of changes previously brought about by forcible methods.226

According to the conference proceedings, this view was most ‘ably’ articulated by the leader of the French group, namely, Sarraut, who declared that those present were living in a time in history where peace was ‘nowhere secure’; having declared this he insisted on the indivisibility of peace. Sarraut stated that there was both an ‘international necessity’ and an ‘international obligation’ to guarantee the basis of peace, adding that this necessity and this obligation expressed themselves ‘best in collective security.’227 Sarraut advised that the supporters of a system of collective security were not advocating at the same time resistance to change, but rather were advocating the view that the fundamental basis of peaceful change could only be provided by ‘massing a supremacy of power against an aggressor’.228 Sarraut’s thinking in relation to this last 224 An Australian member (F. W. Eggleston), 1936, quoted in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 182. 225 Ibid. 226 Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 183. 227 Ibid., and Albert Sarraut, 1936, quoted ibid. 228 A Japanese member, 1936, in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 195.

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point was ably expressed by a Chinese member who stated emphatically that the Chinese people were not interested in peaceful change where that meant ‘recognition of a status quo set up by force in violation of all peace machinery’: as a Canadian member observed, peaceful change presupposed the renunciation of war-like change and the collective means of ensuring that such no such change could be threatened.229 Japanese members, echoing the position of the Japanese government, stated that Japan would be willing to join a system of collective security provided that Japan’s ‘special circumstances,’ by which was meant Japan’s ‘special position in Eastern Asia as compared with other foreign powers’ and need for ‘ample opportunities for…[peaceful] expansion,’ were ‘clearly understood.’ One Japanese member told the conference that ‘average Japanese’ felt that the current system of collective security was designed to maintain the status quo desired by the satisfied states. The same member stated that the Japanese people felt that the Western countries were acting unfairly in ‘imposing the status quo on Japan and calling it “peace”’ and that to the extent that the world’s diplomatic machinery and system of collective security was designed to uphold the form of peace preferred by Western countries, the Japanese were ‘against it.’230 There was some understanding expressed for the Japanese outlook in this regard in that it was pointed out that the American Immigration Act of 1924 and the American Tariff Acts of 1928 and 1930 were contributing factors to the failure of the peace machinery established by the Washington Conference in 1921–1922. The most important piece of this machinery was the Nine-Power Treaty which had been enacted for the purpose of maintaining the territorial integrity of China and ensuring a stable balance of power in the Pacific. It was pointed out that the American Immigration Act of 1924, which saw Japanese immigrants as a national group excluded from the United States for the first time, and 229 Holland

and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 193, 199. 195 and a Japanese member, 1936, quoted ibid. A paper submitted by the Canadian group to the conference, listed fourteen political obstacles to the formation of a regional security pact ten of which directly concerned Japan. The tenth obstacle in the list was as follows: ‘The “special position” of Japan as the paramount Power in Eastern Asia… would have to be recognized, by implication at least, in any general agreement to which Japan was expected to be a signatory.’ J. W. Pickersgill, International Machinery for the Maintenance of Peace in the Pacific Area, Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1936, quoted in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 191. 230 Ibid.,

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the Tariff Acts of 1928 and 1929 were ‘distinctly contrary to the spirit, if not the letter’ of the agreements reached at the Washington Conference. It was also pointed out that ‘although it had been generally recognized that Japan’s best solution to for her population problem lay in speeding up her industrial development’ and, thereby, ‘expanding her foreign trade,’ when Japan in fact began to succeed in its export drive, tariffs and quotas were used to shut out or restrict imports of Japanese goods. The conference heard that as a result, Japan began to feel that its opportunity for economic development was going to be permanently denied, a feeling which served to reinforce ‘the strategic and political arguments of those in Japan who maintained that…[Japan’s]…national destiny depended upon security for herself a predominant position in Eastern Asia.’231 231 Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 185, 187–8. The Washington Conference also issued in the Four-Power Treaty. Article 1 of the Four-Power Treaty provided for the following: ‘The High Contracting Parties agree as between themselves to respect their rights in relation to their insular possessions and insular dominions in the Pacific Ocean. If there should develop between any of the High Contracting Parties a controversy arising out of any Pacific question and involving their said rights which is not satisfactorily settled by diplomacy and is likely to affect the harmonious accord now happily subsisting between them, they shall invite the other High Contracting Paries to a joint conference to which the whole subject will be referred for consideration and adjustment.’ Foreign Relations of the United States, Treaty Between the United States of America, the British Empire, France, and Japan, Signed at Washington December 13, 1921. https:// avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/tr1921.asp. The Four-Power Treaty was a substitute for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The United States had been very keen to see this alliance terminated. Washington’s negative attitude towards the alliance saw the Canadian prime minister, Arthur Meighen, argue strongly at the 1921 Imperial Conference which met in London from June 20 to August 5 that the alliance should not be renewed, the question of whether or not to renew the alliance being high on the conference’s agenda. As a result of the Canadian prime minister’s efforts out and over the objections of the Australian prime minister in particular, the conference made no decision to renew the alliance. ‘Great Britain has ordinarily made pacific-settlement treaties applicable to all parts of the British Commonwealth of Nations. A defensive alliance was made with Japan on January 30, 1902, and renewed in 1905 and 1911, but terminated by the Four-Power Treaty concerning insular possessions.’ Quincy Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 413. In addition to the Four-Power Treaty and the Nine-Power Treaty, the Washington Conference issued in the Washington Naval Treaty or Five-Power Treaty which was signed on February 6, 1922. ‘The serious naval rivalry between the United States and Japan in 1921 was for a time settled by the Washington Conference agreements. The totality of these agreements, including the substitution of the Four-Power Treaty for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the limitation of armaments of Pacific naval bases, and the settlement of major political

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Some at the conference suggested that if no changes were made in the ‘policies of other countries vis-à-vis Japan’ such that Japan would continue to be denied equality of economic opportunity, there was likely to be ‘an explosion.’232 At the conference, Japanese members raised objections to suggestions that by its actions in Manchuria, Japan was guilty of violating the NinePower Treaty, Article 1 of which insisted on respect for the political independence and territorial and administrative integrity of China. Article 1 further insisted on ‘the principle of equal opportunity for the commerce and industry of all nations throughout the territory of China’ and that signatories ‘refrain from taking advantage of conditions in China in order to seek special rights or privileges which could abridge the rights of subjects or citizens of friendly States, and from countenancing action inimical to the security of such States.’ According to the record of the conference’s proceedings, it was clear that Japanese members felt that it was China rather than Japan that had violated the treaty. It was clear that they ‘felt that anti-Japanese activities in China constituted a definite violation of the treaty in that they were “inimical to the security of Japan”’; no less clear, according to the record of proceedings, was ‘the implication that Japan did not intend to relinquish the strategic gains of her continental policy and that present Japanese leaders could not be expected to accept a new settlement which did not confirm her “special position” in North China as well as Manchuria.’233 The dispute concerning whether the Nine-Power Treaty had been violated and how it had been violated prompted one member to suggest that the matter might

problems in regard to China, contributed to this result no less than the treaty limiting naval armaments and establishing the 5: 5: 3 ratio. Essentially the principles of the treaty were maintained and extended to cruisers in the London Conference of 1930, although there the problem concerned Anglo-American naval relations as much as, if not more than, American-Japanese naval relations. The problem has again arisen with the denunciation of the Naval Treaties [by Japan in December 1934] which took effect on December 31, 1936.’ Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 412. 232 Ibid., 181. 233 Foreign Relations of the United States: Treaty Between the United States of America, Belgium, the British Empire, China, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal, Signed at Washington February 6, 1922, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/tr2201.asp, and Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 187.

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be submitted to the World Court for determination. A Japanese member responded to this suggestion by observing that there was a ‘tendency in all countries, not only in Japan, to be unwilling to accept the decision of any outside Power on vital matters’ and that ‘[p]eople’s loyalties are still to particular nations, not humanity at large.’ The same member asked rhetorically whether Canada and the United States would let the question of their immigration policies be settled by a ‘Central State.’234 The Japanese observation that no government would leave decisions concerning the nation’s destiny to ‘“outsiders” called forth the protest that as long as a nation reserved the right to interpret a treaty any way it wished’ in matters it deemed vital, treaties would become ‘worthless when most vitally needed.’235 In the course of an ensuing discussion of the possible revision or revitalisation of the Nine-Power Treaty, one member opined that its signatories had ‘never intended to take the steps necessary to implement it,’ noting that rather than taking those steps its signatories had persisted with a policy of protecting their special interests in China. Although conceding that recent actions by Japan posed a more direct threat to China’s integrity than had any of the actions of the other signatories of the treaty, the same member was insistent that the latter had hardly covered themselves in glory in terms of adjusting their relations to China: through protecting their ‘special interests’ in China rather than relinquishing them, they had failed, contrary to the terms of the Nine-Power Treaty, to assist China ‘in gaining independent control of her own political and economic development.’236 Leaving aside the question of whether or not the other signatories of the Nine-Power Treaty had placed themselves in a morally compromised position vis-à-vis Japan through their sins of commission and omission in respect to China, it should be noted that in the view of many members, the failure of the Nine-Power Treaty stemmed fundamentally from the fact that it lacked coercive machinery. In this regard, a French member suggested that what was needed was a regional pact which provided for the collective and prompt imposition of economic and financial

234 A Japanese member, 1936, quoted in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 188. 235 Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 187–8. 236 Ibid., 186–7.

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sanctions in the event of an infraction, a suggestion strongly endorsed by a Chinese member.237 The question of the utility of bare pacts was discussed at Yosemite in relation to the Pact of Paris. A Canadian member, J. W. Pickersgill, had that pact in his sights in observing in a paper submitted to the conference that the Manchurian crisis as well as other recent events had shown the ‘comparative uselessness of agreements “without teeth”: the comparative uselessness of pacts which prohibited recourse to force but which did not provide for sanctions in the event of their infraction. That issue aside, the same member thought that in view of ‘the rise of Japan to firstclass rank’ and the consequent elimination of ‘non-Asiatic naval power as a paramount factor in Eastern Asia’ and associated with this the ‘risk involved in the application of economic and long-range naval sanctions’ because Shanghai, Hong Kong, the Philippines and French Indochina had effectively been rendered ‘European and American hostages given to Japan,’ it would be very difficult for strategic reasons to put ‘teeth’ into a security agreement which concerned the Asia-Pacific region. Discussion of Pickersgill’s paper followed discussion of a proposal by a British member. Without seemingly feeling the need to call attention to the fact that the Pact of Paris spoke only of war and not of aggression, the technical difficulties consequent upon this fact being another matter that had come to the fore during the Manchurian crisis, the member in question suggested that one way of ensuring that the prohibition against aggression embodied in the Pact of Paris was accompanied by appropriate sanctions, was by linking it in some way to a set of ‘Regional Leagues’ composed of powers which had special interests in a particular region. These powers alone would be militarily liable in the event of an infraction in their region.238 There was a precedent for this way of equipping the Pact of Paris with teeth: the LON Assembly’s deliberations on the Sino-Japanese dispute in 1932 and 1933 had seen it tightly yoke the Pact of Paris to the LON Covenant and thereby, potentially, to the LON’s sanctionist regime. Obviously, the British member’s plan involved a notional modification of the LON’s collective security system as this system was 237 Ibid.,

188. W. Pickersgill, International Machinery for the Maintenance of Peace in the Pacific Area, Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1936 quoted in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 191, and Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 189. 238 J.

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universal in character: the British member’s plan involved the decentralisation of the system of security in respect to the imposition of military sanctions. The reason for the British member’s advocacy of a decentralised approach to security concerned the view that it was impractical to expect states to accept an ‘unlimited liability’ to employ force in distant regions: ‘What can Ecuador know or care about affairs in Manchoukuo? Why should the United States be implicated in the domestic squabbles of Europe? How can Japan take a hand in the settlement of a dispute in the Dardanelles?’239 At the same time, the British member suggested that the regional leagues he proposed should be affiliated with Geneva in order to ensure that in the event that any one of them ‘should see fit to name an aggressor and impose sanctions,’ they would have the support of the rest of the international community, a key manifestation of that support according to the British member’s plan being the imposition of economic sanctions which would be obligatory for all.240 Quincy Wright, an international legal expert and a member of the American delegation, expressed scepticism about the idea of establishing regional machinery for the maintenance of peace and stability in the Pacific area. In a paper submitted to the conference entitled ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ he observed that in order for such machinery to be really effective it would have to be based in a balance of power and that such a balance could not be realised at that time unless ‘Powers whose major interest is not really in the region are brought it,’ in which case, he pointed out, the machinery would hardly be regional.241 The treaties issuing from Washington Conference, Wright observed, while providing for regional cooperation and the resolution of certain regional differences, were never in any authentic sense an attempt at the regional organisation of the Far Eastern powers.242 In any case, he observed, these treaties had been ‘morally weakened soon after their conclusion’ by the passage of the American Immigration Act of 1924, had been ‘further weakened by their failure to function in

239 Ibid. 240 Ibid. 241 Quincy Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ in Holland and Mitchell, Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 425–6. 242 Ibid., 409, 425.

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the Manchurian crisis’ and had now been ‘in part denounced.’243 Wright observed that the Far Eastern powers had generally preferred to make use of genuinely international machinery for the settlement of controversies, citing in this context the covenant and the Pact of Paris. This was also the case, he added, with Latin American countries when it came to disputes of a grave nature. Wright stated that it may be that regional organisation has ‘inherent deficiencies’ when it came to maintaining peace, adding that that if ‘moral opinion’ were to be ‘the main sanction’ in international affairs, this would most definitely be the case. Wright proffered the view that ‘the united opinion of the world was none too much in difficult international disputes’ and argued on this basis that it seemed inadvisable to divide action, such as naming the aggressor and imposing sanctions, between regional and world organisations. To divide action in this way, he maintained, would likely confuse public opinion which would then lack ‘the definiteness and unanimity’ that is needed in order to achieve results.244 Although insistent that collective security must be organised on a universal basis for it to be effective, Wright allowed that regional organisations, could be useful for certain purposes, suggesting, for example, that such organisations could serve as forums in which possible adjustments to the status quo in the region were discussed.245 On the question of the membership of a hypothetical organisation for the Asia-Pacific region, Wright noted that the main actors in the Far East were China, Japan and the USSR, although he added that Siam (Thailand) and India might be also be mentioned in this regard. He then noted that as the push for self-determination in different parts of the region advanced, Korea, the Philippines Islands, Indochina and the Dutch Indies might also participate. Perhaps in an anticipation of the defence of Manchukuo that Japanese members would mount at Yosemite (Manchukuo being the puppet-state that Japan had established in the wake of its invasion of Manchuria and which remained subject to the principle of non-recognition of ‘the fruits of unlawful aggression’ as pronounced on January 7, 1932, by Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson

243 Ibid.,

412. 425. 245 Ibid., 426. 244 Ibid.,

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in view of the obligations of the Pact of Paris and as endorsed in a note issued by the LON Council on February 16 which associated the principle with the covenant’s Article 10), Wright stated that should ‘a real desire for independence develop in that state’ it might also participate.246 It should be noted here that in the tradition of the Lytton Commission’s report, which had been unequivocal on the point that the constitution of the so-called state of Manchukuo was not the expression of a desire for self-determination on the part of the local population as the Japanese government had claimed, Wright elsewhere in his paper put the name Manchukuo in quotation marks.247 In regard to those controversies which concerned the Pacific, Wright considered it ‘reasonable’ to include in a regional organisation the United States and the three British Dominions, namely, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, all of which had ‘homelands fronting the Pacific.’248 At this point, Wright reached the end of this list of prospective members: he suggested that it would be wrong to introduce into an organisation centred on the Asia-Pacific, powers whose sole interests in the region were colonial possessions and trade precisely because to do so would be to transform a regional into a world organisation; it would ‘seem better,’ he concluded in this regard, ‘to handle the problems in which such states are interested through the League of Nations.’249 Wright contended that in terms of stabilising the Pacific area, the LON had chalked up many successes over the years, its most recent success in his view being the resolution in May 1932 of the Shanghai phase of the Sino-Japanese dispute which followed the so-called Shanghai Incident. As Wright noted, the LON Council responded to this incident, which occurred just after midnight on January 29, by immediately appointing the consuls of the powers in Shanghai to report on the problem, adding that the success of the LON’s action in this case (which was definitively ruled upon by the LON Assembly at an extraordinary

246 Ibid., and Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 101–2. See also Text of the Note of Henry L. Stimson, 1932, reproduced in Felix Morley, The Society of Nations: Its Organization and Constitutional Development (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1932), 479, and LON, OJ 13, no. 3 (1932), 383–4. 247 Wright, 248 Ibid., 249 Ibid.

‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 418. 426.

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meeting on March 11, 1932, approximately two months after which Japan would begin evacuating Shanghai, declaring that this was ‘due to a desire conform with world opinion to end the world-wide odium which has fallen on us’), was attributable ‘in no small measure to this circumstance.’250 In regard to its failure in relation to the Manchurian crisis, Wright made the general observation that the power and authority of the LON was greatly impaired due to the absence of Soviet Russia and the United States from its halls.251 Even so, Wright thought that the it might still have been able to successfully resolve the Manchurian crisis had the United States cooperated more fully with the LON Council during its early stages. In stating this, Wright was referring to the fact that Stimson had informed the Japanese ambassador at Washington that the United States favoured direct negotiations between China and Japan and that he was not favourable towards American participation in the proposed commission of inquiry that was under discussion at LON Council at that time. News of this development reached Geneva on September 24, 1931, and on September 25, Lord Robert Cecil declared on behalf of Great Britain which, like other council members, was desirous of American support for the LON’s efforts to resolve the dispute, that he too favoured direct negotiations.252 Stimson, in defending his stance some years later, offered the view that had the LON attempted to dispatch a commission of inquiry during the early stages of the crisis it would have ‘accelerated the outbreak of nationalist feeling which subsequently occurred…[and]…would have hastened the downfall of the Minseito Cabinet which was at that time doing its best to check the army’ and called attention to the fact that as it turned out, Shidehara Kijūrō, the foreign minister, was able to remain in office until December 10 and ‘eventually to consent on behalf of Japan to the sending of the Lytton Commission of Enquiry’.253 Irrespective of these considerations and echoing a criticism he had made of Stimson’s action in November 1934 in an address at Chatham House (a criticism 250 ‘Japan’s Evacuation Aims to End “Odium”,’ New York Times, May 12, 1932, and Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 427. 251 Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 427. 252 Morley, The Society of Nations, 442. 253 Henry L. Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis: Recollections and Observations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), 44–5.

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which had earlier been made by Felix Morley, an American who closely followed the LON’s handling of the Sino-Japanese dispute beginning with the Manchurian incident and down to the conclusion of the Shanghai affair, and which some later felt was not wholly justified given the circumstances), Wright stated the following: Even if the U.S.S.R. had not co-operated, it seems probable that the Japanese Invasion might have been stopped if the United States had immediately stood behind the desire of the League Powers to follow their usual tradition of dispatching a commission to the spot immediately, in order to report on the validity of the Japanese claim that her initial action was justified by defensive necessity. Invasion cannot be stopped by moral opinion unless that opinion becomes crystallized before the invasion has really begun. It was impossible for this opinion to crystallise without an impartial report from Manchuria….The United States apparently was persuaded by the Japanese ambassador at Washington not to support the proposal pending in the League in the latter part of September 1931 for such a commission, with a result that the critical moment passed without action.254

Wright noted that the Manchurian crisis had had a ‘disastrous’ impact on ‘confidence in the effectiveness of general international organization in the Far East’ and that since that time the LON had been subject to two other devastating blows.255 The first blow can in the form of Germany’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Rhineland Pact of 1925, a development which effectively announced the demise of the LON’s Locarno system, and the second in the form of the failure to prevent the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. The latter was a particularly bitter blow given that the Italian aggression had seen the LON mobilise its collective security machinery for the first time, much to the joy and amazement of many League partisans who had thought that machinery had fallen into a permanent state of disuse. Furthering initial hopes that the LON might succeed in checking the Italian aggression,

254 Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 427. See also Quincy Wright, ‘An American View of Far Eastern Problems,’ International Affairs 14, no. 1 (1935): 69–88, 75; Morley, The Society of Nations, 480; and Reginald Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, a Case History: The Sino-Japanese Dispute, 1931–33 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), 17–8, 92. 255 Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 427.

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and thereby adding to the bitterness of the blow when it came, was the fact that, as Wright pointed out, the administration in Washington had ‘unquestionably made every effort to avoid action which would interfere with the efficiency of sanctions, although under strong pressure from Italian-American organizations and from isolationists’ (the latter having scored two recent victories in the form of the neutrality acts of 1935 and 1936), ‘to follow a different policy.’256 In their introduction to the proceedings of the Yosemite conference, Holland and Mitchell noted that discussions of the changes that had taken place in the Pacific area since the time of the Banff conference had been ‘overshadowed’ by the ‘more momentous events’ that had occurred in other parts of the world.257 In particular, they noted, the conference’s attention had been focussed on certain events in Europe and the Mediterranean, namely, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the Italian aggression against Ethiopia. Having observed that the discussions at the conference concerning these events had greatly benefitted from the presence of a large number of European members and that the same events had caused Great Britain and France take less of an active interest in the Pacific area thereby affecting the regional balance of power, Holland and Mitchell declared that it would be mistaken to interpret the security situation in the Pacific area solely in light of the behaviour or situation of certain European powers as there were many other complicating factors. Nonetheless, they cautioned that ‘it would be unwise to suppose…that the Italian success in Ethiopia, and the apparent weakness of the British position in the Mediterranean were wholly unobserved by Japanese political and military leaders, or that the timing of Japan’s more recent attempts to advance her position in North China and Mongolia was unrelated to, or unaffected by what happened in Europe.’258 Against the background of German rearmament, the triumph of Italy’s imperialist campaign and the conclusion of ‘the long-rumoured’ political entente between Germany and Japan in the form of the AntiComintern Pact, announced not long after the Yosemite conference

256 Ibid.,

431. and Mitchell, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, 2.

257 Holland 258 Ibid.

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broke up, it should have been evident to all, according to Holland and Mitchell, that the LON’s collective security system had collapsed.259 In light of this collapse, Wright’s remark in the paper he submitted to the 1936 IPR conference to the effect that it seemed as if moral opinion was now to be the main sanction in world affairs, might be accorded the following significance: the toppling of the LON’s collective security system in conjunction with American isolationism meant that meant that when it came to sanctioning unruly states there was little left to reach for in the international armoury than moral condemnation. Although it did not prevent him from expressing the hope that confidence in collective security might be restored, Wright evidently believed that the moral sanction was not a negligible thing: it was not a pretend sanction. That said, he would have known that confidence in this form of sanction was also at a low ebb. It was certainly at a much lower ebb than it had been when Stimson first presented to world the moral weapon which was the doctrine of non-recognition of the spoils of aggression.260

259 Ibid.,

1.

260 Wright,

‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 431–2.

CHAPTER 2

Paris, 1937: Colonial Questions and Peace

The International Peace Campaign Late in 1935, Cecil, Sir Norman Angell, Philip Noel-Baker, Pierre Cot the French minister for air, Herriot and the French trade union leader Léon Jouhoux discussed the prospect of establishing a ‘movement to co-ordinate all the forces of peace in the world.’1 Following a meeting held at the Cecil residence in early 1936, the International Peace Campaign (or, as its French branch was called, the Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix [RUP]), was formally launched, the joint ­presidents of the campaign being Cecil and Cot.2 The general purpose of the International Peace Campaign (IPC) was to reinvigorate support for the LON amongst governments and the public. More specifically, it 1 For

the formation of the Rassemblement Universal de la Paix [hereafter RUP], see RUP to the director of the IICI, 27 December 1935, Rapprochement international: Généralités, 1927–1944, AG 1 IICI-B-V-4, UA; Rachel Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix (1931–1939): une organization de masse?’ Materiaux pour L’Histoire de Notre Temps, no. 30 (1993): 40–4, 40. See also Donald S. Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 4 (1974): 131–59, 148n. Certain French figures had been discussing the possibility of such a movement as the RUP since 1934. 2 Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 40, and Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 148n. Mazuy points out that the Parisian centre of the RUP created at the end of 1935. For the role of Robert Cecil and Pierre Cot, see RUP to the director of the Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle [hereafter IICI], 4 August 1937, AG 1 IICI-B-V-4, UA.

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aimed at rallying opinion behind four measures deemed necessary for peace: guaranteeing the inviolability of treaty obligations; the reduction and limitation of armaments; the reinforcement of the LON’s ability to prevent and stop wars through the effective organisation of collective security and mutual assistance; and the establishment of mechanisms through which the LON could remedy situations likely to provoke war.3 These measures were approved by the IPC’s executive committee in April 1936, and then tabled for discussion at its first congress which took place in Brussels between September 3 and 6, 1936.4 Held at the Palais de la Centenaria and at the stade du Heysel, the IPC’s World Peace Congress attracted more than five thousand people, a promising sign for what was intended to be a mass movement, and included speakers enlisted from Belgium, China, France, Great Britain, India, Norway, Poland, Romania, the United States and the USSR among other countries.5 Although the issue was not forced but was handled discreetly, the congress bore witness to the continuing shift in the peace movement away from an uncompromising pacifism towards a policy of firmness in the face of threats or acts of aggression: a policy of collective security whether via the League or via more limited security pacts.6 A Chinese delegate at the congress in Brussels put the case for a policy of firmness in declaring that to match ‘non-resistance against war is to work against peace’ for it is to ‘provide a tiger with a pair of wings.’ A message addressed to the women of China issued by the Commission Feminine of the RUP at the French national congress of the RUP held at the end of September in 1937 in Paris invoked what the message described as these ‘noble words’ in support of the organisation and defence of peace. In regard to the war then being waged by Japan against China, the message stated the following: ‘do not believe that distance renders us less sensitive

3 RUP to the secretary general of the IICI, 26 August 1936, AG 1 IICI-B-V-4, UA, and Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 40–41. 4 RUP to the secretary general of the IICI, 26 August 1936, AG 1 IICI-B-V-4, UA. 5 Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 40–1, RUP to the secretary general of the IIIC, 26 August 1936, AG 1 IICI-B-V-4, UA. 6 Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 40. For the shift of opinion in favour collective security, see Birn, ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security,’ 145. See also Alfred E. Zimmern, ‘The Problem of Collective Security,’ in Quincy Wright, ed., Neutrality and Collective Security: Lectures on the Harris Foundation, 1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 72.

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to the horror of the days that you experience: we suffer with you all the atrocities committed by your barbarous adversary, and the bombardment of the Chinese population leaves us shuddering and revolted.’7 The words of the Chinese delegate to the congress in Brussels would be echoed in Geneva in 1937 by Li Yu-ying (Li Shizeng) in the course of a meeting of the LON Assembly’s Sixth Committee. Subsequent to the Eleventh Assembly of the LON in 1930, it was to this committee that questions concerning the LON’s work in the field of intellectual cooperation were addressed.8 Li, after having urged the institution of a convention protecting historical monuments and cultural institutions in times of war, read out a telegram from the president of the Chinese National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation namely, Wu Zhihui (Wu Shi-Fee). In the telegram Wu, a member of the governing body of the Intellectual Cooperation Organisation (ICO) of the LON since 1930, that is, a member since 1930 of the ICIC, pointed to the ‘agonising, catastrophic destruction’ and ‘open massacres’ then being perpetrated by Japanese forces in China. He reported that educational institutions had been especially targeted and that centres of intellectual activity had been subject to aerial attack. Wu concluded his message by imploring the League to ‘employ all effective means to safeguard the civilisation [of] humanity.’ Having read out the telegram, Li pointed out that the Chinese delegation in Geneva had received further documents concerning the destruction of educational establishments, monuments, museums and libraries, adding that the list of destroyed institutions and monuments was very long. He then repeated a point which he had made at the annual meeting of the ICIC in July that year: to ‘propagate the 7 A Chinese delegate to the World Peace Congress, 1936, quoted in Congrès de Paix du People de France: Message of the Commission Feminine du Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix aux Femmes Chinoises and Congrès de Paix du People de France: Message of the Commission Feminine du Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix aux Femmes Chinoises. The first page of the Message of the Commission Feminine du Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix aux Femmes Chinoises is reproduced in Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 42. Mazuy notes that the RUP supported Chiang Kai-shek more than the Communists in opposing the Japanese intervention in China. 8 Pham Thi-Tu, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations (Paris: Librairie Minard, 1962), 21n., 24. The Sixth Committee otherwise addressed political questions. Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée: La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 184. Wu Zhihui (Wu Shi-Fee) was a member of the ICIC from 1930 to 1939.

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idea of peace without assuring its defence, amounts to an abdication of pacifism.’9 At the conclusion of its meeting, the Sixth Committee unanimously resolved that in times of armed conflict, the integrity of artistic and cultural monuments should be respected: they constitute the ‘treasures of civilisation’ and as such the world has a duty to preserve them. However, in regard to Li’s point concerning the defence of peace, it would appear that the committee remained silent.10 Donald S. Birn notes that the IPC represented itself as being ‘nonpolitical,’ nonetheless, as he also notes, following its launch the regimes in Berlin and Rome quickly swung into action, attacking the movement as a stalking horse for the Communists.11 Certainly, a large part of the support base of its European wing, most notably in France, was Communist (as well as explicitly anti-Fascist) and it was because of the Communist taint that it was viewed with caution by figures from both sides of British politics.12 Winston Churchill, who had by 1936 had become a staunch supporter of the LON, had agreed in June 1936 to share the presidency of the New Commonwealth Society which had been established by David Davies (or 1st Baron Davies of Llandinam as he became in 1932), in October 1932 against the background of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.13 An organisation dedicated to the promotion of international law and order, the two specific policies which the New Commonwealth advocated from the outset were as follows: the creation of an Equity Tribunal and an International Police Force (IPF). Explaining 9 ‘La Coopération Intellectuelle à la XVIIIe Session de l’Assemblé de la Société des Nations,’ Coopérational Intellectuelle, nos. 82–83 (1937): 520–42, 540–41. 10 Ibid., 542, and League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1937 (Paris: Intellectual Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938), 171. 11 Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 149. 12 Ibid., 151. For the anti-Fascist dimension of the RUP, see Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 40–2. 13 Michael Pugh, ‘Policing the World; Lord Davies and the Quest for Order in the 1930s,’ International Relations 16, no. 97 (2002): 97–115, 109. Donald S. Birn observes that Churchill ‘began to advocate for an increased reliance on the League shortly after Hitler came to power.’ He also observes that Churchill ‘had doubts about League sanctions against Italy and it was only in 1936 did he emerge as an unhesitating champion of the League ready to join the…[League of Nations Union]…in a “united front” for collective security.’ Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 145. For the establishment of the New Commonwealth, see J. Graham Jones, ‘The Peacemonger,’ Journal of Liberal Democrat History, no. 29 (2000–2001): 16–23, 22.

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its policy stance, the New Commonwealth’s monthly organ editorialised in July 1934 under the heading of ‘Our Purpose’ that a ‘durable peace can only be founded upon justice and…justice is unattainable without the means of changing the public law and enforcing it,’ although it should be noted that by 1936, many of the figures associated with the New Commonwealth were far more concerned with the enforcement of rather than changes to international law. In fact, for many of the New Commonwealth’s adherents this had been the case from the beginning.14 According to Michael Pugh, Churchill viewed the New Common­ wealth as a platform from which to ‘urge preparation for conflict with Germany’ in the form of rearmament and a reinvigoration of the system of collective security.15 In December of that year, in collaboration with the LNU, Churchill launched his ‘“Arms and the Covenant” campaign.’16 However, despite his vital interest in the cause of collective security, Churchill was not willing to give his blessing to the IPC/RUP out of a concern, according to Birn, that it would erode his Conservative support base.17 More conservative elements in the labour movement also looked on the IPC with suspicion. Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton, for example, both of whom supported rearmament and thus might seem to have been ‘logical allies’ of the IPC, were among such elements.18 Cecil, however, although nominally Conservative, was not particularly concerned by the Communist influence on the IPC/RUP. In his view, this influence was not significant. In any case, Cecil considered the work of the IPC far too important to relinquish, especially in light of its galvanising effect on public opinion on the continent.19 (It was perhaps because of the Communist influence on the movement that Cecil’s

14 ‘Our Purpose,’ New Commonwealth: Being the Monthly Organ of a Society for the Promotion of International Law and Order 2, no. 10 (1934): 137. See also David Davies, ‘An International Police Force?’ International Affairs 11, no. 1 (1932): 76–99. 15 Pugh, ‘Policing the World,’ 111. Michael Pugh observes that Churchill’s ‘late conversion to international policing could be more accurately described as a move towards collective security through a “grand alliance” strategy.’ In the late 1930s this would be a common position among New Commonwealth members. 16 Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 145–46. 17 Ibid., 149. 18 Ibid., 151. 19 Ibid. See also Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 40. The IPC/RUP’s congress in September 1936 received much favourable press in France.

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friend, Salvador de Madariaga, a former Spanish delegate to the LON and a prominent New Commonwealth figure, felt moved to state that Cecil’s advocacy of the IPC, which Madariaga dismissed as a complete ‘red herring,’ was an example of the ‘rash courses and serious errors of judgement’ into which Cecil’s ‘impulsive, forward temperament’ sometimes drew him.)20 At the same time, in order to gain and hold onto mass support, elements within the IPC leadership, Cecil among them, sought to veer the movement away from left-right political controversies and this meant avoiding such divisive issues as the war in Spain.21 By no means all supporters of the IPC/RUP appreciated its vaunted apolitical stance and the attempts to distance the movement from the issue of the violence consuming Spain. In this regard, Rachel Mazuy draws a distinction between the English conservatives associated with the League of Nations Union (LNU) in the movement and those adherents of the IPC/RUP who adopted a more radical anti-Fascist stance. She argues that the role of the French Communist militants in the movement, especially those associated with the Comité mondiale contre la Guerre et le Fascisme, was more significant than Cecil perhaps thought or its official history concedes, even though Communists remained in a minority in terms of the movement’s leadership.22 However, it would be wrong to put the support for Republican Spain solely down to the Communist presence in the IPC/RUP. Indeed, for the sake of the movement’s strength, some of its Communist adherents actually joined in attempts to distance the movement from the question of Spain.23 20 Salvador de Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ in Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee, eds., Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 182. 21 Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 151–53. 22 Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 40. Rachel Mazuy points out that French Communists leant ‘active support’ to the movement up until August 23, 1939. She notes that in ‘refusing the German-Soviet pact of the summer of 1939, the RUP demonstrated’ that it was clearly ‘not an association directed by the Communists’ (ibid., 41). 23 Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 151. Birn notes that a ‘spontaneous demonstration on behalf of Republican Spain’ at the 1937 congress of the RUP in Paris, was ‘checked by the veteran Communist Marcel Cachin’. Mazuy, similarly notes that the intervention of the Communists in the movement was conducted with ‘great prudence,’ adding that Cachin went as far as to write that it would be ‘dangerous if the movement is identified with certain political parties’ as this would weaken it. Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 41.

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The feeling of the broader peace movement in France on the war in Spain was made clear in a letter written on behalf of the French National Peace Council (Conseil national de la paix), the leadership of which was composed of a range of political, military, legal and scholarly figures, to Bonnet in October 1936. In this letter, the council complained bitterly of LON inaction despite the ‘aerial terror’ to which Spain was then subject and the clear evidence that had been submitted to the LON Assembly in September 1936 by the Spanish delegate, Alvarez del Vayo (a member of the Spanish National Committee of the RUP), of the complicity of Rome, Berlin and Lisbon in the actions of the anti-Republican forces in violation of Article 10 of the covenant.24 The council contended that given that foreign powers were ‘exercising a decisive influence’ in the conflict and in light of the atrocities being visited on the civilian population, the League’s position of neutrality in relation to the war in Spain really amounted to a ‘regime of blind partiality…to the profit of the [anti-Republican] agitators’. It warned that the events in Spain demonstrated that Europe now ‘found itself in the presence of an international dictatorship of Fascist allies,’ adding that peace would continue to be imperilled as long as the democracies remained paralysed through their lack of ‘solidarity and courage’. It called on the LON to consider coercive sanctions if necessary to uphold the law and the principle of humanity.25 In light of the expression of such feelings in France, it is not surprising that the French RUP would come out openly on the side of the Republicans.26 Although its influence would decline as the prospect of war intensified, at the end of September 1937 when the French national congress of the IPC/RUP was held in Paris, the movement was laying claim to

24 Conseil national de la paix to Bonnet, 8 October 1936, AG 1-IICI-B-V-4, UA. The Conseil national de la paix condemned the Japanese invasion of China and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. See Conseil national de la paix to IIIC, 18 May 1936, AG 1-IICI-B-V-4, UA, and RUP to the secretary general of the IICI, 3 March 1936, AG 1-IICI-B-V-4, UA. 25 Conseil national de la paix to Bonnet, 8 October 1936. AG 1-IICI-B-V-4, UA. See also RUP to the secretary general of the IICI, 3 March 1936, AG 1-IICI-B-V-4, UA. 26 Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 40–41. See also Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 152. Birn points out that members of the League of Nations Union (LNU) became increasingly outraged at their leadership’s conservative responses to their demands that the LNU publicly call for all foreign troops to withdraw from Spain.

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the adherence of forty-three national committees and forty international organisations and through them, the support of some four hundred million people.27 The French national congress of the IPC/RUP was held against the background of the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne. This exposition, which opened in Paris on May 25, 1937, and ran until November 25 of that year, had as its two predominant themes ‘Peace and Progress’. Given its theme of peace and given the standing of the IPC/RUP as a major international peace movement, it might seem unremarkable that the exposition’s general commission invited the IPC/RUP to participate in the exposition in the form of a Palais-Musée de la Paix.28 However, it should be noted that the invitation issued by the exposition’s general commission to the IPC/ RUP was not an unprompted one: it was Cot as air minister and Léon Blum as prime minister who ultimately ensured IPC/RUP involvement in the exposition. Indeed, according to Philippe Rivoirard, the first time that the pavilion of peace was mentioned in the period leading up to the exposition, was in a letter dated November 14, 1936, addressed to Blum. This letter was signed by a number of prominent French figures among them being Cot, who as we saw was joint president of the IPC/RUP, Jouhoux, in his role as secretary general of the Confération générale du Travail, Paul-Boncour, in his role president of the Associations françaises pour la Société des Nations, and Paul Rivet, in his role as director of the Musée de l’Homme.29

27 Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 42. See also RUP to the director of the IICI, 4 August 1937, AG 1-IICI-B-V-4, UA, and Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 149. See further Philippe Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ in Bertrand Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (Paris: Institut français d’architecture/ Paris-Musées, 1987), 313–34. Philippe Rivoirard states that there were forty national committees affiliated with the IPC/RUP and notes that they were located in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, China, Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, India, the Irish Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Turkey, the United States of America, Uruguay, the USSR, Venezuela and Yugoslavia. 28 International Secretariat of the RUP to IIIC, n.d., received by the IIIC, 24 November 1936, AG 1 IICI-B-V-4, UA. 29 Mazuy, ‘Le Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix,’ 42, and Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 308.

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An International Exhibition When the French government first committed itself to the exposition in December 1929, it had intended that it would serve largely as a means of ‘consolidating French claims to cultural authority’.30 By 1936, however, changed political and economic conditions demanded its reconceptualisation. France at that time was suffering from economic recession and had become politically polarised, this second factor being reflected in the fiercely fought elections of May 1936 which saw the victory of the anti-Fascist Popular Front. In view of these considerations, the Blum government organised the exposition with a view to alleviating France’s economic problems and healing social divisions through promoting a thicker sense of cultural and national identity.31 In the official book of the exposition, the French minister of commerce, Fernand Chapsal, observed that against the background of a large movement of opinion in favour of abandoning the exposition which was supported as much in parliament as in Paris’s Municipal Council, the government had determined that the project of the exposition ‘must be integrated into the plan of economic recovery and the battle against unemployment.’32 That the exposition was intended to have a socially palliative effect was epitomised by Blum’s declaration that he hoped that the exposition would foster among the citizens of France a ‘feeling of national cohesion’ and render them ‘more greatly aware of their profound unity and strength’.33 A key role was to be played by art in these respects. Although not formally part of the exhibition, one might call attention here to an enormous state-sponsored retrospective entitled Chefs-d’oeuvre de l’art

30 Arthur Chandler, ‘Duality,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937), expanded and revised from World’s Fair Magazine 8, no. 1 (1988), http://www.arthurchandler.com/paris-1937-exposition. 31 Ibid. See also Bertrand Lemoine, preface to Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 13–4. 32 Fernand Chapsal, introduction to Ministère du Commerce et de l’Industrie, Livre d’or officiel de l’Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne (Paris: Éditions Spec, 1937), 14. 33 Léon Blum, 1937, quoted in Ihor Junyk, ‘The Face of the Nation: State Fetishism and Métissage at the Exposition Internationale, Paris 1937,’ Grey Room, no. 23 (2006): 96–112, 104.

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français (Masterpieces of French Art). An initiative of Blum, the retrospective was prepared with a view to the official inauguration of the Palais de Tokyo on May 24, 1937.34 The Palais de Tokyo, the style of which as with the neighbouring Palais de Chaillot comprised modernist, neoclassical and monumental elements, was designed with the purpose of accommodating two museums of modern art: an east wing, which was destined to house the collection of the municipality of Paris, and a west wing, which was destined to house the collection of the French state.35 Appropriately, on the esplanade in front of the building, ‘a large gilded bronze sculpture,’ the work of Antoine Bourdelle, ‘representing the Spirit of France was erected.’36 The intention of the authorities was that the Palais des musées d’art moderne would receive the aforementioned collections following the conclusion of the exposition. For the exposition’s duration, however, the rooms of the east wing of the palais were reserved for the use of the exhibition’s general commission and for displays of information concerning the fields of urbanism, museography and international intellectual cooperation. During the same period, the west wing of the palais was used to house a retrospective entitled Masterpieces of French Art.37 Pascal Ory

34 Société

pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937: Guide officiel (Paris: Ḗditions de la Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, 1937), 92; Jerry Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, by James D. Herbert, Art in America, no. 88 (1999): 39; Gérard Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ in Vincent Bouvet and Gérard Durozol, eds., Paris Between the Wars: Art, Style and Glamour in the Crazy Years, trans. Ruth Sharman (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 283–84; Philippe Dagen, ‘La malédition du Palais de Tokyo,’ Le Monde 2, April 11, 2009: 46–9, 48; and Pacal Ory, ‘Le Front populaire et l’Exposition,’ in Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 31. 35 Dagen, ‘La malédition du Palais de Tokyo,’ 46, 48; Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937, 90; Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition by James D. Herbert, 39. 36 Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 284. 37 Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937, 90–2. Jean Cassou was the person appointed to direct the Musée national d’ art moderne. His appointment was ‘revoked by Vichy from September 1940 because this former defender of Republican Spain…[was]…reputed to be close to the Communists.’ Dagen, ‘La malédition du Palais de Tokyo,’ 48. The museum finally opened on August 6, 1942, under the direction of Pierre Ladoué and Bernard Dorival. Only a part of the museum’s collection was displayed. Although covering more than fifty years of national art, the presentation

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points out that Masterpieces of French Art comprised 1341 works in total. He adds that this number was unprecedented for such a subject.38 Among the masterpieces of French art on display were works of antiquity, that is, from Gallo-Roman times, from the height of the middle ages, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and from the age of the impressionists.39 Although acknowledging that this retrospective of French art was not part of the international exposition, an official guide to the exposition issued by the Société pour le Développement du Tourisme nonetheless urged people to attend it in order that they could ‘study the first expressions of our creative genius’ and more generally see brought together for the first time so many ‘sister-works.’40 In relation to this last observation, the comment of Louis Gillet concerning the retrospective (which seems to have been both a popular and critical success), is worth noting: it was ‘a demonstration of French culture’s “essential unity”’.41 However, as Jerry Cullum points out, such unity came at the price of ‘excluding four decades of 20th-century aesthetic disputation,’ and it was with this exclusion in view that the curators of the Museum of Modern Art of the Municipality of Paris organised a major retrospective in the Petit Palais called Masters of Independent Art (Les maîtres was ‘purged of Picasso, foreign artists, surrealists and abstractionists… [and]…dedicated primarily to an art of consensus which is strictly French.’ Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, L’art en guerre: 12 octobre-17 février 2013 (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012). Exhibition brochure. Philippe Dagen notes that staging the presentation at the museum, rendered ‘more difficult the requisition of the building by the Nazis.’ He also points out that ‘in October 1942, the lower floors of the building would become one of the places to stock goods pillaged from Jewish Parisians. At the Palais de Tokyo, some dozens of pianos accumulate from November 15 and remain there as far as April 1945 and their restitution to the surviving owners—when there are some survivors.’ Dagen, ‘La malédition du Palais de Tokyo,’ 49. 38 Pascal Ory, ‘Le Front populaire et l’Exposition,’ in Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 31. 39 Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937, 92, and Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition by James D. Herbert, 39. 40 Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition by James D. Herbert, 39, and Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 283–84. 41 Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, by James D. Herbert, 39. On the exhibition’s success see Ory, ‘Le Front populaire et l’Exposition,’ in Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 32.

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de l’art indépendent).42 Gérard Durozol points out that this exhibition, which included works by Bonnard, Braque, Delaunay, Dufy, Léger, Maillol, Matisse and Picasso, was staged ‘despite rumbling protests at the city council, where some claimed that these so-called “masters”…were all foreigners, of the kind regarded in Germany as “degenerate” and also rejected by Italy and the USSR’.43 In fact, the curator of he exhibition, Raymond Escholier, had invited foreign artists who had lived in Paris prior to 1925 to participate in the exhibition in order to underscore the cosmopolitan complexion of the art being produced in Paris at the time.44 The exhibition received reasonably positive reviews in the press, however, there were criticisms from within certain artistic circles. Vasily Kandinsky, who had moved from Germany to Boulogne following the proscription of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, observed that it ‘absolutely followed the trend of the Paris market, which does all it can to systematically leave in the shade anything and everything new.’45 Durozol explains that this judgement explains Kandinsky’s involvement in the planning of a ‘complementary exhibition’ at the Jeu de Palme, entitled Origines et développements de l’art international indépendent which, in contrast with the Petit Palais exhibition, included works of abstraction and Surrealism.46 Meanwhile, plans were underway to stage the first major retrospective of Surrealism. These plans which were realised on January 17, 1938, with the opening of the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts which featured 314 works by sixty-three artists from sixteen different countries.47 Cullum notes that the exhibition was 42 Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, by James D. Herbert, 39, and Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 283. 43 Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 267. 44 Ibid., 267, 283–84. See also James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 4. 45 Vasily Kandinstky, n.d., quoted in Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 284. On Kandinsky’s shift to France, see Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 266. 46 Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 267, 284. See also Ory, ‘Le Front populaire et l’Exposition,’ in Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 32. Ory notes that this exhibition received the French state’s seal of approval. 47 Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 256, and Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, L’art en guerre: 12 octobre 2012–17 février 2013 (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012). Exhibition brochure.

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intended as a riposte to the ‘cool rationality’ of the exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo and the Petit Palais, a riposte which saw the art works displayed ‘in near-total darkness’ (that is, until the organisers ran out of torches), ‘amid strategically located clutter.’48 Although fairly successful with the public, the exhibition’s critics ‘deplored what they saw as the negation of the French spirit…in what amounted to no more than a jumble of odds and ends.’49 Rather more perceptive, Durozol states, was the observation of the critic Raymond Cogniat: that ‘each visitor is forced to accept the unacceptable and can only escape his discomfort through laughter or anger.’50 Indeed, what some dismissed as an insane or frightfully melancholic show of art would in the wake of the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, seem like a ‘strange premonition’.51 It would not be too long before most of the contributing artists, ‘more politicised than their average contemporaries and…aware that everything overnight can turn into violence,’ would be forced into hiding in France or into exile abroad, that is, if they had not already been sent to internment camps as foreign ‘undesirables’ in light of the French government’s decree of November 12, 1938.52 Through the organisation of the artistic dimension of the 1937 exposition, the French government also sought to alleviate poverty among artists: the market for art had declined, not only due to depressed economic conditions but also to the artistic embrace of abstract art, a style of art that had not proved wildly popular among the buying public.53 In addition to a humanitarian concern, there was a feeling of embarrassment at the time about the abject state of artists given Paris’s standing as a world centre of artistic creativity. Thus, the French government along with the city of Paris employed two thousand artists, commissioning 48 Cullum, review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, by James D. Herbert, 39. For the use of torches at the International Surrealist Exhibition, see Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 256. 49 Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 258. 50 Raymond Cogniat, 1938, quoted ibid. 51 Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, L’art en guerre: 2 octobre 2012–17 février 2013 (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012). Exhibition brochure. 52 Ibid. See also ‘Liste des décrets-lois,’ Le Temps, November 14, 1938, and Vicki Caron, ‘Prelude to Vicy: France and the Jewish Refugees in the Era of Appeasement,’ Journal of Contemporary History 2, no. 1 (1985): 157–76, 164–65. 53 Chandler, ‘Duality,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937).

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them to paint frescoes and to decorate the French pavilions, a good number of which, it is worth noting, were consecrated to such artefacts of modernity as cinema, advertising, aluminium, radio and television.54 Architects too were employed extensively on behalf of the exposition. Due to the influence exercised on the ministry of education by the Union des artistes moderne (UAM), the formation of which was announced in 1929 in a manifesto which declared that the UAM was dedicated to ‘L’Art moderne cadre de la vie contemporaine,’ it was modernist architecture that held sway throughout the city.55 Yet in keeping with the desire of the organisers to generate among the French citizens a sense of their essential unity, it was a somewhat restrained form of modernism that characterised the architecture of the exposition in its totality.56 The formal instruction given to the architects was that of ‘harmony of the most revolutionary modernism with the most profound respect for the formidable patrimony of traditions.’57 Generating considerable excitement was the Palais de l’air, its focal point being a massive Aeronautical Hall. Hanging from its ceilings was a display designed by Robert and Sonia Delaunay consisting of ‘gigantic, aluminium rings reminiscent of the rings of Saturn or the paths of electrons,’ encircling a fighter plane. Yet it was not only the airplane’s military function that was highlighted within the walls of the Aeronautical Hall: bas-reliefs depicted ‘airlines tying together (with France leading the way), Europe, the Americas, Indochina and Africa’.58 Such a depiction was evocative of the more general idea of a borderless modernity, its instruments serving to shrink the distances amongst peoples, thereby, as the bas-reliefs in the Aeronautical Hall suggested, socially uniting them. This idea was also evoked in the Pavillon de la 54 Ibid. 55 Jonathan M. Woodham, ‘Paris Exposition des Arts et Technqiues dans la Vie Moderne,’ in Jonathan M. Woodham, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780192800978.001.0001, and Bertrand Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne,’ in Isabelle Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architectures, 1855–1937 (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine/Centre des monuments nationaux, 2009), 71. 56 Junyk, ‘The Face of the Nation,’ 105, and Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne,’ 71. 57 Robert Lange, 1937, quoted in Junyk, ‘The Face of the Nation,’ 105. 58 Chandler, ‘Railway and Airline,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937).

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Radio where the vast networks of communication that transmitted sounds and images across the globe was illustrated and explained.59 The Radio Pavilion was situated in the vicinity of the Pont Alexandre III, which had been converted for the duration of the exposition into the Triumphal Way of Light and Radio (Voie triomphale de la lumière et de la radio).60 Consisting in a series of tall kiosks placed on each side of the bridge, the Triumphal Way of Light and Radio was brilliantly illuminated at night.61 Indeed, electric light was used in abundance throughout the exposition, the gift to humanity that electricity represented being celebrated in Raoul Dufy’s immense painting entitled La fée électricité (The Electricity Fairy) which was especially commissioned for the exposition and which was housed in the Pavilon de l’électricité et de la lumière, ‘where gigantic circuit-breakers and generators stood before it like monstrous robot sentries’.62 The principal locus of the exposition was the Palais de Chaillot. Erected on the top of the colline de Chaillot on the foundation of the old Palais du Trocadéro, it was built especially for the exposition but with the ultimate intention that it would house three permanent museums: the Musée de la Marine, the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Monuments français. The Musée de l’Homme, which was founded in 1937 by Rivet (who was also, according to Georges Henri-Rivière, a founder of the Popular Front), was the old Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro transformed and modernised, its change of title heralding the advent of a ‘science of synthesis’: a meeting of anthropology, prehistory, ethnography, sociology, and linguistics.63 Although criticised later for, among other things, manifesting ‘cultural arrogance’ (such as through 59 Patrice A. Carré, ‘“Exactement modernes”?: Les techniques de communication,’ Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 16, no. 16 (1987): 84–90, 87. 60 Ibid., 86–87. 61 Bertrand Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne,’ in Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architectures, 1855–1937, 78. 62 Nigel Simeone, ‘Music at the 1937 Paris Exposition: The Science of Enchantment,’ Musical Times 143, no. 1878 (2002): 9–17, 10. Pavilon de l’électricité et de la lumière was designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens and Henri Pingusson. La Fée Électricité is now housed in a gallery of the Palais de Tokyo. 63 J. Millot, ‘Le Musée de l’Homme,’ Revue de Paris 45, no. 15 (1938): 687–94, 687– 88. See also Katherine Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marbelous in Everyday Life (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2003) 117.

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allowing ‘French ethnographers to move an entire Ethiopian chapel interior’ into the museum), it is important to the note that the Musée de l’Homme was conceived at the time as a counter to doctrines of racial superiority.64 Although the original plan had been that the museum would be opened in 1937 to coincide with the exposition, according to Alice L. Conklin industrial action on the part building workers at the Chaillot site meant that its inauguration had to be delayed. When the museum was finally inaugurated on June 21, 1938, it was amidst much fanfare. In attendance were such dignitaries as Albert Lebrun, the president of France; Jean Zay, the minister for education; Sarraut, who was at the time of the museum’s inauguration the minister of the interior; and Georges Mandel, the minister for the colonies. Writing some weeks after the event, Jacques Millot observed that to attend the inauguration, was to ‘find onself lost in an immense crowd’ and close to ‘Tout-Paris’. More importantly, he went on to insist that the Musée de l’Homme was a reaffirmation of the right of all cultures and societies to respect however humble they might be.65 For Millot, who himself would later direct the museum, the Musée de l’Homme was a powerful reassertion of humanism in the face of the fanatical cult of race. In this regard, he stated the following: At a moment when, in certain of the most powerful States of the world, the ethnic mystique attains its apogee, and when race, having become an idol, crushes the individual and dominates all spiritual values and morals, the Musée de l’Homme is there in order to show to all that the apparent diversity of human beings covers over a profound unity; that every original culture has its value and its merits; that the most modest forms of life and civilization are not for this reason the least respectable; that finally there is not any race that can legitimately arrogate to itself the right to despise the others.66

As noted, in terms of its architectural style, the Palais de Chaillot brings together modernist, neo-classical and monumentalist elements. 64 Cullum,

review of Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, by James D. Herbert, 39. ‘Le Musée de l’Homme,’ 687–88. On the matter of the delay in the opening of the Musée de l’Homme and for the date on which it was finally inaugurated, see Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 140, 143. 66 Millot, ‘Le Musée de l’Homme,’ 694. 65 Millot,

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It features two curved wings, these being retained from the Palais du Trocadéro, which the Palais de Chaillot’s creators adorned with classical columns. These two colonnades are linked by a vast terrace, that is, the Esplandade du Trocadéro, from the vantage point of which one can enjoy a panoramic view extending across the Seine to the Eiffel Tower and beyond that to the Champs de Mars. On either side of this terrace, two monumental staircases lead down to the Jardins du Trocadéro, the central axis of which features decorative ponds and ornamental fountains. Many of the forty-four national pavilions erected for the purpose of the exposition, were located in these gardens, among them being the German pavilion. Designed by the Reich’s chief architect Albert Speer along neoclassical lines, the German pavilion was approximately 152 metres in height and had a bronze imperial eagle perched on the edge of the roof of its main façade, its claws gripping a wreath framing a swastika.67 The German pavilion communicated emphatically the power of the Reich and it was in an excellent position to do so: it was located at the far end of the Jardins du Trocadéro near to the right bank of the Seine. In a decision that some suggest was motivated by the desire to orchestrate a ‘peaceful encounter of ideological enemies,’ the organisers placed the German pavilion and the pavilion of the USSR directly opposite each other.68 Shorter in height than the German pavilion, the pavilion of the USSR, which was strictly modernist in style, compensated for the difference by means of the two colossal sculptures. These sculptures, which were created by Vera Mukhina, a former pupil of Bourdelle, were planted on the roof of the pavilion. Defiantly facing the pavilion 67 Chandler, ‘Total Disorder,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937). 68 Andreas Fickers, ‘Presenting the “Window on the World” to the World, Competing Narratives of the Presentation of Television at the World’s Fairs in Paris (1937) and New York (1939),’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28, no. 3 (2008): 291–310, 293, 300–01. In a demonstration of German technical prowess, a camera located on the roof of the German Pavilion transmitted live footage of the exposition which could be viewed in a ‘movie theatre at the edge of the exhibition hall.’ Arthur Chandler records the following observation concerning the placement of the pavilions: ‘[T]he scheme of the whole was undiscoverable, since the placement of the 200 pavilions was made without any overarching plan, with the exception of those in the Trocadero Esplanade.’ François Robichon, 1983, quoted in Chandler, ‘An Undiscoverable Scheme,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937).

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opposite, the two figures comprising Mukhina’s sculptural work, which was entitled Worker and Collective Farm Woman, together held aloft a hammer and sickle.69 Meanwhile, at the base of the German pavilion, a ‘massively naked Teutonic couple…[stared]… at the Russian monument with grim determination’.70 Although the pavilions at such international exhibitions had often been used as vehicles for the expression of national aspirations or the assertion of national prestige in the past, at the 1937 exposition this tendency reached dizzying heights, its apotheosis being the face en face between the pavilion of Nazi Germany and that of the USSR.71 This architectural encounter was immediately notorious. In his autobiography, the composer Darius Milhaud pointed out that the French government had decided to hold a ceremony at the Sorbonne in June 1937 in order to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of Briand. With this ceremony in view, it commissioned Milhaud to write a musical piece, the issue of this commission being a choral work entitled, appropriately enough for a composition intended as an homage to one of the two principal sponsors of the Pact of Paris, Cantate de la paix. Milhaud’s music provided the setting for words penned by Paul Claudel, a poet and diplomat who had served as ambassador at Washington D.C. from 1928 to 1933 and who had worked closely with Briand over a long period. Another commission that Milhaud received concerned the Musée de l’Homme. In his autobiography, the composer noted that Vicomte 69 Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne,’ 71. These sculptures were over twenty-four metres in high. According to Chandler, Albert Speer claimed to have ‘accidentally stumbled into a room containing a sketch of the Russian Pavilion’ and thus was able to design a building which dominated the Soviet Pavilion opposite. Chandler, ‘The Dialectics of National Pavilions,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937). On the association between Vera Mukhina and Antoine Bourdelle, see Durozol, ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ 284. The title of Mukhina’s sculpture is recorded in Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, 14. 70 Chandler, ‘The Dialectics of National Pavilions,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937). 71 Ory, ‘Paris, capitale des expositions universelles,’ 12. The Italian pavilion glorified Fascism in monumental style and in the form of an ‘equestrian statue “The genius of fascism”’ which was erected in front of it. See Simeone, ‘Music at the 1937 Paris Exposition,’ 10. Jonathan M. Woodham states that the modernist British pavilion avoided the tendency to propagandise in its displays. Woodham, ‘Paris Exposition des Arts et Technqiues dans la Vie Moderne,’ in Woodham, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Design.

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Charles de Noailles, a noted patron of the arts, and Henri Monnet, the brother of Georges Monnet, minister of agriculture in Blum’s government, asked him to compose a cantata in order to mark the inauguration of the museum. The result of this commission was Cantate pour l’inauguration du Musée de l’Homme, (later renamed Cantate de l’Homme), the words for which were written by the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos. Milhaud recorded in his autobiography that on the occasion of the inauguration of the Musée de l’Homme, this cantata was performed before a crowded audience in the lecture-room of the museum. However, this was not the premier performance of the work: the Cantate pour l’inauguration du Musée de l’Homme was first publicly perfomed on October 11, 1937, on the Esplanade du Trocadéro. Milhaud described the period during which the Cantate de la paix and the Cantate pour l’inauguration du Musée de l’Homme premiered as a ‘brilliant season’ which saw ‘official ceremonies…[follow]…on another thick and fast as if to add to the brilliance.’ Nonetheless, and like many others at the time, he had a growing sense of foreboding. In his autobiography, Milhaud gave the following account of the feelings engendered in him and in his wife, namely, Madeleine Milhaud (who was the récitante on the occasion of the first public performance of the Cantate pour l’inauguration du Musée de l’Homme), by the spectacles on display in the Jardins du Trocadéro and in the Champs de Mars: In spite of the difficult period that followed the adoption of the Popular Front Government’s social reforms…and the disturbances, strikes and factory occupations, preparations for the International Exhibition of 1937 went ahead and were eventually crowned with amazing success. Yet the mutter of sinister threats and portents was already to be heard. There was to be an Austrian pavilion, but the evil forces of the Anschluss were never far away. Picasso’s Guernica adorned the walls of the Spanish pavilion, but the Republic had been murdered. Opposite one another, the German and Soviet pavilions seemed to challenge one another to mortal combat. One evening as we watched the sun set behind the immense mass of flags of all the nations that fluttered above the Pont d’Iéna, Madeleine clutched my arm in anguish and whispered: ‘This is the end of Europe!’72 72 Milhaud, My Happy Life: An Autobiography, 188–89. See also Darius Milhaud Society, The Darius Milhaud Society Newsletter 7 (Summer/Fall, 1991), 1, 3; Jane E. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 231, n.206; Lucik Aprahamian, ‘Darius Milhaud’s “Cantate pour

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In its monumentalism, the Palais de Chaillot has long been seen (as with the neighbouring Palais de Tokyo), as embodying an aesthetic that would have been equally at home in Berlin, Moscow or Rome.73 Yet some have challenged the view of neoclassical monumentalism as an essentially totalitarian architectural style. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, for example, notes that it was embraced in that decade as the style in which the state ‘visually manifested power and authority,’ noting that as such it could be adapted for the purpose of underlining the solidity of ­liberal-democratic institutions just as much as it could be employed in order to give expression to the all-absorbing power of the total state. Indeed, it was because this style was seen as lending grandeur to the institutions it was intended to represent, that it informed the design of the new Geneva headquarters of the League of Nations which in the autumn of 1937 hosted for the first time a meeting of the assembly.74 When used with reference to the LON’s new headquarters, the description of neoclassical monumentalism as ‘government international’ acquires an added significance.75 Ory makes a similar point to that of Schivelbusch, noting that the ‘classical monumental logic’ that the Palais de Chaillot embodies was at the time considered a ‘democratic response to the surrounding totalitarian propositions’.76 As Bertrand Lemoine explains, the Palais de Chaillot is neither a monument of “socialist realism” nor a monument “nazi” or “mussolinian”: it conforms certainly to an aesthetic of representation of the State, but with an ethic that is modern and progressive, linked to values [that are] democratic and hedonistic….The composition of the palais

l’inaguration du Musée de l’Homme,” op. 164: An Examination of Performance Practices and Contemporary Solutions, PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2010, 13, http://hdl. handle.net/10159/195792; and Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marbelous in Everyday Life, 117. 73 Dagen,

‘La malédition du Palais de Tokyo,’ 48. Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 4. 75 Lois Craig and the staff of the Federal Architecture Project, The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and Symbols in United States Government Building (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 331, 334. See also Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, 4. 76 Ory, ‘Paris, capitale des expositions universelles,’ 10. 74 Wolfgang

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is significant in this regard….At the centre, a grand esplanade where one encounters the silence of petrified crowds, a solitary voice amplified by loud speakers [?] To the contrary, a parvis open on two sides, a place of passage, of exchange, of pleasure: leaning on the parapet one discovers the air and the light, the hum of Paris, the spectacle of the Seine, the Tour Eiffel and the Champ-de-Mars.77

Here, one might suggest that in its monumentalism, the palais served as the architectural equivalent of a foreign policy of firmness.78 As Lemoine further stated, it was the sole building at the exposition ‘capable of opposing itself to the mass of the German and Soviet pavilions.’79 At the same time however, the building, with its two vast wings inherited from the old Trocadéro, may be viewed as offering a gesture of welcome to the various national pavilions camped in the gardens and fields below.80 In addition to its domestic socio-economic functions, the creators of the exposition clearly intended that it would serve to reveal a confidant French nation to the world. In this regard, it may also seem noteworthy that the 1937 exposition did not fail to remind audiences that France was a major imperial power. The Centre of Colonies was located on the île des Cynges, an artificial island in the Seine located between the Quai de Passy and the Quai de Grenelle. It symbolised in the context of the exposition, the France d’outre mer. On exhibition at the ‘île des Cynges and housed in separate pavilions, were the arts and crafts of the French 77 Bertrand Lemoine, ‘Le Palais de Chaillot,’ in Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 89. The essential humanism of the Palais de Chaillot is further underscored by the inscription of verses written by Paul Valéry on each of the pediments of the two wings of the palais. One of these verses proposes that cultural enrichment stems from the individual’s desire for such enrichment while the other pays homage to the experience of artistic creation. For further comment on the possible interpretations of the architecture of the Palais de Chaillot, see Chandler, ‘Total Disorder,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937). 78 Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, 5. ‘The Palais [de Chaillot] symbolized France’s self-perception as a major power, unwilling to back down before the two dictatorships, or rather, firmly holding center stage while shunting its rivals off to the sides’ (ibid.). Ihor Junyk notes that when French officials ‘became aware of the fact that many foreign nations were tuning up their propaganda machines’ they decided that France ‘needed to compete or risk being trumped at home.’ Junyk, ‘The Face of the Nation,’ 100. 79 Lemoine, ‘Le Palais de Chaillot,’ 98. 80 Ibid., 89.

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colonies of Algeria, Corsica, the French Indies, Guadeloupe, Indochina, Madagascar, Martinique, Morocco, Réunion and Tunisia as well as those of the territories under French mandate, including the states of the Levant.81 Yet according to Jonathan M. Woodham, although acknowledging France’s ‘imperial leanings,’ the Centre of Colonies, which was reportedly difficult to access, seemed to suggest that France’s ‘commitment to her colonies…[was]…less vibrant’ than it had been several years earlier.82 As Lemoine observes, the grand Colonial Exposition of 1931 had been an emphatic reaffirmation of French ‘supremacy over her possessions d’outre mer’.83 That the staging of the Centre of Colonies (which as it turned out would be the last time a French colonial exhibition was staged), may have communicated the message that France’s commitment to its colonies was less enthusiastic than it had been some years earlier, may be explained in part by the following consideration: within the Socialist Party ‘some groups and individuals were avowedly colonialist while others were anticolonialist,’ a consequence of this being a ‘Socialist overseas doctrine’ lacking in ‘forcefulness’.84 The same consideration may help explain why the Centre of Colonies sought to depict the local cultures of the French colonies as ‘part of the greater French family’ and tended to eschew the contrived exoticism which was part of the ambience of the 1931 Colonial Exposition.85 That said, the following description of the scene on the island is worth noting: on the ‘île des Cynges and seated amidst totem poles and ‘newly-planted banana trees, palms, and cacti,’ artisans from the colonies ‘weaved fabrics and 81 Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architectures, 1855–1937, 74. See also Woodham, ‘Paris Exposition des Arts et Technqiues dans la Vie Moderne,’ in Woodham, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Design. 82 Wooodham, ‘Paris Exposition des Arts et Technqiues dans la Vie Moderne,’ in Woodham, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Design. See also Catherine Hodeir, ‘La France d’outre-mer,’ in Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 291. 83 Lemoine, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition coloniale internationale,’ 63. 84 William B. Cohen, ‘The Colonial Policy of the Popular Front,’ French Historical Studies 7, no. 23 (1972): 368–93, 372–74. See also Hodeir, ‘La France d’outre-mer,’ 291. Catherine Hodeir points out that the colonial exhibition in Paris in 1937 was the last such exhibition. 85 Lemoine, ‘Paris 1931: Exposition coloniale internationale,’ 63. See also Hodeir, ‘La France d’outre-mer,’ 287. See also Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 94–5.

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sang their songs’.86 Doubtless of most importance in explaining the relative lack of fanfare at the 1937 exposition in regard to France’s imperial status is the fact that, as William B. Cohen points out, under the Popular Front government ‘colonial affairs were given little priority in the face of what then seemed the far more pressing domestic and international problems.’87 Indeed, it was the pressing nature of. international problems that had caused Blum, according to Cohen, to indicate in talks in Paris in August 1936 with Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the Reich’s minister for national economics and president of the Reichsbank, that France might be willing to consider the German demand for the cession of colonies.88 Sitting in the shadow of the muscular display of national egoism that was the Reich’s pavilion, was the pavilion of the Spanish Republic which was both modest in size and modernist in style. Designed by Josep Lluis Sert, the Spanish pavilion was nothing less than a desperate cry for help on the part of Republican Spain against the background of what had become a struggle for national survival. El Guernica, a study in outrage at the Nazi and Fascist aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26 and the mass casualties it caused, had been especially painted for the exposition by Picasso at his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins. The painting was displayed in the entrance hall of the pavilion which was adjacent to an atrium where a cinematic programme devised by the filmmaker Luis Buñuel depicted the other horrors which were then being visited on the Spanish population. Commissioned by the Spanish Republic, El Guernica provoked a rabid reaction in the German press.89 86 Chandler, ‘Colonies and Provinces,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937). 87 Cohen, ‘The Colonial Policy of the Popular Front,’ 393. 88 Ibid., 388. 89 Pascal Ory, ‘Paris, capitale des expositions universelles,’ in Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 13, and Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, ‘Max Beckmann and German Modernism,’ The Mad Square Symposium: Art and Culture in Weimar Germany, Art Gallery of New South Wales, August 6, 2011. Notes on symposium lecture in possession of author. Jay Winter records the following of the attack on Guernica and Picasso’s artistic representation of that attack: ‘On that morning, the city centre was destroyed by aerial bombardment. One hundred thousand pounds of explosive were dropped on the town by bombers of the German Condor Legion. Approximately 1,600 people, or one-third of the population of Guernica, were killed. A small arms factory and the town’s railroad station were not hit; the target was civilian life itself. On 30 April, three days after the attack, the story appeared in the Parisian newspaper Ce soir, along with black and white photographs. The next day, Picasso began drawings for his mural. Within

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Just opposite El Guernica was another work commissioned for the pavilion: a constructivist sculpture by Alexander Calder entitled Mercury Fountain. In employing the medium of mercury, Calder was alluding to the ongoing siege at Almadén by General Franco’s forces, Almadén being the site of a large mercury mine. Mercury was the currency in which the Germans were to be paid for their assistance in destroying the Spanish Republic: the Reich wanted mercury for the purpose of feeding its swelling war-machine.90 Also compelling public interest in the Spanish Pavilion, was a huge mural in the building’s stairwell painted by Joan Miró which was formally entitled the Catalan Peasant in Revolt but which became unofficially known as The Reaper. James Thrall Soby, who viewed the painting in situ, later wrote that no-one who saw this mural, with its ‘ferocious and tormented central figure of a reaper with a sickle,’ could have forgotten its ‘strong and poignant efficacy as a symbol of oppression’.91 Volker Barth observes that despite the fact that the Italian aggression in Ethiopia, the war in Spain and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war had already announced ‘the catastrophe to come,’ the French hosts of the international exposition sought to ‘paint a picture of a world in harmony’.92 Chapsal, underscored this in a speech inaugurating the exposition in which he stated the following: France’s decision to hold this major event in insecure and difficult times demonstrates faith in its fate and the future of peace. And by taking up the invitation, the peoples of the world have demonstrated their solidarity with this faith and that they also intend to direct their efforts to the same

a few days he was transferring them on a white canvas, measuring 3.5 by 7.5 meters….In early June 1937, only four weeks after it had been begun, the painting was transported to the Spanish pavilion of the expo. Picasso himself offered his drawings and sketches for sale in the pavilion: postcards of the work were also available.’ Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom, 83. 90 Schulz-Hoffmann, ‘Max Beckmann and German Modernism,’ The Mad Square Symposium: Art and Culture in Weimar Germany. Notes on symposium lecture in possession of author. 91 On The Reaper, see James Thrall Soby, Joan Miró (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 88, 91. 92 Volker Barth, ‘Paris 1937: Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne,’ in Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 71.

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objective. The World Exposition will have fallen short of its goal if it were merely a spectacle—whatever its brilliance.93

Indeed, following its conclusion, Chapsal rejoiced in the thought that the exposition had unfolded as much more than a French spectacle involving a degree of foreign collaboration. Indeed, he stated that the exposition had turned out to be a great ‘gathering [rassemblement] of peoples, a veritable Société des Nations.’94 Evoking the humanism that informed the thinking of certain of the exposition’s planners, such as that of Edmond Labbé, the exposition’s general commissioner, Chapsal stated that the exposition had become in reality an international work, a meeting of races, of peoples, of nations. The International Exposition of 1937 had manifested itself as a true demonstration of universal civilisation. Because not only had it testified to the state of this civilisation in all parts of the world, but had made it apparent that civilisation is one and indivisible and common to all. If the Exposition has revealed this truth…it will deserve well of civilisation and will have marked a date in human history.95

Yet the exposition did not paint a picture of unalloyed harmony: the very insecurities and difficulties to which Chapsal referred in his inaugural speech were incorporated into the exposition.96 Indeed, the attempt to engender feelings of. international solidarity and foster a new humanism via the exposition was a function of an acute awareness that the world existed in a state of profound disharmony, an awareness that 93 Fernand Chapsal, 1937, quoted in Fickers, ‘Presenting the “Window on the World” to the World,’ 293. 94 Chapsal, introduction to Ministère du Commerce et de l’Industrie, Livre d’or officiel de l’Exposition Internationale, 15–16. 95 Ibid., 15. See also Edmond Labbé ‘Les Leçons de l’exposition,’ in Ministère du Commerce et de l’Industrie, Livre d’or officiel de l’Exposition Internationale, 19–20; and Junyk, ‘The Face of the Nation,’ 104; and Lemoine, preface to Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 14. 96 Chandler, introduction to Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937). Chandler notes the following of one of the intentions of the exposition officials: ‘To their credit, exposition officials recognized that they were celebrating in a deeply troubled world, and did their best to confront the actual and impending disasters within the framework of the exposition itself’ (ibid.).

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obviously did not prevent some from entertaining the hope that it might regain its equilibrium through some great effort of will. The contribution of the IPC/RUP to the exposition, namely, the Pavillon de la Paix, reflected this pattern of thinking and should be viewed, as indeed it was viewed at the time, as an assertive exercise in peace propaganda. That the pavilion, one of only two international pavilions at the exposition, was intended as a serious propagandistic tool is underlined by the fact of its strategic location in the Place du Trocadéro, just opposite the Porte d’honneur of the exposition: the entrance to the Palais de Chaillot. By the time it was formally inaugurated on July 9 in the presence of a host of distinguished guests, among them Cecil, Cot, (the latter of whom presided at the inauguration and who in presiding read out a message from David Lloyd George who, as British prime minister, had played a major role at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and who had been unable to come to Paris on this occasion due to illness), Lord Davies, Blum, whose government had fallen by this time, Herriot and Avenol, the peace pavilion had been seen by three million visitors.97 The pavilion was designed along simple lines and, in an echo of the contours and patina of the Palais de Chaillot, was hemispherical in shape and light in tone.98 According to the guide to the exposition issued by the Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, forty-two nations participated in the exposition and it was the flags of these nations, and not, as one report incorrectly stated, the flags of the fifty-eight members of the LON, that were raised on the flat roof of the Peace Pavilion.99 Displayed above the entrance to the building on its left-hand side were the words International Peace Campaign and above the exit on its

97 Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 70, 74; Société pour le développement du tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937, 28, and Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 312, 314. 98 ‘The Star of Peace Shines over Paris: The Pavilion Which Calls on Men to Think and Choose,’ in Arthur Mee, ed., The Children’s Newspaper, no. 966 (1937): 1–2, and ChalletBailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 70, 74. 99 Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937, 28. See also Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 74, and ‘The Star of Peace Shines over Paris,’ in Mee, ed., The Children’s Newspaper, no. 966 (1937), 1. The author of the article ‘The Star of Peace Shines over Paris’ incorrectly reported that the flags raised on the roof of the Peace Pavilion were the flags of the LON.

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right-had side the words Rassemblement Universal pour la Paix.100 In the interior of the building there were four rooms. The first of these rooms was dedicated to the phenomenon of war, its ever-extending geographical reach and ever-intensifying destructiveness.101 In the same room, visitors were informed of the dreadful impact of the current war in Spain: ‘On the18 July 1936, Spain was in. peace; on the 18 July 1937, Spain is devastated, bloodied by the fact of rebellion and foreign intervention.’102 The next room was entitled ‘The Forces of Peace Act,’ and therein visitors witnessed scenes of individuals engaged in various tasks in the home, in the fields, in offices, and in studios. Thus, the IPC/RUP called upon visitors to choose between the forces of war and the forces of peace, shouting the word choose in different languages from the walls of the pavilion.103 The third room showcased the work of the LON, highlighting in this context the essential idea which animated the campaign of the IPC/RUP: [T]he League of Nations is formed of 58 members, 58 nations representing 1471 million human beings. The states that are not members of the League of Nations represent…301 million human beings. If we extract the United States which has not joined the League of Nations but which clearly expresses its neutrality, they [the non-members] represent 200 million human beings. ‘What government would dare to unleash war if it had to face humanity, risen in its pacific and powerful sovereignty.’104

The last of the four rooms detailed the work of the. ICP/RUP and the extent of its membership.105 As to the messages conveyed at the exterior of the structure, inscribed along the length of the upper reaches of the pavilion’s curved central wall was a quotation in French drawn from a 100 Challet-Bailhache,

ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 74. ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 312, and ‘The Star of Peace Shines over Paris,’ in Mee, ed., The Children’s Newspaper, no. 966 (1937), 1. 102 Pavilion de la Paix, Paris Éditions du RUP (s. d. [n. d.]), quoted in Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 312. See also Mee, ed., The Children’s Newspaper, no. 966 (1937), 1. The report entitled ‘The Star of Peace Shines over Paris’ notes that the impact of the Italian aggression in Ethiopia was depicted inside the pavilion. 103 ‘The Star of Peace Shines over Paris,’ in Mee, ed., The Children’s Newspaper, no. 966 (1937), 1. See also Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 312. 104 Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 312–13. 105 Ibid., 313. 101 Rivoirard,

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speech delivered by Briand in the French Senate on January 15, 1929 in defence of the Pact of Paris. To much applause and after having observed that the adversaries of the Pact of Paris in the United States Senate were afraid ‘to see America absorbed by the moral power of Geneva’ and that a critic of it in the French Senate was afraid that the LON would be ‘absorbed by the moral power of America,’ Briand declared the following: a moment will come when people will perceive that however distant the nations be from one another, ‘there is not a peace of Europe and a peace of America, but a peace of the entire world.’ On each side of the wall and immediately below this quotation and the name of its author, were reliefs outlining the world’s continents and other land masses. Shaded in were those areas occupied by countries which were not members of the LON. Inscribed on tablets placed along the length of the base of the wall, was the text of the Covenant of the League of Nations: in English on one side and in French on the other. In the very middle of the wall and also immediately below the Briand quotation, were the letters SDN: the acronym derived from the French name for the LON: the Société des Nations. Below these letters, was a representation of the LON’s new headquarters in the parc de l’Ariana in Geneva.106 Located directly in front of the letters SDN and the representation of the Palais des Nations, was the Monument de la Paix. This monument took the form of a bronze and green column in the tradition, as Rivoirard notes, of a structure which came to symbolise the pax Romana: the column of Trajan. Fifty metres in height and around five metres in diameter, the column was embroidered with olive leaves and bore in letters of gold the name of the IPC/RUP rendered in six different languages.107 The column was crowned with a huge ‘Star of Peace’. 106 Aristide Briand’s speech in the French Senate of January 15, 1929, is reproduced in the following: Christophe Bellon, ‘Aristide Briand et la “mise universelle de la guerre hors la loi”,’ Parlement[s], Revue d’histoire politique 2, no. 2 (2004): 143–49, 145, https:// www.cairn.info/revue-parlement[s]1-2-psge-138.htm. The quotation that appeared on the front wall of the Pavillion de la Paix was as follows: ‘Il n’y a pas une paix de l’Europe, et une paix de l’Amérique, mais une paix du monde entier’ (ibid). See also Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 91. 107 Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 308. See also Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 91. For the architectural and stylistic details concerning the Monument de la Paix, see Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937, 28. See also ChalletBailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 91.

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Emblazoned on its base was the word PAX in letters that were more than double the height of the average person. Due to its location on the heights of the Trocadéro, the column was in the direct sight of the many national pavilions camped in the gardens of the Palais de Chaillot and in the Champs de Mars. One American newspaper report concerning the opening day of the Monument de la Paix, observed the following: ‘The Spaniards continue their murderous struggle. Britain races to re-arm. The Nazis and Fascists belligerently keep the cauldron of war boiling. Nevertheless, the Peace Towers rises bravely above the 1937 Paris International Exposition, symbol of an elusive ideal.’108

The Month of Intellectual Cooperation The promotion of intellectual cooperation and cultural exchange amongst humanity was also central to the intentions of the exposition’s organisers.109 It was in view of this that Herriot issued an invitation on behalf of France to his colleagues on the ICIC, asking them to participate in the exposition. It was an invitation that the ICIC readily accepted, not least because of the opportunity it afforded the ICIC to show-case its work in front of the masses.110 To this end, the General Commission of the exposition placed at the disposal of the ICIC nine galleries on the upper floor of the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo.111 It was there on June 11 that Herriot, in the presence of a number of French and foreign dignitaries, opened an exhibition composed of lavish displays aimed at demonstrating, textually, graphically and symbolically, the reality and necessity of a société des esprits. It should be noted that the expression société des esprits had been coined by the French poet and essayist and from 1931 the president of the ICIC’s newly created

108 ‘Peace Tower Rises Mid War Scare,’ The Clearfield Progress (PA), June 9, 1937, and ‘The Star of Peace Shines over Paris,’ in Mee, ed., The Children’s Newspaper, no. 966 (1937), 1. See also Challet-Bailhache, ed., Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855–1937, 70, 74, 91, and Rivoirard, ‘Le pacifism et la Tour de la Paix,’ 310. 109 Lemoine, preface to Lemoine, ed., Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, 14. 110 ‘Intellectual Co-operation and the Paris Exhibition 1937,’ in League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1937, 139–44. 111 Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, Paris 1937, 91.

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Permanent Committee on Letters and Arts, Paul Valéry, in order to describe the work of the ICO. He stated in 1930 that from the very outset of the LON he had thought that a ‘Société des Esprits is the condition of a Société des Nations and that the one and the other can have only opinion as their unique and identical foundation.’112 Further underscoring the importance attached by the ICIC to its participation in the Paris exposition, in the previous year and with the approval of the League Assembly, the ICIC had declared July 1937 the ‘Month of Intellectual Cooperation’. Against the background of this declaration, the ICIC decided that certain activities of the ICO would take place in Paris during that month, not least among these activities being the annual plenary meeting of the ICIC. In order to show that the ICO was not an ivory tower but had roots in national communities, the ICIC decided that the second General Conference of the National Committees on Intellectual Cooperation would be convened in Paris between July 5 and 9. It should be noted that by 1937, there were fortyfour such committees, these being described by Herriot as the ICIC’s, ‘States-General’ (États-généraux).113 According to a report issued by the IIIC, the General Conference of the National Committees was the first international meeting held in connection with the ‘Month of Intellectual Co-operation’ in 1937 ‘to voice the fears felt in all quarters for the free development of intellectual life’; it added that ‘in the weeks months

112 Paul Valéry, ‘Société des Nations et Société des Esprits,’ L’Europe Nouvelle, September 20, 1930, 1349; L’ avenir de la culture: Entretiens de Madrid, May 3–7, 1933 (Paris: Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 1933), 284; ‘Intellectual Co-operation and the Paris Exhibition 1937,’ League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1937, 139–42. See also Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, Exposition internationale arts et techniques, 91. 113 ‘Extract of the Report Submitted by His Exc. M. Parra-Pérez to the Seventeenth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ and ‘Resolutions of the Seventeenth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ in League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1936 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1937), 132, 136–37. See also League of Nations, National Committees on Intellectual Co-operation (Geneva: Intellectual Co-operation Organisation, 1937), 5–6, 10. The first national committees on intellectual cooperation were formed in 1922. By 1928, the number of committees had risen to thirty-three. The first conference of national committees was held in Geneva from July 18 to July 20, 1929, where it was agreed to establish closer contact between the national committees.

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that followed, there was not a meeting which did not have occasion to denounce the obstacles encountered today by the works of the mind.’114 Another of the ICO’s activities that took place in Paris during the Month of Intellectual Cooperation was a conversation entitled Le destin prochain des lettres. Given the expression of fears at the time concerning the free development of intellectual life, the future destiny of letters was a particularly apt choice of subject and it should be noted that at the very time when this conversation was conducted an exhibition consecrated to books and letters was being held at the Palais de Chaillot. The conversation on the future destiny of letters was the eighth in a series of nine ‘Entretiens’ or ‘Conversations’ held by the ICIC’s Permanent Committee of Letters and Arts between 1932 and 1938. Noted for the participation in them of many leading intellectuals, these conversations, as Jean-Jacques Renoliet points out, were centred on the question of the destiny of culture and civilisation (chiefly that of Europe), and were intended to affirm an essential humanism. Notably, the first of these conversations was held at Frankfurt am Main in May 1932 under the heading of Entretiens sur Goethe à l‘occasion du centenaire de sa mort.115 At Frankfurt, Goethe’s birth-place, Murray had declared the following: The differences which exist between one nation and another have a value in themselves: they help to enrich the total heritage of humanity. They do not contain any intrinsic element of mutual antagonism. It is the misfortune of this sick and misguided epoch that the sentiments of affection that we attach to our diverse homes are today inseparable from that idol covered with blood, the independent sovereign State with its powerful armies and immense navies, its suspicions and blind hates and the incessant torture of its terrors.116 114 ‘General Introduction,’ in League of Nations, Intellectual Co-operation, 1938 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939), 3. 115 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 317–18. The seven other entretiens were as follows: L’avenir de la culture (Madrid, May 1933); L’avenir de la esprit Européen (Paris, October 1933); L’art et la réalité: l’art et l’État (Venice, July 1934); La formation de l’homme moderne (Nice, April 1935); Vers un nouvel humanisme (Budapest, June 1936); EuropeAmérique latine (Buenos-Aires, September 1936); and La qualité de la vie moderne (Nice, October 1938). The conversation at Nice in 1938 was the only one of the eight entretiens which went unpublished. The seven which were published, were published by the IIIC. 116 Gilbert Murray, ‘Goethe et le monde anglo-saxon,’ in Entretiens sur Goethe à l‘occasion du centenaire de sa mort (Paris: Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 1932) 77.

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The conversation in Paris in 1937 on the future destiny of letters was held between July 20 and 24 at the Palais Royal. The meeting inaugurating it was presided over by the French under-secretary of state, François de Tessan. Among the other dignitaries present at this meeting were Herriot, Paul Léon, the deputy general commissioner of the 1937 exposition, Murray and Massimo Pilotti, this last being deputy secretary general (secrétaire général adjoint) of the LON in function of which he had responsibility for the International Bureaux and Intellectual Cooperation sections of the secretariat.117 One other dignitary present was Marchese Balbino Giuliano. An honorary professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Rome, Giuliano had succeeded Alfredo Rocco the former Italian justice minister and Fascist theoretician, as the Italian member of the ICIC following the latter’s death in 1935. Giuliano had also succeeded Rocco in the role of president of the International Institute of Educational Cinematography (IIEC) in Rome. This institute had been placed at the disposal of the LON by the Italian government in 1928 in the same way that the French government had earlier placed the IIIC in Paris at the LON’s disposal and its statute, as agreed to by the LON, provided that the president of the IIEC was always to be the Italian member of the ICIC. At the inaugural meeting Giuliano delivered what Valéry described as a charming speech in which he thanked the French government and the ICIC for making possible the ‘intellectuelle et platonicienne’ event which was the conversation on the future destiny of letters.118

117 Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Entretiens: Le destin prochain des lettres (Paris: Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 1938), 7–8, 207. See also Elisabetta Tollardo, Fascist Italy and the League of Nations, 1922–1935 (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016), 81–2. Elisabetta Tollardo notes that Massimo Pilotti’s legal expertise had seen him participate in Italian delegations to a number of important international conferences. She adds that although Pilotti approached his role as a ‘legal expert’ rather that as a politician, ‘he was asked to put into practice his expertise when the crisis between Italy and the institution peaked as a result of the Italo-Ethiopian conflict’ and that he ‘played a key role in presenting the Italian case during the Ethiopian crisis.’ Tollardo further observes that Pilotti’s ‘approach to the [League] organization and to internationalism was opportunistic and his relationship with Fascism ambiguous’ (ibid., 82–3). 118 Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Entretiens: Le destin prochain des lettres, 213, 216.

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Giuliano was a participant in that conversation and Murray, he according to made the following contribution to it: I remember after our French and and Spanish members had their say, and eloquently expounded how the one prime necessity for good literature was freedom, the Italian member, Marchese Balbino Giuliano, a Fascist but a very cultivated man, ventured to differ. The real issue he thought, was whether a writer had something important and interesting to say; if he had not, he might be as free as air, but nothing of much value would come out of him; after all, the greatest European writer of this century was Tolstoy. Being in the Chair I had to admit he had the best of the argument.119

Several of the papers submitted to the event expressed alarm about the savage assaults on freedom of expression then being undertaken in totalitarian states. Yet, as stated by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in the course of the conversation, there seemed to be a ‘tacit accord’ among those present not to tackle this issue. He observed that if there were such an accord it had been reached partly for ‘reasons of courtesy’ and partly because discussion of the issue in the context of a previous conversation had proved uncomfortable. Yet, Huizinga continued, one could not avoid discussing the great division that had appeared in the western world concerning freedom of expression when addressing the problems of civilisation.120 A reason why discussion of this division could not be avoided at least as far as the Paris conversation was concerned, was that the event had been organised with a view to the adoption of a set of resolutions concerning the material and moral condition of writers. This set of resolutions concluded as follows: the Committee of Letters and Arts ‘notes that the future destiny of letters is linked to freedom of expression and the moral and economic independence of creative minds.’121 One can reasonably surmise that the reasons of courtesy to which Huizinga

119 Murray to Jan Christian Smuts, 8 December 1938, reproduced in Jean Smith, ‘The Committee for Intellectual Co-operation in Gilbert Murray’s Papers,’ in Smith and Toynbee, eds., Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography, 203. 120 Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Entretiens: Le destin prochain des lettres, 145. 121 Ibid., 199.

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referred, largely concerned the fact that present at the event were three Italians: Giuliano, Ugo Ojetti and Alessandro Pavolini.122 Pavolini at that time was president of the Confederazione Fascista dei professionisti e dei artisti and in that capacity was a member, along with his compatriot Ojetti, of the ICIC’s Letters and Arts Committee.123 Following a period of service as a volunteer in Ethiopia, in connection with which he ‘boasted about his military prowess,’ Pavolini had resumed what Richard M. Bosworth describes as his ‘comfortably worldly life as a cultural agent of the regime’124 Pavolini vigorously challenged the statement on literary freedom that concluded the resolutions presented to the participants, warning that it was ‘susceptible to divide us.’ The reason Pavolini gave for objecting to the statement was that it appeared to define the stance of the writer as one of independence in relation to the great social, political and ideological movements that were agitating the modern world. Pavolini maintained that while some writers demanded the liberty to be above the fray, others demanded the liberty to plunge head-long into it. This, he enthused, was exactly what he and other young writers had done during the revolution of the Blackshirts. One cannot say, Pavolini advised his fellow discussants, whether the future destiny of letters will depend on those who were ‘above the mélée’ or those who ‘want to be with all their soul in the heart of the mélée.’125 Georges Duhamel, a member of the Freedom Library, or what was otherwise known as the German Library of Burned Books which had been established on May 10, 1934, out of a ‘desire to emphasize the barbarism perpetrated by the Nazi book burnings,’ and of the Académie française, feigned astonishment at Pavolini’s intervention.126 122 Ibid.,

6, 187–88. 7. Note that Ugo Ojetti had participated in the conversations on Goethe in 1932 in Frankfurt that were organised by the Permanent Committee of Letters and Arts of the ICIC and later published by the IIIC. See n. 116 above. 124 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 506–8. In October 1939, Alessandro Pavolini would become the minister of popular culture. He later would be a pivotal figure in the notorious Republic Sociale Italiana or Saló Republic. 125 Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Entretiens: Le destin prochain des lettres, 187–89. 126 Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (London: Verso, 2006), 293. 123 Ibid.,

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He pleaded with those assembled not to renounce so ‘modest and ­reasonable’ a desire as that of freedom of thought and demanded that the last lines of the text not be removed unless all of those present consented to it.127 Duhamel then called on those present to think ‘with respect…of the thousands of writers currently oppressed or exiled,’ a call to which Pavolini responded with an emphatic ‘No’. Duhamel sought to calm the situation, insisting that Pavolini had nothing to fear as the meeting was not ‘speaking of Italy,’ but rather had in mind certain other countries.128 Madariaga also deftly responded to the objections of Pavolini, gently pointing out that there was a lack of conformity between Pavolini’s acceptance of that part of the text of the resolutions warning of the dangers posed by the erection of spiritual barriers between peoples of different nations and his opposition to the proposition concerning the dangers posed by the erection barriers to freedom of expression within nations. Of most importance from Madariaga’s perspective, was the argument which he, that is, Madariaga, mounted in response to Pavolini when concluding the discussion. Having made mention of the tragic situation confronting his own country, he issued the following warning:129 There is, Gentleman, only one possibility on offer when there is no freedom of communication of thought, and that is violence. That is the only means. Who says no to freedom of thought says violence. We are in the house where people say: ‘Never violence.’ We are in the house where people say: ‘Progress is to be found in the method that consists in convincing and not in vanquishing.’ But if people refuse to admit the pleas by which we express our thoughts and convictions, if the noose is placed around our neck, violence is the only possibility on offer in order to be able to speak.130

The interventions of Duhamel, Madariaga and others in response to Pavolini’s provocation appear to have had their desired effect, as the proceedings of the conversation record that only one dissenting voice was raised in connection with the last paragraph of the resolution. Anezsaki Masaharu, a member of the ICIC and a professor of the science and 127 Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Entretiens: Le destin prochain des lettres, 189. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid., 195–97. 130 Ibid., 197.

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history of religion at the Imperial University of Tokyo, stated that he opposed the text of the concluding statement (which had been read out by George Oprescu, a professor of art history at the University of Bucharest and a former secretary of the ICIC, immediately following Madariaga’s concluding argument), and asked that his opposition to it be registered.131 Just one day before the Paris conversation concerning freedom of expression commenced, an especially brutal assault on culture was publicly launched in Germany. July 19 saw the opening of a large-scale exhibition in Germany under the heading of Degenerate art (that is, Entartete Kunst—an expression which, Jeanne-Marie Portevin records, Kandinsky and his wife found ‘diabolique’), at the Archäologisches Institut of Munich’s Hofgarten.132 Since 1933, exhibitions referred to as Chambers of Artistic Horror (Schreckenskammer der Kunst) had been held throughout the Reich in order to show to the German people the ‘products of the “German cultural ruin”’.133 However, the Munich exhibition, which ran until November 30, was on a much vaster scale than the previous exhibitions (all of which the Degenerate art exhibition now absorbed), perhaps reflecting the fact that the Reich’s artistic policy had been executed less briskly than had been its policy on literature.134 Following a decree by Goebbels on June 30, 1937, a confiscation commission had proceeded to confiscate an estimated seventeen thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, representing the work of fourteen thousand artists, from collections throughout the country.135 Portevin notes that the seven hundred works finally selected for display

131 Ibid.,

7, 197. Kandinsky, n.d., quoted in Jeanne-Marie Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ in Télérama hors série: Kandinsky—Rétrospective au Centre Pompidou (2009), 39, and Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 38–9. 133 Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 38. See also Jacqueline Strecker, ‘“Degenerate” Art,’ in Jacqueline Strecker, ed., The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910–37 (Sydney: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 275. Exhibition catalogue. 134 Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, 719. For the opening and closing dates of the Degenerate art exhibition, see Uwe Fleckner, ‘In the Twilight of Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,’ in Strecker, ed., The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910–37, 255. 135 Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 38–39. See also Fleckner, ‘In the Twilight of Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,’ 259. 132 Nina

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(among them works by Kandinsky, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann), at the Munich exhibition were presented in a ‘disordered and chaotic’ manner.136 She also notes that the exhibition indicated the price at which each work was purchased, ‘forgetting to specify that these sums were paid at the time of the great inflation.’137 Uwe Fleckner points out that the works were ‘accompanied by demeaning comments, including “Paid for by the taxes of the German working people…[and]…selected quotes, such as “massive sham.”’138 Entry to the exhibition was free and it was visited by two million people over a period of four months, the German press having successfully incited the public to see the art for themselves through its provocative reporting of the exhibition.139 Fewer people visited the Great German art exhibition which was held at the neighbouring House of German Art (Haus der Deutschen Kunst) which presented ‘official art’ and celebrated ‘the triumph…over the products of “cultural bolshevism”’.140 Hitler, who had inspected Degenerate art exhibition during its preparation on July 16, officiated at the opening of the Great German art exhibition two days later. In the course of the opening ceremony, he denounced Cubist, Dadaist, Futurist and Impressionist art as unGerman and its creators as ‘art phonies’ and ‘art abusers’. As if the Third Reich’s arts policy required any further clarification, he announced that it was his ‘unwavering decision to clean up the phrases in German artistic life just like ones in other areas of political confusion…From now on we will fight an unrelenting war against the last elements of our cultural demise.’141 136 Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 39. Jeanne-Marie Portevin records that ‘the organisers decided to circulate the [Degenerate art] exhibition, as far as April 1941, in thirteen German and Austrian cities’ (ibid.). 137 Ibid. 138 Fleckner, ‘In the Twilight of Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,’ 255. Portevin records that ‘the organisers decided to circulate the [Degenerate art] exhibition, as far as April 1941, in thirteen German and Austrian cities.’ Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 38–9. 139 Strecker, ‘“Degenerate” Art,’ 275. See also Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 39. 140 Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 38–9. For visitor numbers to the Great German art exhibition, see Strecker, ‘“Degenerate” Art,’ 275. For the exhibition’s location, see Fleckner, ‘In the Twilight of Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,’ 256. 141 Fleckner, ‘In the Twilight of Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,’ 256, 260–61.

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As to the fate of the works not selected for public humiliation, Portevin reports that eight thousand and one hundred and ninety were burned in the courtyard of the fire station at Köpernick Strasse in Berlin, while many others were sold at auctions in Lucerne on June 30, 1939, with the returns on the sales assisting in the financing of a war-machine that was soon to crank into action.142

Peaceful Change: Geneva and London Charles Rist was a member of the Institut de France and director of the Institut scientifique de recherches économiques and sociales in Paris. A member of the Special Advisory Committee which had been set up by the board of Bank of International Settlements towards the end of 1931 in order to advise on Germany’s ability to meet its obligations under the Young Plan, his support in the context of that committee for the view that Germany could not transfer its conditional reparations (and probably even its unconditional reparations), when they fell due in the following year was considered highly significant at the time.143 In an address during the closing meeting of the 1937 session of the ISC, Rist stated that the City of Paris, while ‘always happy to welcome all schools of thought,’ had been ‘particularly anxious to receive…[the ISC’s]…representatives’ that year so as to ensure that the ‘success of the Exhibition’ was really ‘the success of all [the] nations’ which had ‘erected their pavilions on the banks of the Seine’.144 Rist’s statement suggests that the organisers of the international exposition in Paris had been rather keen to see the 1937 session of the ISC conclude in triumph and in light of this it is of little wonder that the institution which served as the ISC’s secretariat, namely, the IIIC had also been particularly anxious: it had

142 Portevin, ‘Purification Esthétique,’ 39. See also Fleckner, ‘In the Twilight of Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,’ 261. 143 Walter Lippmann with the assistance of research staff of the Council on Foreign Relations, United States in World Affairs: An Account of American Foreign Relations, 1932 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933), 19. 144 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 609–10. For the hospitality side of the conference on peaceful change in Paris, see International Studies Conference (Tenth Session), Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Généralities, 1929–1947, AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA.

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been anxious to ensure that as an exercise in international intellectual cooperation, the 1937 session of the ISC yielded real results. To this end and at the suggestion of Bonnet, a preparatory meeting of experts was convoked by the Geneva Research Centre (GRC) ‘to consider proposed solutions for the problem of peaceful change for the purpose of making a synthesis of such solutions and discussing their feasibility in existing circumstances.’145 The ‘Conference on Solutions,’ as this meeting was called, was held between May 21–22 at the Villa Rigot offices of the GRC, which were located at 14 avenue de France in close proximity to the LON Secretariat at the Palais des Nations and to the ILO.146 The GRC had began life as an American institution, established in order to inform Americans when at home and when in Geneva about the workings and activities of the LON. In 1936, however, the GRC was reconstituted as an international research centre. The initiative for this development came from the committee of Americans who directed the GRC from July 1935 to September 1936. During this period, the committee was able to persuade the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to support their proposal to transform the GRC into a centre for international research. Among the Americans on this committee were Malcolm W. Davis, the GRC’s director from 1932 to mid-1935 after which he became associate director of the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment in Paris; Benjamin Gerig, member of the LON Secretariat’s Information Section and of its Mandates Section; Lewis L. Lorwin, staff member of the Brookings Institution from 1925 to 1935, economic adviser to the ILO dating from 1935, former member of the American unit of the IPR and observer on behalf of the ILO at the 1936 conference of the IPR; Herbert L. May, member of the LON’s Central Opium Board; Laura Puffer Morgan, associate secretary of the National Council for the Prevention of War; Felix Morley, the GRC’s director until 1932, the year in which his study The Society of Nations: Its Organization and 145 Report by the Director to the Governing Board, December 14, 1936, Geneva Research Centre (correspondence concernant la C.H.E.I [Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales] jusqu’au-1er juin, 1939), AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA. 146 Persons Participating in the Conference on Solutions, May 21 and 22, 1937, AG-IICI-K-I-16.a, U16.a; John Boardman Whitton to Bonnet, 23 April 1937, AG 1-IICIK-I-16.a, UA, and Geneva Research Centre, Report by the Director to the Governing Board, December 14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA.

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Constitutional Development appeared; Pitman B. Potter, professor of international organisation at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva since 1930, former legal adviser to the Ethiopian government and member of the Italo-Ethiopian Commission; and Shotwell.147 It was this same committee which made the further decision to discontinue the GRC’s two regular publications, namely, Geneva and Geneva Special Studies (although the latter persisted into early 1937), in light of the increasing number of ‘serials or ad hoc important studies in the field of international relations’ emanating from national research centres. Nonetheless, and consistent with its policy over the previous six years, the reconstituted GRC would continue to publish special studies from time to time on ‘certain outstanding questions’ in regard to international affairs. Given that the reconstituted GRC was to have no permanent research staff aside from its director and his secretarial assistants, these studies were to be undertaken in the main by research fellows appointed for shorter or longer periods, the provision of fellowships being conceived of as a ‘unique opportunity to train scholars in the field of international relations.’148 147 Geneva Research Centre: Study, January 22, 1937, Bureau d’études internationales, Genève [Geneva Research Centre], 1935–1940, AG-IICI-K-V-3, UA, and Persons Participating in the Conference on Solutions, May 21 and 22, 1937, General [sic] [Geneva] Research Centre (correspondance concernant la C.H.E.I [Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales] jusqu’au-1er juin, 1939), AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA. For Benjamin Gerig and Pitman B. Potter, see Pitman B. Potter, ‘League Publicity: Cause or Effect of League Failure,’ Public Opinion Quarterly 2 (1938): 399–412, 399. For Gerig see also Kate Mitchell and W. L. Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939: Proceedings of the Study Meeting of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Virginia Beach, Virginia, November 18–December 2, 1939 (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940), 273. For Lewis L. Lorwin, see Bruno Lasker and W. L. Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1931: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Hangchow and Shanghai, China, October 21 to November 2 (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1932), 30, 508; Lasker and Holland, Problems of the Pacific, 1933, 457; Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 440; and ‘Lewis L. Lorwin, Economist and Labor Historian, 86, Dies,’ New York Times, June 7, 1970. See also Sir Eric Drummond, foreword to Morley, The Society of Nations, ix. 148 Geneva Research Centre, Report by the Director to the Governing Board, December 14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA. Geneva Special Studies was launched in 1930. A total of eight volumes of Geneva Special Studies were produced. The number of issues published per volume varied. Only one number of the eighth volume was published. See List of Geneva Special Studies, AG-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA.

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John Boardman Whitton was appointed director of the reconstituted GRC and although his year-long tenure did not formally commence until September 1, 1936, he arrived in Geneva in June in order to conduct an examination of the GRC’s situation. Soon after that examination was complete, Whitton reported to the European representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, namely, to Tracey Barrett Kittredge and Davis respectively. Whitton then made contact with the Graduate Institute of International Studies, discussing with William E. Rappard, the institute’s co-founder and co-director, plans for collaboration between the institute and the GRC. Against the background of the discussion of these plans for collaboration, Rappard offered Whitton a professorship in the field of international law.149 On assuming his official role at the GRC, Whitton immediately entered into close collaboration with the ISC in his capacity as a representative of the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment. He conferred frequently with Bonnet, Bourquin and Gross, this last having been charged with developing the relations between the institutions representing the ISC. The result of these talks was the aforementioned ‘Conference on Solutions’ and the preparation of the following: a study of ‘what had been attempted or accomplished by the League of Nations with respect to raw materials’; a study of those ‘international conventions which contain provision for their own revision, modification or termination’; and a historical and juridical analysis of the changes which the Peace Treaties of 1919–1920 had already undergone.150 Whitton then proceeded to visit ten European countries in order to establish contacts with national research institutions and the national coordinating committees of the ISC. On these visits, Whitton was accompanied by Raymond Leslie Buell, the president of the American Foreign Policy Association. The latter, along with several other members

149 Geneva Research Centre, Report by the Director to the Governing Board, December 14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA. International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 631. In the proceedings of the tenth conference of the ISC, John Boardman Whitton is described as follows: ‘Director of the Geneva Research Centre; Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, and at Princeton University.’ 150 Geneva Research Centre, Report by the Director to the Governing Board, December 14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA. See also Tracey B. Kittredge to Leo Gross, 18 August 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA.

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of staff of the association, had come to Geneva at different points in time during the GRC’s period of transformation in order to assume charge of its publications. It should be noted that Buell, whom some credited with writing the first text book in the field of international relations, namely, International Relations (1925), was also among those who attended the Yale Club meeting in New York on February 22, 1925, to consider the plan for the conference that would establish the IPR.151 While touring with Whitton, Buell gave addresses before organisations consecrated to the study of international problems in such cities as Copenhagen, London, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna as well as making several radio addresses for the benefit of American audiences.152 As a consequence of their efforts, Whitton recorded, the GRC managed to establish excellent relations with a number of outstanding organizations, notably, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the New Commonwealth Society, Centre de Étude de Politique Entrangère, the Hamburg Institute of International Studies, the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute at Berlin, the Institute of Economics and History in Copenhagen, the Konsular Academy in Vienna, the Michelson Institute at Bergen, and at Oslo, the Nobel Institute and the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Cultures.153

Indeed, so close became the links established between the GRC and the various European-based institutions with which Whitton had acquainted himself upon arriving on the continent, that certain members of these institutions were co-opted to the newly established governing board of the GRC. More generally, the co-option of Europeans to the GRC’s governing board was a function of the fact that the GRC was now an international rather than American research centre. Among the 151 Institute of Pacific Relations, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925: History, Organization, Proceedings, Discussions and Addresses (Honolulu: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1925), 19–21. 152 Geneva Research Centre, Report by the Director to the Governing Board, December 14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA. See also Raymond Leslie Buell, International Relations (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1925), and Institute of Pacific Relations, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 19–20. 153 Geneva Research Centre, Report by the Director to the Governing Board, December 14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA. See also Geneva Research Centre: Study, January 22, 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA.

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non-Americans joining the board were Bonnet and Bourquin. Another European joining the board was Berber who, according to Whitton, in addition to being the director of the Institute for Foreign Policy in Hamburg, was the director of the German Coordinating Committee of the International Studies Conference. Whitton’s claim that the German committee that he mentioned was of the International Studies Conference was incorrect to the extent that no German committee had been a direct member of the ISC since 1933. Also invited to join the board were the following: Dennery who, as we have seen, had been an expert advisor to the Lytton Commission but was now general secretary of the Centre de étude de politique étrangère and the ISC’s secretary-rapporteur on the study of raw materials and markets; Christian L. Lange, director of the Norwegian Coordinating Committee for International Studies (Norsk Komité for Internasjonale Studier) the address of which was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Oslo, former secretary of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and delegate of Norway to the Disarmament Conference; the secretary of the RIIA, namely Macadam; and Rappard, director of the Mandates Section of the LON Secretariat from 1920 to 1925 and member of the Permanent Mandates Commission.154 The board of the reconstituted GRC board met for the first time on December 14, 1936, whereupon it approved a draft constitution, thereby taking control of the centre from the aforementioned committee of Americans.155 For a reason that will become clear, it is useful to keep in mind that Article 5 of this constitution specified the following: that the ‘Centre, as an organization shall not express an opinion on any controversial aspect of international affairs. It shall carry on its work in a spirit of international cooperation, and in all its activities shall remain strictly, scientific, impartial and objective’.156 By the end of the third week of January, following the granting of a number of fellowships, the 154 Geneva Research Centre: Study January 22, 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA; International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 631, and Potter, ‘League Publicity: Cause or Effect of League Failure,’ 399. 155 Geneva Research Centre: Study, January 22, 1937, AG-IICI-K-V-3, UA. See also Berber to Bonnet, 26 November 1936, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Groupe international d’études pour les questions [coloniales] sociales [sic], du 1er septembre 1936 au 1er janvier, 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d. 156 Geneva Research Centre, Draft Constitution, Geneva Research Centre, AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a.

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GRC’s research into questions concerning the distribution of raw materials and treaty revision was well underway.157 Among those attending the ‘Conference on Solutions’ in their capacity as members of the governing board of the GRC were Bourquin, who had been elected president of the board, Bonnet, Dennery, Lorwin, May, Puffer Morgan, Rappard, Whitton and Arthur Sweetser.158 Sweetser, an American citizen, had served as a press officer of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace in Paris in 1919, following which he joined the LON Secretariat’s Information Section where he acted as a point of liaison between the LON and the United States and of which he would later become deputy director. Like Lorwin, he had attended the Yosemite conference of the IPR, in his case as an observer on behalf of the Information Section. A confidant of Drummond, Sweetser was the person to whom Morley had dedicated his Society of Nations the foreword for which had been written by Drummond in his role as secretary general.159 Aside from Sweetser, five other members of the LON Secretariat participated in the conference: Vito Catastini, the director of the secretariat’s Mandates Section; Condliffe, who as we saw was a member of the Financial Section; Alexander Loveday, the director since 1931 of the Financial Section and of the Economic Intelligence Service which was attached to that section; the Jean-Daniel de Montenach, a member of the Intellectual Cooperation Section of the secretariat and the secretary of the ICO; and Pietro Stoppani, a non-­ Fascist Italian who was director of the Economic Relations Section from 1931 until October 1939.160 157 Geneva

Research Centre: Study, January 22, 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA. Persons Participating in the Conference on Solutions, May 21 and 22, 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA; and International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 8. 159 For Arthur Sweetser, see Annique H. M. van Ginnekin, Historical Dictionary of the League of Nations (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 181–82; Frank Moorehouse, Grand Days (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, Sydney), 568; Frank Moorehouse, Dark Palace (Sydney: Random House, 2000), 674–75; Morley, Society of Nations, 8; and Potter, ‘League Publicity: Cause or Effect of League Failure?,’ 399n. See also Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 440. 160 Geneva Research Centre: Study, January 22, 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA; Persons Participating in the Conference on Solutions, May 21 and 22, 1937, AG 1-IICI- K-I16.a; and International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 8. 158 Ibid.;

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The IIIC was also represented at the Conference on Solutions, among its delegates being Gross, Christophersen, Leonard J. Cromie and Carl Major Wright, the last three being respectively the ISC’s secretaryrapporteurs for the study of colonial questions, demographic questions and Danubian problems. As one would expect, certain member institutions of the ISC also took part in the conference: the Graduate Institute of International Studies was represented by seven delegates, among them being Paul Mantoux. Mantoux had acted as an interpreter for the Supreme Council (also known as the Council of Four and the Big Four) at the Paris Peace Conference, after which he went on to become the first director of the LON Secretariat’s Political Section. In 1927, Mantoux left the secretariat and joined Rappard in founding the Graduate Institute of International Studies, thereafter serving as its co-director. Also representing the institute esd Hans Kelsen, (who had been removed from his post at the University of Cologne in 1933 and under whom Gross had studied as a doctoral student in Vienna), and Ludwig von Mises, who had left Austria for Geneva in 1934. Wright was also among the seven delegates of the Graduate Institute.161 Also represented at the conference were a number of national coordinating committees for international studies: the Austrian, French, British and Dutch committees. The Austrian Coordinating Committee for International Studies (Österreichisches Koordinationskomite für Internationale Studien) was represented by its president Bruno Dietrich, rector of the Hochschule für Welthandel and by Alfred von Verdross of the Konsularakademie; the French committee by Albert de Geouffre de la Pradelle; the British committee by Hersch Lauterpacht of the LSE; and the Dutch committee by J. H. W. Verzijl of the University of Utrecht. As one would expect given the GRC’s funding arrangements and its relationship with the similarly funded ISC, the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation were also represented at the conference. The former was represented by Davis and the

161 Persons Participating in the Conference on Solutions, May 21 and 22, 1937, AG 1-IICI- K-I-16.a. For Paul Mantoux’s various roles see Ginnekin, Historical Dictionary of the League of Nations, 130. For the relation between Gross and Kelsen, see Detlev F. Vagts, ‘In Memoriam: Leo Gross (1903–1990),’ American Journal of International Law 85, no. 1 (1991): 149–50.

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latter by Sydnor H. Walker, the acting director of the foundation’s Social Sciences Division.162 The GRC was not the only forum in which the topic of peaceful change was addressed in view of the forthcoming session of the ISC. In the early months of 1937, a series of lectures on the topic was given at the LSE by several of that institution’s staff members, the result of which was a publication which appeared in April.163 The first in the aforementioned series of lectures was delivered by Webster who in that context gave voice to his scepticism in regard to the policy of peaceful change. Webster objected to the idea of diverting the ‘activities of Strong Powers’ away from certain objects and towards others: he objected to the notion that the weak should be sacrificed in order to preserve peace among the strong. Such an expedient seemed to him ‘dishonourable.’ In any case, Webster doubted whether peace could be preserved by such expedients for very long. As with others sceptical of peaceful change, he invoked the following French proverb: l’appétit augmente en mangeant.164 Webster observed in his lecture that just as the idea that the peace treaties concluded at the end of the Great War were unjust had energised those demanding change, so too had it impaired the ‘resistance to their aggression even when it was most unjustified,’ adding that in Britain there was a great need for moral and not just physical rearmament.165 In a similar vein, Manning stated in his lecture after having noted that the enthusiasm for peaceful change was based largely on a desire to avoid an ‘anticipated warlike change,’ that his preference was for ‘a big enough instalment of physical, and above all, moral rearmament’ in the right

162 Persons Participating in the Conference on Solutions, May 21 and 22, 1937, AG 1-IICI- K-I-16.a. See also League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions, Organisation, 41. The Konsularakdemi was the direct Austrian member of the ISC from 1929. The application for membership of the conference by the Oesterreichiches Koordinationskomite für Internationale Studien applied for membership was approved by the tenth session of the ISC in 1937. 163 C. A. W. Manning, preface to Manning, ed., Peaceful Change, v. 164 Webster, ‘What is the Problem of Peaceful Change?’ in Manning ed., Peaceful Change, 8–10. 165 Ibid., 23.

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places, such that the demands of ‘even the most dynamic “duce” could be treated more truly on their merits.’166 Toynbee also delivered a lecture in the series, his contribution for the most part being in the nature of a historical survey. In regard to more general questions, at the outset of his lecture he stated that it was important to distinguish between peaceful change and ‘change that takes place without war,’ a point that Manning had also raised. Toynbee observed that when people speak of peaceful change, what they generally have in mind is change that is ‘peaceful and voluntary,’ adding that there had recently been many changes that were not of this kind. The first example he gave of a change that takes place without war as distinct from a peaceful change, was Germany’s unilateral decision to reoccupy the Rhineland, a decision that had presented the other party concerned, namely France, with a fait accompli.167 The second example that Toynbee gave concerned the British pronouncement around the turn of the century that ‘all the land in its Kenya Colony [was] to be vested no longer in the former native occupants but in the British Crown’. Toynbee stated of this pronouncement that one could scarcely call it peaceful change, ‘for, while it was done without fighting, it was not done with the consent of all the parties concerned.’168 Yet despite having qualified the notion of peaceful change by insisting that change of this nature must be both peaceful and voluntary, Toynbee concluded his lecture in a way that suggested that he did not, at least in the midst of the current circumstances, wholly subscribe to that qualification. Towards the end of his lecture, he observed that ‘[l]ife and law must be kept closely in touch,’ maintaining that to this end it was necessary to not only create machinery of collective security, but also to embark on the ‘more difficult’ task of creating international machinery for the ‘regular method perpetual re-distribution of power, of wealth, of population, and of the goods of this world’. Taken at face 166 Manning, ‘Some Suggested Conclusions,’ in Manning, ed., Peaceful Change, 188. See also C. A. W. Manning, ‘The “Failure” of the League of Nations,’ in Carol Ann Cosgrove and Kenneth J. Twitchett, eds., The New International Actors: The United Nations and the European Economic Community (London: Macmillan, 1970), 121–23. In this article which was published in 1942, Manning paints the LON’s failure as a failure on the part of governments to support its sanctions provisions. 167 Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘The Lessons of History,’ in Manning, ed., Peaceful Change, 28. 168 Ibid.

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value, this concluding observation was not troubling. What was troubling was the statement that immediately followed it: that unless changes are effected peacefully, they ‘will presently take place through a series of explosions.’169 In his lecture, Toynbee did not address the issue of the transfer of non-self-governing territories to Germany, although his implied criticism of British colonial policy in Kenya might be telling in that regard. Rather, the issue was addressed by Webster who, as should be evident, disapproved of such a policy and by, albeit briefly, Manning who employed a term in relation to it that had gained much currency: ‘Danegeld’.170 Of most interest in relation to the question of transfers of non-self-governing territories to Germany, was a lecture given by the LSE’s Lucy Mair. Mair, whose lecture was devoted entirely to the topic, acknowledged that some commentators invoked the interests of the populations of such territories in order to ‘burke discussion of the whole question’ of colonial transfers. Nonetheless, she was firm in maintaining that it was not a small consideration that the current colonial and mandatory regimes at least purported to ‘regard their wellbeing and development as a sacred trust’. Accepting that it would be naïve to think that this obligation would be not be breached in the face of more ‘desirable’ objectives, she argued that its existence at least served as an ‘invitation’ to those individuals genuinely concerned for the welfare of the local inhabitants in dependences to state their views.171 In regard to the idea of placing African lives in the hands of Germany, Mair noted that the political doctrine now current in Germany assumed the inherent superiority of the ‘Nordic race to any other,’ pointing out that this doctrine had its ‘parallel’ in the Union of South Africa. Mair clearly regarded the South African parallel as instructive in regard to the question of what might be the fate of certain African peoples should they be surrendered to Germany.172

169 Ibid.,

36–8. ‘Some Suggested Conclusions,’ 174, 187. 171 Lucy P. Mair, ‘Colonial Policy and Peaceful Change,’ in C. A. W. Manning ed., Peaceful Change: An International Problem (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 88. Reprint of the 1937 edition. 172 Ibid., 97–98. 170 Manning,

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The ‘Have-Not’ States at the 1937 International Studies Conference The Tenth International Studies Conference was held between the June 29 and July 3 and was more than welcomed by official France. A reception was held for delegates at the Quai d’Orsay subsequent to which Zay, in his capacity as minister of national education, hosted a lunch in their honour. Delegates were also treated to visits to the Paris exposition.173 It is noteworthy that the ISC’s peaceful change conference was the first in the series of activities that the ICO had scheduled to take place during the Month of Intellectual Co-operation. As further testimony to the importance attached to the ISC, certainly within the context of the ICO, coinciding with the Paris conference was the publication by the IIIC of a booklet which had been compiled by Chalmers Wright in 1936 in Bucharest in which was given an account of the history of the conference. The booklet provided a list of the publications that had emanated from the conference; the names of the participants in each of its conferences; and information concerning the twenty-eight national committees and five international institutions that comprised the conference’s membership.174 Chalmers Wright told Gross that the section in which he sketched the origins and development of the conference had given him ‘a lot of trouble’ because of the difficulty of striking a balance between ‘accuracy and window-dressing, particularly as regards the earlier years of the Conference when much confused thinking enabled the Conference to spend a great deal of time doing exceedingly little.’175 Chalmers Wright did not attend the 1937 conference but remained in Bucharest to where he had relocated from Paris in 1936 in order to establish, with the aid of the IIIC and the Rockefeller Foundation, what he called a Romanian version of Chatham House: the Centrul de Înalte 173 International

Studies Conference (Tenth Session), AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. Institute of Intellectual Co-operation: League of Nations, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions Organisation (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1937). For the role of Chalmers Wright in compiling the booklet on the ISC, see ‘Note’ in League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions, Organisation. 175 Chalmers Wright to Gross, 24 September 1936, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, publications (préparation): Brochure de propaganda sur la conférence, AG IICI-K-II-6, UA. 174 International

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Studii Internaƫionale (Centre des hautes études internationales or Centre for Advanced International Studies). Upon the creation of the centre in December 1936, Chalmers Wright became its director. Presumably because he was the president of the institution to which it belonged, namely, the Institutul Social Român (Romanian Social Institute), Gusti acquired the additional title of president of the Centrul de Înalte Studii Internaƫionale and it was in his role as president of that centre that he attended the Paris conference in 1937.176 That Chalmers Wright did not join Gusti in representing the Centrul de Înalte Studii Internaƫionale at the ninth session of the ISC, may perhaps be partly attributed to the misgivings he had about the organisation of the conference, its programme and the quality of the debate that would ensue following the conference’s inauguration. On February 21, 1937, he sent a letter to Gross in which he repeated criticisms he had made a few weeks earlier concerning Gross’s proposal to equip the conference with an advisory research committee which, according to Chalmers Wright, would be composed of ‘a rock-bottom minimum of eleven vocal participants’ and which would include ‘“the General 176 Chalmers Wright to Oliver Jackson, 27 March 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-15.e, UA, and the International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 624. On the creation of the Centrul de înalte Studii Internaƫionale, see the observation of Georges Sofronie, in Alfred E. Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations: A Record of the Eleventh Session of the International Studies Conference, Prague, 1938 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1939), 295. See also D. Gusti (president) and G. Vladesco Rocoassa [Gheorge Vlădescu-Răcoasa] (secretary) to the director of the IICI [Henri Bonnet], 21 October 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-II2.a, UA, and D. Gusti to Bonnet, 20 May 1931, Conférence des Institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales, 1931 (avant la Conférence), AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b. Note that the Institutul Social Român had earlier been the base for the Romanian Centre of International Studies of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For Chalmers Wright’s later observations on his work in Bucharest, see Chalmers-Wright, Fergus Camille Yeatman (Oral History), Imperial War Museum (production company), Laurie Milner (recorder), Chalmers- Wright, Fergus Camille Yeatman (interviewee/speaker), no. 1, 1984–1985, Imperial War Museum, Sound Archive, Catalogue no. 8188. See also International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation: League of Nations, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions Organisation, 48. The official stationery used by Chalmers Wright in correspondence in his role as director for the years 1936 and 1937 of the Centrul de Inalte Studii Internaƫionale gave the name of the centre in French: Centre des hautes études internationales. However, in the booklet Chalmers Wright complied on the origins of the ISC the centre’s name was given exactly as follows: ‘Centrul de Inalte Studii Internationale.’

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Rapporteur, the Chairman of the Executive Committee [of the ISC], the Director of the IIIC …” and his two or three representatives, plus “a secretary from the staff of Institute’s Social Sciences and International Relations Service”.’177 Chalmers Wright accused Gross of attempting to ‘thrust’ on members a body of such a nature that their autonomy would be undermined: members would ‘find themselves in the position of receiving suggestions from the centre rather than of making them to the centre.’178 In the same letter, Chalmers Wright reminded Gross that in a letter Gross had sent to him on February 16, Gross had made mention of Chalmers Wright’s complaints concerning the ‘unsatisfactory’ nature of the preparations for the conference on peaceful change and the ‘defective condition’ of the ISC’s secretariat at the IIIC.179 Oliver Jackson was a Briton who had been appointed to the IIIC alongside Gross and a French national named Alfred R. Max, in late 1936 in view of a grant made to the IIIC by the Rockefeller Foundation. As of February 1937, as Chalmers Wright reminded Gross in his letter of February 21, Jackson enjoyed the role of secretary of the ISC. In a letter dated March 28 which was addressed to Jackson, Chalmers Wright, after having expressed frustration with certain decisions taken by the IIIC in regard to the method of funding conference participants, went on to express his dismay at what he saw as the paucity of guidance that had been given by the conference’s centre in regard to the preparations for the conference. Above all in this regard, Chalmers Wright lamented the fact that Bourquin in his role as general rapporteur had failed to clarify the question as to whether or not the Paris session would be the ‘final 177 Chalmers Wright to Gross, 21 February 1937, Comité consultatif de recherches, 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-19. 178 Ibid. 179 Chalmers Wright welcomed Gross’s admission that the ISC’s executive committee at a meeting held approximately ten days before Chalmers Wright sent Gross his letter dated February 21, while generally in agreement on the utility of the proposed advisory research committee, had left in abeyance the question of its size as there had been a difference opinion on this matter. Chalmers Wright stated in this regard the following: ‘This difference of opinion which you would dismiss as a triviality is the most encouraging admission of your letter…for it disposes me to think that some of the members of the Committee experienced apprehensions similar to my own and that they sought to indirectly inhibit “authoritarian” tendencies—the self-conscious term is yours not mine—by ensuring at any rate a wide representation on the body which was being thrust upon them’ (ibid.).

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stage of the “Peaceful Change” study.’180 Chalmers Wright’s comments in relation to this alleged failure on the part of Bourquin, give a further intimation of the misgivings that he entertained about the machinery of conference preparation and indicate that he and at least one other key figure associated with the ISC expected that the standard of debate at the 1937 session of the ISC would not be high. Chalmers Wright stated that Bourquin had opened the door widely for an indefinite extension of the period during which this subject is going to be studied. There were no doubt cogent reasons for leaving this question in the air, but the local of effect of this arrangement on the very eve of the so-called ‘general study conference’ has been that several people have joyfully downed tools….I hope for the sake of the Conference, that this case is exceptional and that, in other other countries, interest in the Conference is so intense that, no matter how little…co-ordinating effort proceeds from the centre…the Conference will always have a breathlessly expectant clientèle at its doorstop. I hope also that Manning’s prophecy that you will have a rotten discussion in June is not borne out.181

The inaugural meeting of the ninth session of the ISC took place in the amphithéâtre Richilieu at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris. The dignitary chosen to chair the inaugural meeting was Sarraut and thus it was he who declared the conference open. As was observed at the meeting, Sarraut, as a former minister for the colonies and as the author of Grandeur et servitude coloniales (1931), was an inspired choice as chair of the opening meeting of a conference that would spend much time discussing colonial questions.182 Following Sarraut’s

180 Ibid. 181 Chalmers

Wright to Oliver Jackson, 28 March 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-15.e, UA. Nels, ‘La 10e session de la Conférence Permanente des Hautes Etudes Internationales,’ L’Europe Nouvelle, juillet 17, 1937, 694–96, Conférence Permanente des Hautes Etudes Internationales: ‘Peaceful Change,’ du 1er janvier 1937 au 1er juillet 1938, AG 1-IICI- K-I-15.e., UA. For the locations of the conference’s various meetings see International Studies Conference (Tenth Session). AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. See also, Albert Sarraut, Grandeur et servitude coloniales (Paris: Sagittaire, 1931). The proceedings of the 1937 session of the ISC offered the following observations of Grandeur et servitude coloniales: ‘Fundamental work of recognized value on colonial policy in general. The author urges colonizing nations to protect their colonies against nationalist movements.’ International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 651. 182 Jacques

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declaration, Sébastian Charléty, rector of the University of Paris and chair of the French unit of the ISC, namely, the Commission française des hautes études internationales, in his capacity as president of the conference, delivered an address of welcome. In the course of this address, Charléty noted that for the first time the conference had been graced by the presence of a Brazilian group and by representatives from China, Greece, Mexico and Uruguay. He pointed out that 150 individuals had registered to attend the conference, that these individuals came from twenty-four different countries and that they belonged to ‘various civilizations’. In regard to the subject of the conference, Charléty noted that it was ‘written in the English phrase “Peaceful Change”,’ a phrase which, he added, although ‘difficult to translate into French,’ signified for the purpose of the conference the aim of not repressing war but preventing it. This aim, Charléty pronounced, was ‘very ambitious.’183 In a speech of reply, Lange conveyed a similarly lofty understanding of the role of the conference. He noted that an almost ‘thrilling interest’ was attached to the studies that those present were about to undertake, adding that the question of peaceful change was ‘at the heart of the preoccupation of every man and woman who cares about the future of humanity.’184 After a speech by Bourquin in his capacity as general rapporteur, the inaugural meeting was closed by Sarraut who extended a sincere welcome to the confrères on behalf of the French Republic. It will be recalled that Sarraut, whom Charléty insisted in his address had been the inspiration behind the formation of the French committee to study Pacific problems, had been the leader of the French delegation to the conference held by the IPR in 1936 at Yosemite. In his speech in Paris, after having observed that the cause of moral disarmament (a cause for which the ICO had laboured some years earlier against the background of the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments), was a necessary prelude to material disarmament, Sarraut proceeded to call attention to the Yosetmite conference.185 Sarraut pointed out that he had taken part in an international conference in the United States in the previous year and that this conference had discussed 183 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 591, 593–94. 184 Ibid., 594–95. Christian L. Lange was standing in for Lytton at the inaugural meeting of the 1937 session of the ISC as the latter had been unable to attend it. 185 Ibid., 591, 604–05.

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questions which without doubt would arise in the context of the ISC’s deliberations in Paris concerning raw materials, markets, over-population and colonies. He then stated the following: There also, and with no little difficulty, we endeavoured to formulate suggestions for the peaceful settlement of international problems, in accordance with the right which all peoples have to justice and, above all, to life. This will also be your task here. You will not, however, work—as we did in the United States—amid the marvellously peaceful and serene surroundings of the Rocky Mountains; but here, in France, and in this vibrating city of Paris which welcomes you, you will have as an incentive to your aspirations and hopes, the setting—which, we believe, is nearing completion—of a manifestation to which all the nations of the world have contributed their genius to extol the glory of the twofold field of science and art. A favourable international atmosphere would therefore seem to permeate your labours. Humanity thanks you in advance for the efforts you are about to make in the cause of justice and peace.186

During the course of the ISC’s collective research into peaceful change which had been launched following its conference on collective security in London in 1935 based on a decision of that conference, there had been attempts in certain quarters to broaden the enquiry to encompass the grievances of small, weaker states and not just those of strong, military powers. Over the protests of some such as Zimmern and despite ‘reluctance on the part of others,’ the organisers of the inquiry into peaceful change were allowed to largely confine it to ‘situations generally believed to present the contingent danger of war’; in effect, this meant that the focus of research was directed towards the supposed grievances of Italy, Japan and, above all, Germany.187 That the de facto objective of the conference, at least in the eyes of some, was to find ways of inducing these states to feel less aggrieved in order that a clash of arms might be

186 Ibid.,

605–06. Wright, Population and Peace, 12–3. Zimmern stated that the question of the revision of Article 19 of the covenant was ‘not brought up because there are a number of countries whose grievances do not secure proper recognition. It is brought up because there are certain powerful countries, who are inclined to make us feel that if they are not allowed to have their own way, they will find their way in some other manner. The plain word to apply to that is blackmail.’ Bourquin, ed., ‘Prevention of War: Discussion,’ Collective Security, 280. 187 Chalmers

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avoided, was bluntly stated in a memorandum submitted by the RIIA which noted that prominent among the claims of the dissatisfied states was the ‘demand for colonial expansion’ and which affirmed that there was ‘a growing consciousness that peaceful change is the alternative to serious trouble’.188 The memorandum cited as evidence of the potential for serious trouble, Joseph Goebbels’s warning in a public speech to the Berlin branch of the National Socialist Party on January 17, 1931, that it was ‘dangerous for the world not to concede to such demands, because some day the bomb will explode’.189 Two Japanese observers attended the conference and when the question of Manchuria was raised one of these observers, Yoshizaka Shunzo, a former representative of Japan on the administrative council of the ILO, pointed to the greater density of Japan as compared to European countries of a similar size and its comparable lack of arable land. Yoshizaka added that over-population was a problem that was ‘felt far more forcibly among civilized nations than among uncivilized nations,’ his explanation for this being that education caused people to have greater ambitions in life. In support of this explanation, Yoshizaka stated that during Japan’s period of isolation the Japanese were ‘very easily satisfied.’ Although conceding that Japan’s birth rate had declined in recent times, Yoshizaka nonetheless insisted that Japan was unable to absorb its surplus population. He explained that this was largely because Japan’s industrial development had been hindered as a result of two factors: first, with the exception of silk, Japan had had to import all its raw materials and second, Japan faced barriers to trade in its goods. Yoshizaka observed that Japan’s population had grown at a time when opportunities for emigration were more restricted than they were in the past. Singling out the United States in this regard, he observed that the very same country which ‘opened… [Japan’s]…doors’ to international life ‘and whose climate is the one most favourable to the Japanese, very soon closed its own doors to Japanese emigrants.’ It was fortunate, Yoshizaka stated in concluding, that Japan now had in Manchukuo ‘an outlet for

188 Royal Institute of International Affairs, Raw Materials and Colonies, Information Department Papers no. 18 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 51. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 25n. 189 Joseph Goebbels, 1931, quoted in Royal Institute of International Affairs, Raw Materials and Colonies, 58. See also in Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 25n.

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emigration,’ adding that within twenty years it was expected that ten per cent of the Japanese population would have been transplanted there.190 Reflecting Italy’s now fast-waning interest in the LON, the Italian institutions that were affiliated with the ISC did not take an active part in the preparations for the conference except during the initial stages.191 In regard to the conference itself, for the first time at a session of the ISC, Italy was represented not by members but by observers. One of those observers was Claudio Baldoni of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law in Rome. This institute had been offered to the LON by the Italian government in September 1924, an offer which was accepted by the LON’s Fifth Assembly. On May 30, 1928, at a ceremony at the Villa Aldobrandini attended by King Vittorio Emanuel III, members of the Italian government, League officials and representatives of states which were members of the LON, the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law was officially inaugurated.192 In opening the institute, Mussolini had stated that the Italian ‘government had been keen to make an effective contribution to the intellectual collaboration which has made such promising progress under the auspices of the League of Nations’.193 The other Italian observer at the conference was Vito Catastini, the director of the Mandates Section. When Italy announced its withdrawal from the LON at the end of 1937, he would have to relinquish this position. The same announcement would 190 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 373–76. Henry Forbes Angus noted that generally at IPR meetings, Japan did not make ‘sweeping demands for territory to which her people may migrate or for access to sources of raw materials or to markets’. Angus, Peaceful Change in the Pacific, 190. See also Imre Ferenczi, The Synthetic Optimum of Population: An Outline of an International Demographic Policy (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938), 35. In light of Angus’s observation it may be noteworthy that, as pointed out by Imre Ferenczi, Naotako Satō, who would be appointed Japan’s minister of foreign affairs in March 1937, gave a lecture at the Centre d’étude de politique étrangère on January 27, 1936 entitled ‘The Problem of the Population and Industrialisation of Japan,’ in which he referred to Japan’s increase in population and its need for raw materials and access to foreign markets. 191 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 23n. 192 Pierre Widmer, ‘The International Institute for the Unification of Private Law: Shipyard for World-Wide Unification of Private Law,’ European Journal of Law Reform 1, no. 3 (1999): 181–92, 181. 193 Benito Mussolini, 1928, quoted in Pierre Widmer, ‘The International Institute for the Unification of Private Law,’ 181.

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also bring to an end the relation between the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law and the LON. According to the record of the conference’s proceedings, Baldoni made no contribution to the discussions. Catastini, by contrast, did: he gently insisted on two occasions, that even if ‘the throwing open of colonial territories to white immigration only constituted a partial and minor solution to the population problem,’ it was not without importance in relieving demographic stress. Further to this, Catastini told the conference that it should not ‘be forgotten that the possession of colonies greatly stimulated the economic development of the mother country.’194 That the Italian observers at the 1937 session of the ISC emitted no spurts of contempt during the proceedings as had, to cite just one instance, the Italian delegates to its general conference on collective security two years earlier, may be partly explained by the fact that Italy, as Frederick Sherwood Dunn put it, had declared ‘while digesting her new African Empire’ that it was ‘a “satiated” state for the time being.’195 In an interview published on May 6, 1936, in the Daily Mail, Mussolini told the journalist G. (George) Ward Price the following: ‘I give you my word that Italy has no further colonial ambition. Believe me, this victory in East Africa now puts Italy in the category of the satisfied Powers.’196 In an interview conducted by the same journalist in March 1937, Mussolini reiterated his claim of May 6, 1936, that Italy was now a satiated state and with no less emphasis.197 Later however, feeling emboldened by the Munich Agreement, Rome would launch a campaign demanding the cession to it of French territory. At its most bombastic, this campaign saw Rome demand the cession to Italy of Nice and Corsica, a demand which most considered to be an ‘exaggerated bluff’. Indeed, Rome quickly withdrew this demand, confining itself to making rather confused claims in relation to Tunis and Djibouti based on allegations of French ‘ill-treatment’ of Italians in Tunisia and of French 194 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 508, 622. 195 Frederick Sherwood Dunn, Peaceful Change: A Study of International Procedures (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1937), 3. 196 Benito Mussolini, 1936, quoted in Emanuel Moresco, Colonial Questions and Peace, A Survey Prepared under the Direction of Emanuel Moresco (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939), 65. 197 Moresco, Colonial Questions and Peace, 65.

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‘mismanagement of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway line and the port of Djibouti itself.’198 Rome’s later rhetorical antics on the territorial front aside, at the time when the 1937 session of the ISC commenced, the so-called colonial problem was widely seen as being of concern only in relation to Germany. This point was reflected in the following statement made by Whitton at the conference: Any solution to the problem of raw materials must be partly political; such a solution, if there is one, must be a synthesis of economics, politics and law. The very origin of this movement was political; you will remember that the statement by Sir Samuel Hoare [at the LON in 1935] was mainly an attempt to meet the claims of Italy for colonies. The movement was continued in the hope of meeting the German demand for colonies.199

The German Colonial Campaign: From Versailles to 1933 At this point in time, Germany was conducting a vigorous campaign for the return of its colonies. It should be noted that in the early years of the Weimar Republic, the German government showed no interest in entering into diplomatic discussions concerning equality of status in the colonial field, such was its preoccupation with the pressing issues of internal strife, hyperinflation and the payment of reparations. Nonetheless, a minority of Germans continued to harbour a desire for such equality of status and due to this minority’s propaganda efforts, the issue was kept alive in the public domain. In 1924, at the first German colonial congress to be held in the post-war period, a resolution was passed ‘asking the Government to make its entry into the League of Nations conditional upon Germany’s being granted territory under mandate.’200 By the time of the next colonial congress in March 1925, German efforts on the colonial front had broadened and had begun to acquire a quasi-official cast. For example, not long before the signing of the 198 Ibid. 199 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 334; and Gilbert Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales: Examen des solutions proposées (Paris: Centre d’Études de Politique Étrangère, 1937), 14. 200 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 60–61.

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Rhineland Pact, Schacht, as president of the Reichsbank, declared that Germany would be able to fulfil the requirements of the Dawes Plan if it were able to avail itself of the resources of colonies belonging to it. On the very eve of the signing of the Rhineland Pact, Stresseman was sent a telegram by the Deutschnationale Volkspartei asking him to obtain from France and Britain a commitment on paper in regard to a range of concessions. Although, Stresseman did not formulate an official request in respect to colonies during the negotiations at Locarno, he nonetheless raised the issue during those negotiations. The response of Briand and Austen Chamberlain, according to the British under-secretary of state, Godfrey Locker-Lampson, speaking in the House of Commons in 1926, was simply to assure Stresseman that Germany, ‘as a member of the League of Nations, would be a possible candidate for Colonial mandates like all other members.’ Having pointed this out, Locker-Lampson stated that it would be ‘incorrect to suggest that any promise or undertaking was given to the German government.’201 Despite the fact that no commitment in regard to mandates was made at Locarno, the fact that the issue was even raised in that context was enough to cause disquiet among imperialists in Britain. This disquiet caused the Times opine that the idea that ‘remote settlers,’ meaning British settlers, in Tanganyika (what is now the mainland part of Tanzania), ‘might be given away in the interests of European good feeling or bartered away in negotiation, is not founded upon any solid calculation’ and that one should not overestimate the importance of the German colonial movement: the movement was ‘largely factitious’ because the colonial project was of interest to only a minority of the German population.202 201 193 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series) 18 March 1926, 601–2. On Hjalmar Schacht’s statement in relation to the Dawes Plan and the telegram of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei to Gustave Stresemann, see Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 64. See also Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Colonial Problem: A Report by a Study Group of Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 80–1. 202 ‘The Future of Tanganyika,’ Times, October 5, 1926. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 63–4. On welcoming Germany’s membership of the LON, the Times stated that Germany’s ‘supposed ambition to become a Mandatory State under the League may, for the present, be regarded as a vain aspiration, because no mandate is available. Moreover the best observers are of the opinion that the agitation for mandates has been artificially stimulated in Germany and finds no general support.’ ‘Germany in the League,’ Times, September 11, 1926.

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Imperial circles were further disquieted by a request on the part of the Reich Colonial Task Force (the Kolonialen Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft otherwise known as KORAG), that the German government insist that Germany’s former colonies be returned as a condition of its entry to the LON. KORAG was lightly rebuked in an editorial in the Times for making this request on the basis that it displayed ‘a certain impetuosity which it may be hoped will be restrained when German representatives find themselves actually cooperating in the work of the League.’203 The year 1926 also saw the appearance of an English translation of a polemic penned by Heinrich Schnee, the former governor of East Africa, called Die koloniale Schuldlüge (1924) under the heading of German Colonization, Past and Future: The Truth About the German Colonies.204 In his book, Schnee sought to disprove ‘the theory that the German administration of her colonies had been so unsatisfactory that she had thereby forfeited her right to colonial territory’: what became known in Germany as the colonial guilt-lie, this being the English translation of name of Schnee’s book in German.205 Citing praise of German colonial administration and criticism of mandate administration, Schnee attacked the ‘the entire structure of calumny and defamation’ with which the annexationist Powers had hitherto ‘succeeded in concealing the real motives of their illegal action,’ and insisted that Germany should be ‘reinstated in the ranks of colonising powers, with a status equal to that which she won for herself by untold exertions and sacrifices during a struggle over thirty years.’206 Schnee’s defence of the German colonial record won some sympathy in Britain, but also lead Leopold S. Amery, secretary of state for dominion affairs and for the colonies, to emphatically insist on Britain’s legal title to Tanganyika. Amery was the chief guest at a dinner held at the Savoy Hotel on the evening of June 11, 1926, which was described in 203 ‘German Colonial Aims,’ Times, July 29, 1926. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 65. 204 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 65n. 205 Moresco, Colonial Questions and Peace, 57. Moresco noted that students of colonial administration were ‘unwilling to generalize’ on Germany’s ‘colonial methods which varied according to circumstances’ (ibid., 57n.). 206 Heinrich Schnee, German Colonization, Past and Future: The Truth About the Germany Colonies, with introduction by William Harbutt Dawson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), 174–75. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 65.

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the Times as the ‘East African dinner’. At the dinner, Amery, after having ‘proposed the toast “East Africa,”’ observed that concern had arisen that ‘our tenure’ in Tanganyika was ‘temporary and uncertain.’ He stated that this was a ‘mistaken notion’ which had arisen because of ‘a misunderstanding of what was meant by the term “Mandate.”’ To cheers from the audience he declared that Britain ‘held Tanganyika under our obligations to the League of Nations, but we held it in our own right under the Treaty of Versailles’; thus, he added, the ‘foundations of the East Africa of the future were as sure and as permanent in Tanganyika as they were in any other East African territory’.207 The claim that Britain held Tanganyika in its own right, a claim which, it should be noted, was vulnerable to the objection of the United States that the right to dispose of Germany’s former colonies was vested in the Principal Allied and Associated Powers, and the claim that British tenure in Tanganyika was in no sense ‘a lease’ from the League had the following basis according to Amery: ‘We are in Tanganyika by plain right of conquest and formal surrender, and shall remain there until someone stronger than ourselves takes it from us.’208 The Reichstag’s Inter-Party Colonial Association and Schnee immediately issued objections to the views expressed by Amery at the dinner at the Savoy, charging that Amery was ‘placing British tenure before British duties to the League’ and pointing to ‘the recognition at Locarno of Germany’s mandatory eligibility, [thereby] indicating the importance to Germany of the new status.’209 Despite the indignation Amery’s statements aroused in certain quarters, in the view of the Times, the German colonial campaign was not of real significance and was largely driven by Schnee who had been the prime mover behind the formation of the Inter-Party Colonial Association. Most Germans at the time, while keen to be free of the taint of Kolonialschuldlüge, were not so anxious for

207 ‘A United East Africa: Mr. Amery on Recent Progress,’ Times, June 12, 1926. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 66. 208 L. S. Amery, The Forward View (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1935), 250. The United States ‘claims and emphasizes an interest in the disposition of all mandates on the ground that by the peace settlement title to them was vested in the Principal Allied and Associated Powers of which it was one.’ Malcolm W. Davis, ‘Peaceful Change: An Analysis of Some Current Proposals,’ Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the Drift Towards War (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 157. 209 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 66.

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Germany to be an imperial power once more.210 Further to this, many felt that in light of the assurances given at Locarno, the imputation of the so-called colonial guilt lie could be considered to have been withdrawn.211 Indeed, Stresseman stated in Geneva in the course of the Seventh Assembly in 1926 that it could ‘now be confidently asserted “that Germany had the same right to possess colonies as any other people”’. Yet Stresseman, putting his faith in the extension of spirit of Locarno, ‘made no demands for German mandatization.’212 La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales: examen des solutions proposées was a study prepared by the Parisian barrister Gilbert Maroger in view of the Paris conference on peaceful change which he attended alongside his colleague Touzet. The latter, who was described in the conference proceedings as a former ‘Résident Supérieur in Indochina,’ had just seen published the first volume of Le problème colonial et la paix du monde: Les revendications coloniales allemandes. In La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, which was published under the auspices of the Centre d’études de politique étrangère with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, Maroger examined in detail the German colonial demands. He observed that a great number of them appeared to be but the contemporary expression of an ‘old and more general demand: the demand for the space necessary in order for Germany to live, the demand for Raum.’213 Maroger further observed that the contemporary German discourses on the subject of colonies often evoked those images that had for a long time accompanied affirmations of the necessity for Germany to expand beyond its borders. By way of example, he pointed out that that Germany was sometimes compared to a ‘seething cauldron, of which one must prevent the explosion’ and that Germans 210 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 66–7. See also Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 148. 211 Moresco, Colonial Questions and Peace, 57. Moresco observed that the alleged withdrawal of the imputation of colonial guilt at Locarno was a tentative withdrawal (ibid., 57n.). 212 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 67. See also Baranowski, Nazi Empire, 148. Shelley Baranowski notes that all parties except for the Communists were involved in the Inter-Party Colonial Association. 213 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniale, 39. International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 628, 631.

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were sometimes likened to ‘caged birds clamouring for freedom.’214 Framing the issue in general terms, Maroger stated that the German demand for a new division of the territories and riches of the world and thus a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, responded ‘to a general conception of “non-satisfaction”, of “future destiny”, and of the rhythm of death and re-birth, familiar to the German Lebensphilosophien’.215 In the 1920s, the pre-war term Lebensraum emerged as a key element in the political vocabulary of the right, it being invoked in order to heap further infamy on the Treaty of Versailles: the treaty had ‘stolen living-space from the German Volk’.216 In 1926, Hans Grimm’s propaganda novel Volk ohne Raum appeared. According to Peter Gay, its title alone served to convey ‘a prevailing sense of claustrophobia, an anxiety felt, and played upon by right-wing politicians, over “inadequate living space” and the “encirclement” of Germany by its hostile, vengeful neighbours.’217 Shelley Bararnowski notes that Grimm, who was connected to the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft) and the German National People’s Party, sought to express: through his characters Germany’s mission to settle its Volk overseas, particularly in Africa, and supplant Great Britain as the world’s dominant imperial power. The acquisition and settlement of living space would allow Germans to remake their social order. They would recover their spiritual and cultural values and, by providing opportunity for its surplus population, eliminate the class divisions that drew workers to socialism.218 214 Ibid. Gilbert Maroger attributed the comparison of Germany to a boiling cauldron to Schacht. The depiction of Germans as caged birds he attributed to General Ritter Von Epp in view of a speech Epp delivered at the Nuremberg Congress of 1934. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 58n. 215 Maroger, La question des matières Premières et les revendications coloniales, 39. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 58n. Woodruff D. Smith, notes that the term Lebensraum ‘was first used in its classic sense in the 1890s by the renowned Leipzig University geographer Friedrich Ratzel. He adds that according to Ratzel, cultural groupings had to expand their living space as a matter of necessity: Ratzel argued that ‘like a plant, a Volk had to grow and to expand its Lebensraum or die’ and that it is this imperative gives rise to conquest of lands inhabited by less vital people. Woodruff D. Smith, ‘Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,’ German Studies Review 3, no. 1 (1980): 51–68, 52–4. 216 Smith, ‘Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,’ 55. 217 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Penguin Books, 1974), 83–4. 218 Baranowski, Nazi Empire, 152–53.

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Although Volk ohne Raum sold very well, the colonial question still remained an issue of minor importance in Germany.219 After 1929, the colonial question ceased to be regarded as a distinct issue and instead became a subordinate feature of the broader push on the part of Germany for equality and, in relation to this, treaty revision. By 1931, opinion in Britain had begun to soften on the question of revision. The increasing growth of the Hitlerite movement encouraged the view abroad that moderation should be shown towards Germany, whilst also compelling the leaders of the German government to become more insistent in their revisionist demands.220 In a number of letters to the Times in July 1931, Sir Alexander Gordon urged that peace should be pursued through a policy of ‘contentment,’ that is, through treaty revision, rather than through a policy of disarmament. He called on Britain to ‘take a lead at Geneva in the direction of “appeasement,”’ appeasement being a term that at this stage had not acquired a negative connotation.221 Gordon’s position was assailed the next day by Wickham Steed, a journalist who would later join the New Commonwealth Society. Steed argued that to talk of treaty revision was to add ‘highly explosive fuel’ to the ‘flames of discord’ that were already ‘burning fiercely’ in Europe. Revision, Steed insisted, could only be considered in a ‘atmosphere of confidence,’ an atmosphere that would only be revived when people became convinced that it was the

219 Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, 83. Peter Gay points out that Volk ohne Raum was a ‘long-lived best-seller.’ He notes that Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) which appeared three years later, had ‘enormous sales’ in Germany and that this ‘aroused’ the Right. It is telling of the rapidly shifting political landscape nonetheless, that the voices raised against the film based on Remarque’s novel upon its release in December 1930, were more numerous and more openly vicious than they had been upon the actual novel’s release (ibid., 83, 144). Detlev J. K. Peukert points out that ‘within four months of its publication in January 1929…[Im Westen nichts Neues] had sold half a million copies.’ He adds that although the novel was ‘generally well received,’ following the film’s release the ‘attacks on Remarque by the hard right were unceasing.’ Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, trans. Richard Deveson (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 173. 220 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 75–6. 221 Ibid., 76–7. See also Alexander Gordon, letter to the editor, Times, July 15, 1931; Alexander Gordon, letter to the editor, Times, July 18, 1931; and Alexander Gordon, letter to the editor, Times, July 23, 1931.

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‘avowed policy of Germany to seek treaty adjustments peaceably.’222 Steed’s position was in turn attacked in a letter to the Times by William Horsfall Carter. Carter, who was later to become the secretary of the New Commonwealth Society and the editor of its monthly organ The New Commonwealth, criticised the British and French governments for failing to address the question of treaty revision which, he stated, ‘should have been boldly tackled if there were ever to be any improvement in the psychological situation in Europe’. Carter claimed that the current outbreak of ‘exasperated Germany nationalism’ was an understandable response to this ‘breach of faith.’223 Among the measures mentioned at the time in respect to appeasing Germany was French acceptance of the Anschluss and the consideration by Britain of ‘returning certain of the colonies lost by Germany.’224 Whether or not the latter measure was in the realm of possibility prior to 1931 is unclear. However, what is clear is that in the course of 1931 and 1932, the prospect of colonial retrocession became increasingly remote. In a letter written to the Times on July 28, 1931, Arthur Hirst, who had recently visited Germany, reported that revisionism in Germany had reached a level of frenzy. The Germans, he stated, ‘passionately believe that Germany was entirely guiltless in 1914…and that the whole War and the Treaty of Versailles constituted the greatest crime in all history, against a noble and innocent people.’ He added that it was ‘too late to do anything to counter this most fateful propaganda.’225 Thus, although many in Britain wished to assist the ailing Weimar Republic through responding to the German sense of injustice, there was at time same time ‘already a suspicion in British minds that revision would not generate goodwill in Germany’ and a feeling ‘that concessions to Germany,’ as

222 Wickham Steed, letter to the editor, Times, July 16, 1931. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 77. 223 W. Horsfall Carter, letter to the editor, Times, July 20, 1931. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 77. 224 Major John C. Daniell, letter to the editor, Times, July 18, 1931. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 77n. 225 Arthur Hirst, letter to the editor, Times, July 28, 1931. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 78.

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Austen Chamberlain contended in early 1932, were ‘used as pretexts for demanding more.’226

The German Colonial Propaganda After 1933 The victory of the Hitlerite movement might at first have been thought to herald an end to colonial agitation, given that the National Socialist Party showed itself to be indifferent and even hostile to colonial policy.227 In Mein Kampf, Hitler denounced pre-war Germany’s ‘inane colonial policy’ as an onerous luxury and declared that from here on Germany should look to the East in the quest for living space. The book stated: However much we may all recognize the necessity for a reckoning with France this would yet remain ineffective if it were to become the only goal of foreign policy. It can only have sense if it acts as a cover for an enlargement of the living room of our people in Europe. It is not to colonial acquisition that we must look for a solution of this question but exclusively to the acquisition of territory for settlement which will increase the area of the Motherland…We finally part with the colonial and trade policy of the period before the War and pass over to the land policy of the future. When we speak today in Europe of new land, we can think in the first place only of Russia and the border states under her subjection.228

In order to successfully carry out this policy, conflict with Britain had to be avoided. Noting that Germany’s pre-war colonial and trade had 226 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 79. Wood stated the following in explaining the reluctance of Great Britain to make colonial concessions to Germany during the last couple of years of the Weimar Republic: ‘Not only was confidence in the potential German use of colonies at a low point, but the growth of economic nationalism during the depression had enhanced the value of colonial territory’ (ibid., 80–1). 227 Ibid., 81, and Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 26. 228 Mein Kamph, quoted in Harold Nicholson, ‘The Colonial Problem,’ International Affairs 18, no. 1 (1938): 32–50, 44. Emphasis in original. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 81. Gilbert Maroger pointed to the clear opposition drawn in Hitler’s book between Germany’s world politics and commercial policy before the war, of which the colonial policy was one aspect, and ‘the policy of the “union of men with their soil” which must be the one of the National-Socialist Party.’ Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 27.

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been a source of tension between Germany and Britain, Hitler stated that ‘[n]o sacrifice is too great in order to win England’s good will (Geneigtheit)’ and that this meant ‘[r]enunciation of world trade and colonies; renunciation of a German navy, concentration of the whole force of the state on the land army.’229 Yet as indicated by Toynbee’s discussion of the colonial question during a meeting with the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg in June 1934 and in his meeting with Hitler in February 1936, once installed in power the National Socialist Party gradually modified its rhetoric regarding the colonial thesis. From May 29 to June 2, 1933, Carl Brinkmann, a sociologist and economist from the University of Heidelberg attended the sixth session of the ISC. This session, which was held in London, was devoted to the subject of ‘The State and Economic Life’ as had been a conference held in Milan in May in the previous year, albeit in that case under the auspices of what was then called the CISSIR. In the course of the London conference, Brinkmann insisted on the democratic nature of the new Germany. In this regard, he drew a contrast between plebiscitary and parliamentary democracy, dismissing the latter as a fiction. Some weeks earlier, on May 3, Brinkmann had delivered an address at Chatham House. It was perhaps a sign that a shift in the public stance of the Reich in respect to the colonial thesis was in the wind that he declared during his address that Germany ‘could not be excluded from the mission of colonial development’ and that there would be ‘in future an ever increasing danger from the non-white races that Germany would have to help resist.’230 229 Mein

Kampf, 1936, quoted in Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 81. ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 244. For Toynbee’s meeting with Alfred Rosenberg, see McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: A Life, 171. Carl Brinkmann declared the following at the 1933 session of the ISC: ‘Professor Manning has emphasised the point, in speaking of privilege, of a monopoly of political power as the backbone of the new State, that there must be sufficient guarantee that this political monopoly will be exercised in harmony with the wishes and interests of the nation and of the State. I would submit two considerations. Firstly, that under what you call a Liberal democracy the parliamentary method of government [sic] there were no such guarantees; secondly, that in all the countries where the more modern movements have latterly come to the fore, it is practically certain that the will of the nation, as expressed by Parliament, did not correspond to the will of the nation in general.’ League of Nations, Sixth International Studies Conference, A Record of a Second Study Conference on the State and Economic Life Held in London From May 29 to June 2 and Organised by the International Institute of Intellectual co-operation in collaboration with the British Co-ordinating Committee for International Studies (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1934), 209. 230 Crozier,

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In June of that year, Alfred Hugenberg, the former leader of the German National People’s Party and now the Reich minister of economics, stated in a report to the 1933 World Monetary and Economic Conference that Germany would be in a better position to pay its debts if the Germans, a ‘people without space,’ were granted domains in Africa where this ‘energetic race could settle colonies and carry out great works of peace.’231 This statement caused an outcry in Britain where the general mood following the National Socialist triumph was even more anti-concessionary, although later on, in the face of the looming threat of war, this mood would shift somewhat.232 Hugenberg’s statement was immediately repudiated by the other members of the German delegation to the World Monetary and Economic Conference and he was compelled to return to Germany where he resigned his ministry on June 29. It was subsequently a matter of debate as to whether Hugenberg was simply expressing a personal opinion, whether his intervention on the subject of colonies had been orchestrated in order to supply a pretext for pushing him from his post, or whether it was an officially sanctioned ballon d’essai, the last two possibilities not being mutually exclusive.233 Despite the disavowal of Hugenberg’s memorandum, the colonial issue did not remain dormant. In. particular, it was pursued by members of that milieux which before the advent of the new regime, belonged to political groups supportive of Germany’s earlier colonial policy. For example, in September 1933, Franz von Papen, then seemingly in ‘good standing,’ announced that ‘the great majority of 65,000 Germans refuse to regard the former colonies as lost possessions,’ adding that ‘world stability cannot be established until Germany regains her place in the tropical sun.’234

231 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 130–31; and Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 83. 232 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 85–6. 233 Ibid., 83. Maroger noted that ‘the emotion raised’ by the memorandum Hugenberg submitted to the economic conference ‘was considerable: people in Germany judged it preferable to disavow the author.’ Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 17. 234 ‘Germany’s Place in the Tropical Sun,’ Saturday Evening Post, September 30, 1933, quoted in Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 84. See also Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 25.

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In 1933, the German Colonial League was established under the presidency of Schnee with the purpose of grouping together various colonial organisations and charging them with the task of organising propaganda.235 In December of that year, a large mass-meeting was held in Berlin under the auspices of the Nazi Party at which orators, Schnee among them, insisted on ‘a policy of colonial recovery for Germany.’236 Hitler himself had already publicly raised in the issue, stating in October 1933 in an interview with Daily Mail’s Price the following: ‘Germany contains too many people for her size…and it is to the interest of the world that a great nation should not be deprived of the conditions for existence, but we shall never go to war to get colonies. We are convinced that we are as capable as any other nation in administering and developing colonial territories, but we regard this as a matter of negotiation.’237 The qualification that Germany would not got to war to obtain colonies was repeated on later occasions, notably in 1938 at Munich where Hitler told Neville Chamberlain in a private conversation the following according to Chamberlain: In the first place he repeated to me with great earnestness what he had already said at Berchtesgaden, namely, that this was the last of his territorial ambitions in Europe and that he had no wish to include in the Reich people of other races than Germans. In the second place he said, again very earnestly, that he wanted to be friends with England and that if only this Sudeten question could be got out of the way in peace he would gladly resume conversations….He said, “There is one awkward question, 235 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 33. The colonial organisations that Heinrich Schnee mobilised for the purpose of propaganda included the following: the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), founded in 1882); the League of Former German Combatants (Deutscher Kiolonialkriegerbund), founded in 1922; the German Red-Cross and the Women’s Association for Overseas Germans, founded in 1888; the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society (Frauensbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), founded in 1907; the Colonial Economic Committee, founded in 1896; and the Academic Colonial League, founded in 1925. 236 ‘Nazi Orators Stress Colonial Recovery: Quote Theodore Roosevelt to Deny Charge That Germans are Bad Colonizers,’ New York Times, December 11, 1933. 237 G. Ward Price, ‘Reich Shuns War, Hitler Declares,’ New York Times, October 22, 1933. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 84. Note that in Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem the date of George Ward Price’s interview with Hitler is mistakenly given as October 22, 1934.

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the Colonies, but that is not a matter for war,” and, alluding to the mobilisation of the Czechoslovakian Army, which had been announced to us in the middle of our conversations and had given rise to some disturbance, he said, about the Colonies, “There will be no mobilisation about that.”238

It was left to other figures in the regime to add a touch of menace to the German colonial propaganda. As noted in a paper issued by the RIIA in May 1938 on Germany’s claims to colonies, the German government had not ‘up to this point, put forward. officially and publicly any precisely formulated requests to the Colonial Powers concerning its colonial aspirations.’239 Nonetheless, from about the mid-1930s, semi-official demands for colonial revision began to be heard with increasing frequency against the background of a ‘strong pro-campaign,’ the probable. effect of which was to render the German people in 1939 ‘more colonyconscious than at any other time since the War.’240 Taken as a whole, the German colonial propaganda after 1933 was based on the following contentions: that Germany was lacking in living space; that Germany was in dire need of raw materials and foodstuffs; that due to a lack of foreign exchange Germany needed zones of exploitation in which investments and exchange could take place under the cover of a German monetary system; that German honour demanded that Germany resume its place among the colonial powers; that colonial retrocession was a matter of justice and legal right.241 Addressing the question of under what form were presented the psychological and moral arguments insisting on colonial revision, Maroger noted that there were a great number of declarations issued in the period 238 339 Parl. Deb, H.C. (5th series), September 28, 1938, 22. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 119. 239 Royal Institute of International Affairs, Germany’s Claims to Colonies, Information Department Papers, no. 23 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1938), 28. See also Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Colonial Problem, 81. 240 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 84–5. 241 Ibid., 84, and Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 36. See also ‘Dr. Schacht Joins in Colonies Demand: “Impossible to Withhold Them,”’ Straits Times (Singapore), June 11, 1936. Heinrich Rogge stated that ‘Germany’s demand for colonial revision…is based on the vital necessities of the German people—overpopulation, lack of raw materials, exclusion from foreign markets through tariff barriers, lack of foreign exchange—and on a complex of legal and ethical arguments.’ Heinrich Rogge, 1937, quoted in Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 49.

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dating from 1935 down to early months of 1937 to the effect ‘that for Germany the acquisition of colonial territory had become today a question of honour’: that among the principal powers, German alone was denied any overseas territory and that the restoration to Germany of equality of rights could not be considered to have been realised until this remaining form of discrimination had been removed.242 In what was before revisions a confidential memorandum that he submitted to the ISC’s general rapporteur on peaceful change and to the IIIC, Frederick Lugard, 1st Baron Lugard, former governor of Hong Kong, former governor-general of Nigeria and from 1922 to 1936 a member of the Permanent Mandates Commission, pointed to an article appearing in a monthly magazine entitled League of Nations and International Law (Völkerbund und Völkerrecht). Therein, the magazine’s publisher, the jurist Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven, said that ‘though the question of raw materials and room for emigration are important, the decisive issue is that a restitution of Germany colonies is a question of Right and of Honour.’243 Yet according to Maroger’s analysis, what mostly characterised the German colonial demands in the period which concerned him, was the stress placed on the economic aspect of the colonial question and it was this, he contended, that distinguished the German colonial propaganda from that of Japan and Italy.244 Maroger stated in this regard the following: Doubtless, Japan and Italy had already explained their politics of expansion in relation to some economic preoccupations; but there were numerous declarations which insisted on the political aspect, on the moral aspect of the problems posed. Most of the German declarations, to the contrary, put the accent on the links between the colonial problem and the monetary problem: in the speeches of Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering, economic policy holds a place the extent of which astonishes.245

242 Maroger,

La Question des Matières Premières et les Revendications Coloniales, 36–37. Study Group: Note (in absentia) by Lord Lugard March 13–14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.b, UA, and Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 51n. Emphasis in the original. 244 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 39. 245 Ibid., 13. 243 International

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The ‘Economic’ Case for Colonial Retrocession The most ‘well-known’ statement of the economic case for the return of German colonies appeared in an article written by Schacht, who was described by Chalmers Wright in Population and Peace as Germany’s ‘foremost exponent abroad of his country’s economic requirements,’ that was published in Foreign Affairs on January 7, 1937.246 Indeed, the publication of this article, which according to a report emanating from New York on December 16, 1936, had already received considerable attention in Germany, probably marked the high-point of the German economic propaganda concerning colonial revision.247 In the article, Schacht maintained that the so-called colonial problem was not a ‘problem of imperialism’ or ‘a mere problem of prestige,’ but was ‘simply and solely a problem of economic existence’.248 Schacht claimed that this point had in some measure been acknowledged by Hoare in his famous speech at the League Assembly in September 1935 when he came ‘forward in favor of redistributing the means of access to the world’s raw material resources,’ although Schacht added that what this meant in concrete terms had yet to be revealed.249 Schacht insisted that Germany’s economic survival was imperilled by a scarcity of raw materials in a context in which there was ‘no longer free trade in the world’ and in which Germany was ‘crushed by foreign debt.’250 He proposed that in order to ameliorate Germany’s economic situation, two conditions needed to be met: he stated that first, Germany must be able to ‘produce raw materials on [colonial] territory under her own management’ and second, that Germany must be able to exercise monetary sovereignty over this territory.251 This proposal was interpreted in some reports as meaning Germany did not seek ‘absolute sovereignty over her colonies’ and was ‘willing to administer colonies on the League 246 Chalmers

Wright, Population and Peace, 49. Schacht on Colonies,’ Straits Times (Singapore), December 17, 1936. 248 Hjalmar Schacht, ‘Germany’s Colonial Demands,’ Foreign Affairs 15, no. 2 (1937): 223–34, 234. 249 Ibid., 233. 250 Ibid., 231. 251 Ibid., 233. See also Étienne Dennery, Le Problème des Matiéres Première dans les relations Internationales (Paris: Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1939), 171. IICI/9/11, UA. 247 ‘Dr.

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mandate system,’ an interpretation that was encouraged by the fact that Schacht indicated in his article that the question of sovereignty in its political and legal manifestations was open to negotiation.252 Explaining Germany’s colonial demands Schacht stated the following: Colonial raw materials cannot be developed without considerable investments. Colonial markets are not of the kind that can live by the personal needs of the native population. Shirts and hats for the negroes and ornaments for their wives do not constitute an adequate market. Colonial territories are developed by the building of railways and roads, by automobile traffic, radio and electric power, by huge plantations, etc. From the moment that the German colonies came under the control of the Mandate Powers, Germany was cut off from the delivery of goods required for such investments. In 1913, for example, Germany’s exports to Tanganyika formed 52.6 per cent of that area’s imports. In 1935 they formed 10.7 per cent. The British Mandate Power as a matter of course places its orders in England and not in Germany or elsewhere. That is why Germany needs colonial territories which she herself administers. Since, however, the development of colonies depends upon longterm investments, and these investments cannot be made by the native negro population, the German currency system must prevail in the colonial territories, so that the required investments can be made with German credits. These then are Germany’s two basic demands in the colonial field: that she have territories under German management and included in the German monetary system. All the other questions involved—sovereignty, army, police, the churches, international collaboration, are open to discussion. They can be solved by means of international co-operation so long as nothing unworthy is imputed against the honor of Germany.253

Claiming to want to clearly demonstrate for the benefit of his American readers, the audience to which the article was openly addressed, that for Germany the colonial question was ‘not to-day, any more than it was before, a question of Imperialism and Militarism’ and implicitly responding to certain of the pretexts upon which Germany was deprived of its colonies, Schacht pointed out that it was not the German ­government which had ‘brought the war into the colonial territories’ or

252 Straits Times (Singapore), December 17, 1936. See also ‘What Germany Expects of Colonies,’ Straits Times (Singapore), December 19, 1936. 253 Schacht, ‘Germany’s Colonial Demands,’ 233–34.

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‘the colored peoples into the World War’.254 Schacht noted that the Congo Act of 1885, to which Belgium, Britain, France and Germany were signatories, provided that in the event of war the parties to the act ‘would renounce the Congo Basin as a basis for war-like operations.’255 He also noted that the German government had suggested on August 23, 1914, that the colonies be left out of the war. Britain and France, Schacht observed, effectively rejected this suggestion: he stated that they had proceeded to violate the Congo Act by bringing the war into the German colonies, the combined military forces of which, Schacht added, consisted of only around 7000 men and had ‘no significance other than to act as a police force for the maintenance of law and order.’256 Schacht stated that whereas Germany had never used the inhabitants of its colonies for military purposes, France had ‘brought over half a million coloured soldiers into the field against Germany,’ adding that the consequence of this was ‘the widespread unrest prevailing amongst the colored peoples.’257 Appealing to his target audience, Schacht observed that in matters of international politics, Americans had generally shown a ‘healthy, human, moral attitude,’ adding that while it ‘is true that, for reasons which are gradually being seen in their true light,’ the American people had entered the war, they had ‘rightly refused to ratify’ the Treaty of Versailles because it was an ‘immoral treaty’.258 Schacht acknowledged that a large number of Americans disapproved of many of the things that had occurred in Germany in recent years. However, he then suggested that his American ‘friends’ should ask themselves what would they do if they found themselves in Germany’s position: what would they do if, like Germany, they had lost a war which they had fought in the sincere belief that it was ‘for their very existence’ and then found themselves ‘oppressed for twenty long years by an unjust peace imposed by the victors, and on top of that were deprived by their opponents of the

254 Ibid.,

225–26. 225. 256 Ibid., 225–26. 257 Ibid., 226. Bryce Marian Wood noted that the fact that France had been the ‘militarizer of the natives’ was cited by elements in Britain who were keen to ‘uphold the fitness of Germans to rule over African territories.’ Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 90. 258 Schacht, ‘Germany’s Colonial Demands,’ 223. 255 Ibid.,

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necessities of life?’259 If all this were not enough, Schacht continued, the German people, ‘the torch-bearers of European culture for thousands of years,’ the same people who had given the ‘world Luther and Goethe,’ had had to sit by and see their nation’s ‘moral standing…affronted and disparaged by its opponents for two decades! It is inconceivable that such treatment,’ he stated in concluding his lament, ‘should not produce a profound reaction in the German people.’260 Schacht conceded that the question of Germany’s colonial possessions was likely of no or little interest to American readers. Nonetheless, he maintained that Americans could not remain indifferent to this question for two reasons. The first reason was economic: without German prosperity there can be no European prosperity and the ‘ebb and flow of European prosperity’ was important to America. The second reason, and the most important reason for the purposes of Schacht’s general argument, was moral: Americans, he stated, ‘must not imagine that they can evade the moral responsibility laid on their shoulders’ by President Wilson.261 This moral responsibility concerned Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 18, 1918, which formed the accepted basis of the peace negotiations. Point five of Wilson’s program called for: A free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based on strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interest of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose title is to be determined.262

Schacht stated that the Germans were more than willing to submit their claims to the test specified in point five of the Fourteen Points and that this was especially the case in light of an observation contained in what he referred to as Edward M. House’s ‘well-known Lyons wireless of October 1918’ from which he then proceeded to quote.263 According to an editorial comment concerning the so-called Lyons wireless, what Schacht was actually referring to was a cable that House sent to Wilson 259 Ibid.,

232.

260 Ibid. 261 Ibid.,

223–24, 232–33. Wilson, 1918, quoted ibid., 224. 263 Schacht, ‘Germany’s Colonial Demands,’ 224. 262 Woodrow

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from Paris on October 29, 1918, which communicated a memorandum composed for House in the main by Walter Lippmann which provided an interpretation of the Fourteen Points. It was from the section of the memorandum that addressed point five that Schacht quoted the following sentences: ‘What are the “equitable” claims put forth by Germany? That she needs access to tropical raw materials, that she needs a field for the expansion of her population, that under the principles of peace proposed, conquest gives her enemies no title to her colonies.’264 In relation to point five of the Fourteen Points and the sentences he quoted from the memorandum communicated in the cable sent 264 Ibid., 224. The full text of the section of the memorandum dealing with point five of the Fourteen Points read as follows: ‘Fear is expressed in France and England that this involves the reopening of all colonial questions. Obviously it is not so intended. It applies clearly to those colonial claims which have been created by the war. That means the German colonies and any other colonies which may come under international consideration as a result of the war. The stipulation is that in the case of the German colonies the title is to be determined after the conclusion of the war by “impartial adjustment” based on certain principles. These are of two kinds: 1. “Equitable” claims: 2. The interests of the populations concerned. What are the ‘equitable’ claims put forward by Britain and Japan, the two chief heirs of the German colonial empire, that the colonies cannot be returned to Germany? Because she will use them as submarine bases, because she will arm the blacks, because she uses the colonies as bases of intrigue, because she oppresses the natives. What are the “equitable” claims put forth by Germany? That she needs access to tropical raw materials, that she needs a field for the expansion of her population, that under the principles of peace proposed, conquest gives her enemies no title to her colonies. What are the “interests of the population”? That they should not be militarized, that exploitation should be conducted on the principle of the open door, and under the strictest regulations as to labor conditions, profits and taxes, that a sanitary régime be maintained, that permanent improvements in the way of roads, etc., be made, that native organization and custom be respected, that the protecting authority be stable and experienced enough to thwart intrigue and corruption, that the protecting power have adequate resources in money and competent administration to act successfully. It would seem as if the principle involved in this proposition is that a colonial power acts not as owner of its colonies, but as trustee for the natives and for the interests of the society of nations, that the terms on which the colonial administration is conducted is a matter of international concern and may legitimately be the subject of international inquiry and that the peace conference may, therefore, write a code of colonial conduct binding upon all colonial powers’ (ibid., 224–25n.). The editor of Foreign Affairs noted that Schacht’s reference to House’s cable as ‘a wireless from Lyons’ is ‘obscure.’ It further noted that in Wilson’s reply to the House cable of October 29 which was transmitted from Washington the next day, Wilson stated that the ‘comment on the Fourteen Points was “a satisfactory interpretation of the principles involved”, but that the details of the application mentioned should be regarded as merely illustrative suggestions’ (ibid., 224n.).

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by House to Wilson, Schacht stated that it would ‘impossible for the American people to ignore the solemn declarations made by their Chief Executive and his collaborator.’265 The Americans, he declared, could not close their eyes to the moral responsibility with which President Wilson had saddled them as a result of the way in which Germany was treated in 1919 in respect to its colonial possessions.266 In order to show that the Americans did indeed feel the weight of this responsibility, Schacht quoted from an article penned by House, who had been a member of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace and Wilson’s close adviser at the Peace Conference, which had appeared in 1935 and which was called ‘The need for an international New Deal.’ The quotation read as follows: Every statesmen will admit in private that Germany, Italy and Japan need reservoirs into which to pour their man power and from which to draw those necessities and raw materials that nature has denied them. But the great possessing nations—Great Britain, France, the United States and Russia—are unwilling to grant to their less fortunate fellows more than the crumbs that fall from their colonial table. Just as social peace cannot prevail without some adjustment of the capitalistic system, so international peace cannot be preserved without drastic territorial adjustments. Great Britain, France, Russia and the United States must receive Italy, Germany, and Japan Germany on terms adjusted to present world conditions and recognize their insistence upon being given their proper part of the colonial resources of the world. Chaos and catastrophe will be upon us unless those who have among the Powers are willing to share in some way with those who have not.267

House’s call for an international New Deal had already provided useful ammunition for Japan it having been used by Prince Konoe in November 1935 as a basis for arguing that Japan was ‘justified in seeking, along with Italy and Germany, a redistribution of the world’s wealth’ and for ‘demanding new recognition for Japan’s power in Asia.’268 265 Ibid.,

225.

266 Ibid. 267 Edward M. House, 1935, quoted in Schacht, ‘Germany’s Colonial Demands,’ 233. See also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 214, 325. 268 William Miles Fletcher, The Search for New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 95.

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Like Konoe, Schacht drew on House’s division of the world into ‘Haves’ and ‘Have nots,’ making the observation that standing against the ‘great national economic domains’ of Great Britain, France, the United States and Russia, were the ‘countries with large populations and limited territories’ which, because of their ‘inadequate land resources…are much more dependent than the others upon the international exchange of goods’.269 Having asserted this, Schacht then quoted a speaker in the House of Lords, who, according to Schacht, had recently observed, after having noted the vast amount of natural resources at the disposal of the British Empire, the following: that ‘it was not surprising that there was unrest in Germany, Japan and Italy; it was true that Great Britain was probably the most peace loving country in the world; that was because she had got all that she wanted.’270 Schacht stated that what was interesting about this observation was the connection it drew between access to raw materials and the ‘love of peace’: that the author of the statement recognised that a country that cannot access those resources that are needed in order to live is potentially a source of instability. Schacht added that events had ‘unfortunately’ conspired to render the situation of Germany now very different from that of Japan and Italy.271 Elaborating on this point Schacht stated: Despite the League of Nations and its alleged assurances of peace, Japan has meanwhile decided to help herself and has acquired Manchuria; while Italy, by the conquest of Abyssinia, has expanded the territory which she requires for life. As a result, Japan and Italy are no longer among the ranks of the unsatisfied nations…Germany remains the lone unsatisfied large Power. So long, then, as the problem of colonial raw materials is not solved for Germany, so long will she remain a source of unrest despite all her love of peace. It is that love of peace which still permits her to entertain the hope that she can solve the colonial problem peacefully and that she can take her place in the ranks of the Haves…There will be no peace in Europe until this problem is solved. No great nation willingly allows its standard of life and culture to be lowered and no great nation accepts the risk that it will go hungry.272

269 Schacht,

‘Germany’s Colonial Demands,’ 227. 227–28. 271 Ibid., 228. 272 Ibid. 270 Ibid.,

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One might observe that the last sentence of the above statement was somewhat evocative of the Japanese right to live doctrine, although perhaps a more precise description of the doctrine which Schacht might be said to have invoked in that sentence is that of the will to live and flourish of great nations. Schacht’s statement in his article that no nation of ‘honor and worth’ would willingly submit to a policy aimed at depriving it of the vital necessities of life and that, to the contrary, such a nation would use everything in its power in order to defeat it, is consistent with such a doctrine. According to Schacht, his point concerning a nation of honour and worth was well demonstrated by the failure of the policy of sanctions against Italy. Advancing an argument often put forward by apologists for the unruly, Schacht declared in his article that a policy of sanctions was contrary to the spirit of peace: ‘no friend of peace can ever approve of measures intended to cut off great Powers from the natural treasures of the earth’ as such measures drive ‘nations apart and into war’.273 Schacht had long argued that Germany was over-populated. Germany’s putative population problem was the point of departure for a speech he gave on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Berlin-Charlottenburg section of the German Colonial Society in March 24, 1926, in which he outlined the ‘Neue koloniale Politik.’274 However, in that speech and unlike other supporters of German colonial expansion both past and present, Schacht did not dwell on emigration 273 Ibid., 230. According to Carl Walter Young, who, it should be noted, was one of the Lytton Commission’s seven expert advisors, the Japanese right to live doctrine was developed by Japanese officials and publicists because the treaty rights that Japan enjoyed in Manchuria were insufficient to ‘establish legal claims to a general superiority of economic and political position.’ The crucial feature of the doctrine was the assertion that a nation that is ‘manifestly poor in the gifts of nature, has a right, moral or legal, to require a comparatively richer but politically weaker state to provide for the uninterrupted flow of such resources to the needy nation.’ Carl Walter Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931), 298, 300. George H. Blakeslee gave as another name for the right to live doctrine the ‘right to economic expansion’. He noted that the right to live doctrine was ‘interwoven’ with the Japanese Monroe Doctrine. George H. Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ Foreign Affairs 11, no. 4 (1933): 671–81, 275. 274 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 15–16. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 339. Schacht’s speech of March 24, 1926, was reported in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on March 26 and 28, 1926. See also Gilbert Maroger, L’Europe et la question coloniale: Revendications coloniales allemandes– Aspirations coloniales polonaises (Paris: Sirey, 1938), 446. Note that the preface to L’Europe et la question coloniale was written by Sébastien Charléty.

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to colonies as a solution to the putative problem of over-population, insisting rather that Germany’s surplus population must live ‘on the soil of Germany’ alone.275 Following upon this insistence and foreshadowing the argument he would mount in his Foreign Affairs article, Schacht maintained that care must be taken in the first place to assure to Germans an adequate supply of foodstuffs, in the second place and above all to develop the industrialization of the Reich. It is thus a matter for Germany of having access to raw materials— raw materials in order to fulfil the first condition, industrial raw materials to fulfil the second. The problem of raw materials is thus the essential problem: the Kernproblem; the demographic argument is not invoked in itself, it serves only to introduce and reinforce the argument based on the poverty of the Reich in respect to basic products. The importation of raw materials in massive quantities poses the question of currencies; Germany can only resolve it if the raw materials are produced in the monetary territory of Germany (Währungsgebiet), from which follows the demand for an extension of the domain of German monetary circulation.276

In the foreword he penned for a booklet which was published in Berlin with official approval in the first part of 1936 and which maintained that ‘the recovery of Germany’s lost colonies…[was]…an essential part of the Nazi programme,’ Schacht suggested that in the present just as in the past Germany needed colonies partly in order to accommodate its surplus population, he soon after returned to his earlier approach to the question of colonies.277 In an address which had as its subject 275 Maroger, La Question des matières premières et les revendications xoloniales, 15–6. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 339. 276 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 15–6. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 50–51n. 277 Straits Times (Singapore), June 11, 1936. The booklet for which Schacht penned the foreword was called Colonies or Not? The Attitude of the Party and the State Towards the Colonial Question and was authored by H. W. Bauer. Schacht wrote in the booklet’s foreword the following: ‘In her old colonies Germany found a valuable expansion of her raw material resources, her trade and her space for settlement. As recent developments have shown, these are an absolute necessity for an over-populated country. It is therefore economically and politically impossible to withhold from Germany the administration of her old colonial possessions.’ (Hjalmar Schacht, 1936, quoted ibid.) The booklet sought to explain away the shift in attitude towards colonies on the part of the National Socialist Party. In this regard, Bauer stated the following: ‘A certain phrase in the Fuehrer’s book

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‘People for whom there is not enough room’ given at Frankfurt on December 9, 1936, on the occasion of the centenary of the Association of Geography and Statistics, Schacht described Germany as ‘a country that has too large a population and too small a space’ and declared that this reality ‘weighs on us like a nightmare.’278 Despite saying this, Schacht nowhere suggested in his speech that colonies were required as zones for the placement of Germany’s surplus population. Responding to Amery’s recent claim that the return of Germany’s colonies would bring Germany ‘little advantage,’ Schacht stated in the speech that the only solution to Germany’s difficulties, namely, a scarcity of foodstuffs and raw materials, was ‘the assignment to her of colonial space.’279 Schacht warned that ‘[p]eace in Europe—and thus in the rest of the world,’ depended on ‘whether the possibility of existence,’ by which he meant access to resources, ‘is or is not given to the densely packed masses of Central Europe.’280 Although he concluded his Foreign Affairs article with a similar warning, that is, he concluded it in stating that the future of European peace depended on a resolution of the colonial problem in so far as it concerned Germany’s economic existence, Schacht refrained therein from ‘endorsing the notion so widely held in other countries’ that Germany’s ‘claims are seriously put forward in part as springing from a problem of

“My Struggle,” in which he criticises the foreign and colonial policy of the Kaiser Wilhelm era, has been separated from the context and used to show that national socialism is not interested in colonies. Although the Fuehrer rightly censures the half-heartedness of the former German colonial policy because it neither strengthened the Reich nor provided the opportunity for settlement, that does not mean that he thereby renounces all colonial activity for our people. That can only be maintained by malicious opponents. The Fuehrer gives his fundamental assent to the colonial idea and Germany’s colonial necessities.’ H. W. Bauer, 1936, quoted in Straits Times, (Singapore), June 11, 1936. In a report on this booklet, the following was noted: ‘The encouragement of colonial policy…does not mean that opportunities should be neglected for “colonisation at home and in the east.” No explanation is given of this phrase, but it appears to refer to Eastern Europe.’. Straits Times, (Singapore), June 11, 1936. 278 ‘“Not Enough Room”: Why Germany Wants Colonies—Dr. Schacht on a “Nightmare”,’ Straits Times (Singapore), December 28, 1936. See also Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 33; Maroger, L’Europe et la question coloniale, 443, 446, and Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 48, 145, 358. 279 Straits Times (Singapore), December 28, 1936. 280 Ibid. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 49.

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population.’281 The issue of over-population was mentioned in the quotations from the so-called Lyons wireless of 1918 and from the aforementioned House article which he reproduced in his Foreign Affairs piece. However, Schacht himself did not claim in his Foreign Affairs article that Germany was over-populated. Schacht directly addressed demographic questions on three occasions in the article, albeit briefly and in general terms: he noted on two occasions that the immigration policies of those countries which had welcomed immigrants before the war had become much stricter since the war’s end and on one occasion remarked on the contrast between the situation of the great national economic domains and that of countries with large populations but inadequate land resources.282 Observers writing not long after the publication of Schacht’s Foreign Affairs article thought that the absence from it of an argument linking Germany’s demand for colonies to Germany’s demographic situation suggested that partly for doctrinal reasons Germany’s colonial propagandists had decided to put to one side the contention that Germany needed colonies because it was suffering from population pressure.283 As suggested earlier, the National Socialists were at first indifferent to and even hostile towards Germany’s old colonial policy as it conflicted with key elements of National Socialist doctrine and policy. The idea of mass emigration to colonies conflicted with the general policy of ‘the union of men on their soil.’284 In addition to this, according to Maroger, through ‘its character as world politics,’ colonial policy was seen by the National Socialists as potentially a ‘source of weakness’: to pursue a colonial policy was to risk dissipating the energies of the German people within the framework in of a battle of conflicting interests in the world.285 In addition National Socialism was opposed to mass emigration to colonies on the ground that ‘colonisation may lead to a diminution in the “racial” value of emigrated populations.’286 Finally, the Third Reich’s policy of autarchy in the agricultural and industrial fields, the end and effect of 281 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 50. See also. Schacht, ‘Germany’s Colonial Demands,’ 334. 282 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 50. 283 Ibid., 51. 284 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 27. 285 Ibid., 28. 286 Ibid.

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which was ‘to link men to the national soil,’ opposed itself to the international orientation of Germany’s pre-war commercial policy of which the old colonial policy was an aspect.287 Maroger observed that the manifestations of these views, which were numerous, betrayed the profound opposition in National Socialist philosophy between ‘the cult of “vital energy” and intellectualism, between Germanic nationalism and universalism.’288 The new tendencies abroad in Germany demanded a new German colonial theory and, according to Maroger, it was above all the Academic Colonial League, (Akademischer Kolonialbund), a body founded in 1925 and which grouped together professors and students, that was responsible for its elaboration. Maroger observed that in the years 1935 and 1936, the Academic Colonial League was particularly active in modifying the object and methods of the traditional German colonial policy. A leading member of this group was Diedrich Westermann, an ethnographer who advised the National Socialist Party on racial politics. The editor of a monograph submitted to the conference on peaceful change for which Berber wrote the preface, Westermann had elaborated a colonial theory for the Third Reich according to the racial principles espoused by the regime. Another leading member was Carl Troll, a geographer who directed the Institute of Colonial and Overseas Geography in Berlin, a professor in the Department of Economic Geography at the Institute and Museum of Ocean Science at the University of Berlin and editor in chief of Kolonial Rundschau. The school of thought associated with Troll pointed to the economic and demographic obstacles to mass emigration to colonies.289 Maroger summarised the new German colonial thinking as developed by the various members of the Academic Colonial League as follows:

287 Ibid. 288 Ibid. 289 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 23–4. For interesting portraits of Diedrich Westermann and Carl Troll, see respectively Peter Keillaway, ‘Diedrich Westermann and the Ambiguities of Colonial Science in the Inter-War Era,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45, no. 6 (2017): 871–93, and K. W. Butzer, ‘Practicing geography in a totalitarian state: (Re)casting Carl Troll as a Nazi collaborator?,’ Erde 135, no. 2 (2004): 223–31.

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The old colonialism, easily influenced by arguments of a ‘sentimental’ character, anxious to prepare for a mass emigration of Germans to the tropics, makes way for a new colonialism….The thesis favourable to a substantial German ‘colonisation’ in Africa…cannot survive, according to Professor Troll, a close examination. From the ‘racial’ and social point of view…, it would seem desirable to avoid employing Europeans in the same areas as natives in the tropical colonies….According to the new theses put forward, German emigration to the colonies can be no more than the emigration of cadres….‘The romantic stories of hunting wild animals’ do not interest youthful members of the university milieux favourable to the colonial idea; it is in consequence of the ‘necessity of the existence of their country’ and in consequence of the character of the ‘industrial structure’ of Germany that they apply themselves to orienting the new colonial policy of the Third Reich….[Troll’s school has] shown…the difficulties that attend any substantial settlement of white races in tropical areas…. Survival is only possible for…a small and exclusive native undertakings, on the one hand, and for major capitalist concerns on the other; thus, as it would already be difficult to find room in East Africa for ten times more colonists than there are to-day, a fortiori the idea of mass emigration of millions of colonists must be put aside….Stress is now laid only on Germany’s desire to produce a certain number of raw materials in areas covered by the Reich’s monetary system….Generally speaking, the idea of mass emigration to colonial territories now seems to have been abandoned in Germany….Based on considerations of a racial order…, the Third Reich does not favour a thesis which for a long time had found some ardent partisans in Germany….The German studies published on this subject now confine their observations to the advantages which a portion of the youth of Germany—active young men eager to find employment—would derive from colonial services. The argument for opening up emigration areas for Germany in her former colonies, thus no longer plays more than a secondary rôle in the claims advanced by Germany.290

Chalmers Wright thought it significant that unlike the statements on the subject of raw materials, the ‘profusion of polemical utterances’ to the effect that ‘the German people are living under an intolerable burden of numbers,’ had never been ‘developed into coherent arguments.’291 Elaborating on this point, he observed that the ‘diffidence’ of German 290 Ibid.,

23–4, 28, 30, 119. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 56–7. Wright, Population and Peace, 48. See also Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 24. 291 Chalmers

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officials and publicists in regard to the formulation of such arguments seemed to be ‘accompanied by some reluctance to have…[Germany’s]… demographic situation examined.’292 This reluctance had become apparent, he stated, to those charged with preparing the materials for the peaceful change conference in Paris in 1937. Further to this, he thought it significant that at that conference an exponent of Germany’s views on the colonial question not only declined to invoke the population pressure argument, but declined to invoke the economic case for colonial retrocession to Germany. Chalmers Wright suggested that this was somewhat surprising given that much effort had been channelled in Germany into elaborating the economic case for colonial revision and that this case had been restated by Schacht for the benefit of an international audience only several months earlier. As discussed below, the exponent in question stated that Germany wanted its colonies back not because it needed territories for emigration or raw materials, ‘nor even principally on the ground of honour, but more as a matter of right and of legal justice.’293 In relation to this, Chalmers Wright observed that it had become ‘increasingly obvious, not only that the “population pressure” argument in favour of colonial revision “had been falling somewhat into the background,” but that all the “scientific” arguments which have been developed in Germany are put forward or withdrawn in accordance with the requirements of political expediency.’294 Given this, it should of no surprise that even though the demographic and economic cases for retrocession did indeed fall into the background, references to Germany’s alleged lack of living space and dire economic problems would still feature in Germany’s colonial propaganda including the colonial propaganda issuing from Hitler himself.295

292 Chalmers

Wright, Population and Peace, 51. 51. 294 Ibid., and T. E. Gregory, ‘The Economic Bases of Revisionism,’ in Manning, ed., Peaceful Change, 63. 295 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 49, 356. In a speech to the Reichstag in January 1937, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on October 3, 1937 and on November 21 in a speech at Augsburg, Hitler reiterated the point that Germany’s living space was too small and that the colonies would have to be returned. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 133. Wood recorded the following based on a speech that Hitler delivered before the Reichstag on January 30, 1939: ‘“The German nation must live; that means export or die,” said the Chancellor. The only alternative to exports is the “extension 293 Ibid.,

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Consideration of the Colonial Question Schacht seemed to genuinely want to see an international agreement reached with Britain and France on the question of colonial retrocession. According to Gerhard L. Weinberg, this was ‘partly because it might help his own position in Germany, partly because he still hoped to divert Hitler from eastern conquests to international economic cooperation and colonial development in Africa.’ With this in view and in light of French démarches in December 1936 concerning such matters as Franco-German trade and colonial concessions, Schacht suggested that a tripartite conversation take place between himself and representatives of Britain and France.296 Weinberg records that Schacht seemed to envisage a general settlement that would involve concessions to German in the economic field, most particularly in the form of colonial transfers, in exchange for certain political concessions on the part of Germany.297 Despite having severe doubts as to whether Schacht was able to speak authoritatively on behalf of his government, the British and French governments, presumably not wanting let any opportunity for reaching a settlement slip, decided to send representatives to hold talks with Schacht in Paris between May 25 and 29, 1937.298 Schacht was again in Paris in June. On this occasion, he was in Paris in order to inaugurate the German Pavilion at the international of our nation’s living space so that in our domestic economy the problem of Germany’s food supplies can be solved,” and this “extension” included the old German colonies.’ Wood observed that the ‘absorption of Czechoslovakia may have deferred action in regard to the colonies, but they were not forgotten by Berlin.’ Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 141. In his 1937 study of Germany’s revisionist policy, Rogge referred to ‘“the revision need of over-populated Germany” and to “the need of the German people for wider living and working space” which “arose immediately after the Diktaten of 1918–1919, which reduced German living and working space,” and which was accentuated, among other things, “by the expulsion and elimination of Germans, from a number of countries, causing a mass return to the over-crowded homeland.” These needs, he suggests, would be met by a return to Germany of her former colonies, but he marks no reference to any officially formulated German demands.’ Rogge, 1937, quoted in Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 49. 296 Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler’s Foreign Policy 1933–1939: The Road to World War II (New York: Enigma Books, 2005), 340, 355. 297 Weinberg, Hitler’s Foreign Policy 1933–1939: The Road to World War II, 341. 298 Ibid., 340–41, 345, 356. See also ‘Dr. Schacht’s Paris Visit: Considerable Political Importance,’ Straits Times (Singapore), May 27, 1937.

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exposition. Interviewed by journalists following his arrival in the city, he declared that the stories in French newspapers stating that his mission in Paris extended to seeking a loan on behalf of Germany were wrong: his mission was purely one of ‘friendship.’299 The Germany economy, he stated, although experiencing difficulties in common with other countries, was ‘a long way from being threatened with disaster’ despite what was said in the newspapers.300 This was a rather more sanguine view of the German economic situation than the one he expressed in his Foreign Affairs article some months earlier. However, it should be noted that Schacht, along with the other organisers of the German pavilion, saw the exposition as an opportunity to persuade other countries to renew or increase trade with Germany and to this end it was important to portray ‘the Third Reich as a reliable and economically stable, commercial partner’.301 Thus, in a speech he gave when inaugurating the German pavilion, Schacht emphasised Germany’s commitment to rebuilding the world economy and to peace among nations: World exhibitions where nations display their achievements in the domain of economics as in other fields are always a means of peaceful advance of the nations towards each other […] The world exhibition in Paris is an appeal to the nations to build bridges from country to country: bridges of flourishing trade, for tourism, but also bridges for a more intimate contact in civilization, and thus bridges for a solid political understanding to the benefit of all participants. Germany’s exhibition at Paris wishes to contribute its share in attaining this end.302

Schacht’s concern in relation to the promotion of trade with Germany lay with the shortages of foodstuffs that had resulted in part from Germany’s rearmament programme and the shortages of raw materials and foreign currency that this same programme had caused. Shelley Baranowski writes that food shortages and a shortage of raw materials 299 ‘Dr. Schacht in Paris: Money Problems of Germany, “Long Way from Disaster”,’ Straits Times (Singapore), June 19, 1937. 300 Ibid. 301 Karen A. Fiss, ‘In Hitler’s Salon: The German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition International,’ in Richard A. Etlin, ed., Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 318. 302 Hjalmar Schacht, 1937, quoted in Andreas Flickers, ‘Presenting the “Window on the World” To the World,’ 293.

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had given rise to Schacht’s ‘own desperate recommendation’ in 1936 ‘to slow the pace of rearmament.’303 In their efforts to have the pace of rearmament slowed Schacht and his like-minded colleagues were defeated, the public mark of this defeat being the announcement in September 1936 at the Nuremberg rally of the Four-Year Plan, the control of which lay in the hands of Hermann Göring. Baranowski notes that this plan instituted the centralization of production and the distribution of raw materials, the allocation of labor and the imposition of price and foreign exchange controls. The plan also aimed at stimulating the production of synthetic fuels and rubber to eliminate Germany’s dependence on imports. Consumers would suffer more than ever for the program racheted up the pace of rearmament to the point where the Four Year Plan would claim in excess of 20 per cent of the national income. As Germany’s enlarged living space, east-central and Eastern Europe would settle its raw material, labor, and food needs permanently.304

In his speech in Paris, which was attended by five members of the French cabinet, after having declared his support for an improvement in Franco-German relations, Schacht, unsurprisingly, took the opportunity to reiterate Germany’s demand for colonies. In this regard he stated: With the exception of Switzerland, which enjoys an international guarantee, Germany is the only nation in the world which does not possess, either at home or abroad, a source of foodstuffs sufficient to feed her population. This is a grotesque situation for any nation, especially a great nation, and those who seek to keep up this state of things will never be able to eliminate the risks that it causes. Those who contribute to its removal will guarantee the peace of Europe and of the world for generations.305

Schacht declared that Germany’s colonial claim had often been ‘misunderstood’ because this ‘fundamental element of German life was unappreciated.’306 Certainly, the economic case for colonies as presented by 303 Baranowski, Nazi Empire, 201, 215–16. See also Fiss, ‘In Hitler’s Salon: The German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition International,’ 318, 325. 304 Baranowski, Nazi Empire, 215. 305 ‘German Colonies Claim: German Demand Revived: Dr. Schacht’s Speech,’ Sydney Morning Herald, May 28, 1937. 306 Ibid.

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Schacht was disputed by many commentators in Britain and France. The grounds for disputing it were as follows: that the stringent economic conditions in Germany were largely a consequence of the priority given to rearmament and the diversion of foreign exchange to that end. Even those who favoured a policy of ceding colonies to Germany for the most part did not contend that concessions of this kind would solve Germany’s economic problems in general or ameliorate the stringencies required by the Four-Year Plan. Almost no-one seriously argued that Germany’s former colonies were so richly endowed with raw materials that the economic distress being experienced by German consumers could be overcome by virtue of their return. Those sympathetic to the cause of colonial retrocession framed their arguments in terms of the requirements of either peace or justice or both. As one contemporary observer pointed out, it was ‘clear that no matter how many colonies were ceded, the maws of the armament factories, rather than mouths of civilians’ would be the beneficiaries of such a policy.307 At the time of the scheduled talks with Schacht in Paris, the British and the French governments were contemplating granting Germany economic assistance and as part of that, colonial concessions. It should be noted that here that on July 27, 1936, Eden stated in a speech to the House of Commons that the government was willing to discuss at ‘an international conference under the auspices of the League of Nations’ the issue of giving ‘to foreign countries freer access to the raw materials as are produced in the Mandated Territories and in the Colonies.’308 In the same speech, Eden addressed the question of whether an actual transfer of territory held by them was contemplated by the government. In this regard he declared the following: ‘Let me make it clear that this question is one which affects, of course, all Mandatory Powers…The Government have not had any consultation with them upon it, but, so far as His Majesty’s Government are concerned, the question of any transfer of Mandated territories would inevitably raise grave difficulties, moral, political and legal, of which His Majesty’s Government must frankly say that they have been unable to find any solution.’309 307 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 103–5. See also Gregory, ‘The Economic Bases of Revisionism,’ 76, and ‘Dr. Schacht’s Paris Visit: Considerable Political Importance,’ Straits Times, May 27, 1937. 308 315 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), 27 July 1936, 1132–133. 309 Ibid., 1133.

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This declaration may have provided some comfort to those members of the House of Commons who were anxious about the future status of those mandates which had once been colonies of Germany. However, it sat somewhat oddly alongside an assurance given earlier by Prime Minister Baldwin. On April 27, Baldwin had stated in the most ‘categorical terms’ that the government ‘have not considered and are not considering transferring mandated territories to any other Power.’310 As Wood pointed out, one cannot but conclude ‘that the inability to find a solution could be admitted only after some reflection had been devoted to the matter.’311 Nonetheless, on February 15, 1937, Baldwin’s formula was repeated by Viscount Cranborne (Robert GascoyneCecil), under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, who had been asked by Vyvyan Adams to ‘dispel ill-founded German expectancy’ through stating unmistakably that the British Government ‘cannot contemplate the cession to Nazi Germany of any territory whatsoever under British political control.’312 Cranborne replied as follows: ‘As has been previously stated, His Majesty’s Government have not considered and are not considering such transfer.’313 On March 2 in a speech in the House of Commons, Eden quoted Cranborne’s reply to Adams, adding that the ‘statement of my Noble Friend remains the policy of His Majesty’s Government, and I have nothing whatever to add to that reply.’314 Irrespective of these declarations of the government’s official position and the grave difficulties involved in any transfer of mandatory territories as acknowledged by Eden, the prospect of such a transfer had not been entirely ruled out. Weinberg touches on this point in the following description of British thinking in relation to the mooted conversation with Schacht in Paris: If a basis for negotiation could be reached on…political questions, the French [and British Governments] would be ready to include in the discussions consideration of the question of assisting Germany to re-establish her financial and economic system on a sounder basis….In regard to 310 311 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), 27 April 1936, 552–53. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 129–30. 311 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 131. 312 320 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), 15 February 1937, 815. 313 Ibid. 314 321 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), 2 March 1937, 211.

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colonies, the British had decided, largely at Chamberlain’s urging, to make no specific reference ‘to the transfer of colonial territories on the importance of which Dr. Schacht has insisted, except in so far it is stated that it is not intended to exclude any `proposals from discussion.’ This was not only because Britain and France would first have to work out the details of a colonial offer,…but mainly because there could and would be no prospect of colonial concessions to Germany unless the British and French political requirements were met by Germany; so that if the negotiations failed, it would be over Germany’s refusal to meet these requirements rather than the refusal of colonial concessions.…[C]olonial concessions ‘could only be contemplated if they were accepted by Germany as a full and final settlement of all her territorial claims, and if thereby a permanent basis could be found for European appeasement’.…The danger to the whole world, including the people of Africa, was so great that almost any effort must be made to avoid it. The prospects did not look good, but if colonial concessions would bring Germany back to the family of nations, especially by the maintenance of the independence of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the abandonment of German ambitions for an eventual attack on the Soviet Union, the price—as perceived from London and Paris if not from Douala and Lomé—would be worth paying.315

Whatever hope was vested in the planned talks with Schacht, it was soon apparent to London and Paris that he had no authority to discuss political matters on behalf of Berlin.316 Indeed, Neurath told Sir Neville Henderson and André François-Ponçet, the British and French ambassadors at Berlin respectively, ‘that the colonial question was of no importance and merely Schacht’s hobby.’317 In connection with this, it should be noted that according to a New York Times report, a meeting between Neurath and François-Ponçet in December 1937 would end ‘upon a note of high tension,’ because the former told the latter ‘straight out that the colonies question would, if necessary, be decided by the argument of force.’318 This last observation aside, Schacht’s lack of authority 315 Weinberg,

Hitler’s Foreign Policy 1933–1939, 342–3. 340–1, 345. 317 Weinberg, Hitler’s Foreign Policy 1933–39, 345. 318 Augur, ‘Reich would Risk War for Colonies, Neurath Indicates,’ New York Times, December 7, 1937. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 142n. ‘The Reich’s capital experienced tonight its first mass meeting for the return of German colonies. It demonstrated chiefly that Berlin is not particularly excited about colonies. For the first time since the National Socialists came to power the whole balcony in the Sportpalast 316 Ibid.,

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meant that the talks scheduled for May in Paris were bound to be an exercise in futility. Indeed, by the time the talks took place, Schacht had grown shy of discussing the political conditions set forth by Britain and France as a basis for any settlement.319 Weinberg offers an explanation for Schacht’s shyness on this score, an explanation which, according to Weinberg, should be viewed against the background of Hitler’s desire to demonstrate that the German demands in regard to colonies and other questions were non-negotiable. Of the talks Schacht conducted in Paris, Weinberg states the following: There is…good indirect evidence to suggest that Schacht saw Hitler [before he left Berlin for Paris] and was given clear-cut instructions to stay away from political subjects…. Whatever precise instructions Hitler gave Schacht before or after the latter’s trip to Paris in May 1937, he was not going to be detoured from his immediate aggressive designs, and most assuredly not in talks inaugurated by a man whose advice he no longer followed and whom he would soon drop entirely. Schacht could trumpet German colonial demands and economic needs in a general way; that might soften public resistance abroad and build up enthusiasm for aggression at home, but there must be no bargaining in which German would have to become specific in her demands and in her offers. Such a procedure threatened to tie her down to what others considered reasonable and to what she herself promised in return. Beyond showing once more German determination not to allow a negotiated settlement of alleged grievances, the Schacht talks must be placed in still another context. Like the other efforts of the Western Powers to come to an agreement with him, they were interpreted by him—and by no means incorrectly—as signs both of opposition to German continental expansion and of a desperate reluctance to go to war to prevent it….In regard to colonies, he would get those for nothing when the continental expansion he intended had made Germany strong enough to demand them at the point of a gun. Ironically, the very attempts Britain and France made and were still to make to divert him from aggression in was empty during a political demonstration and empty seats were scattered about even on the main floor. The speaker was General Franz Ritter von Epp, chief of the Reich Colonial League, who has been touring the country. His audience consisted chiefly of elderly men who were young enough to have gone out to the colonies before the war but whose colonising days were obviously over. Scarcely any young persons were to be seen.’ ‘Colonies Rally in Berlin,’ New York Times, December 7, 1937. 319 Weinberg,

Hitler’s Foreign Policy 1933–39: The Road to World War II, 341.

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Europe by offering colonial and economic concessions encouraged him to take greater risks in a course of continental expansion which would, among other things, pave the way for what Hitler expected would be a later and even greater German colonial empire.320

Despite what Neurath told Henderson and François-Ponçet, Schacht was not the only minister of the Reich whose hobby was colonial revision. Maroger maintained that the ‘personal attitude of one of the principal authorities of the new Reich in matters of foreign policy,’ namely, Ribbentrop, had been decisive in rendering the colonial demand as one of the principal demands in the international politics of Germany.321 Having stated this, Maroger observed the following: ‘It seems that in the entourage of M. Von Ribbentrop people have very strongly hoped to obtain, thanks to some amiable negotiations, some important concessions in regard to primary materials and colonies.’322 According to Maroger, this hope was encouraged by the fact that Hoare, Ribbentrop’s partner during the conclusion of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935, had raised the problem of the redistribution of raw materials in Geneva in September of that year.323 However, as Maroger suggested, Ribbentrop and his circle were interested in much more than the economic dimension of the colonial question.324 As Maroger pointed out, the principle merit of the policy of issuing colonial demands was its ‘suppleness’: although the acquisition of colonies was certainly desirable it was not ‘strictly indispensable for the Reich’ and thus the demands could be, depending on the circumstances, ‘accentuated or withdrawn, or at least attenuated.’325 Importantly in respect to the view that such demands were intended above all to serve as diplomatic leverage, Maroger observed that while their success would prove ‘profitable,’ their ‘sacrifice, at least partial, cannot be without benefits.’326 Elaborating on the latter point, Maroger pointed out that since the end of the war Germany had been in a fundamentally 320 Ibid.,

357–58. La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 25–6. 322 Ibid., 26. Emphasis in the original. 323 Maroger, L’Europe and the question coloniale, 217–18. 324 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 9. 325 Ibid., 26. 326 Ibid. 321 Maroger,

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different diplomatic position to that which it had occupied in the days of Bismarck: since the war, Germany had been ‘constantly a claimant party’—what else could Germany ‘offer in a general or particular discussion…other than the attenuation of a previous claim?’327 By way of providing an answer, if only partial, to the question as to what benefit would be derived from sacrificing or attenuating Germany’s colonial claims, Maroger suggested that these claims were part of a campaign to induce in Great Britain a willingness to further cooperate with the Reich.328

The German Colonial Propaganda and the 1937 International Studies Conference As he was a member of Ribbentrop’s entourage, the interventions of Berber at the 1937 session of the ISC on the colonial question deserve attention and thus they will be discussed below. It will suffice to say here that Berber’s declarations in regard to this question at the session, were interpreted to mean that the economic case for retrocession which had been so forcefully advanced by Schacht only a few months earlier, had for the moment been abandoned. Berber attended the conference accompanied by his secretary Dorothea von Renvers whose previous position had been that of ‘Scientific Secretary’ of the German Central Committee for the Study of International Relations’ (Deutsche Zentralstelle zum Studium der Internationalen Beziehungen) in Berlin. This committee had been established by Berber on August 15, 1936, as a successor to a previous committee he had established, namely, the Department of Scientific Studies of International Relations (Abteilung für das Wissenschaftliche Studium der Internationalen Beziehungen). The German Central Committee ‘acted as the…[IIIC’s]…correspondent in Germany for all questions relating to the International Studies Conference.’329 After having 327 Maroger, L’Europe and the question coloniale, 218. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 56. 328 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 26. 329 League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions, Organisation, 44, 107. For Dorothea von Renvers’s position, see Berber to Bonnet, 15 August 1936, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: ‘Peaceful Change,’ du 1er juin 1936 au 1er janvier 1937, AG 1-IICIK-I-15.d, UA, and Christophersen to Bonnet, 28 October 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA.

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informed Bonnet of the creation of this committee and of Renvers’s appointment as its secretary, Berber stated that like its predecessor, the German Central Committee would coordinate all the ‘scientific works of German institutions’ relative to the ISC.330 As it was also intended to serve as the IIIC’s correspondent in Germany for all questions concerning the ISC, Berber asked Bonnet to send all documents relating to the work of the ISC directly to the Central Committee’s address in Berlin.331 In the following year, the German Central Committee for International Relations Research was merged with the Institute for Foreign Policy (Institut für Auswärtige Politik) to become the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research (Deutsches Institut für Aussenpolitische Forschung) of which Berber became the director.332 While this was the role ascribed to Berber in the list of participants in the 1937 session of the ISC, Berber’s presence in Paris was formally of a ‘personal and private nature’ just as it had been at the ISC’s 1935 session in London. As he himself explained it, the particular nature of his presence at the Paris conference was a consequence of the ‘peculiar state of things arising out of a peculiar and delicate situation’.333 The peculiar and delicate situation to which Berber referred was as follows: the ISC’s relationship with the IIIC and thereby the LON meant that there could be no official German presence at the conference. That said, there is an important sense in which Berber’s claim that his presence at the conference was of a private nature was a fiction. Bardo Fassbender points

330 League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions Organisation, 44. 331 Ibid., 44, and Berber to Bonnet, 15 August 1936, AG-IICI- K-I-15.d, UA. 332 League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions Organisation, 44. For the title of the organisation resulting from the merger of the German Central Committee and Institut für Auswärtige Politik, see Dorothea von Renvers to Henri Bonnet, 29 October 1937, AG 1-IICI- K-I-15.d, UA. See also Dorothea von Renvers to Leo Gross, 11 January 1939, Echange des publications et des bibliographies du 1er avril 1937 jusqu’en 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-13.b, UA. The following letterhead appears on the stationery used by Renvers in writing to Gross: Deutsches Institut für Aussenpolitische Forschung und Hamburger Institut fürAuswärtige Politik. 333 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 621, and Berber to Gross, 14 April 1936. Conférence permanente des études internationales: ‘Peaceful Change,’ mars-avril 1936 jusqu’au 1er juin, 1936. AG 1-IICI- K-I-15.c, UA.

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out that the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research was under the control of Ribbentrop and that its main function was that of propagandising on behalf of the Third Reich’s foreign policy.334 The ISC’s International Study Group on Colonial Problems had been ‘very anxious’ to obtain the collaboration of German colonial study groups in preparing materials for submission to the peaceful change conference in Paris. In particular, information was sought on German prewar colonial administration and the implications of the ‘present political philosophy and practice in Germany would have for a possible German colonial policy.’335 Securing these materials, however, proved to be a rather fraught process. Indeed, by late November 1936, it appeared that German collaboration had come to a ‘dead end.’336 Berber wanted the IIIC to circulate the German materials but was adamant that the German memoranda must not bear the imprint of either the LON or the IIIC.337 Bonnet, however, insisted that he would not agree ‘under any circumstances’ to the distribution by the IIIC of any German memoranda without a frontispiece bearing the names of these two institutions.338 Christophersen, in his role as secretary-rapporteur of the International Study Group on Colonial Problems, sought to negotiate a compromise during meetings with an extremely busy Berber in Berlin in October and November 1936. Berber told Christophersen in late October, that he had been especially busy because he had to visit England once a fortnight

334 Bardo Fassbender, ‘Stories of War and Peace: On Writing the History of International Law in the “Third Reich” and After,’ European Journal of International Law 13, no. 2 (2002): 479–512, 491–92. Bardo Fassbender records that after 1939, the Institute for Foreign Policy ‘was closely associated with the Deutsche Informationsstelle (German Office for Information), a propaganda institution working for the Foreign Office and also headed by Berber. Perhaps Berber had originally conceived the Institute rather as a think-tank, but Ribbentrop, eagerly following each of Hitler’s moves, was not interested in original or critical ideas….The Institute readily and continuously supported the Socialist policy of conquest. In the main, it appears, its publications abstained from using anti-Jewish or racist language’ (ibid., 492). 335 Christophersen to Berber, 13 August 1936, Conférence permanente des études internationales: Groupes internationaux d’études, à partir du 1er juin jusqu’au 1er septembre 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.a, UA. 336 Gross to the Christophersen, 25 November 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA. 337 Christophersen to Bonnet, 28 and 29 October 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA. 338 Christophersen to Bonnet, 29 October 1936, and Gross to Christophersen, 4 and 25 November 4 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA.

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(presumably because of Ribbentrop’s recent appointment as ambassador to Great Britain), and because he had been visited in Berlin by his fellow GRC colleagues, namely, Whitton and Davis, and by Shotwell in view of the forthcoming conference on peaceful change.339 The compromise in regard to the distribution of the German memoranda that had been proposed by Bonnet, who planned to discuss the matter with Berber at a meeting of the advisory council of the GRC which was scheduled to take place in Geneva on December 14, was that the German materials would not be distributed by the IIIC but would rather be placed by the ISC’s secretariat at the disposal of the conference. If Berber agreed to this, Gross told Christophersen on Bonnet’s behalf, then any reference to the LON or the IIIC or even to the ISC could be omitted from the German materials.340 Berber and Christophersen met again in February 1937, this time in Paris. Berber had come to Paris in order to attend the annual meeting of the executive committee of the ISC, Berber having been co-opted to this committee at the 1936 session of the ISC. After his meeting with Berber, Christophersen wrote to Renvers pointing out that Berber had 339 Christophersen to Bonnet, 28 and 29 October 28 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA; Gross to the Christophersen, 4 November 1936; and Berber to Bonnet, 26 November 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA. In the course of a speech given at the American Academy of Political Science in May 1937 in which he sought to counter the impression that the LON was dead and after having remarked on his recent visit to Berlin, James T. Shotwell pointed out that the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation with which he was associated had called ‘an important conference this summer for the study of the most difficult of all problems in international relations, that of peaceful change.’ Elaborating on this point, Shotwell explained that the conference would address, ‘under the auspices of the League, not the problem of status quo, but the way in which we can, in a world that is dynamic, adjust the conditions of peaceful life to these changing situations.’ Shotwell recommended to his American audience cooperative action backed by the LON ‘to deal with those peoples whose lands are held in trust as well as with the raw materials of the world’ with a view, in the first analysis, to correcting two grave errors: that ‘colonies are to be thought of as profitable property, and materials can best be secured for strong nations by giving them full opportunity to seize the raw materials themselves.’ Shotwell’s more general concern in proposing cooperative action to deal with the raw materials of the world was the prospect that the raw materials that the earth possesses in limited quantities might one day be exhausted. He told the American Academy of Political Science that such materials should be placed under ‘some kind of general control, otherwise they will be used up forever by a civilization that is unaware of what it is doing.’ James T. Shotwell, ‘Mechanism for Peace in Europe,’ Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 17, no. 3 (1937): 15–24, 19, 22–3. 340 Gross to Christophersen, 4 November 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA.

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told him that the ISC would be mentioned in the preface to the German memoranda. He stated that this news had gladdened him as it meant that it was now possible for the conference to ‘call attention to the extensive work’ undertaken by the German colonial groups, which, he informed Renvers, he would delicately describe in his report to the conference as parallel studies.341 Renvers quickly responded, telling Christophersen that although a reference to the ISC would indeed be made in the preface, Berber had asked her to ‘to point out once more’ that the ‘German memoranda can in no way be looked upon as memoranda of the Conference nor for the Conference.’342 In the event, three German memoranda were listed in the bibliography appended to the proceedings of the conference, albeit not under the heading of conference memoranda but under the heading documents placed at the disposal of members of the conference.343 Two of these memoranda boasted prefaces by Berber. In these two prefaces, Berber pointed out that German institutions had withdrawn from the ISC in the autumn of 1933 on account of its administrative connection with the League. Nonetheless, in these same prefaces, Berber acknowledged the indirect and unofficial collaboration of German institutions with the ISC, stating that the ISC’s work was of the ‘greatest interest to German scientific research’. One of the memoranda for which Berber penned a preface, concerned the breakdown of the Treaty of Versailles. Called Der Zerfall des Versailler Vertrages, this memorandum was published by the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. The other memorandum for which Berber penned a preface, was comprised of a series of studies by several different authors on aspects of the German colonial question. Called Beiträge zur Deutschen Kolonialfrage, this particular memorandum was published by the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research.344

341 League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions Organisation, 56, and Christophersen to Renvers, 17 February 1937, Conférence des hautes études internationales: Groupe international d’études pour les questions coloniales, du 1er janvier 1937 au1er avril 1938, AG-IICI-K-I-18.e, UA. See also International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 170n. 342 Renvers to Christophersen, 22 February 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.e, UA. 343 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 642–43. 344 Ibid., 170–71n., 643.

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At the conference itself, Berber did not speak until a late stage in the discussion, his point of departure being a methodological observation. Echoing a point he had made at the 1935 collective security conference, Berber stated that it was a ‘scientific or intellectual fallacy’ to fail to ‘distinguish between the abstract and the concrete method.’ He advised that the abstract method should only be applied where there existed a ‘long series of similar cases with analogous conditions,’ thus allowing for the development of general rules. In the absence of such cases, he further advised, the use of ‘abstract formulae’ would only serve to conceal ‘the real issues’.345 Having noted that Hitler had ‘semi-officially’ made a claim for the return to Germany of its former colonies in a speech on January 30 that year, Berber declared that the German case was not that Germany had a ‘right to get colonies from other Powers’ provided it could show that it needed them for its emigrants or in order to obtain raw materials. He insisted that such a case had never been made by Germany and that Germany did not need to demonstrate ‘compliance with those conditions’. To demand that Germany should show that it needed colonies for these reasons Berber stated, was to commit the fallacy of the abstract method: it was to make the mistake of locating Germany within the general category of have-not states. Classifying Germany as a have-not state, Berber maintained having noted Italy’s self-declared satiation, explained ‘nothing’ and was ‘absolutely false’.346 Germany’s claim to colonies, Berber declared in Paris, had nothing to do with its supposed have-not status: Germany’s position was that it had been wrongly deprived of its colonies in 1919 under Article 119 of the Treaty of Versailles. Berber noted that the reasons advanced for depriving Germany of its colonies in 1919 were first, that it was unable to administer them and second, that Germany had ‘used its colonies to prey upon the world’s commerce’.347 In relation to the first reason, Berber stated that no-one dared to advance it anymore; in relation to the second, he stated that it was a ‘fact that not a single German vessel during the war used the colonies to prey upon the world’s commerce,’ even though, he added, it ‘is a privilege accorded to nations in war-time from the time of

345 Ibid.,

464. 465–66. 347 Ibid., 466. 346 Ibid.,

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Drake.’ Berber observed that the arguments concerning Germany’s inability to administer colonies and its use of colonies to prey upon world commerce had been ‘dropped’ because they could not be ‘sustained.’ He then noted that other arguments had been advanced in their place, citing in this regard the claim that Germany would ‘break down’ if it accepted the responsibilities entailed by ‘this terrible white man’s burden.’348 Berber pointed out that none of the victor states’ colonies had been considered for redistribution, despite Wilson’s recommendation to this effect under point five of the Fourteen Points, the very points that had served, he added, as the terms on which Germany surrendered. Article 119 of the Treaty of Versailles, Berber declared, not only inflicted a moral injury on Germany, but was legally invalid. Berber stated in concluding his speech that the German claim was not even principally ‘a question of honour’; it was ‘more a question of right, of legal justice.’349 Quincy Wright, in responding to Berber’s speech, stated that he did not entirely understand the nature of the distinction that Berber had drawn between the abstract method and what Wright referred to as the

348 Ibid., 466–67. German negotiators at Peace Conference in 1919 argued that Germany had a right to its colonies on the following grounds: German ‘had acquired them lawfully and has developed them by means of incessant and fruitful toil….The possession of her colonies will be even more necessary for Germany in the future than in the past, since, if only on account of her low rate of exchange, she must be able to acquire from her own colonies, as far as possible, the raw materials necessary to her own economic life. Her earning capacity having been reduced owing to the result of the war, she also requires the profits accruing from home production. Moreover, Germany needs her colonies as a market for her industries, in order that she may be able to pay for raw materials with her own manufactures and may have a field of activity for commerce. Germany is looking towards these resources to meet the liabilities imposed upon her in the Peace Treaty. Finally, Germany requires colonies in order to have territory where at least a part of her surplus population may settle, the more so as the result of the war increases the necessity for, and reduces the possibility of, emigration. As a great civilized nation the German people have the right and the duty to co-operate in the joint task which devolves upon civilized mankind of exploring the world scientifically and of educating the backward races. In this direction she has achieved great things in her colonies.’ German Reply to Article 119 of the Treaty of Versailles, quoted in Royal Institute of International Affairs, Germany’s Claim to Colonies (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs 1938), 19–20. The text of the note of rejection of the German reply to Article 119 is reproduced in Moresco, Colonial Questions and Peace, 51. 349 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 479. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 105–7.

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political approach.350 What Berber intended in making this distinction (a distinction which reflected, as Fassbender notes, the legal theorising of Carl Schmitt and the conceptual preferences of the National Socialists more generally), had been explained more fully by Berber in his 1934 book Security and Justice.351 Therein, Berber rejected the approach to international law that had emerged after 1920. He claimed that the postwar approach to international law was characterised by ‘a “totalitarian” view’: he contrasted ‘the “old” international law, satisfied with regulating, so to speak, minor affairs between nations with the “new” international law’ which attempted to ‘regulate the most central and highly political relations between states’. In this connection, he dew a contrast between the ‘purely static character of the French conception’ of international law and a ‘dynamic’ conception. Berber thought that international law had only a limited role to play in the field of international relations. However, he also thought that to the extent that it did play a role, it should be able to respond to an ever-shifting political reality: international law should seek to ‘materialize justice,’ understood, first and foremost, as respect for ‘national honour’ and ‘full equality’ among states, ‘in the concreteness of political reality.’352 Wright well understood the intentions behind Berber’s distinction between the abstract and the political method. He countered Berber’s argument in regard to this distinction by insisting that if the conference taking place were to ‘to make any contribution at all, it must make it on the basis of general considerations.’ Attempts at reaching ‘solutions on the exigencies of a particular moment or a particular area,’ Wright 350 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 476. 351 Fassbender notes that Carl Schmitt’s ‘koncrete Ordnungs-und Gestaltungs-denken (“thinking in terms of concrete order and formation”)…declared rules to be secondary to “concrete”, pre-existent reality.’ Fassbender, ‘Stories of War and Peace: On Writing the History of International law in the “Third Reich” and After,’ 489–90. Fassbender observes that Schmitt’s ‘construction fitted exceedingly well the National Socialist preference for the “concrete” over the “abstract”, the “natural” over the “artificial”, the “organic” over the “mechanical” and the “living” over the “rational”’ and that his ‘construction was also an “open” concept which allowed one to understand and interpret the law in accordance with changing (political) developments and guidelines’ (ibid., 490). 352 Joseph L. Kunz, review of Sicherheit und Gerechtigkeit. Eine gemeinverständliche Einführung in die Hauptprobleme der Völkerrechtsspolitk, by Fritz Berber, American Journal of International Law 29, no. 2 (1935): 350.

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insisted, would mean that policy would simply be shaped according to the ‘special interests’ involved.353 In this context, Wright might have usefully added that Berber himself had appealed to general considerations in insisting that the German colonial claim concerned above all a ‘question of right, of legal justice.’354 Yet Wright appeared more interested in exploring a subsidiary argument that on his interpretation had been strongly implied although a not openly advanced by Berber: that the problem of the return of German colonies was essentially a political problem and required a political solution if, in the words of Berber, the ‘danger of war’ were to be avoided.355 Wright acknowledged that Berber had not directly stated that the reason for returning colonies to Germany was that ‘otherwise Germany would make war,’ diplomatically insisting that he did not want to suggest this.356 Nonetheless, Wright obviously felt that what Berber had said about the colonial question came with a warning. He thus stated the following: It is to be hoped that we shall get peace as a by-product of justice, but if we are going to make changes to the status quo only because otherwise somebody threatens to make war if we do not, we are likely to be confronted by more serious demands in the future. We cannot buy peace as an immediate political proposition at the price of injustice; our discussions must not proceed on the basis of what we have to do to buy off Powers that are threatening war, but on what is necessary for justice.357

The conference was generally sceptical of the demographic case for territorial expansion, especially given that the German, Italian and Japanese groups represented at the conference had submitted little if any documentary evidence on the subject, despite the fact that the chief exponents of this case over the previous decade were German, Italian and Japanese government officials and propagandists. Further to this, it was a matter of note at the conference that the claimants themselves had retreated from 353 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 476–77. 354 Ibid., 479. 355 Ibid., 465. 356 Ibid., 477. 357 Ibid.

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the demographic argument for a right of territorial expansion and had come to rely instead on economic arguments, although as Berber indicated through his contribution on the subject of colonies in Paris, the German government at least was retreating from economic arguments as well.358 In other contexts, it did not go unremarked that the complaints about demographic pressure and congestion emanating from Germany and Italy sat rather oddly alongside the ‘unusual methods,’ such as discouraging celibacy, adopted by the governments of those countries in order to increase their population numbers for the proclaimed reasons of national renewal at home and a greater presence abroad.359 Mussolini had once stated in regard to Italy that it was a case of either ‘[e]xpansion or explosion.’ Yet he had also stated that the ‘fate of nations is bound up with their demographic power’ and had boasted of the virility of the Italian nation. Similarly and irrespective of the talk of seething cauldrons and caged birds, Goebbels had stated that Germany, in order to fulfil its ‘great national and international tasks’ needed not only ‘power, living-space and technical means’ but also ‘hands’.360 Generally, the claims to colonies of the so-called have-not states were seen as ‘partly contradictory, partly hypothetical and largely inconclusive,’ stemming less from material and more from psychological factors: a desire for honour, prestige and equality with their great power peers.361 Some argued that even if they were only psychologically driven, the claims of the dissatisfied states should be taken seriously; against this, others argued that it would hardly make for a ‘rational system of international relations’ if territorial revision were deemed the appropriate ‘cure for a psychological ailment’.362 Whatever was the attitude of bulk of the membership of the ISC towards the claims of the soi-disant dissatisfied powers in the summer of 1935 when the conference decided to embark on a two-year study of peaceful change, within the forum which was the 1937 session of the 358 Ibid.,

466, 470. Lugard, ‘The Basis of the Claim for Colonies,’ International Affairs 15, no. 1 (1936): 3–25, 6. This paper was read at Chatham House on December 3, 1935. 360 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 146–47. 361 Ibid., 25n., 27n., 57. See also International Study Group: Note (in absentia) by Lord Lugard March 13–14, 1936, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationale: Groupes internationaux d’étude, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.b, UA. 362 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 129. 359 Lord

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ISC the scepticism of many of them in regard to those claims was palpable. Eugene Staley, professor of economics at the University of Chicago, reported in the Christian Science Monitor that the ‘factual reports submitted to the Conference appeared to convince many delegates that much nonsense had been going the rounds in those popular discussions which run in terms of “haves” and “have-nots” and which couple raw material supplies with colonial possessions.’363 Staley stated that Berber’s intervention at the conference concerning the nature of Germany’s colonial grievance and the questionable ‘scientific accuracy’ of certain statements in a German monograph on the subject of the German attitude to colonial questions confirmed for him what he had long suspected, namely, that the argument which coupled raw materials with colonial possessions was a ‘rationalization and not the central issue,’ the central issue being for Staley like so many others ‘a feeling of prestige and pride and inequality.’364 In addition to there being a general agreement as to what was the central issue in regard to colonial claims, there was a general agreement that no territorial transfers should be considered under threat of war.365 Peaceful change, figures such as Lytton argued, should only be considered against the background of a more general system of pacification: peaceful change should only be given effect against a background in which states had renounced aggression and where aggression had been rendered ‘impossible by a collective system of defence’.366 Clearly

363 Eugene Staley, ‘What Price Self-Sufficiency? Not to Alter Boundaries but to Lessen Their Impact, Defined as One Conclusion of Discussions at the International Peaceful Change Conference in Paris,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 22, 1937, 5. 364 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 470. In stating that the argument that coupled the possession of raw materials with the possession of colonies was a rationalisation, Eugene Staley was specifically referring to the following document: K. K. Weigelt, ‘Supply of Colonial Raw Materials within the framework of the German National Economy,’ in Diedrich Westermann, ed., Beiträge zur Detschen Kolonialfrage, preface by F. Berber (Berlin: Deutsches Institut für Aussenpolitische Forschung, 1937). In the aforementioned document, Germany’s claim to colonies was justified on economic grounds. Staley stated at the conference in Paris that the document contained statements that were ‘capable of being challenged for their scientific accuracy’ (ibid.). 365 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 449. 366 Ibid., 261.

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directing his comments at Berber, Lytton observed the following of the generation which experienced the catastrophe of 1914: The generation which has had that experience is led now to desire peace passionately, to seek peace by any possible avenue; but let there be no mistake; we have not grown soft in our pursuit of peace and though we can never efface from our memories the experience we have been through, this generation is still equally determined that it will never consent to buy its immunity from a repetition of that experience by submission to force presented in any form.367

Lytton’s thesis was questioned at the conference by Wood who had spent the past year in Europe on a fellowship from the American Social Science Research Council and who produced Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem as a result. Wood suggested that it was ‘precisely’ because of the threat of war that ‘interest in peaceful change… [had] become most acute’ and that conferences on the topic were being held. He added that as it was ‘most necessary’ to avoid war, consideration should be given to ‘making some sort of concessions.’368 In Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, Wood elaborated on the point he made at the conference to the effect that it was only because of the threat of war that a groundswell of interest in the topic of peaceful change had emerged. In his book he argued that under conditions in which international relations are generally equable, one would not expect the word change to be modified by the word peaceful as change under such conditions is assumed to be peaceful: the expression peaceful change is only likely to be used in a context in which one is faced with a choice between violent or non-violent adjustments to the status quo.369 A reason for resisting demands for the redistribution of colonies and colonial retrocession that was discussed at length at the conference concerned the principle of trusteeship. Henri Labouret, a professor at the 367 Ibid.,

579–80. 455. 369 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 18. In the preface to Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, a book which was written after the outbreak of war in Europe, Wood stated the following: ‘Should the Allies win, it is not inconceivable that, in a peace conference with representatives of a non-Hitlerian Germany (assuming that they will be allowed to attend), Germany might be readmitted to the burdens and privileges of trusteeship over African territory’ (ibid., 7). 368 Ibid.,

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Ḗcole libre des sciences politiques and director of the Institut international des langues et civilisations Africanes, maintained that ‘conceptions of humanity and trusteeship’ had inspired the colonial powers in their colonial administration long before the war, point out in this regard that such conceptions had found expression at the Berlin Conference of 1885.370 At the same time, it was widely admitted at the conference that the conception of trusteeship had received added emphasis after 1919 due to the influence of the mandatory provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant.371 In the memorandum that he submitted to the general rapporteur on peaceful change and to the IIIC, Lugard, an early but not uncontroversial proponent of trusteeship, explained the significance of this principle from the British perspective. He stated that however ‘sceptical some nations may be about its altruism, and in spite of some failures,’ the British policy of trusteeship is a ‘very real thing’. He added that no British government would ‘dare ignore’ this principle, citing in support of this contention the fierce public reaction to the Hoare-Laval proposal.372 Lugard stressed the urgency of reaching some sort of settlement with Germany in order to avoid another fait accompli. As with Hoare and Eden, the settlement that he had in mind would take the form of economic concessions: Germany would be afforded access to the raw materials in the colonial areas and in the territories under mandate.373 For Lugard, the transfer of colonies or mandates to Germany was out of the question. He declared that to transfer territories under mandate or under British colonial rule to Germany would be to treat the populations of these territories as mere ‘chattels’ and to break the repeated pledges Britain had made to them: to ‘give them as much share in the Government as they are from time to time capable of’ and assist them to ‘“stand alone” at some distant time’. That these policies were ‘derided by Herr Hitler,’ was a crucial reason, Lugard observed, why the British Government refused to transfer even mandates to Germany.374 370 Ibid.,

520–21. 446, 463. 372 International Study Group: Note (in absentia) by Lord Lugard, March 13–14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.b, UA. See also Lugard, ‘The Basis of the Claim for Colonies,’ 14. 373 International Study Group: Note (in absentia) by Lord Lugard, March 13–14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.b, UA. 374 Ibid. 371 Ibid.,

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Throughout 1936 and 1937 there were numerous letters published in the Times arguing that it would be dangerous on security grounds to award Germany colonies in Africa. One such letter, written under the pseudonym of ‘Africanus,’ asked whether anyone who advocated such a policy had thought of the effect on Africa of the creation of a ‘huge black army.’ Another letter, in discussing the prospect of transferring Tanganyika to Germany, noted that the Union of South Africa, the government of Rhodesia and the residents of the colonies and protectorates of Kenya, Uganda and Nyasaland, had all insisted that there must be no ‘jeopardizing of Imperial communications’; yet another, warned of the ‘immense havoc’ which Germany could cause in case of war if it were given ‘air and sea bases in Africa.’ Against this background, it is perhaps not surprising that resolutions were passed at the Conservative Party conferences of 1936 and 1937 opposing the transfer of any mandated territories to Germany. Lugard too considered the question of the transfer of African territories to Germany from the perspective of security, observing that the ‘training of children in Tripoli to drill as soldiers and the pre-war declarations by German publicists that they would raise black armies are considered by Gt. [sic] Britain to be a danger to the peace of the world.’ Yet Lugard laid far more emphasis on the point that the military exploitation of peoples living under colonial rule was contrary to the policy of ‘progressive evolution towards autonomy.’ In this regard, it should be noted that for Lugard and other like-minded British imperialists, what was at stake when it came to the question of colonial retrocession was above all British honour.375 As noted above,

375 ‘I wonder whether those who advocate the restoration of Tanganykia to Germay have ever considered what the effect on Africa would be of the creation of a huge black army.’ Africanus, letter to the editor, Times, October 16, 1936. On the importance of protecting imperial communications in Africa, see Charles Posonby, Chairman, Joint East African Board, letter to the editor, Times, January 7, 1937. In addition to warning of the danger that would be unleashed by giving a ‘militaristic Germany’ air and sea bases in Africa, F. S. Joelson, the editor of East Africa and Rhodesia stated the following: ‘It is curious that humanitarians like Lord Noel-Buxton and Lord David Cecil should appear completely unconcerned at the idea of the wholesale transfer of Africans, without their knowledge or consent, to Nazi rule which has scarcely shown itself to be distinguished by that human understanding which is now recognized to be the essential prerequisite to the best type of African administration.’ F. S. Joelson, letter to the editor, Times, December 19, 1936. See also, A. A. Somerville, letter to the editor, Times, April 27, 1936; Evelyn Wrench,

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in his submission to Bourquin in March 1936, Lugard pointed out that Freytagh-Loringhoven had asserted that the question of the restitution of German colonies was above all a question of right and honour. Responding this assertion, Lugard stated the following: ‘As regards the question of Right, the Allies did not admit the premises on which this case is based. To the question of German Honour I would reply that British Honour is no less involved in view of the pledges given’. Lugard was prone to insist on this point. It had been a key theme of a lecture he gave at Chatham House in December 1935. In November 1936, in a speech entitled ‘Colonial Problems’ given at a meeting at the Royal Empire Society, he declared to cheers that ‘to hand over on demand, as though they were slaves or cattle, peoples to whom we have pledged our protection is neither consistent with our national honour nor, in the long run, would such a surrender make for peace.’376 The fact that there was in a German memorandum submitted to the conference in Paris in 1937 a rejoinder to Lugard’s dismissal of the claim that Germany needed overseas territory in order to accommodate its surplus population on the ground that the German state had adopted measures aimed at encouraging population growth, suggests that Lugard’s views on the question of colonial retrocession were seen as influential.377 letter to the editor, Times, December 29, 1936; and L. S. Amery, letter to the editor, Times, October 16, 1937. In condemning a policy of military exploitation Lugard stated the following: ‘[I]t may be said that the British policy is to promote the evolution and adaptation to civilised conditions, of Native institutions as opposed to Europeanization and Assimilation.’ International Study Group: Note (in absentia) by Lord Lugard, March 13–14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.b, UA. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 89, 94. Joseph Kenworthy, 10th Baron Strabolgi stated in response to a paper Lugard gave at Chatham House in December 1935 that a ‘very sinister’ reason behind the recent push for colonies which Lugard had not mentioned in his paper ‘was the desire for military power by the use of coloured armies…A million men of high military value, cruel, fierce and brave armed with modern weapons and under Blackshirt officers, might conquer half of Africa and set the world alight in the process’. See Lugard, ‘The Basis of the Claim for Colonies,’ 17. 376 International Study Group: Note (in absentia) by Lord Lugard, March 13–14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.b, UA, and ‘Demands for Colonies: Lord Lugard on British Honour,’ Times, November 18, 1936. 377 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 151. The German rejoinder to Lugard appeared in Heinrich Rogge, Das Revisionsproblem: Theorie der Revision als Voraussetzung einer internationalen wissenschaftlichen Aussprache über ‘Peaceful Change of Status quo’ (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1937).

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Emanuel Moresco, a former the vice-president of the Council of the Netherlands Indies and the chair of one. of the Paris conference’s round table meetings on the colonial question, later observed that it was somewhat curious that, contrary to the expectations, a ‘National-Socialist race doctrine, with its implications for the treatment of coloured peoples’ was not raised at the peaceful change conference in Paris given that at the conference much time was expended on arguing why German colonial demands should be resisted.378 Certainly, the implications of this doctrine in regard to the colonial question had already been much addressed and in very explicit terms in various other forums. For example, Randolph Churchill, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph published on January 23, 1937, stated that ‘to abandon these helpless natives to the crude racial hatreds of men like General Goering and Dr. Goebbels without their express desire would be an act of betrayal and infamy unparalleled in British history since the Rohilla war.’379 In the previous month, a letter to the Times had advised that it was ‘no good pretending that the abominable cruelty with which Jews and Socialists have been treated in Germany’ had not ‘damaged incalculably’ the German ‘claim to bear rule over backward peoples.’380 General Ritter von Epp, a former officer in the colonial army and the former head of National Socialist Party’s Colonial Bureau in Munich who became the chief of the successor organisation to the Colonial League following its dissolution in January 1936, in effect acknowledged the truth of this point. He declared that the National Socialist’s racial doctrine would not be a cause of danger to those peoples over which Germany would exercise sovereignty should Germany’s colonies be returned to it.381 Epp stated the following:

378 Emanuel Moresco, ‘Claims to Colonies, Markets and Raw Materials,’ New Commonwealth Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1936): 318–29, 326–28. Moresco suggested that a discussion of National Socialist Racial doctrine ‘may possibly lead to an international exchange of views on the racial policy practised in different African mandated territories’ (ibid.). See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 126. 379 Letter to the editor, Daily Telegraph, January 23, 1937, quoted in Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 89. 380 Edwyn Bevan, letter to the editor, Times, December 28, 1936. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 89–90n. 381 Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 33.

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Every race possesses its own biological characteristics: a hierarchy of the races must be affirmed, but the consciousness of this ‘racial hierarchy’ does not lead to the toleration of the destruction of inferior races. NationalSocialism, will endeavour to further the specific characteristics of the native races by permitting the tribes to live in their traditional environment, according to their ancestral customs: racialism rejects only, but with vigour, the concept of assimilation.382

One of the German memoranda placed at the disposal of the conference included a chapter entitled ‘Principles of Native Education in the former German Colonial Territories’ wherein Martin Schlunk sought to reassure the targets of German colonial propaganda that Germany’s intentions in regard to the administration of colonies were benign. Schlunk, professor of mission science at the University of Tũbingen, insisted that a National Socialist colonial policy would seek to preserve the ‘religious and moral attitudes of the natives, but in such as a way as to enable them to share in certain manifestations of the higher European culture. A collaboration of this kind,’ Schlunk added, ‘can be based only on a recognition of the truth of the Christian religion.’383 Although the conference’s deliberations were absent of any discussion of National Socialist racial doctrine, in ‘speech after speech’ at the conference, as Lytton pointed out to Berber, the obligation to protect the interests of subject peoples was emphasised.384 Berber indicated to the conference that he considered the invocation of this obligation mere hypocrisy. Perhaps alluding to Churchill’s statement condemning the ‘repulsive talk of handing over millions of human souls irrespective of their wishes like cattle or slaves to new sovereignties,’ a statement subsequently echoed by Lugard and Sarraut, Berber observed that France

382 Maroger, L’Europe et la question coloniale, 307. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 126. 383 Martin Schlunk, 1937, quoted in Moresco, Colonial Questions and Peace, 60. The publication details for the ‘The Principles of Native Education in the former German Colonial Territories,’ are as follows: M. Schlunk, ‘Grundzũge der Eingeborenenerziebung in deutschen Schutgerbieten,’ in Westermann, ed., Beiträge zur Detschen Kolonialfrage, 27–44. 384 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 469.

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had not had to demonstrate in 1918 that the ‘interests’ of the Germanspeaking residents of Alsace-Lorraine would be taken into account and that they would not be ‘transferred like cattle.’385 Lytton countered Berber in stating that the reason why speaker after speaker had emphasised the need to consider the interests of the populations in colonial and mandated territories was because the populations in such territories were ‘particularly helpless to defend’ themselves. For this reason, Lytton stated, they needed ‘access to the protection of public opinion somewhere in the world,’ either the protection of ‘the public opinion of a metropolitan country in the case of a colonial area, or the protection of the international public opinion represented in the Mandates Commission.’ It was not ‘merely evidence of hypocrisy or insincerity,’ Lytton advised Berber, to insist that should the question of the transfer of colonial or mandated territories ever arise, there would need to be an investigation of the ‘opportunities for the free expression of public opinion’ in the country desirous of such a transfer.386

385 Winston Churchill, n.d., quoted in Lugard, ‘The Basis of the Claim for Colonies,’ 14. Lugard echoed Churchill’s statement to the effect that to transfer colonies would be to treat the inhabitants as cattle in the course of his lecture at the Royal Empire Society in November 1936, See n. 376 above. In 1938, Sarraut stated the following: ‘The cession or sale of one of its colonies would be an especially odious act on the part of any European colonial Powers….[T]o transfer a colony for a political advantage, that is to say, a collectivity of human beings, like one transfers cattle or foodstuffs is properly-speaking slave-trading. German speaks at every opportunity of her honour; thought England, Belgium and France speak less often of theirs, they have no less care for it.’ Albert Sarraut, 1938, quoted in Maroger, L’Europe et la question coloniale, 286–87. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 125. Chalmers Wrights gives the year in which Sarraut made the above statement comment. For Berber’s comment concerning the German-speaking residents of Alscace-Lorraine, see International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 467. 386 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 469. Emanuel Moresco stated of the need for accountability in relation to colonial administration the following: ‘Without parliamentary control and criticism in the home country there is little hope of redress of grievances against colonial administrations…But it so happens that most of the European colonial Powers govern themselves by parliamentary institutions, and that the dissatisfied Powers are dictatorships; nowhere can a parliamentary vote be expected for transfer under these conditions. Even the most backward tribe, voiceless and unable to make up its mind on the issue, could not be handed over like so many head of cattle.’ Moresco, ‘Claims to Colonies: Markets and Raw Materials,’ 326.

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In his Christian Science Monitor article, Staley stated that in addition to the general agreement that much nonsense had been aired in the course of discussions centred on the theme of have and have-not states, what was striking about the conference was that it ‘registered the decided shift in attitude towards colonies and those who possess them’ that had emerged in recent years: that colonies could no longer be regarded as ‘private preserves’ of metropolitan powers but must be administered in interests of the local population. Staley noted that the British experts at the conference had insisted especially that ‘one must expect colonies to “grow up” and achieve independence’ and that in the meantime ‘colonial administration must be regarded as trusteeship, not as an opportunity for exploitation.’387 Wright similarly thought that the conference had registered the shift in attitude towards colonies that was then occurring. He observed in this regard that in the United States and in Britain the sentiment that it is ‘inherently unnatural’ for a people of a ‘very different culture’ to be governed by a metropolitan centre was widely recognised and that it now appeared that the regime of colonial administration by particular powers was but a temporary one.388 Wright pointed out that the United States had ‘recently decided voluntarily to accord independence to the Philippines’ and that Sir Cecil Hurst had stated in a lecture at the University of Chicago that the British Commonwealth of Nations conceived of its entire colonial system as a ‘ladder by which all the colonies could eventually mount to Dominion status and that it made no difference whether their population was black or white.’389 As noted above, although the conference recognised that the principle of trusteeship had begun to take hold well before the war, it was of the view that its hold had markedly tightened following the war’s end as a result of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations as via this article the principle had been rendered a part of contemporary international law. Bertram J. O. Schrieke, a professor of colonial ethnology at the University of Amsterdam, told the conference that despite the 387 Staley, ‘What Price Self-Sufficiency?’ 5. See also Malcolm W. Davis, ‘Peaceful Change: An Analysis of Some Current Proposals,’ Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the Drift Towards War (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 156–57. 388 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 459–60. 389 Ibid., 460.

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limited powers of the Permanent Mandates Commission, it was ‘undeniable that it had exercised considerable influence upon colonial administration, not merely in the mandated areas, but also in the colonies proper.’390 As further testimony to the influence of Article 22 beyond the confines of the mandatory regime, one might note Moresco’s observation that since 1918 there had been ‘increasing recognition of the right to independence of colonies other than Mandated territories’.391 As welcome as they no doubt thought this development was, figures such as Wright and Schrieke nonetheless urged the extension of the mandate system such that its general principles would formally apply to all subject peoples. The proposal to extend the mandate system so that it covered all non-self-governing territories, however, was dismissed by Labouret who advised the conference that ‘it was doubtful that the guardian States would ever permit foreign officials to assume a position of authority and thus to receive by delegation a part of the national sovereignty.’392 The advent of Article 22 was not the only factor that was cited at the conference in order to explain the changed attitude towards colonies. In the view of some, the change attitude in regard to colonies was an unintended effect of the colonial propaganda of certain dissatisfied states and, one might add, the political arguments of those, most of them British, who felt there was little to choose between British or French colonial administration and a prospective German colonial administration. The German colonial propaganda assisted by the rhetoric regarding colonial administration on the part of those who called for justice for Germany, gave rise to a situation in which there was an even greater felt-need on the part of the colonial powers to defend their colonial policy and along lines that were more deferential to the principle of trusteeship than might otherwise have been the case. Amidst a rhetorical environment rich with suggestions of moral equivalence, there was a felt-need to demonstrate why, for example, British colonialism was to be preferred to that of National Socialist colonialism. Thomas Drummond Shiels, a Scottish Labour parliamentarian and a former under-secretary of state for the colonies, was secretary of the British Hygiene Council. He was one of the British experts mentioned by Staley in his article on

390 Ibid.,

446, 463. Colonial Questions and Peace, 44–5. 392 Ibid., 459, 464, 474. 391 Moresco,

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the conference. Shiels well illustrated the nexus between the colonial propaganda and the changed attitude towards colonies in a contribution to the conference which closed with a statement that one reviewer of the conference described as one of the many wise observations strewn throughout the proceedings and on which the review in question placed a particular emphasis.393 Shiels stated the following: The desire for equality of status with certain other Powers which underlies and largely explains the cry of dissatisfied countries for colonial possessions can be more satisfactorily met by preparing to make an end of all Imperial domination rather than sharing its privileges and cares with those who at present have neither….In the meantime we must at least be discharging our responsibility of trusteeship. In so far as we are doing that, we are to a very great extent meeting the criticisms which are based mainly on the fact that certain Powers possess possibilities for the domination and exploitation of Native peoples which non-colonial Powers are desirous of having for themselves. If we do not exploit there can be no grievance.394

It is worth noting here that at the conference, Schrieke sought to shift the focus of the discussion of peaceful change: he urged that rather than focus on changes aimed at preventing war in Europe, the conference should focus on the ‘peaceful change…[that was]…actually taking place in colonies.’395 In a similar vein, Shiels and others urged that the kind of change that should be favoured was that of the ‘the gradual emancipation of subject peoples’ with a view to the ‘eventual termination of colonial status.’396 Shiels considered that a policy of colonial transfers was the antithesis of a policy of aimed at the emancipation of subject peoples given its implied premise that such peoples were property to be traded. 393 S. Herbert Frankel, review of Peaceful Change: Proceedings of the Tenth International Studies Conference, Paris, June 28th–July 3rd, 1939, by the International Studies Conference, South African Journal of Economics 7, no. 2 (1939): 222–25, 225. 394 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 451, 453. 395 Ibid., 462–63. 396 Ibid., 450. Note the following observation by J. Henry Richardson, another British delegate to the conference on peaceful change: ‘The change of sovereignty that I favour most is the one which would lead to the complete sovereignty of the native peoples themselves and I would regard that as the first objective of policy.’ The conference’s proceedings noted that Bertram J. O. Schrieke ‘also spoke on the education of the natives towards self-government’ (ibid., 450, 516, 518).

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He did not doubt that transferring colonies or mandates to Germany would result in the ruthless exploitation and subjugation of the populations concerned. Having noted that the process of ending imperial domination was underway ‘in varying degrees in practically all colonies,’ Shiels advised that the proposals for the transfer of colonies were out of line with this modern tendency.397 The conclusion reached by the vast majority of delegates at the conference, was that territorial adjustments, whether in Africa or in Europe, should be ruled out as a form of peaceful change. To the extent that the grievances giving rise to demands for territorial adjustments were genuine, it was thought that there were best addressed by the removals of ‘obstacles to economic intercourse’: by diminishing, as David Mitrany had argued at the 1935 session of the ISC, the significance of borders rather than altering them.398 Yet, it was also suggested that economic cooperation of this nature should be linked to collective security guarantees, and it should be noted that the general view at the conference was that the LON should be strengthened even though it was well understood by those present that it had entered a state of eclipse.399 As with the opening meeting, the closing meeting of the conference was held in public at the amphithéâtre Richilieu, albeit this time under the chairmanship of Herriot. In a somewhat dispirited closing address, Herriot asked whether or not the root of the conflict between France and Germany concerned a clash between two sharply different conceptions: ‘one, the French conception, which holds that we have inherited from Roman law a static conception demanding that truth shall be proclaimed with absolute clarity and, according to some views, with finality; the other, the German conception, which manifests itself, for example in Hegelianism, in that doctrine of incessant transformation, of perpetual evolution’. In short, Herriot wondered whether the

397 Ibid.,

451. ‘What Price Self-Sufficiency?’ 5. See also Bourquin, ed., ‘Prevention of War: Discussion,’ Collective Security, 265. 399 Ibid. Economic cooperation linked to collective security guarantees was the essence of the plan of April 1936 of the French foreign minister, Pierre-Étienne Flandin. It projected ‘the utilization of a common reserve of raw materials and the opening up of a territory of expansion destined to absorb the surplus European population’. International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 448. 398 Staley,

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conflict between France and Germany was ‘a conflict between two verbs to be and to become.’400 Touching on the question of the LON’s demise, was a closing speech by John Foster Dulles who had served as chair of the conference’s study meetings.401 In his speech Dulles stated that over the past week his mind had turned to another conference he had attended in Paris some years ago: the Paris Peace Conference. He recalled that at that conference the desire to re-establish peace was universal and that this desire had issued in the League of Nations and then the Pact of Paris. That the feeling of security induced by these developments had not been destined to last, he stated, was because ‘the steps we had taken were inadequate and tended excessively to perpetuate the status quo, and it became obvious that any given status, however admirable it might be at the beginning, could not be indefinitely prolonged without bringing about a clash with human needs, which are constantly changing.’402 A reversion to the war system on the part of certain states was only to be expected, Dulles suggested, as long as the world system remained ‘not sufficiently flexible to conform to changing needs and equities.’403 Indeed, Dulles observed that it was now generally accepted that the war system was ‘the premise on which national policy must be based.’404 He pointed out that the reversion to the war system was reflected in ‘elaborate provisions designed to ensure neutrality’ in some instances and in the form of ‘formidable armaments’ in others, adding, that neutrality was no guarantee against being drawn into a war once it had commenced and that formidable armaments could 400 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 618. Emphasis in the original. 401 Dunn, Peaceful Change: A Study of International Procedures, v–vi. John Foster Dulles had earlier chaired a sub-committee of the American Coordinating Committee for International Studies. This sub-committee directed a study of international procedures of peaceful change which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The study in question was authored by the sub-committee’s rapporteur, Frederick Sherwood Dunn, and was one of a series of studies submitted to the peaceful change conference by the American Coordinating Committee for International Studies. The other members of the aforementioned sub-committee were Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Philip C. Jessup and Walter Lippmann. 402 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 613–14. 403 Ibid., 614. 404 Ibid.

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not for very long deter war in a situation in which international conditions were highly volatile.405 Addressing the disillusionment that all felt in light of the disrepute into which ‘the noble concept of moral and material sanctions’ had fallen, Dulles stated that peace required a counterpart to sanctions in the form of mechanisms capable of responding to ‘the needs of changing social justice.’406 He acknowledged that such an approach would demand ‘real sacrifice’ in the form of sharing in ‘what we now possess for ourselves alone,’ by which he largely meant that there should be a reallocation of economic resources.407 Dulles stated that although the possibilities of peaceful change in the form of territorial concessions ‘should not be ignored’ and that such concessions might ‘expedient to tide over immediate emergencies,’ their ‘the ultimate effect may be merely to magnify the efficacy of the system of potential force.’408 Dulles concluded his speech in stating that if world leaders assembled in Paris in 1919 had ‘failed by creating sanctions without change,’ the current generation of leaders should not ‘fail by creating change without sanctions.’ Although ending his speech with a statement that might suggest that he took the view that at that point in time a policy of collective security should have priority over that of peaceful change, it needs to be emphasised that the key message conveyed by Dulles’s speech was as follows: the elimination of force will have a ‘sound moral basis’ and force will be ‘deprived of some moral sanction’ only if those enjoying ‘great natural advantages’ abandoned their efforts to ‘perpetuate for all time a monopoly of advantage.’409 Clarification as to the intent behind Dulles’s speech, which mostly was of a general nature, might be found in an article Dulles penned for the Atlantic Monthly just under two years earlier. Dulles commenced the article by noting that despite the assurances that accompanied such diplomatic feats as the covenant, the Washington Naval Treaty, the Locarno Treaties, the Pact of Paris and the doctrine of ‘nonrecognition of the fruits of aggression’ that the world was on the path to peace, the current

405 Ibid. 406 Ibid.,

614, 616. 614. 408 Ibid., 615–16. 409 Ibid., 614–16. 407 Ibid.,

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feeling was that the world was ‘inevitably moving towards war.’410 As a way of coming to grips with this seemingly perplexing situation, Dulles stated in the article, people had postulated ‘a personal devil,’ that is, they had pointed a finger accusingly at Hitler, Mussolini and Japanese militarists. In doing so, he added, they had overlooked the fact that ‘isolated individuals could never prevail against world sentiment for peace, except as they are the instrumentalities of powerful underlying forces.’411 Foreshadowing the key message of his closing speech at the 1937 session of the ISC, Dulles claimed in his Atlantic Monthly article that the real explanation for the march towards war concerned the fact that the current world system was designed to prevent change. Explaining his point, he observed that ‘forces which are in the long run irresistible are temporarily dammed up’ and warned that when these forces ‘finally break through,’ they will ‘do so with violence.’412 Dulles maintained no-one would challenge the general proposition that the world will and should continue to change: no-one would imagine that ‘the world is immutably frozen in its present national lines’ or deny the need for flexibility in some areas given the constant changes in the size and character of the populations of nations.413 Dulles insisted that in talking of change he was not necessarily thinking of changes in national boundaries. Indeed, he stated that what he had most in mind was the complex of treaties and rules which served to define and confine the activities of nations. Dulles then offered the view that unless people allowed for ‘elasticity’ in the field of treaty law and in regard to the norms of international conduct, the possibility of ‘healthy life and growth’ will be denied.414 Dulles went on to note that at the end of the war, France had sought a superstate equipped with an international police force with a view to preventing changes that ‘might deprive her of the fruits of victory.’ He added that having failed to achieve this goal, France had supported the creation of the LON with its implied guarantee of the perpetuation of

410 John

Foster Dulles, ‘The Road to Peace,’ Atlantic Monthly (October 1935): 492–99,

492. 411 Ibid. 412 Ibid. 413 Ibid. 414 Ibid.,

492–93.

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existing national boundaries in the form of Article 10 of the covenant and in the form of covenant’s provisions under Article 16 concerning sanctions. The ‘static’ or inflexible situation that would arise if Articles 10 and 16 were actually observed, Dulles opined, was not practical or desirable. According to Dulles, the Locarno Treaties also sought peace by means of consecrating the status quo, albeit only in the context of Europe.415 As for the Pact of Paris, Dulles claimed that it was ‘the most futile’ of all the peace plans: it only allowed for changes obtained by pacific means, even though it was plain to all that the pacific means in existence ‘were wholly inadequate to effect changes which are inevitable and desirable.’416 Finally in this regard, Dulles condemned the Stimson doctrine of non-recognition. He stated that although he was not certain whether or not the facts on the ground favoured the changes wrought by Japan in China, he thought it was ‘at least conceivable that they reflect a logical and inevitable tendency’; he suggested that if this were so, labelling these changes as aggression and denying them recognition was pointless.417 Dulles concluded in relation to the Stimson doctrine that peace would not be achieved by turning a blind-eye ‘to actual changes merely because they result from the only mechanism for change which is available.’418 Dulles claimed that it was no accident that the governments of what were then the most ‘powerful, self-satisfied’ states, that is, the governments of France, Great Britain and the United States, had been the most busy in drawing up plans for eternal peace.419 He suggested that these states had ‘selfishly’ sought to perpetuate indefinitely their preferred state of affairs and that this explained why in their pronouncements they equated peace with stability and characterised efforts to change the status quo as aggression.420 Dulles opined that if Germany, Japan and Italy were only reluctant adherents of the peace plans devised by the most favoured countries, it was not because they were bent on war.

415 Ibid.,

494.

416 Ibid. 417 Ibid. 418 Ibid., 419 Ibid., 420 Ibid.

494–95. 496.

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Dulles insisted that these three powers all desired peace. According to him, the hesitations of Germany, Japan and Italy in regard to post-war peace plans stemmed from the fact that they felt that their ‘potentialities…[were being]… repressed’ by those plans: they wished to ‘keep open the avenues of change’ that those plans seemed to deny.421 On the ground that crises arise ‘through the intensification of opposing forces for change and stability,’ Dulles urged the satisfied states to agree to revise those treaties which were proving unduly repressive and the dissatisfied states to exercise restraint.422 Although warning against the introduction into international affairs of too much treaty law on the ground that it conduced to rigidity, Dulles conceded that in the context of international affairs a significant degree of rigidity, most especially in relation to territorial boundaries, could not be avoided. He went on to argue that the potentially explosive consequences of territorial rigidity could be attenuated through promoting ‘economic fluidity.’ Dulles maintained that the freeing up of the movement of people, goods and capital would forestall the need for ‘evolutionary forces…[to]…find satisfaction only through changes of boundaries’ and that a large measure of ‘international flux’ in the form of the free movement of peoples, goods and capital could be introduced into the international system ‘without shock to national boundaries.’423 That certain of the concepts and terms employed by Dulles in his account of international affairs were reminiscent of the concepts and terms employed in the context of Bergson’s ‘Philosophy of Change’ was no coincidence: Dulles had studied under Bergson at the Sorbonne following the completion of a degree in philosophy at Princeton in 1908.424 Stephen Kinzer notes that from his studies under Bergson, Dulles had ‘picked up the concept of “dynamic” forces in eternal conflict with “static” ones,’ and that in the 1930s ‘he began describing France and Britain as “static” societies, interested only in defending what they had, and predicting that the future would be shaped by three newly

421 Ibid. 422 Ibid. 423 Ibid.,

499. Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Henry Holt and Company), 16. For Bergson’s description of his philosophy, see J. Alexander Gunn, Bergson and His Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1920), 13. 424 Stephen

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creative and “dynamic” powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan.’425 Dulles was not the first to apply Bergsonian oppositions, such as the opposition between the static and the dynamic, to international affairs. Bergson himself had notably done so in a presidential speech delivered at the annual public meeting of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques on December 12, 1914, an authorised translation of the opening portion of which was published in the British religious periodical the Hibbert Journal in April 1915 under the heading of ‘Life and Matter at War.’426 In a speech in which he sought to convey the ‘inner meaning’ of the war, Bergson predicted that despite Germany’s impressive material power, Britain and France ultimately would triumph in a war in which there was ‘[o]n one side, mechanism…[and]…on the other, life, the power of creation which makes and remakes itself as every instant.’427 In view of the way in which Dulles’s applied the notion of life as an ongoing struggle between the forces of statis on the one hand, and the forces of dynamism on the other, to international affairs, it is worth recalling the contrast that Berber had drawn between the static and dynamic conceptions of international law and that Berber had identified the static conception of international law with France. For the same reason, it is also worth recalling that one of the lines of argument energetically pursued by the Fascist propagandist Francesco Coppola at the 1934 and 1935 sessions of the ISC was the following: the post-war international security system as an ‘immobile equilibrium’ cannot accommodate ‘the moving and living forces’ that have emerged since the war’s end and unless a more

425 Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, 49. For the centrality of the conflict between the static and the dynamic in Bergson’s philosophy see chapter two, ‘The Reality of Change,’ in Gunn, Bergson and His Philosophy. 426 Henri Bergson, ‘Discours en séance publique de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques,’ in Henri Bergson, ed., Mélanges (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972), 1107–8, and Henri Bergson,‘Life and Matter at War,’ Hibbert Journal 13, no. 3 (1915): 465–75. Henri Bergson’s speech at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques was published in full in Great Britain in the following form: Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict, with an introduction by H. Wildon Carr (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915). ‘Life and Matter at War’ was republished in the United States in the following form: Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ The Living Age, July 31, 1915, 25964. 427 Bergson,‘Life and Matter at War,’ 465, 475.

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‘plastic’ and ‘flexible’ system is established there will be outbursts of violence.428 Kinzer observes that although Dulles had a close affinity with France which had bestowed on him the Legion of Honour for his efforts at the Paris Peace Conference, he was more profoundly drawn to Germany ‘based on its centuries of achievement and the rigor of its social order.’429 Dulles also had considerable professional involvement with the latter country. In 1924, he had assisted in the development of the Dawes Plan and in that year and in the years that followed, he helped obtain for Germany substantial loans from American banks, acting in this regard under the auspices of the law firm in which he was a partner, namely, Sullivan & Cromwell. Sullivan & Cromwell, it should be noted, had a well-appointed office in Berlin.430 During the Weimar period, Dulles developed a friendship with Schacht, a friendship that continued after the latter was appointed minister of economics under the National Socialists. Kinzer observes that both men ‘believed that a resurgent Germany would stand against Bolshevism’ and that ‘[m]obilizing American capital to finance its rise was their common interest.’431 Dulles’s involvement in the project of obtaining American capital for Germany came to an end in 1935 when, at the insistence of all the other partners in the firm, among them his brother Allen W. Dulles, Sullivan & Cromwell’s office in Berlin along with another one in Frankfurt were closed and the firm ceased representing German clients.432 Kinzer points out that despite these developments, Dulles continued to visit Germany down to 1939, publicly voicing his regret towards the end of that year that Great Britain had declared war on the country. He maintained that there was ‘neither in the underlying causes of the war, nor in its longrange objectives, any reason for the United States becoming a participant.’433 Against the background of the outbreak of the Second World 428 Francisco Coppola, ‘Aperçu sur l’idée de sécurité collective,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 40–41 (1934): 256–60, 259–60. See also Francisco Coppola, ‘The Idea of Collective Security,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 144–47. 429 Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, 48–9. 430 Ibid., 49, 53. 431 Ibid., 50–1. 432 Ibid., 53. 433 John Foster Dulles, 1939, quoted ibid., 54.

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War, Dulles urged ‘“alterations of the international status quo” in order to head off “powerful forces emotionally committed to exaggerated and drastic change”’ which his brother, according to Kinzer, took to mean ‘accepting the rise of Nazism as a way to fight Bolshevism.’434

The Colonial Question After Paris Although the prevalent view among the participants in the ISC’s 1937 session at the time of its conclusion was that peaceful change at least as it related to Europe was something of a chimera, the notion continued to prove attractive because, as Wood put it, ‘of the large-scale sanguinolence of modern war.’ Wood noted that at least some of those attracted to the notion would ‘applaud the Munich. “settlement”,’ although Wood himself suggested that a better description for the Munich Agreement than peaceful change was a description employed by C. R. M. F. Cruttwell in discussing events of the nature of the incorporation of free city of Kraków in the Austrian Empire in 1846: he stated that the city’s incorporation was the result of a bloodless war. Although increasingly subject to derision in the wake of the Munich Agreement, for some time after the conclusion of the 1937 session of the ISC, peaceful change would remain a popular slogan amongst a mixed crew of conservatives, liberals and pacifists who were anxious for a peaceful settlement with Germany. The currency of the expression suggests that its use was assumed to have a palliative effect.’435 Despite the almost entirely negative attitude adopted in Paris in 1937 towards peaceful change in the specific form of the transfer of colonies or mandates to Germany and the contempt that had been heaped on the idea of colonial transfers elsewhere, public discussion of the colonial question continued. The authors of a letter published in the Times on October 7, 1937, which bore the heading of ‘The Question of Colonies: A Case for Inquiry— Extend the Mandatory System,’ declared that they looked forward to the convening 434 Kinzer,

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, 54. Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 36–7. In discussing whether or not the Munich settlement could be described as a case of peaceful change, Wood drew on the following statement by C. R. M. F. Cruttwell: ‘Doubtless whether a change was simply enforced by a threat of overwhelming strength it would be inappropriate to describe it as peaceful even though no drop of blood was shed in its accomplishment….Changes such as these may be described as the result of bloodless wars.’ C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 1. 435 Wood,

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of a conference to consider German colonial claims. The same authors insisted that in regard to the ‘administration of non-self-governing territories and in the matter of access to raw materials[,] “the European Powers should be placed upon a footing of approximate equality”’. The authors of this letter were Toynbee, Murray, Vernon Bartlett and Noel Edward Noel-Buxton, 1st Baron Noel-Buxton. Doubtless conscious of the controversy that their proposal would excite, the letter’s signatories took care to insist that the first condition of any settlement of the colonial question must be the following: that the ‘natives of the non-self-governing territories (both those which are and those which are not at present under Mandate) should not be sacrificed in any way for the sake of improving the relations between European Powers.’436 It was in view of this consideration that the letter went on to state that if one or more of Germany’s former colonies were to be returned to Germany, it should be in the form of mandated territories, such that Germany would not exercise ‘unrestricted sovereignty’ over any territory ceded to it. Equally, however, the letter suggested that ‘the European Powers which possess Crown Colonies should consent to place at least an equivalent portion of those Crown Colonies under the Mandatory régime’ in order that Germany would not be ‘the only Power that is being asked to administer under Mandate colonial territories over which she has once exercised unrestricted sovereignty.’437 In relation to the matter of ‘access to such legitimate sources of supply and markets that these territories might offer,’ the letter stated that the ‘European Powers should be placed upon a footing of approximate equality with one another.’438 The authors of the letter claimed that they saw in their proposal the ‘possibility of a colonial settlement which might prove equally favorable to the well-being of the native peoples and to the peace and prosperity of Europe.’439

436 Vernon Bartlett, Gilbert Murray, Lord Noel-Buxton and Arnold J. Toynbee, letter to the editor, Times, October 7, 1937. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 109. 437 Times, October 7, 1937. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 109n. 438 Ibid. 439 Ibid.

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The proposal put forward in the letter, which seems to have been conceived of by its authors as a mid-way position between those who refused to countenance any transfer of colonies or mandated territories and those who accepted the German colonial demands without question, was vulnerable to the criticism that despite what its authors said to the contrary, ‘any transfer of natives to German control would involve their “being sacrificed”’ and that their sacrifice would be precisely in order to improve relations among European powers.440 In any case, it is remarkable that the letter’s authors thought that such an arrangement, as Lugard stated in relation to Toynbee’s earlier proposal for ‘direct administration [of mandates] by a Committee of the League,’ would ‘satisfy the amour propre of the claimants for colonies in their own right.’441 What is also remarkable is the fact that Murray gave the proposal his seal of approval given that in a letter published in the Times on November 6 of the previous year, he had expressed strong misgivings about the prospect of granting concessions to Germany in light of its aggressive posture. In the letter published in the Times on November 6, 1936, he stated the following: To a peaceful and law abiding Germany faithful to the principles of the Covenant and the Kellogg Pact, I should like my country to make every reasonable concession and, if anything, to err on the side of generosity. To a Germany which militarizes its whole culture, glorifies war, preaches the Vernichtung Frankreichs, and keeps Europe in a state of anxiety by its threats of aggression, I do not see how its destined victims can be expected to make any concessions which will make their subjugation easier.442

It appears that Murray and the other signatories of the letter appearing in the Times on October 7, 1937, envisaged the transfer of mandates as part of a more general settlement with Germany. One can reasonably presume that in their view, a general settlement with Germany should be subject to the conditions specified in Murray’s letter of November 6,

440 Wood,

Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 101, 109n. ‘The Basis of the Claim for Colonies,’ 16. 442 Gilbert Murray, letter to the editor, Times, November 6, 1936. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 102. 441 Lugard,

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1936, in particular, to the condition that Germany return to the League, to the condition that there was a ‘mitigation of racial intolerance’ in Germany and to the condition that there was ‘general disarmament.’ That said, it is very difficult to accept that the authors of this letter, Murray especially, actually believed that the National Socialists would be willing to meet any of these conditions.443 In 1936, in a private communication with William Percival Crozier, editor of the Manchester Guardian, and against the background of the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Murray made the following observations: By the way, I am getting really alarmed at the flood of anti-French feeling in the English papers. Hitler makes it quite clear in Mein Kampf, and has since repeated it to Brüning, that his policy is ‘to bring France to her knees by the help of Great Britain,’ and I think he has chosen a very ingenious way of doing it. He breaks his treaty at a point vital to the French, where we are legally but not morally emotionally bound. If we acquiesce here, what shall we do when he makes aggressions in Czechoslovakia or Austria, where we are bound by no special treaty? My own view is that we ought simply to have replied to him that by violating the Treaty of Locarno, Germany has forfeited the protection of the Treaty, whereas France and Belgium retain it. Thus, the result of his action is not to divide us from the French but to align us up with France and divide us from Germany. I believe that would have been enough, and we could have done it without any consultation.444

There is one other consideration that makes the letter penned by Toynbee, Murray, Bartlett and Noel-Buxton on the colonial ­question worthy of note: that the question that its authors addressed seemingly in earnest, was no more than a conjurer’s trick. That the German colonial demands were confected in order to achieve political ends of a different kind was a view that many had arrived at by 1937. For example, in January 1937, Marius Moutet, the French minister for the colonies, observed that the German colonial claims appeared and disappeared ‘according to her needs in general and, above all, her European

443 Wood, 444 Gilbert

Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 101. Murray, 1936, quoted in Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ 196.

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policy’.445 In that same month, James Scorgie Meston, the chair of RIIA, noted in a letter to the Times written on behalf of the BCCIS, that the ISC was exactly the kind of fact-finding body that some had called for in order to test the German claims. Lord Meston informed readers that in Paris that year the ISC would be ‘checking…[their]…exploitation for political capital’.446 It was in this spirit that Manning affirmed at the Paris conference that there is such a thing as an aspiration with ‘a merely conventional existence—cultivated, as an instrument of policy’ and pronounced himself deeply sceptical of the idea that there was a solution to the putative problem of peaceful change.447 A few months later, in a paper delivered at Chatham House, Harold Nicholson (who had been a member of the BBCIS’s study group on peaceful change), elaborated at length on what he believed to be the Reich’s real strategy in relation to the colonial question, the broad outlines of which were touched on in the previous chapter in the context of a discussion of Toynbee’s meeting with Hitler in early 1936. Before discussing what Nicholson considered to be the Reich’s real strategy in pressing its colonial demands, I want to address certain of Nicholson’s observations concerning the case put for the transfer of colonies by German propagandists and his observations concerning the objections to such transfers. In his Chatham House paper, Nicholson quickly disposed of the legal case advanced on behalf of the

445 Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 56n. The Berlin correspondent of the Times, reported the following of the colonial claim in November 1936: ‘At this point, the more direct aim…[is to use]…the colonial claim as a bargaining counter. After Western countries, especially Britain, have been suitably impressed with the obstinacy and the annoyance of the German colonial claim, it might be suggested that this claim could be abandoned or left harmlessly in abeyance in return for a free hand for Germany in the East. By this would be meant, if not formal approval of her eastward expansion, at least an assurance of non-intervention in any seriously obstructive form. A weapon of such contested value as the colonial claim is bound, however, to be used experimentally in situations as they arise.’ ‘Colonial Demands: Germany’s Campaign a Vehicle for Bargainig,’ Sydney Morning Herald, November 5, 1936. 446 Lord Meston, letter to the editor, Times, January 28, 1937, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, publications (préparations), brochure de propaganda sur la Conférence, AG K-II-6, UA. 447 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 271–72.

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German claim, pointing out that the fifth of Wilson’s Fourteen Points was superseded by Article 119 of the Treaty of Versailles on the basis of which Germany unconditionally gave up its overseas possessions.448 That he considered the legal case unsound did not prevent Nicholson from expressing his belief that the case that a wrong had been done to Germany in depriving it of its colonies on what were ostensibly moral grounds was unassailable. In this regard he stated the following: The fact that we desired to seize the colonies and at the same time pay lip-service to the Fourteen Points led us into one of the most flagrant acts of hypocrisy that even the Peace Conference committed, and culminated in that appalling piece of Jesuitical exegesis by which we explained that we could not give a mandate to Germany owing to her mal-administration of her colonies in the past. Instead of basing our rights on military victory (which was a fact), we based them upon a moral comment which was both ungenerous and untrue.449

Nicholson also expressed a measure of sympathy for the economic and demographic cases for colonial retrocession, stating in relation to the demographic case that the possession of outlets for emigration would largely diminish that ‘sense of claustrophobia that lives on in the expression Volk ohne Raum.’ As to the German arguments concerning equality and national honour, Nicholson stated that he was very sympathetic to them and that he could not reproach the Germans for resenting the colonial-guilt imputation.450 Pretending for the moment that territories under mandate or subject to colonial rule were mere things that could without embarrassment be bartered away, Nicholson then turned to the question of what Britain could give Germany. The offer of Togoland and the Cameroons, he stated, would be regarded by Germany as ‘derisory’ unless added to it was the territory of Tanganyika. Nicholson, then pointed out that there were a number of very serious strategic objections to the cession of Tanganyika, such as the objection that its cession would give Germany a base in the Indian Ocean.451

448 Nicholson,

‘The Colonial Problem,’ 34.

449 Ibid. 450 Ibid., 451 Ibid.,

34–5. 37–8.

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In addition to the strategic objections any attempt at retrocession would face certain legal hurdles. It might be questioned, Nicholson stated, whether the African territories under British mandate were Britain’s to give: they might be said to belong, under the Article 119 of the Treaty of Versailles, to the Principal Allied and Associated Powers or to the League of Nations by virtue of Article 22 of the covenant or even to the populations of these territories themselves.452 Addressing the moral objections to retrocession, Nicholson, echoing Lugard, observed that it would involve the ‘breaking of pledges and the disappointment of serious hopes.’ While Nicholson stated that although he did not want to sound ‘self-righteous’ or to suggest that German administration would be ‘less humane than our own,’ he could not help but point out that it would gravely disappoint many Africans to be transferred from British trusteeship ‘to a country the main and avowed intention of which is exploitation’ and which espoused a doctrine of ‘race superiority.’453 Yet even assuming all these objections could be overcome, colonial retrocession would not achieve the desired goal of satiating Germany and thereby preventing a ‘Second German War,’ Nicholson maintained. The idea that Britain could ‘pay the Danegeld’ merely with the return of the colonies Germany held in 1913, he affirmed, was a ‘most profound illusion’: the price that Britain would likely have to pay for peace was going to be ‘infinitely heavier than that.’ Turning to the question of what Germany really wanted, Nicholson declared that the German colonial demands were ‘essentially a side-show’ to the planned main event, adding that Britain should not allow itself to be distracted by this sideshow.454 Nicholson then stated the following: There are many people in Great Britain who…sincerely imagine that Germany will be “grateful” for a “generous gesture” on our part. To the Germans generosity means patronage; gratitude, humiliation. They do not want us to be kind: they want us to be frightened….What Germany wants is power. She knows very well that the return of her colonies (even if that were feasible) would diminish rather than increase her power. I regard Herr Hitler as a most consistent man. I believe that what he desires

452 Ibid.,

37. 36–7. 454 Ibid., 40–1. 453 Ibid.,

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is contained in the pages of Mein Kamph. What he desires is Grund and Boden or, in other words, territorial and economic acquisitions in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Such acquisitions might lead him into conflict with Russia. If he is to win in that conflict he must assure that he is protected in the rear, that he has the necessary Rückentdeckung against France. In order to sterilise France he must sterilise England. Yet what does he possess wherewith to purchase…[England’s] neutrality? He has no real assets at all. Therefore he creates an artificial asset, the Colonial Propaganda. He can now offer the abandonment of his claim for the colonies in return for a free-hand in the East. If we take his colonial demands at face value, then he at least obtains some colonies, which will please his people. If we refuse his demands, then he can claim as compensation our neutrality in his European ambitions. It was for this reason so important that we should not surrender one inch of colonial territory without obtaining in return precise assurances in regard to Germany’s European ambitions.455

Writing not long before the outbreak of the war and having noted that many years earlier Alfred Rosenberg had mused that Britain might ‘very well be sympathetic toward a German conquest in the northeast, if Germany should consider this a substitute for overseas colonies,’ Wood (who as we saw had argued for the granting of some concessions at the 1937 Paris conference as a means of preventing war), observed that the German lack of colonies had served as a ‘handy bargaining weapon’.456 This weapon had proved so effective, he added, that one was entitled to suspect that some Germans ‘might not have liked to part with their

455 Ibid., 38–1. The French minister of the colonies, Marius Moutet, in a statement to the Echo de Paris in January 1937, declared the following: ‘I do not think the colonial question figures amongst the fundamental concerns of Germany, or even of Hitler. Germany is using it as a means to her political ends and her claims appear or disappear according to the needs of her general, and, above all, European policy’. Moutet, 1937, quoted in Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 56n. 456 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 82. In 1927, in The Future of a German Foreign Policy (Der Zukunftsweg enter Deutsche Aussenpolitik), Alfred Rosenberg stated that the German people needed land if they were to survive. However, he added that the plan of future German foreign policy must be based on the following consideration: ‘This land can no longer be obtained in Africa, but must be secured in Europe, especially in the East,’ Alfred Rosenberg, 1927, quoted in Franz Theodor Hart, Alfred Rosenberg: Der Mann und sein Werk (München: J.F. Lehmanns, 1933), 56, 59.

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lack of colonies’: without a lack of colonies Germany would have no ‘claim on the British Government, and no one in England to plead that Germany was being unjustly deprived of her own.’457 Nicholson’s analysis of the German colonial propaganda was endorsed by those participating in the discussion of his paper who were familiar with the territorial ambitions outlined in Mein Kampf. Sir Malcolm Robertson, after having declared that ‘few understood the fundamental importance of Hitler’s book,’ proceeded to read out certain passages in order to demonstrate that the fundamental policy of Germany what that of acquiring territory in Europe. ‘Was it possible to keep the peace by handing Germany back her former colonies? The speaker doubted it.’458 By contrast, Sydney Arnold, 1st Baron Arnold, a Labour parliamentarian and pacifist, appeared to take the German colonial demands rather seriously, stating in the course of the discussion of Nicholson’s paper that the colonial question was the last of the Versailles injustices that needed to be addressed. Perhaps in the hope of appeasing his audience, Arnold stated he was not proposing that only British territory be transferred. He then cited with evident approval a letter penned by Sir Claud Russell which had been published in the Times of February 3. He noted that in his letter, Russell had suggested that sections of Nigeria, the French Cameroons, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola should be ceded to Germany in the interests of peace.459 Arnold put forward the view that ‘many natives would prefer to be under German rule’ rather than be subject to the rule of powers such as Belgium or Portugal. He added that it was ‘also true that in certain stages of the last War the natives had fought better for the Germans than had some natives for the other Powers.’460 Arnold claimed that a transfer of colonial territory to Germany would satisfy the German desire for ‘prestige’ and have an ‘enormous’ psychological effect. He declared that it would be a tragedy if war were allowed to break out due to the refusal to transfer a ‘trifling amount of tropical

457 Wood,

Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 142. ‘The Colonial Problem,’ 44–5. 459 Ibid., 46; and Sir. Claud Russell, letter to the editor, Times, February 3, 1937. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 106. 460 Nicholson, ‘The Colonial Problem,’ 46. 458 Nicholson,

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territory.’461 A similarly breezy attitude towards what was ultimately at stake in regard to the colonial question was conveyed in Parliament by another Labour parliamentarian: Frederick Montague. Montague urged consideration of the possible disposition of mandates to Germany under the auspices of the LON and ‘subject to guarantees of disarmament and the observance of proper colonial practice.’ He then declared that it was a fact that ‘the common people of this land will not murder Germans wholesale for the sake of a splash of the tropical red’.462 Responding to Montague’s urging, Anthony Crossley, a Conservative parliamentarian, stated plainly, ‘Germany has left the League of Nations.’463 Writing in the Times on November 2, 1937, Noel-Buxton, a ‘near-pacifist’ who had been an opponent of colonial transfers when that prospect was first canvassed in the 1920s, argued that if one were certain that Germany was bent on aggressive expansion eastward in Europe then it would be reasonable not to offer it concessions but instead to make preparations for war. However, he went to state that in the absence of such certainty, ‘it is incumbent on us not to increase the incentive to the Germans to embark on such a disastrous course.’ In answer to the deep disquiet expressed by some at the prospect of colonial rule by the National Socialists, Noel-Buxton declared that Germany had a ‘real contribution to make to the fund of talent in science and organization’ of which Africa was in urgent need and that the ‘greatest injury that could befall the natives of Africa would be war, which the denial of colonies to Germany might well produce.’464 Responding to fears expressed about the prospect of colonial rule by the National Socialists during the discussion of Nicholson’s presentation, Noel-Buxton claimed that although

461 Ibid.

See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 119. Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), March 15, 1937, 1687. Frederick Montague posed the following question in Parliament: ‘Do the Government believe that the manhood of this country will throw itself into another war of unnameable horrors for the continued possession of mandates in Africa, for Togoland for instance? If they, do they must be mad. Our people will fight for defence and for honour, but they will not fight for mandates’ (ibid., 1685). 463 321 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), March 15, 1937, 1686. 464 Lord Noel-Buxton, letter to the editor, Times, November 12, 1937. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 113–14. For Noel-Buxton’s earlier support of a policy of colonial retrocession and pacifism see Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 63, 68, 113. 462 321

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there would be ‘keen exploitation’ of the local populations in colonies administered by the Nazis, the hardship they would experience would not be any greater than that which they experienced under British rule.465 He further claimed that Nazi ‘racial theory would not involve hatred of the natives like that of the Jews’ on the ground that the former would not have ‘seized professional positions or laid themselves open to animosity’; he added, that although there would doubtless ‘be strong efforts to prevent a population of half-castes,’ this was not such a ‘terrible charge ….certainly not so in British eyes.’466 Responding to Arnold’s intervention during the discussion of Nicholson’s presentation, the journalist Wickham Steed noted that Robertson had correctly pointed out that the second volume of Mein Kampf had been written not while Hitler was in prison but a couple of years later. He further noted that it was written with the assistance of members of the German General Staff and stated that he agreed with Robertson that the ‘strategical conceptions’ in it were very important.467 Steed then stated that he had doubted whether anyone in the group to which Arnold belonged, by which he presumably meant that group which believed peace in Europe could be bought with colonial concessions, ‘could read German sufficiently well’ to be able to read the book, adding that Hitler had ‘taken great care’ to ensure that the English edition was inadequate.468 Shiels responded to Arnold in arguing that there was not one but many colonial problems and that in strict terms the question of the return of the German colonies was not a colonial problem at all. As Germany had yet to formulate a precise demand in relation to the matter, he stated, it remained entirely unknown as to which powers were expected to contribute, whether or not the Dominions were expected to contribute, how the transfer was to be effected and whether or not Germany was willing to accept the mandate system. Shiels stated that German acceptance of that system should be the most important factor under consideration should negotiations on the question of returning

465 Nicholson, 466 Ibid. 467 Ibid., 468 Ibid.

47.

‘The Colonial Problem,’ 49.

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colonies ever eventuate. He further stated that if international supervision was considered necessary even in the case of democratic states where the exposure of poor administration and abuses was relatively easy, it was all the more necessary in the case of a state such as Germany. Shiels then recalled that Lytton had pointed out in an ‘admirable series of speeches’ on the subject at the Paris conference on peaceful change, that in Germany there was ‘no free parliament, no free press, and no complaints could be made against authority with safety.’469 Shiels declared that in light of the nature of the current German state and given the German government’s ‘racial theories,’ it would ‘surely be a betrayal of the trust which Great Britain had undertaken even to contemplate handing back these native peoples’ without their full and willing consent ‘and without very real safeguards.’470 Beyond this, Shiels was insistent that Britain should not consider any new arrangements with Germany ‘except as part of a comprehensive and satisfactory settlement.’471 Shiels evidently did not believe that any of the conditions he insisted must be met before Britain even considered addressing the so-called colonial problem would ever be agreed to by the German government as he gave a strong indication that he did not think negotiations with Germany on the colonial front would ever get very far. Indeed, he stated that the only real colonial problem that Britain faced was that ‘[n]otwithstanding good intentions, and considerable successful efforts, many British overseas peoples were under-nourished, unhealthy, and had low standards of life.’472 Noting that these peoples were already ‘restless and critical,’ Shiels warned that it would ‘not be wise to alienate them either by diplomatic injustice or neglect of their needs, as this would weaken the physical and mental resources and the unity of the concord of the British Commonwealth of peoples,’ this being the ‘greatest international factor in the preservation of democracy and world peace.’473 Margery Perham, a research lecturer in colonial administration at St. Hugh’s, Oxford, who had spent much time in different parts of Africa,

469 Ibid., 470 Ibid., 471 Ibid. 472 Ibid. 473 Ibid.

47–8. 48.

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shared Shiels’s views on the subject of colonial transfers. In the midst of the discussion of Nicholson’s presentation she exposed what she saw as the morally confused, hypocritical and disingenuous features of the arguments in favour of ceding colonies to Germany.474 This was not the first time that Perham had forcefully entered the debate on colonial transfers. In February 1936, she contributed three articles to the Times on the topic of British colonial administration. In the first of these articles, Perham noted that the British characterised their colonial policy as one of trusteeship, adding that ‘in its meaning of unqualified service to our wards’ trusteeship still remained ‘an ideal.’475 She stated that she viewed the mandate system as an improvement upon the policy of trusteeship because under that policy it was at the discretion of the imperial trustee as to whether or not it was in ‘the best interests of his wards…[to]…attain their majority’; by contrast, Article 22 of the covenant assumed that the role of the mandatory was temporary: under that article the mandatory was charged with ‘developing backward peoples until they can “stand by themselves.”’476 Having stated that based on official statements one could assume that the British government accepted the mandate principle in respect to both mandated territories and colonial possessions in Africa, Perham observed that amidst the diversity of Britain’s African administration one could clearly discern a trend in favour of the principle of indirect rule.477 Perham’s second article in the series appeared in the newspaper the following day and commenced with the observation that the British were today providing Africans, ‘judged by the best of their administrations,… effective training in self-government.’478 After having explained in detail how this training was being provided, Perham went on to observe that it was the vibrancy of British democracy that guaranteed the course that British ‘native policy’ had taken: it was difficult to imagine that a policy providing for the training of subject peoples in self-government could come into existence and expand ‘in a country where there was not the 474 Anthony Kirk-Greene, ‘Margery Perham and Colonial Administration: A Direct Influence on Indirect Rule,’ in Frederick Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse, eds., Oxford and the Idea of CommonWealth: Essays Presented to Sir Edgar Williams (London: Croon Helm, 1982), 123. 475 Margery Perham, ‘Our Task in Africa: I—Administration of Natives: The British Method,’ Times, February 10, 1936. 476 Ibid. 477 Ibid. 478 Margery Perham, ‘Our Task In Africa: II—The Colonial Structure: Creating a Service,’ Times, February 11, 1936.

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utmost freedom to criticize the Government, and where an energetic public opinion was not constantly playing upon colonial problems.’479 This last point gives an indication of Perham’s overriding intention in writing the three articles, an intention which she explained to readers in the third article in the series. In that article, she called attention to the political context that had determined the focus of the first two articles in the series: the colonial claims. Perham confessed in her third article that in the two previous articles she had laid herself open to the charge of ‘complacency,’ adding that this was a charge which foreign readers would be especially inclined to make.480 She stated in relation to this confession that if she had been writing in any other context but that of the colonial claims, the focus in her two previous articles would have rested on the shortcomings of Britain’s African administration rather than on its achievements. After having announced that she now intended to discuss some of those shortcomings, Perham made two points which she obviously thought needed to be considered in the context of the debate concerning colonial claims. The first point she made in this regard was that it had to be admitted that Britain’s ‘somewhat altruistic’ colonial policy did not enjoy unanimous support in the country and thus sometimes things were said or done which gave ‘foreigners an excuse to charge us with hypocrisy.’481 The second point she made was that it would be well to correct the false impression that Britain pretended that its record in the colonial field was beyond reproach because this impression had been exploited by Britain’s foreign critics in order to distract attention from the main issue at stake. Perham observed that it was important not to forget that Britain had acquired colonies by force and had ‘in the process committed…crimes.’ At the same time, she insisted that it was equally important to stress that the object of current British colonial policy was that of changing the basis of British rule ‘from one of force…to that of cooperation and ultimately partnership.’482

479 Ibid. 480 Marjery Perham, ‘Our Task in Africa: III—The Line of Advance: Trusteeship on a Broader Basis,’ Times, February 12, 1936. 481 Ibid. 482 Ibid.

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Perham stated that it was precisely because of this change in the nature of British rule that ‘true internationalists’ must brave the charge of hypocrisy and conclude that the inhabitants of Britain’s African territories would have ‘nothing to gain, and possibly much to lose’ by being placed in the hands of another Power.483 Perham declared that while she did not undervalue the effects of peaceful adjustments to the status quo, in the case of the colonial claims it was of the utmost importance to remember that one was not dealing simply with resources or land ‘but with subject people’ if one were to avoid the danger of making sacrifices at their expense.484 As a form of response to the claims of what she referred as the so-called have-nots, Perham suggested two courses of action. First, Britain should adopt a policy along the lines proposed by Hoare at Geneva according to which the country would ‘freely share with the rest of the world such economic advantages as belong at present to trusteeship’.485 Second, and much, much more importantly from her perspective, Britain should commit itself to making even greater efforts to advance the interests of the inhabitants of its African territories and then seek international approval for this commitment. Here, Perham was proposing a measure of internationalisation of British trusteeship and, indeed, of imperialism in Africa in general, in the form of international regulation in regard to such matters as the ‘militarization of natives’ and the ‘rights and future needs of Africans in regard to land.’486 As she noted, such an approach had already been adopted at Geneva in the case of ‘native labour’ through the machinery of conference, committee, an investigation report and a convention.487 Perham argued that international regulation would have the advantage of not only making it apparent to all that Britain was in fact carrying out its policy of trusteeship, but also of propelling Britain further along the path of preparing its subject peoples for self-government. International regulation, she stated in concluding,

483 Ibid. 484 Ibid. 485 Ibid. 486 Ibid. 487 Ibid.

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would impel us to associate African opinion so far as possible in all these international proceedings. In this matter of the part to be played by the coloured races we have no choice but to combat in deed and word the very different ideas apparently held in Italy and Germany. Only the other day Herr Hitler, as reported, proclaimed the indefinite indulgence of the white race’s ‘urge to rule’ as necessary to the basis of the European economic structure, while he derided our policy of trusteeship as a ‘weak conception’ and a ‘pacifist idea.’ Britain’s answer must be to pursue that policy…even more openly and deliberately. It is the only policy which can justify her to herself, to most of the world, and to her own subjects in retaining present control of such large areas. And it is the only policy that promises in the end to remove one of the causes of world-conflict by enabling Africans to take charge of their own destiny.

Perham did not pretend that any of the measures she proposed would ‘appease the most dissatisfied nations,’ however, aside from undermining the persuasiveness of their colonial propaganda, these nations were not her concern.488 Indeed, on April 29, 1936, she called for Britain to take the lead in applying ‘full sanctions,’ presumably economic sanctions, against one such dissatisfied nation, lamenting at the same time what she described as French ‘hesitation to keep the Covenant’ and a more general inclination to ‘sit back in a new kind of neutrality and watch the aggressor exterminate its victim.’489 Although accepting that the British government must have had ‘grave reasons hitherto to hesitate’ to pursue a ‘forward policy….independently of France,’ she argued like Toynbee, whose letter to the Times of April 22 she described as an eloquent expression of the profound feelings harboured by many about the fate of Ethiopia, she insisted that ‘justice and security’ rendered this course necessary.490 Perham described the dangers that would loom on the horizon if no action as taken as follows: One [danger] is that the refusal to take risks in the clearest imaginable issue of international right and wrong to-day may increase the risks of an old-fashioned balance-of-power war to- morrow. Another is that the apparent discrepancy between our words and actions at Geneva may cost us the

488 Ibid.

See also Margery Perham, letter to the editor, Times, April 29, 1936. Perham, letter to the editor, Times, April 29, 1936.

489 Margery 490 Ibid.

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trust of the world, and especially that of the coloured people upon whose loyalty our Empire stands. Finally, in the event of the League breaking down over this issue, it is important that Britain should be clear of responsibility for that failure. Otherwise she will have disqualified herself for the task that must be hers in another generation, that of helping Europe to rebuild a more effective international order.491

In insisting on the Britain’s recent colonial policy in Africa was at the very least somewhat altruistic, Perham’s principal target would seem to have been those whom the Times described in applauding Perham’s efforts and after having noted that hers was an authoritative voice on the subject, as ‘hasty and ill-informed enthusiasts’ who were so eager to believe ‘international unrest might be appeased by a redistribution of Colonial possessions’ that they disregarded the interests of subjects peoples.492 Lord David Cecil was seemingly one such enthusiast. He wrote in a letter to the Times appearing in May 1936, that although it may well be that the peoples in ceded African territories would be ‘less happy’ under German rule than under British rule, he could ‘not think that in order to avoid such hypothetical sufferings we ought to bring upon mankind the certain and catastrophic sufferings involved in a European war.’493 Perham’s first observation in the discussion following Nicholson’s address was that the limited attention given to the interests of subject peoples in discussions of the colonial claims caused her to fear they would be disregarded in any final settlement. She stated that she thought it odd that in discussions of these claims in the British context, the point that from perspective of principle the interests of subject peoples was paramount had been so overlooked. Perham then went on to state that those who adopted the view ‘that it would be preferable to give away one, two, or even three colonies rather than have bombs dropping on London, did not stop to consider…[the interests of subject peoples]…at

491 Ibid. 492 ‘White

and Black in Africa,’ Times, February 12, 1937. David Cecil, letter to the editor, Times, May 14, 1936. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 90. 493 Lord

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all.’494 She noted that those liberals and humanitarians who would normally show concern for the welfare of dependent peoples had had been ‘so busy applying their liberalism and humanity to Germany’ and deprecating at the same time British practice in the colonial field, that they risked abandoning a central truth: that ‘restitution to Germany of her former colonial possessions would not be in the interests of the subject races.’495 Perham reminded those participating in the discussion of Nicholson’s presentation that Germany was the antithesis of Britain in terms of free institutions, that is, in terms of avenues for public criticism and for reform and that Britain’s free institutions had served as powerful checks on the abuse of colonial power. She warned that a ‘native society’ would crumble under the pressure of the ‘twentieth century European industrial exploitation’ that Goebbels had in recent days indicated he would impose on ceded colonies.496 Perham pointed out that Britain was just beginning to understand that ‘imperialism was not a good thing’ as it demoralised both the ruler and the ruled. She observed that because of its demoralising effect, many in Britain hoped that in the ‘not very far-distant period,’ imperialism would be brought to an end.497 The way of bringing it to an end, she added, was expressed in the covenant’s provision concerning the mandatory obligation of teaching subject peoples to stand alone, an obligation which Hitler, she again noted, had treated with derision.498 Perham acknowledged that there was a tendency abroad ‘to sneer at the assumption of responsibility for the natives,’ adding that as a result many of those opposed the cession of colonies to Germany had retreated from ‘this apparently vulnerable position’ and had instead based their opposition to cession on the less assailable grounds of imperial and strategic interests.499 An example of the tendency to which Perham referred

494 Nicholson,

‘The Colonial Problem,’ 42.

495 Ibid. 496 Ibid.,

43. 44.

497 Ibid., 498 Ibid. 499 Ibid.

See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 105, 114–15.

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was provided by Arnold who confessed in the wake of Perham’s intervention in the discussion at Chatham House that her assumption of moral superiority on the part of Britain caused him to gasp. He then pointed to such stains on the British colonial record as the ‘colour bar’ in South Africa, the use of forced labour in certain African territories and the seizure of land occupied by Kenyans on behalf of white settlers.500 Arnold’s response to her speech illustrated another point made by Perham, namely, that the misconception that Britain pretended to be a pillar of colonial rectitude had been exploited in order to distract attention from the main issue: the interests of those people who were to be, if those such as Noel-Buxton who were calling for Britain to make ‘sacrifices in the cause of peace’ and for justice for Germany had their way, ‘instruments of our appeasement.’501 On November 19, 1937, Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax and the Lord President of the Council, who was then in Germany in order to visit a hunting exhibition, had an interview with Hitler in Berlin lasting one hour and a half. This interview occurred against a background of ‘[c]onsiderable hope’ in Britain ‘that some tangible agreement might be reached’ with Germany that would ‘allay suspicions’ between the two countries and of ‘rumors that the grant of a free hand in the East might take the Chancellor’s mind off the tropics.’502 Two days after this interview in a speech to a rally at Augsburg, Hitler declared to wild cheers that on the ground of morality and the ground of vital necessity, the former German colonies would have to be returned. Before promising the crowd that Germany would express its colonial demands more loudly

500 Nicholson,

‘The Colonial Problem,’ 45–46. 42; and Lord Noel-Buxton, letter to the editor, Times, November 2, 1937. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 114–15. 502 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 134. In respect to Lord Halifax’s interview with Hitler, Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons the following: ‘It was never the expectation or the intention of His Majesty’s Government that those conversations should produce immediate results. They were conversations, and not negotiations, and, therefore, in the course of them no proposals were made, no pledges were given, no bargains were struck. What we had in mind as our object, and what we achieved, was to establish a personal contact between a member of His Majesty’s Government and the German Chancellor, and to arrive, if possible, at a clearer understanding on both sides of the policy and outlook of the two Governments.’ 330 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), December 21, 1937, 1804. 501 Ibid.,

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in the future and insisting that he knew the world would not be able to reject these demands, Hitler declared the following: that the colonies were ‘our lost property and the world will have to return it. What the world shuts its ears to today, it will not be able to ignore in a year’s time. What it will not listen to now, it will have to think about in three years time, and, in five or six, it will have to take into practical consideration.’503 That the matter of. colonial transfers was under consideration by the British government was signalled to the House of Commons by Neville Chamberlain on November 30, 1937, when he read out the terms of a communiqué issued at the conclusion of conversations he and other British ministers had held with Camille Chautemps, Blum’s successor as head of government, and Yvon Delbos, the French foreign minister, during the French ministers’ stay in London from November 29 to 30.504 The terms of this communiqué as read out by the prime minister on November 30, were in part as follows: ‘The French Ministers heard from Lord Halifax himself a statement on his recent conversations in Germany. They were glad to recognise that while Lord Halifax’s visit, being of a private and unofficial character, was not expected to lead to any immediate results, it had helped to remove causes of international misunderstanding and was well calculated to improve the atmosphere.’ ‘The problems of Europe as a whole and the future prospects of appeasement and disarmament came under review. On these important subjects the French and British Ministers found fresh evidence of that community of attitude and outlook which so happily characterises the relations between France and the United Kingdom.’ ‘A preliminary examination was made of the colonial question in all its aspects. It was recognised that this question was not one that could be considered in isolation, and moreover would involve a number of other countries. It was agreed that the subject would require much more extended study.’505

On December 21, Chamberlain, referring to Halifax’s conversation with the German chancellor in connection with the prospects for establishing a basis for cooperation in Europe, stated the following: 503 ‘Hitler Expecting no Colonies Deal for 5 to 6 Years,’ New York Times, November 22, 1937. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 133. 504 329 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), November 30, 1937, 1877. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 134. 505 329 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), November 30, 1937, 1877.

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I think I may say that we now have a fairly definite idea of the problems which, in the view of the German Government, have to be solved if we are to arrive at that condition of European affairs which we all desire, and in which nations might look upon one another with a desire to co-operate instead of regarding each other with suspicion and resentment. If we are to arrive at any such condition as that, obviously it cannot be achieved by a bargain between two particular countries. This is rather to be considered, as we would consider it, as a first step towards a general effort to arrive at what has sometimes been called a general settlement, to arrive at a position, in fact, when reasonable grievances may be removed, when suspicions may be laid aside, and when confidence may be again be restored.506

According to Wood, this statement ‘characterized the new trend in British policy toward Germany—that of actively seeking methods of appeasement….There was no denial here that the colonial problem was being considered; there was rather the implication that it, along with other outstanding issues, would receive attention in an effort, with other countries, to reach a general settlement.’507 Seizing on this implication, Churchill observed in Parliament on December 21 that since Halifax’s visit to Germany, which, he noted, had caused ‘widespread commotion’ in Europe, the German government had raised questions concerning ‘the restoration of war conquests.’508 Churchill stated in the same context that should a specific request be made in this regard, the response of the British government should be that it was ready to discuss ‘in a friendly spirit’ the restoration of war conquests, albeit provided that ‘every other country, or the bulk of the countries that made such conquests, are ready to join with us, and discuss the situation on equal terms.’509 Churchill well knew that obtaining the agreement of all or even the bulk of the beneficiaries of war conquests, a list which included Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Japan, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia, to their restoration was out of the question, especially as several of them, as he told his parliamentary colleagues, owed their very national existence to

506 330 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), December 21, 1937, 1804–805. See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 134. 507 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 134. 508 330 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), December 21, 1937, 1833–834. 509 Ibid., 1834.

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such conquests.510 Churchill’s response to the prime minister’s declaration of December 2 seemed to be crafted so as to nip in the bud any suggestion of colonial retrocession. The same observation applies to the following statements of Churchill. If this question of the restoration of War conquests is to be raised, and if sacrifices are to be made to lay the ghost of hatreds arising out of the late War, I say that these sacrifices should be made all round, and that all the Powers who profited in territory by the victory of the Allies should be prepared to consolidate their victory by sharing in and contributing to any measure of appeasement which may be agreed upon to those who were defeated. There must be no singling out of Great Britain to be the only Power to be invited to make these sacrifices. We have heard a lot about the return of the former German colonies….I should like to say that, though there are a very large number of people in this country who would be willing to make sacrifices to meet German wishes about the colonies if they could be assured that it meant genuine lasting peace to Europe, none of them would yield one scrap of territory just to keep the Nazi kettle boiling. I therefore welcome very much the declarations we have heard at different times, and renewed this afternoon by the Prime Minister, to the effect that there is no question whatever of any isolated retrocession of colonial war conquests; that we could only discuss such matters in company with our former Allies; that we should only approach the many difficulties involved if it were part of a general return by Europe to the old standards of tolerance and the final healing of outstanding quarrels; and, above all, leading in the end to an all-round reduction of armaments.511

In the event, the occasion for a more extended study of the colonial question in relation to a prospective general settlement did not present itself: in the following year British diplomacy was preoccupied first, with Germany’s annexation of Austria and second, with the arrangements for the partitioning of Czechoslovakia.512 In fact, Prime Minister Chamberlain informed the House of Commons immediately after the Anschluss that as far as the colonial question was concerned no action was being taken. Chamberlain told his parliamentary colleagues the

510 Ibid.,

1834–835. 1835. 512 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 135. 511 Ibid.,

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following: ‘Obviously in present circumstances nothing further can be done in that direction.’513 One of the effects of the Munich Agreement, (which according to Sir John Simon the chancellor of the exchequer and before that secretary of state for foreign affairs, was ‘reached under pressure of the alternative of instant invasion’), was to harden opinion against the idea of colonial concessions, although this did not stop some from expressing the hope that the so-called ‘spirit of Munich’ could be extended further afield.514 A poll conducted in October 1938 by the British Institute of Public Opinion found that eighty-five per cent of Britons were opposed to the restitution to Germany of any of its former colonies and that only fifteen per cent were in support of such a policy, a nine point decrease in support since the previous year. Of the eight-five per cent opposed, eightyone per cent gave a positive response to the following question: ‘Would you rather fight than hand them back?’515 Opinion further hardened on the receipt of news of the pogrom of November 10. The general public sentiment was reflected in a speech on November 11 by Sir Archibald Sinclair, the leader of the Liberal Party and someone who had earlier expressed a willingness to consider the German claims in the context of a general settlement. Sinclair stated that we in Britain could not honourably hand over to a Government which permitted and even instigated such vile outbursts of frenzied barbarism against what it regarded as a subject and inferior race, any of those primitive peoples in Africa who now enjoy the blessings of freedom and impartial justice under British rule. There are several possible solutions of the colonial problem, but that solution must now be ruled out.516

513 333

Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), March 16, 1938, 411. Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 117–19. 515 Ibid., 119. According to Wood, in 1937 a poll found that twenty-four per cent of the British population were in favour of colonial restitution and seventy-six per cent were opposed. 516 Archibald Sinclair, 1938, quoted ibid., 120. Archibald Sinclair, envisaged an economic settlement in the colonial sphere with Germany, stating in March 1937 that the ‘“Ottawa policy of selfish and exclusive economic Imperialism” must be abandoned if a constructive policy of peace was to be pursued’ (ibid., 97). 514 Wood,

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Two weeks later, in a speech at Harlow in Essex, Churchill, referring to the growing opposition to proposals for colonial appeasement, applauded what he called this ‘very decisive rally against such surrender and betrayal of trust’.517 Following the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, the very decisive rally of which Churchill spoke became unyielding resistance. By mid-March 1939, beyond the ranks of in those conservatives whose anti-Soviet sentiments proved stronger than their imperialist disposition and of the British Union of Fascists, there was hardly any support remaining for a policy of colonial retrocession.518 By this time, the colonial racial policy of the Racial-Political Department of the National Socialist Party was being hailed in Germany as follows: ‘This programme presents…the greatest contrast imaginable to that theory of “equality of everything that bears a human face”. It demonstrates the harm done by democratic colonial policy, as shown by the Dark Continent’s history’.519

Collective Security Versus Peaceful Change In concluding this chapter, I would like to make some observations concerning the increasingly polarised relationship between the policies of collective security and peaceful change with reference to remarks made by Normal Angell and Davis in the context of the twelfth series 517 Ibid.,

121–22. Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 123. 519 H. Bechtholdt, 1939, quoted in Moresco, Colonial Questions and Peace, 61. Moresco recorded the following: ‘Dr. H. Bechtholdt in the Voelkischer Beobachter of January 1939 quotes from the Kolonialfrage und Rassengedanke, published by the Racial-Political Department of the National Socialist Party, nine-points of a colonial racial policy. The notion underlying this policy is that the native population shall receive such benefits as their racial character will allow them to enjoy. The principal benefits are: a full right to live on their own land; a system of their own suited to their racial character; native schools in which their own culture is taught and European educations materials excluded; positions of trust for natives talented and “experienced in co-operation”; complete protection in their life work; respect for their religious cults. On the other hand, the natives are considered unfit by reason of their racial Substanz to take part in European religious or social life; to be admitted to Europe in any capacity whatsoever; to become citizens of the Reich; higher education is to be closed to them on principle; there are to be white judges to administer “swift justice”’. Moresco noted that this statement of colonial policy contradicted the principles outlined in earlier statements of National Socialist colonial policy particularly in respect to ‘the place of Christianity in native policy’ (ibid.). 518 Wood,

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of lectures given at the Geneva Institute of International Relations in August 1937. In his two lectures in the series, which bore the subtitle Geneva and the Drift Towards War, Angell drew attention to the assumption of those British conservative opponents of collective security that ‘commitment to “the League” as a commitment for a vague and dangerous altruistic purpose remote from British interests’.520 Referring to the Italian attack on Ethiopia and Italy’s intervention in Spain, Angell stated that it was because Italy knew that Britain was ‘in two minds about the defence of the Covenant,’ that the Duce had been ‘ready to gamble’ and remained so.521 Angell predicted that much of the opposition to collective defence would evaporate once it lost its dreaded ‘Geneva flavour’ and was called another name, a prediction that he in fact thought had already been confirmed in light of the support in conservative circles for the ‘Grand Alliance’ which was then in the process of formation.522 It was with a view to promoting collective security under this guise, that Churchill had exploited his role in the New Commonwealth and it was to collective security in the form of a grand alliance, that many former advocates of an IPF were now converting if they had not already.523 Angell also took aim at those pacifists who had misguidedly leant their support to those who would deny the LON the means of enforcing the law: that in seeking the best they had become enemies of the better.524 As William Arnold-Forster had stated in 1935 in a lecture at the Geneva Institute of International Relations, the pacifists had been ‘misled into the anarchic assumptions of militarists and nationalists.’525

520 Norman Angell, ‘How may League Principles be Made Political Realities?’ in Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the Drift Towards War, 144. See also, Norman Angell, ‘Current Criticisms of the Peace Front,’ in Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the Drift Towards War, 203. 521 Angell, ‘Current Criticisms of the Peace Front,’ 204–05. See also Edgar Ansell Mowrer, ‘The Spanish Conflict: Its International Repercussions,’ in Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the Drift Towards War, 54. 522 Angell, ‘How May League Principles Be Made Political Realities?’ 144. 523 Pugh, ‘Policing the World: Lord Davies and the Quest for Order in the 1930s,’ 111. 524 Angell, ‘Current Criticisms of the Peace Front,’ 206–07. 525 Arnold-Forster, ‘The Elements of World Order,’ 36.

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Above all, however, Angell took aim at those who proposed the redressing of grievances as an alternative to a policy of collective security. Angell stated of the revisionist approach the following: This is not realism; it is not equity. Remedy of grievances, ‘revision,’ is not an alternative to the policy of collective security. The latter is the condition sine qua non of being able to carry any just revision into effect; of any hope of change in the status quo except by war, which means change at the dictation of the victor…To argue ‘there can be no security till we get justice’ is to invert the truth, which is that we shall never get justice till we have managed to organize our common defence on a mutual and collective basis.526

Noting that elements in the press and elsewhere had denounced plans for mutual assistance as ‘making trouble with Germany,’ Angell argued that revision should not be considered until states such as France felt secure. This meant that the states demanding revision must renounce violence and conquest and that machinery for ensuring that unruly states can be brought under control must be created. Revision unaccompanied by the creation of machinery for enforcing the law, Angell warned echoing Zimmern, Webster and others, would not conduce to peace, but would only encourage ‘more force, more ferocity, more cynicism and evil’.527 Angell brought into full view the breakdown in the alliance between peaceful change and collective security. This alliance was prone to rupture from the moment when some began to treat peaceful change as a complement of rather than a supplement to the system of collective security. It did not take much of a leap from there to go on to present peaceful change as an alternative to collective defence in response to the threat of change by violent means. Such an approach seemed to be encapsulated by the title of Toynbee’s December 1935 lecture at Chatham House: ‘Peaceful Change or War?’. That the mantra of peaceful change drowned out the calls for collective security for a time is partly explained by the overwhelming priority given to peace by many of the partisans of peaceful change: the question of the means of achieving peace became for many of these partisans a second-order consideration.528 526 Angell,

‘Current Criticisms of the Peace Front,’ 201. 202, 205. 528 Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 18–9. 527 Ibid.,

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It is also important to note that with the policy of collective security effectively in a state of suspension in the wake of the collapse of the sanctions against Italy, it seemed to some that peaceful change was the only alternative to change of a war-like character. None of this, however, is sufficient to explain the willingness of certain advocates of peaceful change to consider the expedient of ‘placing African non-Aryans in Herr Hitler’s care.’529 Not all advocates of peaceful change were seduced by the seemingly harmonious union of the words peaceful and change. In a lecture delivered at the Geneva Institute International Relations also in August 1937, Davis stated that he had always considered peaceful change to be a ‘bad phrase’: it gave an inaccurate impression of the situation it addressed. However and for the very same reason, Davis thought that it was also a ‘brilliant’ phrase: the mesmerising word peaceful kept hidden from view what was the real situation. Davis observed that the expression seemed to imply the unobjectionable idea that the ‘readjustments between States, can and should take place, as a matter of course peaceably and quietly.’ However, as Davis also observed, this apparent implication only served to conceal a less palatable fact: what was really involved in peaceful change was the giving of something of value to a dissatisfied people in a position to threaten or use violence in exchange for something which satisfied people valued: security or safety. Based on this analysis, Davis concluded that the expression ‘Change with Security’ more accurately described the situation that peaceful change sought to address.530 The same analysis lead Davis to reject the popular expression ‘have-not’ states in favour of the expression ‘dissatisfied insurgents’.531 Davis contended that his conceptualisation of the essential elements of peaceful change, which he summed up as power and security, and of the relations between these elements, was borne out by the fact that peaceful change had emerged as a topic of lively and sustained discussion only in the previous two or three years. On the surface, he stated, this fact was curious since the grievances now being discussed under the rubric of peaceful change had been in existence since the end of the

529 Ibid.,

135. ‘Peaceful Change: An Analysis of Some Current Proposals,’ 146. 531 Ibid., 149–51. 530 Davis,

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World War and ‘some of the deeper-lying ones longer still.’ Davis insisted that in order to understand why the debate on peaceful change had only recently arrived, one needed to recall certain of the events that had occurred over the previous few years. He declared that it was his intention to recall those events and that he would do so ‘in a scientific spirit so to state things that they be recognized as true whether one likes it or not, to define facts, disregarding partisan preferences.’532 Davis recalled that when the United States refused to ratify the peace treaties and join the LON, Great Britain and France had been left in a ‘position to control the course of European events and to direct major policy’. He stated that this was a situation that could only last as long as these two powers concurred with each other on ‘main points in practice and in principle’. Davis maintained that the situation in question was upheld down to 1934 or 1935. In these years, ‘indications of a deep divergency in the tendencies of…[British and French]… thought began to multiply’. According to Davis, the culminating points of this deep divergency were firstly, the Franco-Italian ‘tacit understanding in regard to…interests in Africa, especially Ethiopia,’ and secondly, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement that had given rise to so much ‘French resentment.’ All the while these developments were unfolding, he noted, German military and naval strength continued to augment such that Germany was soon able to ‘have her own policy and pursue it.’ Davis pointed out that the augmentation in German military and naval power in conjunction with an accord later reached between Berlin and Rome, had created such an uncertain outlook that London and Paris had ‘drawn closer together again with a view to regaining a measure of the control that had been let slip.’533 Davis affirmed that the debate on peaceful change arose because of the loss of Anglo-French control over events in Europe and the growing perception in light of this loss of control that in order for there to be ‘any security in the sense of freedom from the menace of possible war,’ there must be an effort to ‘open prospects of reasonable satisfaction to the claims of dissatisfied and insurgent nations’ in regard to questions of ‘power, prestige and prosperity.’ He claimed that the ‘clear conclusion’ reached by the 1935 session of the ISC in London was that the problem

532 Ibid., 533 Ibid.,

147. 148–49.

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of collective security ‘could not be satisfactorily solved without provision for the reasonable reconsideration and settlement of situations threatening trouble’: without such provision ‘neither the dissatisfied insurgent nations nor the many neutrals, so-called,’ whose support for the international system was ‘indispensable,’ could be relied upon to fully cooperate should an emergency arise. Davis stated that it was this conclusion that had caused the ISC to decide at its 1935 session to spend the next two years examining what came to be known as ‘Peaceful Change’. Davis’s claim regarding the conclusion reached by the 1935 session of the ISC in respect to the problem of collective security was an over-statement. The view that the problem of collective security cannot be satisfactorily solved without making provision for the satisfaction of the demands of the dissatisfied insurgent nations was a view promoted by a minority of the participants at the conference. Further to this, the conference’s decision to spend the next two years studying peaceful change appears to have been largely influenced by a push in that direction on the part of the conference’s American membership to which certain of the conference’s British members leant their support. In an opening address that he gave in his role as chair of the conference’s study meetings in London in 1935, Allen W. Dulles stated that Americans were apprehensive that when Europeans called upon the help of the United States, that help was being sought in order to preserve a status quo favoured by certain powers rather than to maintain peace. Given that Davis referred in his lecture in Geneva to the post-war tendency on the part of Americans to turn away from Europe, it is very likely that Davis had this same American apprehensiveness in mind in urging in his lecture that Europe should adopt a policy of peaceful change and in stating in connection with this that the support of the many neutrals for the international system was indispensable.534

534 Ibid.,

149–50. Emphasis added.

CHAPTER 3

Conferences at Prague and Bergen and the Looming War

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Reform of the International Studies Conference One of the criticisms of the ISC in its early years was that it spent a considerable amount of time doing not very much at all. Somewhat by contrast, in the wake of its tenth annual session, the ISC was criticised for attempting to do far too much in too little amount of time.1 The view that the conference was seeking to cover too vast a field of inquiry and that as a consequence of this it was failing to adequately address the subjects of its inquiry was touched on by Murray in his closing address at the ISC’s 1937 session.2 Similar views were privately expressed by John Foster Dulles and some of the other American participants in that session in letters written to Walker, who, as we have seen, was the acting director of the Social Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation. Walker had attended the conference in Paris as an observer on behalf of the foundation. Some months after it had concluded, she began to canvas views concerning the quality of the work undertaken by the conference and how, if it were thought necessary, the conference might be reformed. It is doubtless testimony to the seriousness with which the work of the conference 1 Chalmers

Wright to Leo Gross, 24 September 1936, AG IICI-K-II-6, UA. Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 609. 2 International

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on peaceful change was regarded by the foundation, that Walker had also attended the preparatory symposium on peaceful change which was held at the GRC in May 1937: the ‘Conference of Solutions.’3 In a letter sent from his law firm in Wall Street in November 1937, John Foster Dulles informed Walker that he felt the ‘voluminous’ materials submitted to the conference in Paris fell short of attaining the ideal of research work of a ‘high order’ and complained that the topic selected for the conference ‘was so broadly developed and interpreted that it was impossible to have any adequate discussion’ within the timeframe set for the conference. The actual conference arrangements, he observed, were not ‘conducive to an intimate and useful exchange of ideas.’ Presumably with the question of revision of the status quo in mind, he further observed that participants tended to adopt the perspective of their national governments and avoid discussion along ‘lines which might suggest the desirability of a change in their government’s policies.’ Dulles concluded his critique of the conference in stating that although he thought the general conception of the ISC was an excellent one and although he did not want to see the conference abandoned, he doubted whether the results that it produced warranted the money that was required to maintain it. Dulles thought that further funding should only be directed at the ISC if its ‘defects and limitations’ were overcome.4 In this context, it worth drawing attention to a letter sent in the following year to Bonnet by William O. Scroggs, the latter being the secretary of the American Coordinating Committee for International Studies. This committee, which first met on May 4, 1936 and which was financially supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, was established on the proposal of the CFR in light of the decision of the CFR to resign from direct membership of the ISC. Despite its resignation from the conference, CFR maintained an association with the ISC as it was represented on American Coordinating Committee as was, it should be noted, the Foreign Policy Association and the American Council of the IPR. It is also noteworthy that the secretariat of the American Coordinating Committee was located at the headquarters of the CFR: The Council House, 45 East 65th Street, New York City. In the aforementioned 3 Persons Participating in the Conference on Solutions, May 21 and 22, 1937, AG-IICIK-I-16.a, UA. 4 John Foster Dulles to Dr. Sydnor H. Walker, 17 November 1937, Fondation Rockefeller, à partir du 1er septembre 1937, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA.

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letter, Scroggs informed Bonnet that neither Dulles nor Shotwell were ‘disposed’ to collaborate with the IIIC in the production of the ‘cooperative volume’ which had been proposed by Bonnet and which was supposed to address the following subject: the ‘political and psychological factors which condition procedures’ of peaceful change. It should be recalled here that Shotwell had chaired the discussion of peaceful change at the 1936 session of the ISC in Madrid. He was also a member of the American delegation to its 1937 session in Paris. By way of explaining the attitude of Dulles and Shotwell in regard to the proposed volume, Scroggs stated the following: ‘It was the general consensus of the [American] group that a collection of brief and miscellaneous papers on so broad and important a subject would not be a fruitful undertaking and would not provide a basis for adequate treatment. As Secretary of the Committee I was instructed to report this decision to you.’5 Another American who participated in the Paris conference was Charles K. Leith, a professor geology at the University of Wisconsin. He informed Walker that in his view the conference placed too much emphasis on protocol and was ‘heavily institutionalized’. Observing that the foregrounding of so many ‘big names’ in the conference’s publicity material was ‘apt to bring a smile,’ Leith told Walker that

5 Wm. O. Scroggs to Bonnet, 20 April 1938, Peaceful change: Groupes internationaux d’études (Procédures), jusqu’au 1er mai 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.q, UA. William O. Scroggs also stated in his letter to Bonnet the following: ‘While you may not regard this as good news, I am happy to inform you that our Committee is undertaking to cooperate whole-heartedly in other features of the program for the next study meeting of the Conference. For some time our work has been retarded because of delay in completing certain plans for the revision of the Committee’s working methods. A satisfactory plan has at last been worked out and adopted, and the Rockefeller Foundation has just placed new funds at the disposal of the Committee to finance the work during 1938 and 1939. We are now ready, therefore, to move forward at full speed.’ See also Leo Gross to Maurice Bourquin, 3 May 1938, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.q, UA, and Scroggs to Bonnet, 13 May 1936, and attached memorandum on the Plan for the Organization of an American Coordinating Committee to Replace the Council on Foreign Relations as the American Member of the International Studies Conference, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, 1er novembre-1935–18 novembre 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.u, UA. For Shotwell’s role at Madrid and his presence at Paris, see respectively, Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 24, and International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 630.

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his preference would be for a smaller and more informal gathering. In concluding his response, he stated that he ‘saw no need for an international secretariat.’6 Vera Micheles Dean was a prominent figure in the Foreign Policy Association and, according to a memorandum sent to Walker, was editor of its periodical Foreign Policy Bulletin. Dean, who was also involved with the GRC, complained to Walker that at the conference she had had to endure too many formal speeches of an ‘intellectually sterile’ nature. She stated that because of the extent of the speechifying, there was insufficient time to discuss ‘living issues of international relations.’ One of Dean’s recommendations was that in the future such conferences should be held, ‘not in world capitals like London or Paris where there are too many distractions, but in some quiet spot’ which would permit more informal discussion. In this regard she pointed to the success of the Williamstown Institute in Massachusetts and the recent Yosemite conference of the IPR. Walker would have been well aware of the success of the Yosemite conference as she had attended it as a member of the American delegation. Indeed, while at Yosemite, she had served as of one of three rapporteurs for the following round table topic: The Changing Balance of Political Forces in the Pacific and the Possibilities of Peaceful Adjustment. Like the other American respondents, Dean criticised the role of the IIIC in relation to the conference, stating that the Paris institute was so swamped by other activities that it could not effectively serve as the conference’s secretariat. She told Walker that she thought that this accounted for the conference’s ‘slovenly’ character. Dean stated that in the future, conference preparations should be entrusted to a small international committee with a permanent executive secretary, ‘preferably an American’.7 Letters asking for opinions on the future direction of the ISC and its relation to the IIIC had been sent to figures residing on the other side of the Atlantic by the Rockefeller Foundation’s assistant director of social sciences, namely, Kittredge. Among the respondents to these 6 C. K. Leith to Dr. Sydnor H. Walker, 2 October 1937, and memorandum of Vera Micheles Dean sent to Dr. Sydnor H. Walker, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. 7 Copy of Memorandum sent by Vera Micheles Dean, Editor of Foreign Policy Association, answering certain questions raised in Miss Walker’s letter to Mr. Allsberg regarding the ISC, 2 October 1937, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. See also ‘Appendix 1: Conference Membership and Committees,’ in Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 439, 441.

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inquiries were Bonnet; Célestin Bouglé, a professor in the field of history and social economy at the Sorbonne and director since 1935 of the École normale supérieure; Condliffe; Dennery; Lange; Mantoux; Count Pál Teleki, a former prime minister of Hungary, chair of the Hungarian Coordinating Committee for International Studies and professor at the University of Budapest: Toynbee; and Webster. Another respondent was Eric Voegelin, a professor at the University of Vienna and secretary of the Austrian Coordinating Committee for International Studies. In contrast to the American responses to Walker’s questions, the responses emanating from Britain and Europe, while agreeing on the point that the ISC needed reform, were ‘emphatically affirmative’ as to its utility.8 For the benefit of the foundation in New York, Kittredge prepared a preliminary analysis of the replies to his letters concerning the progress of the ISC sent from Britain and Europe. In that analysis, Kittredge highlighted the fact that younger scholars such as Dennery and Voegelin, both of whom had participated in the 1937 ISC, had stressed the ‘specific advantages’ of the conference: it had seen the production of ‘new documentation on significant international problems’ and had provided ‘opportunities...for work and free discussion of essential issues.’ Kittredge pointed out in his analysis that although Toynbee had not attended the 1937 conference, he had been closely associated with the ISC since 1927. What Kittredge meant by this was that Toynbee had collaborated in that year with Zimmern, then the deputy director of the IIIC, in making arrangements for the ISC’s foundational meeting in Berlin in 1928. Kittredge stated that Toynbee was ‘more than ever convinced’ of the value of the conference in light of the deteriorating international situation. Kittredge recorded that Toynbee had observed that the ‘outlook would be very black indeed’ if scholars were ‘unable to talk across frontiers’ and had stressed that the ISC remained ‘one of the few unbroken bridges which still permits reasonable and amicable discussions of burning problems between scholars of different countries’. Indeed, Toynbee had stressed, Kittredge noted in concluding his

8 Tracey B. Kittredge, Preliminary analysis of replies to letters concerning the progress of the International Studies Conference, Paris, September 26, 1937, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. For the occupations of Célestin Bouglé, Tracey B. Kittredge, Pál Teleki, and Eric Voegelin see ‘List of Participants,’ in International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change, 622, 626, 630–31.

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analysis, that the ISC remained ‘one of the excepted processes of international discussion and collaboration which still survives’.9 In response to Kittredge’s question regarding the relation between the ISC and the IIIC, the respondents from Britain and Europe were ‘equally unanimous’ that it was the ‘logical body’ to serve as the permanent secretariat of the ISC if the ISC were to continue in its present form.10 This point was not quite accurate. In a letter on the subject of the conference sent to Kittredge, a letter which was by far the most elaborate in terms of its recommendations for reform of the ISC, Condliffe, after having noted that he had seen ‘something of its origins in 1930’ and had, ‘as a member of the League Secretariat been aware of some its political repercussions,’ stated that if he were considering ‘a new venture’ he would insist on the view which he had first put forward in 1930. The view that Condliffe had expressed in 1930 when he was called upon by what was then known as the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations to make recommendations as to how the conference might go about transforming itself into a study conference on the model of the IPR, was that it would be ‘preferable to create an ad hoc organisation.’ By ad hoc organisation, Condliffe meant an organisation that was independent of any other organisation.11 Condliffe stated that he accepted that severing the ISC’s link with the IIIC, which, he noted, had ‘brought the conference to its present development,’ had established a secretariat for it and had ‘generously stressed its autonomy,’ would be at this stage impractical and ‘unwise,’ although he also stated that consideration might be given to its severing at a future date.12 At the same time, Condliffe expressed the view that it would be necessary to make ‘somewhat radical changes’ in the organisation of the conference’s secretariat in order to place added emphasis on the conference’s autonomy and in order to divorce the ISC ‘from the political atmosphere and League precedents necessarily followed’ by the IIIC.13 In this regard, Condliffe made the following recommendations:

9 Ibid. 10 Condliffe 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.

to Kittredge, 18 September 1937, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA.

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I would place the whole responsibility for preparing the conference in the hands of the Rapporteur-Général and his staff and leave them to work directly with research institutions and individuals. I would place the staff in the I.I.C. [IIIC] and insist that all the conference preparation go through the Rapporteur-Général to the Executive Committee….The RapporteurGénéral would…need a senior assistant of good linguistic qualifications, high educational attainments and a capacity to negotiate with research workers and groups. This assistant would need to travel a good deal and arrange for the execution of the research preparation. In addition, since the subject of the next conference is mainly economic, there should be an economic technician. The Rapporteur-Général could also take general direction of any study groups that are continued. He would obviously need a Secretary and I would strongly urge the official up till now a member of the I.I.C. staff, responsible for actual conference preparation, be placed under the Rapporteur-Général also.14

Condliffe, who had recently left the Financial Section in order to take up the position of professor of commerce at the University of London, had attended the conference Paris in 1937 as an observer on behalf of the LON Secretariat. At the request of the ISC’s International Study Group on Markets and Raw Materials, he had prepared a memorandum for the conference, his memorandum being among a number of memoranda requested from ‘international experts during the preparatory period to supplement on special points the work done by Institutions participating in the Conference.’15 During its session in Paris in 1937, the ISC had appointed an editorial board ‘to approve a plan of publication of the results of the Conference on peaceful change’.16 The members of this board were Davis, Bourquin and Dennery and in their capacity as members they had decided that because of the topicality of the subject of peaceful change, the board would ‘publish as full a record of the discussions [in Paris] as soon as possible’ and that it would ‘publish at once four of the monographs prepared by individual experts’.17 Appearing in English under the heading of Markets and the 14 Ibid. 15 J. B. Condliffe, Markets and the Problem of Peaceful Change (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938), 3–4. 16 International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 12. 17 Ibid., 12–13.

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Problem of Peaceful Change and in French under the heading of La commerce internationale et la paix, Condliffe’s memorandum was the first in the series of four expert studies to be published.18 The prospect of its publication, however, did not enthuse Condliffe who wrote to Gross in December 1937 in order to tell him the following: I am not happy about the printing of my memoranda which does not really warrant the expenditure, particularly of a double publication in two languages. I should have withheld my consent to its publication if I had not thought it was part of a series. The French title…is I think accurate. If there were a way of not publishing this memoranda at this late date, I should be glad to find it; but if the publication must go on, I am glad to accept the French title.19

Condliffe’s second thoughts in regard to the publication of his memorandum, which was issued by the IIIC in the name of the ISC, perhaps reflected the fact that the quality of the debates at the conference in Paris had not impressed him at all.20 In fact, Condliffe told Kittredge that because he had been so little impressed by the quality of the debates in Paris he had chosen not to participate in them. Echoing the American critics of the conference, Condliffe told Kittredge that recent conferences were less noted for ‘discussion of the results of research’ than for their ‘political aspects’ and that he had the feeling at Paris that members of the conference had been ‘unable to think of themselves as individuals and scientists, but were exercising unwarranted diplomacy as members of national groups.’21 Condliffe also told Kittredge that if the conference were to have ‘any future use,’ it must make a determined effort to eliminate the political aspects and discuss ‘basic problems in a scientific spirit’ and he urged to this end that the conference should in future rigorously exclude not only politicians and administrators, but all ‘those academic and lay people who act as if they felt themselves to be diplomats’.22 Condliffe expressed the view that the tendency of the conference ‘to take itself far too seriously as it were a plenipotentiary body, instead of 18 Condliffe,

Markets and the Problem of Peaceful Change, 3. to Gross, 10 December 1937, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Comité exécutif, à partir de 1er septembre, 1937 à décembre 1946, AG-IICI-K-I-2, UA, and Condliffe, Markets and the Problem of Peaceful Change, 3. 20 Condliffe, Markets and the Problem of Peaceful Change, 3. 21 Condliffe to Kittredge, 18 September 1937, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. 22 Ibid. 19 Condliffe

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an interim meeting to take stock and plan further study,’ was aggravated by the approach it had adopted: that of selecting a single topic, preparing it over two years and then, following discussion of it, dropping it for another subject. For ‘obvious reasons’ Condliffe told Kittredge, he considered that the ISC should model itself far more closely on the IPR: it should undertake research over the long-term on a range of topics and discuss the most urgent of these as suggested by the research at a biennial conference. Indeed, Condliffe stated that ‘[a]t this stage, in Europe more than is necessary in the IPR,’ the role of research should be exaggerated: in Europe at that stage it was especially imperative to ‘build up the conception of a meeting of individuals free from any responsibility save that of scientific standards.’23 With its future financial viability possibly in doubt, the criticisms of the ISC submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation had to be taken seriously. It was with these criticisms in view, that on November 5 and 6, 1937, an international programme committee established by the ISC at its session in Paris, met at the Palais Royal. Among those attending the meeting were Davis and Condliffe, representatives of the national coordinating committees of Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland and representatives of the IIIC: Bonnet, Gross and Vranek. Two observers were present: Whitton, who observed on behalf of the American Coordinating Committe and Brinkmann who observed, on the nomination of Berber, on behalf of the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research.24 As already noted, Brinkmann, had been a member of the German delegation at the Sixth International Studies Conference which took place in London from May 29 to June 2, this being the only other occasion on which he had assisted at a meeting associated with the ISC. At that conference, Brinkmann’s contention that the concepts of democracy

23 Ibid. 24 ‘La XIth session de la Conférence permanente des hautes études Internationales aura pour subjet “Les Politiques Économique et la Paix”,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 85–86 (1938): 1–15, 1–2, and League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1939), 24. For Vranek’s past and current occupations see Appendix D: Eighth International Studies Conference, Department of International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1934–1935, Reports on Activities of the British Co-ordinating Committee for International Studies, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 633.

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and liberalism should be ‘disassociated’ drew the ire of Bouglé, who, it should be noted, would play a key role in assisting scholars fleeing the new Germany.25 The meeting in Paris established what Condliffe called a ‘minimum programme’ of research: it requested that the national groups undertake a ‘careful analysis’ of the commercial policies of their respective states through separating out the domestic economic, social and political factors and external pressures which drove such policies and which determined their mode of operation.26 A further meeting of the programme committee was held on January 14, 1938, in Paris, a meeting that was augmented by the presence of Kittredge and observers on behalf of the national committees of Austria, Bulgaria, Belgium, Romania, Poland and Yugoslavia. On this occasion, there was no Italian representation, however, Germany was represented in the form of Berber who would also attend on January 15 a meeting of the ISC’s executive committee of which Davis was the chair.27 The executive committee meeting heard that the Rockefeller Foundation had decided to extend the funding of the ISC and that it had voted to the IIIC the generous sum of 100,000 dollars for the years 1938–1939. This sum was intended to cover the costs of the conference’s secretariat, to fund the work of the various national groups and to ensure that the study conference’s next general rapporteur was able to carry out the reforms to the conference that Condliffe and others had recommended.28 25 International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, ed., League of Nations, Sixth International Studies Conference: A Record of a Second Study Conference of the State and Economic Life, Held in London, May 29 to June 2, 1933, 193. 26 League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938, 24, and International Studies Conference: Report by the General Rapporteur Professor J. B. Condliffe on the Meetings on Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace at the Eleventh Session of the Conference, Prague, May 23–27, 1938, XIth Session, Prague, 1938, Report by Professor Condliffe on the meetings, AG IICI-K-XI-22. 27 Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 85–86 (1938), 5, and Société des Nations, ‘Au comité exécutif de la Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 85–86 (1938): 16–23, 16. 28 League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938, 23, and International Studies Conference: Report on the 10th Meeting of the Executive Committee held in Paris, Saturday, January 15, 1938, AG 1-IICI-K-XI-10, UA. See also Bonnet to Kittredge, January 17, 1938, AG 1-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. The total sum of $100,000 granted to the ISC by the Rockefeller Foundation for the years 1938 and

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The executive committee meeting was told that in making the grant, the trustees of the foundation had stressed their ‘interest in the action’ which the conference was ‘exercising in the sphere of international relations’ and had ‘testified to the importance’ they attached ‘to the examination of current problems, and to finding the elements for their solution which would make it possible to improve present relations between nations and gradually dispel the difficulties that constitute a menace to peace.’29 The trustees had stated that they recognised that the carrying out of a programme of research on an international scale faced ‘formidable’ obstacles given current circumstances, however, they had also stated that they considered that ‘progress in this direction is essential for the improvement of international relations.’ Importantly in terms of the conference’s future, the trustees had expressed the hope that that the ISC would make every effort to render the conference ‘more efficient’ and to assure ‘substantial results.’30 Zimmern had attended the executive committee meeting. Following the meeting, he remarked that the generous subvention of the Rockefeller Foundation was a ‘new mark of confidence in the work of the Conference’. At the same time, he also acknowledged the fact that a ‘heavy responsibility’ had been imposed on it. It was no doubt in order to reassure the foundation that its stated wishes in respect to improved efficiency and the production of substantial results would be realised, that Condliffe was appointed as the conference’s new general rapporteur.31 The heading under which members of the conference would conduct their studies during its next study cycle as decided on in Paris in 1937 1939 was made up of two grants of $50,000 per annum. In addition, a grant of $25,000 was awarded to the ISC by the foundation in order to fund the work of a group of experts on Danubian problems. 29 League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938, 23–24. 30 International Studies Conference: Report on the 10th Meeting of the Executive Committee held in Paris, Saturday, January 15, 1938, AG 1-IICI-K-XI-10, UA. 31 Rapport sur la XIème Réunion Administrative de la Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales tenue à Prague le 26 Mai, 1938 par le rapporteur Sir Alfred Zimmern, AG 1-IICI-K-XI-21, UA. For Condliffe’s appointment, see Bonnet’s letter of 27 November 1937, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Les politiques économiques et la paix, dossier général, du 1er juilliet 1937 au 1er juin 1938, AG 1-IICI-KI-22.a. Condliffe’s appointment was confirmed at the meeting of the ISC’s executive committee on January 15. International Studies Conference, 11th Session, Prague, May 23–27, 1938: Agenda of the Administrative Meeting, AG 1-IICI-K-XI-15.a, UA.

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was ‘Economic Policies and Peace—Reciprocity, Regionalism and SelfSufficiency in Trade Policies Today,’ although this was later shortened to ‘Economic Policies and in Relation to World Peace.’32 Plans for the inquiry into economic policies in relation to world peace were made with a view to ensuring that the work produced on the subject by conference members was as focussed as possible: to ensuring that inquiry into economic policies in relation to world peace was nothing like the sprawling and amorphous inquiry into of peaceful change. As Condliffe later explained, his plan was for a ‘limited and more precise attempt to study the problem of Peaceful Change in a particular sphere,’ namely, the sphere of commercial policy.33 However, it was not just the vastness of the study undertaken in the period dating from the latter part of 1935 to mid-1937 that concerned Condliffe: he also believed that the study of peaceful change in those years had been a largely futile exercise given the political and economic conditions in which that study was undertaken. In the memorandum he submitted to the 1937 ISC, namely, Markets and the Problem of Peaceful Change, Condliffe observed that the post-war political and economic settlement had ‘conspicuously broken down’. Further, he advised that it was exceedingly unlikely that there would be a ‘satisfactory settlement’ of disputes in regard to territorial ‘boundaries, colonial possessions, markets and any other aspect of international relations’ in the near future.34 Condliffe was of the view that the settlement of disputes in regard to such matters as territorial boundaries and access to markets ‘may be undesirable at the present time’ and that any changes in this regard were dependent on an improvement in international political conditions. In any case, Condliffe was doubtful that ad hoc remedies could do anything to reduce the current level of international tension. Further to this, he suggested that the demands for territorial change issued by certain actors were not based on any real need. In his view, such demands were not economically motivated: they either sprang from a desire for ‘prestige, national honour, racial or national unity’ or had their basis in strategic calculations. For Condliffe, the only respectable form of peaceful change 32 League

of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939, 17. Studies Conference: Report by the General Rapporteur Professor J. B. Condliffe on the Meetings on Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace, AG 1-IICI-K-XI-22. 34 Condliffe, Markets and the Problem of Peaceful Change, 5. 33 International

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was that which responded to ‘urgent needs,’ and in this regard he urged the ‘devising of procedures whereby the legitimate aspirations of dissatisfied peoples in a rapidly changing world may in the future be justly and reasonably met.’35

The Liquidation of the Austrian Committee The eleventh session of the ISC took place in Prague between May 23 and May 27 and, in that context, the conference welcomed the participation of two new members: the Chilean Institute for International Studies and the Mexican Committee for the Scientific Study of International Relations. Adding to the conference’s more authentically international flavour was the fact that observing at the conference were two delegates from Brazil and three from Japan. Kittredge and Brinkmann also observed, the former on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation and the latter on behalf of Berber’s Berlin outfit. Berber himself was unable to attend. For the first time, no savants from Austria participated in a session of the ISC.36 As was noted in Zimmern’s report of the ISC’s administrative meeting in Prague, in light of ‘recent events,’ the Austrian Coordinating Committee had decided to resign its membership of the conference.37 This was not news to some of those present at Prague. Kittredge had been acquainted with Voegelin for some years due to the latter’s receipt 35 Ibid.,

5–7. Emphasis added. Studies Conference: XIth Session, Prague, 1938: List of Participants, AG 1-IICI-K-XI-19, UA. See also ‘La Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales a tenu sa onzième session à Prague,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 89–90 (1938): 199–235, 235. In 1938, a plan was being entertained for the preparation of a new edition of the Répertoire international des centres de documentation politique which had been published by the IIIC on behalf of the ISC in 1931. According to Leo Gross, a revised edition was needed because the ISC wanted to ‘profit in particular from the considerable extension in the number of members of the Conference…since 1931,’ and ‘in order to extend the geographical range of…[the original]…list.’ See the circular sent by Leo Gross, 8 June 1938, concerning the ‘Revised Edition of “Centres of Reference for International Affairs”’. Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, publications (préparation): Répetoire international des centres de documentation politique, nouvelle édition. 1938–1939, AG 1-IICI-K-II-2.c, UA 37 Rapport sur la XIème réunion administratif de la Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales tenue à Prague, le 26 mai 1938, par le Rapporteur Sir Alfred Zimmern, AG 1-IICI-K-XI-21, UA. 36 International

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in the 1920s of a Laura Spellman Rockefeller Fellowship which had allowed him to spend two years studying in the United States and one year studying in Paris.38 On a visit to Vienna ten days before the Prague conference commenced, Kittredge met with Voegelin. The latter immediately informed the former of the ‘intention to liquidate’ the Austrian Coordinating Committee for International Studies which in 1937 had replaced the Konsularakademie as the direct Austrian member of the conference. In his capacity as secretary of the committee, Voegelin had commenced the process of liquidation in April.39 It was because of the liquidation of the Austrian committee that another of its members, namely, Verdross, had found himself in the position, as Gross wrote to Bourquin on May 3, 1938, of being ‘obliged to retract his acceptance of some weeks ago’ of an invitation to collaborate in the proposed volume on the subject of political and psychological factors that condition procedures of peaceful change. As Gross observed in the letter he sent to Bourquin on May 3 after having noted that Berber had expressed a desire to speak to Bonnet about the proposed volume on the occasion of the Prague conference, ‘the decision [in respect to both German and Austrian collaboration] is in the hands of the Berlin Committee.’40 Voegelin’s position in Austria was now precarious as Kittredge was well aware. In his writings, Voegelin had identified National Socialism as a ‘satanic force for evil’ and had sought to expose its ‘mendacity and apocalyptic fantasies,’ such that, as Barry Cooper observes, even the ‘most dull-witted employee of the Gestapo [had] to realize the author was not on side.’41 In order to ascertain his prospects of academic advancement, Voegelin had addressed himself to Oswald Menghin, the minister of education. As he told Kittredge, the response of Menghin was to ‘strongly advise’ Voegelin to seek a position in the United States, advice confirmed in a letter which was interpreted as ‘formal permission

38 Barry Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 11. 39 Tracey B. Kittredge to Henri Bonnet, 7 July 1938, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b. See also Eric Voegelin to Henri Bonnet, 24 June 1938, in Jürgen Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, translations from the German by William Petropulus (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 170–71. See also League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The International Studies Conference: Origins Functions, Organisation, 41. 40 Gross to Bourquin, May 3, 1938, AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.q, UA. 41 Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, 9–10.

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to enter into negotiations in order that …[his]…correspondence on this subject might not be misunderstood by the authorities.’42 Voegelin informed Kittredge of these developments in a letter dated April 5, 1938, in the hope that Kittredge could assist him in his quest for academic employment in the United States or elsewhere. Letters requesting such assistance were sent to many other figures and institutions, for example, to Davis at the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and Whitton at the GRC.43 In some of his letters outlining his curriculum vitae, Voegelin highlighted his role as secretary of the Austrian Coordinating Committee for International Studies and his organisation in Paris in 1937 at the Tenth International Studies Conference of a ‘special study group on the Austrian problem.’44 It was against the background of Voegelin’s bleak academic prospects in Austria, that Kittredge discussed with Voegelin the latter’s plans to come to France in August from where Voegelin hoped travel to the United States.45 At a meeting on May 14, Kittredge, who held Voegelin in high esteem and wanted to improve the latter’s chances of finding employment in the United States, offered on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation ‘to pay one-half of the salary, for three years, of any appointment offered to…[him]…by an American university.’46 42 Eric Voegelin to Tracey B. Kittredge, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 145–46. 43 Ibid. A portion of the letter that Eric Voegelin sent to John B. Whitton is reproduced in Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, 12n. See also Eric Voegelin to Malcolm W. Davis, 5 April 1938, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 143–44. 44 Eric Voegelin to Frederick A. Ogg, Head of the Political Science Department, University of Wisconsin, 28 May 1938, in Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, 13. For mention of Voegelin’s work in connection with the ISC, see Eric Voegelin to Gottfried Harberler, 10 May 1938 and attached curriculum vitae, and Voegelin to Head of the Political Science Department, University of Wisconsin, May 24, 1938, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 155–61, 162–65. Among the memoranda submitted to the ISC for the benefit of its 1937 session by the Austrian Coordinating Committee for International Studies were three memoranda produced by a ‘study group on ideological questions.’ International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 634. 45 Kittredge to Bonnet, 7 July 1938, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. 46 Voegelin to Ogg, 28 May 1938, in Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, 14. The date on which Kittredge met with Voegelin is indicated by Voegelin in a letter he sent to Gottfried Harbeler which is dated May 15, 1938. See Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 161–62

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On May 17, an edict issued by the Austrian ministry of education provided further confirmation of Voegelin’s outsider status: he was removed from his post at the University of Vienna as of the first day of June 1938, his salary being discontinued on the same date.47 As evidenced by a letter Kittredge sent to Bonnet on July 7, the latter had been aware of Voegelin’s situation for some time and of his plans to leave Austria.48 However, what Bonnet had only more recently discovered was that in a letter dated June 1 which was delivered to by a messenger on June 3, Voegelin had been informed of his dismissal from the office of secretary of the Austrian Coordinating Committee. This letter was signed, so Voegelin told Bonnet in a letter dated June 24, by the committee’s vice-chairman, namely, Bruno Dietrich, rector of the Academy for World Commerce (Hochschule für Welthandel). Further to this, Voegelin told Bonnet, ‘the archives and the folders containing [the committee’s] current correspondence’ had been ‘taken from…[him]… by employees of Professor Dietrich.’ According to Voegelin, the pretext for his dismissal from the position of secretary, which, according to Dietrich’s letter had the agreement of the committee’s chair, was that he no longer held a position at the University of Vienna.49 Anxious to get to the United States, Voegelin wrote to Gross at the IIIC asking him to inquire at the American consulate in Paris about the possibility of obtaining in Paris an American visa and to help procure for him and his wife a French visa for the months of August and September. Voegelin explained to Gross that applying for a visa in Vienna would involve considerable delays. He told Gross that the American consulate in Vienna was a ‘mad-house, swarming with thousands of Jews who want to get Visa[s]’.50 47 On the edict issued by the Austrian Ministry of Education, see Voegelin to Austrian Ministry of Eduction, 3 June 1938, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 167. 48 Kittredge to Bonnet, 7 July 1938, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. AG IICI-K-I-4. 49 Eric Voegelin to Henri Bonnet, 24 June 1938, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 170–71. Voegelin further stated in his letter to Henri Bonnet the following: ‘Professor Dopsch [the chairman of the committee] did not know anything about this letter [of dismissal], but was happy to remember that he had given order to dismiss me a few yours later’ (ibid., 171). 50 Eric Voegelin to Leo Gross, n.d., 1938, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 171–73. See also Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, 17. Barry Cooper notes that Voegelin’s letter to Gross was written in early July.

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Gross’s response to Voegelin was that in the absence of a visa for the United States, a transit visa for France could not be obtained.51 Exactly a week after Kittredge’s letter to Bonnet, Voegelin, having found himself the subject of investigations by the Gestapo who were attempting to seize his passport, fled to Switzerland where he was joined by his wife a week later.52 Initially Voegelin had difficulties obtaining a visa for the United States because being ‘neither a Communist, a Catholic, nor a Jew,...[he]... had no apparent reason to be fleeing Austria unless he was a criminal.’53 It was only after he received a letter at some point in August from the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Government, that is, from Arthur N. Holcombe, confirming that he would serve as an instructor and tutor at Harvard for one year dating from September 1, 1938, that the American consulate resolved to give Voegelin and his wife a non-quota visa.54 A change in French regulations saw Voegelin and his wife receive permission to come to Paris for one night. Safely aboard the SS Washington, the Voegelins sailed from Le Havre for the United States on September 8.55 There was at least one other service that Kittredge performed in order to assist Voegelin’s passage. In his letter to Bonnet of July 7, Kittredge noted that when Voegelin had been appointed secretary of the Austrian Coordinating Committee, it was on the clear understanding that he would serve in that position until the ISC’s next study conference which was scheduled for 1939. Kittredge noted that accepting this position had involved ‘considerable financial sacrifice’ on the part of Voegelin: he had been ‘obliged to give up better-paid work’ in exchange for a ‘modest’ stipend of two hundred Austrian schillings per month. Pointing out that Voegelin had been paid for the period between October 1 and March 30, Kittredge stated that it seemed ‘appropriate in cases of this kind to allow approximately six months’ indemnity to personnel like 51 Cooper,

Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, 18. 16. See also Eric Voegelin to W. Y. Elliot, n.d., August 1938, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 181–82. 53 Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, 18. 54 Eric Voegelin to Arthur N. Holcombe, n.d., August 1938, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 179. 55 Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, 18. See also Voegelin to Gottfried Bermann-Fischer, August 22, 1938, and Voegelin to Elliot, n.d., August 1938, in Gebhardt, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 29, Selected Correspondence 1924–1949, 180, 182. 52 Ibid.,

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Dr. Voegelin who are brusquely removed from their positions without any fault on their part.’ Kittredge also suggested to Bonnet that as this was a ‘special case,’ the IIIC might arrange to pay him the dollar equivalent of the six months’ salary.56 Consequently, based on advice from Voegelin concerning the exchange rate, Gross drew a cheque for the sum of three hundred and twenty dollars to be placed at the disposal of Voegelin upon his arrival in Paris.57 Further to this, Kittredge told Bonnet that he considered it only legitimate that this amount should be charged against the funds allocated that year to the Austrian Coordinating Committee then in liquidation, informing Bonnet that he had sent a letter to Dietrich requesting that ‘such part of the allocation to the Austrian Committee as had not been expended before the 11th March’ should be returned to the secretariat of the ISC in Paris.58 Dietrich’s response to this request came in the form of a letter sent to Kittredge in which he stated that because of exchange regulations such a transfer from Vienna would be impossible. Thus, it was decided that the remaining amount would be turned over to the ‘appropriate section of the Reichsbank, with a request that it be made available for release to the Rockefeller Foundation, in conformity with the arrangements the Foundation has with the Reichsbank.’ Kittredge advised Bonnet that it might be necessary for the foundation to ‘take over these Marks and use them for its own payments in Germany,’ adding that the foundation’s European office would arrange to credit to the IIIC an equivalent amount in order to assist in its work as the secretariat of the ISC.59

The University Teaching of International Relations The Prague conference, as with previous ISC sessions, profited from the attentions of state officials. At its inaugural meeting which was held at Charles University, the conference was opened by the minister for social welfare, Jaromir Nečas, who stood in for Prime Minister Milan Hodža as the latter had to deal with a ‘pressing’ matter: the partial mobilisation 56 Kittredge

to Bonnet, 7 July 1938, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. Gross to Tracey B. Kittredge, 25 July 1938, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. 58 Kittredge to Bonnet, 7 July 1938, and Kittredge to Bonnet, 18 July 1938, AG-IICIK-I-4.b, UA. 59 Kittredge to Bonnet, July 18, 1938, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. 57 Leo

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in response to reports that Germany was concentrating military forces along its border with Czechoslovakia. An evening reception was held for conference participants by the foreign minister Kamil Kroft, who also closed the conference. Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovakian president and the former head of the Czechoslovakian delegation to the LON, held a reception in honour of the president of the conference, Antonin Bohac, vice-president of the Czechoslovakian State Office of Statistics, and the conference’s two general rapporteurs and two secretary-rapporteurs. Despite this element of ceremony, relative to the conference of the previous year, the 1938 session of the ISC, which was mostly conducted at the SIA Building, was a low-key affair, both in terms of its organisation and in terms of the nature of the discussions to which it gave rise.60 That it was a low-key affairs was only to be expected: the Prague conference was not associated with a grand exposition and nor was the subject matter under discussion as politically charged as was the subject matter of the 1937 conference. Indeed, aside from the preparatory meetings on the topic of economic policies in relation to world peace, most of the meetings at the conference were devoted to the discussion of the university teaching of international relations.61 Zimmern was the general rapporteur of the meetings on university teaching of international relations. In the preface to the conference’s proceedings on this subject, he reflected on the maturation of international studies, observing that a conference on the teaching of international relations could not have been held before 1914. He stated that this was because there had been, ‘at least in the Old World, no teaching of the subject as such, and very little conscious study.’ Certainly, he added, it would have been impossible before then to hold a gathering

60 Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946 (Paris: Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1946), 285, and Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 89–90 (1938): 199–235, 199-200, 219, See also XIth Session, Prague, 1938, Note on the Organisation of the Conference, AG IICI- K-XI-16 UA. On the partial mobilisation see Igor Lukes, ‘The Czechoslovak Partial Mobilization in May 1938: A Mystery (Almost) Solved,’ Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 4 (1996): 699–701. 61 Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 1925–1946, 283.

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on the subject one tenth of the size of the Prague conference, which, he insisted, was the most representative of its kind yet.62 A further sign of the development and maturation of international studies came in the form of three volumes that were presented to members of the conference. One of these volumes bore the title Les sciences sociales en France: Enseignement et recherche and had been submitted by the Commission français de coordination des hautes études internationales. Published in 1937 under the auspices of the Centre d’études de politique étrangère, this volume was based on a report prepared by a group of social scientists chaired by Bouglé. A substantial section of this report concerned the development of international studies in France and, in this respect, it was inspired by Stanley Hartnoll Bailey’s International Studies in Great Britain (1933) and by a survey prepared by Edith E. Ware called The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934.63 Ware’s survey, as Ware noted in the preface to The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934, owed ‘its existence’ to Shotwell as ‘the making of such a survey was his idea, the collaborators were chosen by him, and he…[had]…piloted through all the stages of its compilation.’64 In 1933, Shotwell had assumed the chairmanship of the American National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations and it was on behalf of this committee that Columbia University Press had published Ware’s survey. The publication was an immediate success as evidenced by the fact that a reprint of it appeared in 1935. In early 1938, a new edition appeared: The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1937. This

62 Alfred E. Zimmern, preface to Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 1. Attending the conference on the university teaching of international relations in Prague were representatives from the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and the United States. 63 Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 6. See also Centre d’études de politique étrangère, Le Groupe d’études des sciences sociales, Les sciences sociales en France: Enseignement et recherche, préface de C. Bouglé (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1937), 6–7. 64 Edith E. Ware, ed., The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), ix.

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edition was also published under the auspices of the American National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and it too was presented to the conference on university teaching of international relations at Prague. The third of the three volumes presented to the Prague conference was Bailey’s International Studies in Modern Education. This particular work was a survey of progress in the field of international studies internationally and at all levels of education. International Studies in Modern Education, which was published under the auspices of the RIIA, was distributed to participants in the Prague conference on university teaching by the Rockefeller Foundation, which had, along with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, financed the research on which it was based.65 The Rockefeller Foundation also financed a French translation of International Studies in Modern Education which had been facilitated by the IIIC and which was published just before the Prague meeting under the heading of Les études internationales dans l’enseignement contemporain.66 Both the foundation and the endowment, ‘desirous…to prepare in all countries a sort of coalition of the scientific spirit with the international spirit,’ as Bouglé noted in the preface to Les sciences sociales en France, had also supported the inquiry into the state of the social sciences in France.67 As with the earlier surveys of international studies conducted by Bailey and Ware, the origins of Les sciences sociales en France, The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1937 and International Studies in Modern Education can be traced to a resolution of the Joint Committee of the International Studies Conference and the League’s Sub-Committee of Experts for the Instruction of Youth in the Aims of the League which had issued from the 1931 session of the CISSIR in Copenhagen and which had later been approved by the ICIC and after that by the LON Assembly.68

65 Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 6. See also Edith E. Ware, ed., The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1937 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), and S. H. Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), viii. 66 Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 6. On the translation and publication of the French edition of International Studies in Modern Education, see Jiri F. Vranek to Tracey B. Kittredge, 17 May 1938, AG-IICI-K-I-4.b, UA. 67 Célestin Bouglé, preface to Centre d’études de politique étrangère, Le Groupe d’études des sciences sociales, Les sciences sociales en France, 7. 68 Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, v–vi.

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While many of the submissions concerning university teaching of international relations to the Prague conference argued that the study of international relations should focus chiefly on law, diplomatic history and contemporary politics, a few contributions were striking for their emphasis on the importance to the discipline of the study of psychology. Emanuel Chalupný of the Československý Koordìnační Výbor pro Menzinárodní Studia (Czechoslovak Coordinating Committee for International Studies) and the author of The Character of the European Nations and in Particular of the Germans (1934), argued that the ‘foremost place be given to psychology,’ albeit ‘social not individual psychology’.69 The notable interest in collective psychology at the time was inspired by an understanding, as stated by a Polish delegate at the conference, that animating the territorial and other material ambitions of certain states were ‘great currents of thought’ and that these required closer examination.70 In particular, many felt at the time that there was an urgent need to investigate that form of collective psychosis which is the tribal lust for war. For example, the British Medical Association at its annual assembly in July 1937, had passed a resolution requesting that the LON’s Health Organisation undertake a study of the psychology of war.71 Early in 1938, against the background of the consideration of this request by the executive committee of the LON’s Health Organisation, the GRC had decided to commission Robert Waelder to conduct a study under the heading of the Psychological Aspects of War and Peace.72 Waelder had already written at length on this subject in the form of a letter entitled ‘L’étiologie et l’évolution des psychoses collectives’ which was included in the third of the four volumes which comprised the International Series of Open Letters (Correspondance) sponsored by the Permanent Committee of Letters and Arts: L’esprit,

69 See for example Emanuel Chalupný, ‘The University Teaching of International Relations,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 33. 70 Bohdan Winiarski, ‘International Policy as a Science of International Relations,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 61. 71 Société des Nations, Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Comité exécutif: Point XIII de l’ordre du jour—Psychologie de la guerre, 28 mars 1938, La Psychologie de la guerre: Étude proposée par la British Medical Association, 1939–1940, AG 1-IICIB-V-10, UA. 72 Head of Publications, Geneva Research Centre, to Carl F. Remer, 23 February 1939, AG 1-IICI-B-V-10, UA.

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l’éthique et la guerre (1934).73 A Viennese disciple of Sigmund Freud, Waelder had prepared his letter in November 1933, ‘denouncing’ in it, as Bonnet later observed, ‘the paranoia at the moment when it was acceding to power.’74 Waelder’s work was well known in Geneva and Paris and his new study was keenly awaited in both capitals. Upon receiving a copy of the study in February 1939, the GRC’s head of publications wrote to Whitton’s replacement as director of the centre, namely, Carl F. Remer, declaring the following: We have got..to go far deeper into these problems than we have gone heretofore. The conventional explanations will no longer answer the extraordinary phenomena now taking place in the world. Deeper than all the more obvious problems such as territorial aspirations, commercial policies and the like, lie the causes which are behind them and which give rise to one type of demand and now to another. It is certainly a psychological and emotional unsteadiness and unrest in the world which predominantly brings into being and explains some of otherwise inexplicable things that are happening. There must be, and indeed is, a considerable degree of psychological explanation for certain extraordinary individuals who are holding great power today and for great masses of people who follow them almost blindly.75

Leon Steinig was a functionary at the Social Questions and Opium Trafficking Section of the League Secretariat. With the collaboration of Bonnet, he had invested much effort in persuading Einstein to participate in an exchange of letters with Freud on the question of war, an exchange which was published in English, French and German by the IIIC in March 1933 under the respective headings of Why War?; 73 Robert Waelder, ‘L’Étiologie et l’évolution des Psychoses collectives,’ in L’esprit, l’éthique et la guerre: Lettres de Johann Bojer, J. Huizinga, Aldous Huxley, André Maurois and Robert Waelder (Paris: Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1934). The first volume in the open letters series was the following: League of Nations, A League of Minds: An International Series of Open Letters 1 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1933). This volume was published in French with the following title: Pour une société des esprits. 74 Henri Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1966): 198–209, 204. See also Waelder, ‘L’Étiologie et l’évolution des Psychoses collectives,’ 91. 75 Head of Publications, Geneva Research Centre, to Remer, 23 February 1939, AG 1-IICI-B-V-10, UA.

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Pourquoi la guerre?; and Warum Krieg?. Why War?, which was the second volume in the open letters series, was banned in Germany. In a letter to Bonnet in March 1939 in which he conveyed his enthusiasm for the Waelder project, Steinig observed that psychological approaches to social phenomena were growing ‘visibly’ at the time.76 Bonnet shared Steinig’s interest in psychological approaches: when the executive committee of the Health Organisation deemed that the proposal of the British Medical Association did not directly relate to its mandated role of protecting public health and passed the request of that association on to the ICO, it was Bonnet who pursued the issue. Bonnet’s proposal that the ICO should undertake a series of studies along the lines of the Waelder study was later endorsed by the ICIC which authorised the organisation to maintain its interest in the field.77 The importance of studying international relations from a psychological angle was also emphasised at Prague by Julio Escudero, a representative of the Chilean Institute for International Relations and director of seminar studies in public law at the University of Chile. Escudero noted that Àlejandro Alvarez, a Chilean jurist and one of the founders and directors of the Institut des hautes études internationales of Paris, had long called for the creation of a new science: for the creation of ‘a science of international life’ devoted above all to the ‘psychology of nations’ because this psychology ‘embraces’ all the other aspects of international life. Escudero noted that Alvarez had coined the expression psychology of nations and that by this expression ‘is to be understood all those imponderable factors in the life of nations which are at the same time the most active forces: sentiments, mental states, doctrines, ideas, ideals, etc.’ Escudero stated that according to Alvarez, just as there is ‘a science of economic life, a science of law, a science of criminology, serving as bases respectively for political economy, public law, private law, and criminal

76 Leon Steinig to Henri Bonnet, 23 March 1939, AG 1-IICI-B-V-10, UA. On Steinig’s interest in the study see also Carl F. Remer to Henri Bonnet, 6 April 1939, and Carl F. Remer by H. (Hessell) Duncan Hall, 5 December 1938, AG 1-IICI-B-V-10, UA. Hessell Duncan Hall was a member of the Social Questions and Opium Trafficking Section of the LON Secretariat. 77 H. (Hessell) Duncan Hall to Henri Bonnet and attached memorandum, 15 September 1939, AG 1-IICI-B-V-10, UA.

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law, a fortiori there must be a science of international life showing what life is and revealing its various manifestations’.78 Escudero opined that a science of international life in the form laid down by Alvarez, could serve as a basis on which to reconstruct international law which, according to Escudero and before him Alvarez, had declined in prestige and authority in recent times. He contended that this fate had befallen international law because it had been ‘approached from the standpoint of abstract legal science’ and had thus ‘failed give weight to the realities of the life of nations.’79 Escudero highlighted a point made by Alvarez in 1908, namely, that the scope of studies of international life and international law needed to be broadened because at that point in time they were largely confined to Europe. He stated that Alvarez’s studies had shown that because of the special conditions of life in the New World, a body of international law had evolved in the Americas that was different from the body of international law that had evolved in Europe: what Alvarez called American international law was characterised by principles, doctrines and problems which were peculiar to it. Escudero went on to insist on the importance of studying the special conditions of life on in continent. Such a focus on regional and continental variation, Escudero stated, was not antithetical to the notion of ‘a world-wide international law’.80 Rather, to call attention to the variations between different regopma; ad continental legal orders, according to Escudero, is to reveal the real character of world-wide international law: ‘side by side with principles of universal validity’ there are legal orders ‘of a continental—European or American—or even regional character.’ Escudero then pointed out that Alvarez had urged that ‘continentalism and regionalism should be taken into account, not only in international law, but also in international organisation, and that the League of Nations should be established on that basis, rather than on the excessive universalism imposed upon it by its founders’.81

78 Julio Escudero ‘The Necessity of the Study of International Relations,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 28-9, 31. 79 Ibid., 29. 80 Ibid., 28–9. 81 Ibid., 29–30.

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In a submission on behalf of the Mexican Committee for the Study of International Relations, Manuel Marion Sanchez, put forward a somewhat contrasting image of the international legal order. Sanchez pointed to the myriad and complex relations of interdependence, both material and spiritual, that now extended across the globe such as in the form of technical methods, social and political ideals and culture. He characterised these manifold relations in terms of Léon Duguit’s notion of social solidarity, Émile Durkheim’s notion of moral density, and Kelsen’s notion of an international legal order ‘transformed into the supreme law of the stability of the different national systems’. All these expressions, Sanchez maintained, pointed to a single phenomenon: the ‘harmonisation of life on a higher plane’ and it was this phenomenon that Sanchez thought the teaching of international relations should convey.82 Two Romanian participants, namely, Mihai A. Antonescu and George Sofronie argued similarly to Sanchez. During the discussions of the university teaching of international relations in Prague, Antonescu (who would later serve as minister of justice and after that deputy prime minister and foreign minister in the dictatorship Ion Antonescu), restated the argument that he had advanced at the ISC meetings on collective security in Paris in 1934 and in London in 1935: that sovereignty is necessarily qualified by obligations that are owed to the rest of the international law community. He had argued this in Paris and London on the basis that there is in an important sense in which the identity of the state qua state is a consequence of its participation in the society of states: its participation in a civilisation of which it was a particular outpost or instrument.83 82 Manuel Marion Sanchez, ‘The University Teaching of International Relations,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 37–8. 83 Mihai A. Antonesco, ‘The University Teaching of International Relations,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 80–1. See also the following biographical descriptions: ‘Michel A. Antonescu, L.L.D. Assistant Professor of Public and Private International Law at the Bucharest Academy of Higher Commercial and Industrial Studies; Lecturer in Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest; Professor of International Law at the Higher School of Administrative Law; Barrister at the Court of Appeal Bucharest,’ Maurice Bourquin, ‘Biographical Notes on the Delegates and Participants at the Conferences of Paris and London, and on the Authors of Memoranda, Submitted in 1934 and 1935,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 493; ‘Antonesco, Michel A. Lecturer in International Law University of Bucarest [sic], and Academy of Commercial Science,’ International Studies Conference, ‘Annex 3: List of Participants in the Session,’ in International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population,

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In consequence of this, Antonescu maintained, it was necessary for students of international relations, especially at a time when the ‘totalitarian regimes entrust to one man the government of the country and therefore also the influence of the country on the whole course of international life,’ to determine the ‘limits within which each element in the community of peoples is to operate.’ In this regard, he urged the adoption of the ‘critical method’ which he defined as the adoption of ‘value judgement, critically dissecting the concrete facts and the social phenomena, with the tendency and the objective of creating a spiritual influence on international relations.’ As he otherwise expressed it, this method involved the combining of ‘scientifically organised idealism with the realism of material life.’84 Sofronie, professor of international law at the University of Cluj, expressing support for the view that university teaching must be adapted to the development of life, invoked the words of the celebrated Greek diplomat Nikolaos Politis (who, in the context of the Disarmament Conference in 1932, had put forward to much acclaim a particularly lucid definition of aggression): that ‘international solidarity is a living reality—the mightiest reality of our time’. Sofronie acknowledged that the exacerbation in some countries of nationalistic tendencies, an exaggerated emphasis on ‘imperatives based on the concept of sovereignty’ and the insistence ‘with or without reason’ on equality of rights, were giving rise to what another commentator had described as the ‘pulverisation of the solidarity of States’. This development, Sofronie warned, had

Raw Materials, Colonies, 621; and ‘Antoneso, Mihai (Rumanian), Lecturer in International Law University of Bucarest [sic] and Académie de Hautes Études Commeriales et Industrielles,’ ‘List of Participants in the Eleventh Session of the International Studies Conference,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 344. Wojciech Roszkowski and Jan Kofmans record that Mihai Antonescu was the author of the following work: ‘Organizarea păcii și a Societații Națiunilor (The establishment of a peaceful order and the League of Nations, 1929)’. They further record that following a coup in Romania in August 1944, Antonescu was arrested and spent a period of detention in the USSR. In May 1946, he was tried and found guilty of war-crimes. He was then ‘executed by firing squad in the garden of the Jilava prison, along with Marshal Antonescu’ in May 1946. Wojciech Roszkowski and Jan Kofman, ‘Mihai Antonescu,’ in Wojciech Roszkowski and Jan Kofman, Biographical Dictionary of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (London ad New York: Routledge, 2015), 29–30. First published in 2008 by M. E. Sharpe. 84 Antonesco,

‘The University Teaching of International Relations,’ 78–81.

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the potential to ‘weaken and even to destroy the nascent conceptions of law’ that underpinned the current international order.85 Having issued this warning, Sofronie struck a note of cautious optimism, predicting that after the forthcoming ‘combat for peace’ against those few nations who were engaged in what he referred to as the ‘final agitations’ or ‘final revolts’ against law, international solidarity and a ‘more real reign of law’ would be reaffirmed.86 Like his colleague Antonescu, Sofronie stated that should the ‘crisis of the LON lead implacably to its suppression,’ this experiment in international organisation at some point would have to be relaunched, albeit accompanied by greater efforts to deepen, organise and diffuse the international spirit.87 The discussion of university teaching in Prague bore witness to the airing of Japanese grievances in regard to the current distribution of territory. Retsu K. Kiyusawa, the editor of the Oriental Economist, drew attention to the fact that Japan occupied only one per cent of the Asiatic land in the region of the Pacific, observing that of the rest of this land, seventy-three per cent and ‘more than half the population (excluding, of course, the Chinese), forms the “burden” of the white man.’88 Kiyusawa insisted that on learning this, a Japanese student of international relations would naturally ask, how can the problem of Japan’s lack of land area be solved? The teacher’s response, he stated, could not be that the Japanese are ‘free to settle and to produce in such regions where, as in British New Guinea 1,000 whites are living, or in Dutch New Guinea with a white population of 300, or in the whole mandated territory of Australia with a population of barely 3,000 souls, whites and Chinese reckoned together, or…in Alaska, a territory four times larger than Japan with a population of 28,600. For all those territories are closed to the Japanese.’89 What the student would learn based on these considerations, Kiyusawa declared, is that in international relations ‘the first action 85 George Sopronie, ‘The Teaching of International Law in Connection with the Study of International Relations,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 63–4, and Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 346. 86 Ibid., 64. 87 Antonesco, ‘The University Teaching of International Relations,’ 80. 88 ‘Fourth Study Meeting,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 306. 89 Ibid.

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taken by the Powers is to establish a moral code providing for the exclusive ownership of the territories in question by the controlling race.’90 Kiyusawa further insisted that if the Japanese standard of living was to be raised, either Japan’s population pressure must be eased or Japan must be given greater access to international markets. Kiyusawa stated that as ‘hard’ as it was for him to say it as a Japanese liberal, he had to say that he felt that ‘something must be basically wrong somewhere in the present world’ and that under present world conditions the Japanese could not hope for ‘fair play.’ Turning to the theme of peaceful change, Kiyusawa stated that one could not realise the ‘desired’ result merely by teaching the necessity of international order and security as one had also to examine the ‘real causes of disturbances’; this, he added, was the ‘ABC of teaching international relations’.91 The only person to respond to Kiyusawa’s speech was Brooks Emeny, the director of the American Foreign Affairs Council. Emeny, who represented both the American Coordinating Committee for International Studies and the IPR at Prague, stated that in the United States it was considered very important that American students understood the Japanese perspective on raw materials, demographic pressure and trade barriers. However, Emeny went on to insist that intellectual honesty called for recognition of the fact that in the United States as well as in other countries, economic arguments ‘can be used as excuses for policies which may be questionable.’92

A Meeting of Economists The meetings concerning economic policies in relation to world peace took place on the afternoon of May 26 and the morning of May 27. The two meetings were ‘strictly confined to an exchange of reports as to the progress of preparation under way in the various countries and to various technical questions’ that had arisen in the course of preparation.93 In his 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid.,

307. 310. 93 International Studies Conference: Report by the General Rapporteur Professor J. B. Condliffe on the Meetings on Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace, AG IICIK-XI-22. John Bell Condliffe noted that at the conference in Prague there was ‘general agreement that previous conférences had suffered from a mass of unrelated and somewhat uneven papers presented and there was a general desire for more concentrated and uniform preparation as a basis for precise and effective round-table discussion’ (ibid.). 92 Ibid.,

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opening address, Condliffe observed that having spent the past few days addressing the nature of the study of international relations, a discussion in which, Condliffe believed, none of the economists present participated, the conference was ‘now coming down to earth’: it was about to turn its attention to concrete economic issues in the form of barriers to commercial exchange.94 This was an issue that had already been canvassed that year at two meetings of economists which took place in Paris in February and April and which had been convened by the GRC, the governing body of which Condliffe was now chair.95 Condliffe emphasised at the meetings on economic policies in Prague that both he and the ISC’s international programme committee had worked hard to ensure that the research work undertaken by the various national groups was focussed and to the point. He observed that all were agreed that previous conferences had ‘suffered from the mass of unrelated and somewhat uneven papers’ and that there was a ‘general desire for a more concentrated and uniform presentation as a basis for precise and effective round-table discussion.’96 Condliffe pointed that while he and other members of the IPR’s secretariat had in the past been criticised for their apparent ‘obsession with scientific and particularly with economic policies,’ his experience with that body had shown that ‘no matter how carefully factual or descriptive the preparation,’ the discussants at conference meetings always wanted to address political questions. Based on this experience, Condliffe told his audience, he and the programme committee had thought it wise to limit the scope of the preparation through choosing a single topic and requesting a report that was ‘concise, factual and descriptive’ with a view to ensuring that when discussion shifted to what were unavoidably political questions, it would not be too ill-defined.97 94 League of Nations, International Studies Conference XIth Session: Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace—A Record of Meetings Held in Prague on May 25th and 26th, 1938 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938), 8, AG IICI K-X1-23, UA. 95 John B. Whitton to Henri Bonnet, 22 April 1938, and John Bell Condliffe, draft of letter to Tracey Barrett Kittredge, 19 May 1938, AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA. 96 International Studies Conference: Report by the General Rapporteur Professor J. B. Condliffe on the Meetings on Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace, AG IICI KXI-22, UA. 97 League of Nations, International Studies Conference XIth Session: Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace—A Record of Meetings Held in Prague on May 25th and 26th, 1938, AG 1-IICI K-X1-23, UA.

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The Italian Withdrawal The Austrian group was not the only founding member of the ISC noticeably absent from Prague. The Italian group had sent notification of its withdrawal from the ISC in light of Italy’s announcement of its withdrawal from the LON on December 11. In another blow to the ICO, Italy’s withdrawal from the LON also saw the dissolution of the IIEC. Giuliano, as president of the IIEC, communicated to Avenol on December 18, that the IIEC was going into liquidation as of December 31, 1937. All the Italian staff, Giuliano informed Avenol, had resigned.98 The notification concerning the dissolution of the IIEC, Charles André reported at the time, was sent at the instigation of the ‘Hitlerian’ government.99 On November 6, 1937, Italy joined Germany and Japan in adhering to the Anti-Comintern Pact.100 The Danish classical scholar Hartvig Frisch, author of Pest Over Europa: Bolschevisme, Fascisme, Nazisme (1933), observed in a 1938 report to the ICO, that the Berlin-RomeTokyo Axis functioned like a ‘new genre of internationalism’: it had established a network of relations across the world in order to spread its doctrine of ‘supernationalism’. The Axis, Frisch stated, had shown itself to be ‘very effective and active in what concerns war and aggression,’ but also in the domain of ‘peaceful exchanges such as radio, cinema, sporting competitions and international expositions’. Frisch added that in ‘all these manifestations, we see appear the same axis’ and can observe its efforts to draw into its circle states of a secondary importance and promote a new ideology of which the formula of ‘democracy, Geneva, communism and disorder’ featured as its ‘leitmotiv.’101 98 For the letter of Balbino Giuliano and for two letters by the Italian minister of foreign affairs Count Galeazzo Ciano concerning the fate of the International Institute of Educational Cinematography see Journal des Nations, janvier 14, 1938, Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, Rome, 1938–1940, AG 1-B-IX-17, UA. Note that Ciano was Mussolini’s son-in-law. See also Charles André, L’Organisation de la Intellectuelle (Rennes: Imprimerie Provinçale de l’Ouest, 1938), 148, and Hila Wehberg, ‘Fate of an International Film Institute,’ Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1938): 483–85, 485. 99 André,

L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 148. Mussolini’s Italy, 4–3. See also Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (London: Phoenix, 1994), 217. 101 La Coopération internationale et la radiodiffusion educative, étude de Mr. Hartvig Frisch, March 23, 1938, Radiodiffusion dans l’intérêt de la paix, 1938, AG I IICI-E.X.3, UA. 100 Bosworth,

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The manifestations promoting the above formula were for members of the ICO sad to observe given the prodigious efforts of that organisation over many years to reinforce the Geneva spirit. It should be noted that this spirit was now widely derided and not only in the camp of the dictators and their satellites. One effort in which the ICO had been engaged since the late 1920s that had recently come to fruition concerned radio: on April 2, 1938, the Convention on the Use of Radio in the Interest of Peace entered into force. It was telling of the times, however, that the convention’s entry en vigeur was not greeted with any sense of triumph. In a letter to Bonnet, William Beveridge, the noted British economist and former chair of the BCCIS, lamented that irrespective of the radio convention, broadcasting had become ‘an additional armament in international hostility and national propaganda,’ adding that he did not ‘see how the Institute of Intellectual Co-operation can do anything effective to remedy this’.102 Consistent with the ICO’s policy of intellectually and culturally engaging with states which were not members of or which had withdrawn from the LON, the IIIC issued an invitation to the Italian Centre for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to send representatives to the next session of ISC which was scheduled to take place in August 1939. (The invitation was issued to the Centre for Cultural Relations in view of the fact that the Centro Italiano di alti studi internazionale along with its host organisation, namely, the Commissione nazionale italiana per la Cooperazione Intelletuale had been dissolved.) The response to this invitation, as Gross told Condliffe, was negative. Gross told Condliffe that was now very difficult ‘to approach any Italian directly.’103 102 William Beveridge to Henri Bonnet, 11 January 1938, AG 1-E-X-3. The Convention on the Use of Radio in the Interest of Peace was opened for signature on September 23, 1936. See Société des Nations, ‘Entrée en vigeur de la convention internationale sur l’emploi de la radiodiffusion dans l’intérêt de paix,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 85–86 (1938): 37. In regard to the Sino-Japanese war, Alec T. Rixon noted that the Japanese ‘swamp the whole world with their broadcasting publicity’ while at the same time demolishing Chinese radio communications through aerial bombing and then drowning what remained of it by means of their interference station in Southern Manchuria. Alec T. Rixon, ‘Telecommunications of China with Foreign Countries,’ Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1938): 478–83, 483. On the Italian use of radio for propaganda purposes, see Taylor Cole, ‘The Italian Ministry of Popular Culture,’ Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1938): 424–34, 431–42. 103 Leo Gross to John Bell Condliffe, 16 August 1939, Organisation materielle des Sessions de la Conférence, du 1er juin 1939 au 1er permanente septembre 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-25.b, UA.

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Negotiations regarding German participation in the 1939 conference were at the outset more fruitful and it appeared that up until late July of that year, at least two German professors would attend. Berber assured Bonnet that Andreas Predöhl, the director since 1934 of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy would almost certainly participate. He also assured the director of the IIIC that Brinkmann, (who had been among the economists participating in the Prague meetings on economic policies in relation to world peace), would attend. As for Berber himself, in a letter dated July 23 which he sent to Bonnet from Salzburg, Berber explained that it would remain uncertain up to the last minute as to whether he could personally attend.104

Berber’s Reich Service Berber was forced to greatly curtail his involvement in the ISC in 1939. Berber was among those who were expected to attend a meeting of the ISC’s executive committee in Paris on March 24 and 25. On March 4, he informed Bonnet of his ‘lively regret’ that he would be unable to come to Paris. He told Bonnet the following: ‘unfortunately, I have had a new attack of my bile and I am forced to spend the month of March in Karlsbad in order to finally re-establish myself.’105 Berber was preoccupied that year with much more than his health: he was having a very full year in the service of the Reich. By way of marking Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, Berber offered praise of the Führer’s foreign policy, celebrating the fact that it had caused German scientists of international law to reconceptualise their subject matter. Fassbender records that drawing on Carl Schmitt’s recent work, Berber in the name of ‘German Science’ stated the following:106 104 Fritz Berber to Henri Bonnet, 23 July 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-25.b, UA. See also ‘List of Participants in the Eleventh Session of the International Studies Conference,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 346. Carl Brinkmann attended a meeting of the ISC’s Programme Committee held at the IIIC on November 4, 1938. See Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace, Report of the Meeting of the Programme Committee held at the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation on November 4, 1938, AG 1- K-XII-2a., UA. 105 Fritz Berber to Henri Bonnet, 4 March 1939, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Comité exécutif à partir du 1er septembre 1937 à décembre 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2. 106 Fassbender, ‘On Writing the History of International Law in the “Third Reich” and After,’ 500–1.

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[I]t has been the Führer’s exceedingly successful foreign policy that eventually caused the German science of international law to discover and realize its task as a political science that is in touch with reality and responsible to the present. Instead of dead formulae and abstract notions, a political science of international law [Völkerrechtspolitik] is coming to the fore as a scholarly observation of concrete political international law. International law is treated in dynamic perspective of constant change, of a fight of new ideas against old forms. This political science of international law has been given the task of discovering and unmasking the political, historical and ideological background to the West European and Anglo-Saxon international law, of supplying German foreign policy with weapons of international law [völkerrechtliche Waffen] to assist in its fight for the freedom and greatness of the German people, and of finding new forms and new vessels for new political thoughts and creation. But what is more, this science must work out a system of a true international legal order which is no longer a result of adding more or less random and formal rules…but an order of a community of free and equal peoples based on justice and set in the living stream of history.107

It was also in 1939 that Berber produced a two volume collection of documents entitled Das Diktat von Versailles: Entstehung, Inhalt, Zerfall, eine Darstellung in Dokumenten (The Diktat of Versailles: Origin, Content, Collapse, A Presentation in Documents). Numbering one thousand and six hundred seventy-two pages and published under the auspices of the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research, the book was intended to conclusively demonstrate that the Treaty of Versailles had no basis in law or justice. To the contrary, its thrust was to demonstrate that Versailles was an act of ‘malevolence’ on the part of the victorious powers and as such it had ‘not brought peace or security to Europe.’108 Ribbentrop, who had become German foreign minister in February 1938, once more supplied Berber with a foreword, declaring therein that whoever read the collection of documents that Berber had assembled, could ‘only concur’ in Berber’s assessment of the Versailles treaty. Noting that the book traced the history of the treaty from its ‘beginnings to the present, from its self-dissolution to its final overthrow by Nationalism 107 Fritz

Berber, 1939, quoted ibid., 501. Pfankuchen, review of Das Diktat von Versailles, ed., Fritz Berber, Journal of International Law 33, no. 44 (1939): 793–94, 793. 108 Llewellyn

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Socialism,’ Ribbentrop stated that Das Diktat von Versailles demonstrated that ‘political science in Germany retained the courage of objectivity without losing sight of the needs of the day’. As he had wished for Locarno: A Collection of Documents, Ribbentrop wished for Das Diktat von Versailles the ‘widest circulation.’109 In respect to Berber’s objectivity, an American reviewer, writing immediately after the outbreak of war in Europe, stated that ‘after all the discounts are made for the “needs of the day,” reticences, and fanaticisms,’ the material presented in Das Diktat von Versailles was ‘objective enough…to make the nature of the new peace a matter of profound concern to all men of good will.’110 It was in consequence of his role as Ribbentrop’s personal advisor, that Berber’s letter to Bonnet of July 23 was sent from Salzburg. James Douglas-Hamilton has established that during the afternoon and evening of the July 26, Berber was witness to a conversation between Ribbentrop and the British merchant banker and founder of the Anglo-German Fellowship, Ernest Tennant. This conversation was held at Ribbentrop’s recently acquired castle on Lake Fuschl, approximately eighteen kilometres from Salzburg.111 Hamilton-Douglas points out that the report of this meeting, which was headlined ‘PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL,’ was sent to the chief intelligence officer of the RAF Fighter Command on July 31.112 Tennant recorded that at the meeting, Ribbentrop spoke of his great disappointment at the British failure to reach an understanding with Germany: an understanding ‘by which Germany,…would look after Britain’s interests on the Continent in exchange for Britain looking after Germany’s interests overseas’. Tennant further recorded that Ribbentrop left no doubt that irrespective of the British guarantee to Poland, Germany planned to take most of it and observed that 109 Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreword to Das Diktat von Versailles: Entstehung, Inhalt, Zerfall, eine Darstellung in Dokumenten (Essen: Essener Verlagsantalt, 1939), iii. 110 Pfankuchen, review of Das Diktat von Versailles, ed., Fritz Berber, 794. 111 James Douglas-Hamilton, ‘Ribbentrop and War,’ Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 4 (1970): 45–63, 45. 112 Ibid. James Douglas-Hamilton record that the document prepared by Ernest Tennant ‘came into the hands of Mr Hird, the General Manger of the Bank of Scotland, who sent a copy to the Earl of Selkirk, the newly appointed Chief Intelligence Officer of RAF Fighter Command.’ He also notes that Tennant had earlier organised meetings between Ribbentrop and the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and that in the mid-1930s his reports were of ‘considerable interest’ to the British Secret Service (ibid.).

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when he, Tennant, reminded Ribbentrop that Britain was ‘ready and vastly stronger than Germany at sea, and equal to Germany in the air,’ Ribbentrop ‘shook his head’.113 According to Tennant, Ribbentrop then stated: ‘My dear T…Britain’s strength or weakness never enters our calculations because Britain could never get at us.’114 After the evening dinner, Tennant drove back to Salzburg in the company of Berber. Tennant described him as a ‘mild young man obviously alarmed at the outlook,’ adding that during the return drive, Berber told me that if he might venture to give some advice on the present crisis he would endeavour to urge upon Mr. Chamberlain the importance of making it clear to the Poles that they must without further delay come to a settlement with Germany over the Corridor and Danzig, even if that meant Danzig returning to the Reich. When I asked him ‘and then what would Germany demand of Poland next?,’ he replied ‘your guarantee to Poland would still stand and would operate if Hitler went beyond what the Poles felt compelled to agree to concede. That should prevent any further demands on Poland.’115

Tennant travelled to Berlin the next day in the same train as Ribbentrop and his party which he, Tennant, was invited to join. In his account of the eleven hour journey, Tennant reported that Ribbentrop was travelling to Berlin in order to attend a meeting with Hitler after which Ribbentrop planned to conduct an inspection of a part of the Siegfried Line. Clearly regarding it as of symbolic importance, Tennant observed that while the day before Ribbentrop had been sporting ‘a white cotton knickerbocker suit and brown stockings, he was now very much the Foreign Minister in full uniform’.116

A Conference in Bergen The 1939 session of the ISC commenced on August 27 and was hosted by the Christian Michelsen Institute of Science and Intellectual Liberty, which had been founded in Bergen in March 1930. Despite the ominous 113 Text

of Ernest Tenant’s memorandum, 1939, ibid., 52. 54. 115 Ibid., 57. 116 Ibid., 57. 114 Ibid.,

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international outlook, attendance at the event greatly exceeded expectations both in terms of number of delegates present as well in terms of the wide range of countries that were represented. The conference boasted an attendance list which, leaving aside its Norwegian hosts, included delegates from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, India, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, Turkey, India, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.117 Nonetheless, the international situation meant that many prospective participants had been unable to or felt that they were not in a position to make the journey to Bergen. Unsurprisingly, neither Berber nor any other German nationals were present. Suprisingly perhaps, there was no representative of the BCCIS present. Breaking news of events on the continent prompted some among those who managed to make the journey to ask themselves if it might not be advisable to return home. Indeed, there was much discussion into the evening of August 27 at a reception at the Hotel Terminus, as to whether or not the conference should be abandoned altogether.118 In the end, the delegates decided that the conference should take place, although they also decided that the study meetings, which were originally scheduled to conclude on September 2, should conclude on the evening of August 29 and that both the opening and closing meetings should be cancelled.119 117 Note that the final act of the first Conference of the American National Committees of Intellectual Cooperation, which took place in Santiago from January 6–12, 1939, resolved that American National Committees should ‘collaborate most actively’ in the work of the ISC. ‘Comité exécutif et comité du programme de la Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 99–100 (1939): 783–87, 785–86. 118 International Studies Conference, Twelfth Session, Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace: A Record of the Study Meetings Held in Bergen from August 26 to 29, 1939 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, League of Nations, April 1940), vii, 9. IICI/9/23, UA. 119 The Indian delegate, Sir Brojendra al Mitter, who was the advocate-general of India, had been due to reply on behalf of the conference to the formal address of welcome. Instead, he gave a brief address to the conference and then departed. Leo Gross to Dr. Edvard Hambro, 3 July 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-25.b, UA. On the original dates of the Bergen conference see Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 99–100 (1939), 783. For the actual dates of the conference at Bergen and the schedule of meetings held there see League of Nations, International Studies Conference, Twelfth Session, Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace: A Record of the Study Meetings Held in Bergen from August 26 to 29, 1939, 92, IICI/9/23, UA. As many of the conference participants were already present in Bergen on August 26, a programme committee meeting was held on the morning

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That the Bergen meeting was conducted with barely any ceremonial pomp was not just an effect of the grave international situation. Condliffe and the conference’s programme committee had issued clear instructions to the Norwegian national committee that the number of receptions was to be strictly limited. As Condliffe underlined in the report of the general rapporteur, it was no accident that the conference was held in the calm atmosphere of Bergen rather than in a grand city with all its distractions.120 Most of the focus of the conference was on the general issue of the confrontation between policies of economic nationalism and national self-sufficiency on the one hand, and the globalising tendency of modern industrialism on the other. Condliffe lead the discussion throughout and a summary of his views well conveys its overall tenor. In the course of his interventions, Condliffe painted a dramatic picture of the tension between nationalism and an expansionist modern industrialism, representing this tension as a combat between major forces in the context of which nationalism currently was prevailing.121 Condliffe well appreciated the pull of nationalism, observing that it is based on ‘profound instincts in the human heart’: the ‘love of home, of family and of country, a love “which dates from distant legends of the past”.’ For this reason, Condliffe advised, one should take care not to underestimate nationalism’s power. Yet, he added, the ‘forces which are of that day in order to discuss modifications to the conference agenda.‘XIIe Session de la Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales,’ Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle, Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 1–2 (1939): 6–13, 6, and Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, L’Institut Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 288. 120 Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Conférence Permanente des Hautes Ḗtudes Internationales, XIIème Session, Bergen 1939—Les Politiques Économiques et la Paix: Discours du Rapporteur General, M. J. B. Condliffe, Professor of Commerce à l’Université de Londres, à la séance d’ouverture, le lundi, 28 août, 1939, Maison de Commerce et de Navigation, 2, AG 1-K-XII.13 UA. Due to the time constraints on the conference only the last two paragraphs of the opening speech that Condliffe had prepared and had intended to give in full at the Bergen conference in his capacity general rapporeur were delivered orally. International Studies Conference, Twelfth Session, Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace: A Record of the Study Meetings Held in Bergen from August 26 to 29, 1939, 93–5, IICI/9/23, UA. 121 Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Conférence Permanente des Hautes Ḗtudes Internationales, XIIème Session, Bergen 1939—Les Politiques Économiques et la Paix: Discours du Rapporteur, M. J. B. Condliffe, Professor of Commerce à l’Université de Londres, à la séance d’ouverture, le lundi, 28 août, Maison de Commerce et de Navigation, 5–6, AG 1-K-XII.13. UA.

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at the base of economic activity are very powerful also,’ depending in part on emotions that are as deeply rooted as those which give rise to nationalism: the instinct of self-preservation which is the ‘first law of nature.’122 Condliffe noted that some educational doctrines had ‘sacrificed the apparently too matter-of-fact and egoistic aspect of economic activity to the more romantic, and apparently less egocentric, patriotism,’ adding that rational economic organisation had always battled with this obstacle. Yet Condliffe stated that it would be ‘premature to affirm that the State had succeeded at breaking the industrial forces tending to expansion on a world scale,’ as it was equally possible that in the long term such forces might destroy the state. As an alternative to either extreme, Condliffe pointed to the possibility that a way might be found to reconcile ‘legitimate national aspirations with the advantages of world organisation of industry and commerce in educating future generations with a view to a larger comprehension of the human problems’ that extend from ‘the home to the neighbour, from the nation to humanity.’123 Here, Condliffe was suggesting that not all assertions of nationalism or state sovereignty were based in irrational impulses and equally that unrestrained economic expansion was not an unalloyed good. He sought to illustrate this by drawing on psychoanalytical symbolism: that the conflict between nationalism and industrialism could be viewed as a conflict between the ‘maternal principle of political organisation which seeks to protect, shelter and conserve and the paternal principle of enterprise, unstable and adventurous.’124 Condliffe contended that the case for economic liberalism was not ‘quite clear-cut’ and that he was ‘not going to re-state the case from the nineteenth century, the “laissez-faire” theory.’ Rather, he argued that the case for international economic liberalism had to be ‘re-stated in terms of modern conditions’.125 These conditions included not only the trend of economic development but of the ‘the whole way of living in the modern world, of increasing speed and efficiency of communication,’ all of which, he suggested, was ‘driving us towards a world economic organisation.’126 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid.,

6.

124 Ibid. 125 International Studies Conference, Twelfth Session, Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace: A Record of the Study Meetings Held in Bergen from August 26 to 29, 1939, 115, IICI/9/23, UA. 126 Ibid., 64.

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Yet modern conditions also included the very important fact that people, especially working people, were looking to the state for major social transformation: for security against unemployment and for higher levels of well-being.127 Condliffe warned that it would be dangerous, both economically and politically, for governments to pursue policies aimed at countering such problems as unemployment on a unilateral basis. This held, he stated, to the extent that unilateralism impaired international trading relations or, at the extreme, conduced to war through the construction of war economies in peace-time. Was it not possible, Condliffe asked, to ‘conceive of an international co-ordinated and parallel programme to achieve these objects without straining the delicate mechanism of international relationship’.128 Condliffe informed the conference that after working for six years at the Financial Section, which he described as the ‘most effective organisation for international economic research’ then in existence, the principal impression that he had gained, was that the ‘best work done at Geneva…was when those participating realised the necessity of a greater degree of co-operation’.129 Condliffe urged the ‘organisation of a sensible world based on knowledge,’ yet, due to his experience of the LON and no doubt due to what he described as his New Zealand-bred pragmatic disposition, he also well understood that technical work, however ‘important and well done,’ was not a ‘substitute for the discussion of real political issues’ and the ‘facing of political issues.’130 Condliffe lamented the fact that the League machinery had not been properly exploited by governments as a forum for facing political issues and for cooperation in order to resolve them. He told the Bergen meeting that there was ‘never any moment when one felt that what was done at Geneva was anything more than a registration of the decisions taken in the national bodies’: major decisions at Geneva were shaped by national situations, national policies and national institutions. The decision he 127 Ibid.,

50, 65, 69. 219–20. 129 Ibid., 58–59, 89, 217. 130 J. B. Condliffe responding to comments on an address by Alexander Loveday, in Alexander Loveday, ‘The Economic and Financial Activities of the League,’ International Affairs 17, no. 6 (1938): 788–808, 808. For Condliffe’s self-description, see International Studies Conference, Twelfth Session, Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace: A Record of the Study Meetings Held in Bergen from August 26 to 29, 1939, 27, IICI/9/23, UA. 128 Ibid.,

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highlighted in this regard was apposite, since Europe was about to witness what was intended as another territorial fait accompli. Condliffe declared that he thought he knew ‘every decision and every fact and every point of discussion in the sanctions controversy against Italy, except one important decision: why in London and in Paris and other world centres the decision was taken at the critical moment not to impose effective sanctions. This decision,’ he stated emphatically, ‘was not taken at Geneva.’131 The theme of economic interdependence and its centrality to world peace was touched on frequently throughout the conference. It was a theme pursued most especially in a memorandum prepared on the invitation of the conference by the economist Michael A. Heilperin entitled International Monetary Organisation. Therein, Heilperin observed that the monetary system which had been reconstructed in the 1920s had not been able to withstand the impact of the 1929–1930 crisis and the subsequent economic depression. The failure of what Salter called the ‘first effort,’ Heilperin explained, brought to the surface the forces of economic nationalism which had been operating ‘behind the scenes’ throughout the 1920s. Heilperin maintained that it was no exaggeration to suggest that these forces had lingered: although the project of postwar reconstruction had rested ‘on the assumption of a lasting peace,’ states remained ‘suspicious of one another’s intentions, while the fear of another war lurked in the background all the time’.132 With the onset of the Depression, political nationalism became more vocal, fuelled by public resentment concerning the decline in living standards and rising levels of unemployment. Economic and political nationalism further intensified, Heilperin observed, as a result of the failure of the World Monetary and Economic Conference of July 1933 and the stalemate and ultimate collapse of the disarmament negotiations.133 Heilperin dismissed as simplistic the notion that economic policies can bring about peace: that peace can be bought through liberalising trade. He stated that in any case, such a policy was impossible given current world conditions: the world was then ‘torn’ by aggressive nationalism 131 International Studies Conference, Twelfth Session, Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace: A Record of the Study Meetings Held in Bergen from August 26 to 29, 1939, 58–9, IICI/9/23, UA. 132 Michael A. Heilperin, International Monetary Organisation (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939), 41–2. 133 Ibid., 41.

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and ‘oppressed by the shadow of war.’ Indeed, he argued, that the world’s descent into a state of mutual hostility and suspicion showed that the problem of economic cooperation was much more political than had been thought by economic liberals in the past.134 This argument, he pointed out, had recently been advanced by Rappard in Post-War Efforts for Freer Trade, a publication which had resulted from the Cobden lectures that Rappard had delivered at the LSE in early February 1938 and which had been issued by the GRC in March of the same year. Therein Rappard stated the following: Richard Cobden taught us to seek for peace through free trade. But all recent experience shows both that international trade cannot be free in a world of hostile or potentially hostile and therefore suspicious sovereign States and that trade alone cannot ban international hostility and suspicions. The problem is thus more complex, because less exclusively economic, than it appeared to Cobden.135

In the spirit of Rappard, Heilperin concluded that the preservation of peace demanded an international policy of economic interdependence that was designed in a such a way that it would be very difficult for a state to be autarkic. A well designed policy of economic interdependence, would lessen the temptation to resort to war: it would render war more costly and would generate an atmosphere in which a state desiring autarky would be regarded as a peace breaker.136 Similar views were expressed by another economist, namely, Louis Baudin of the University of Dijon. Citing the example of Heinrich Hunke, an economic advisor to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Baudin pointed out that some contemporary German theorists considered that the distinction between a peacetime economy and a wartime economy had been ‘superseded’.137 He noted that according to Hunke, since ‘defence is included in the very definition of the nation…the national

134 Ibid.,

55. E. Rappard, ‘Post-War Efforts for Freer Trade,’ Geneva Studies 9, no. 2 (Geneva: Geneva Research Centre, 1938), 66. 136 Heilperin, International Monetary Organisation, 56. 137 Heinrich Hunke, 1938, quoted in Louis Baudin, Free Trade and Peace (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939), 57n. 135 William

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economy must always be in arms.’138 Baudin then described the atmosphere created by a policy of autarky and why such a policy conduces to war. [T]he desire for autarky which animates the totalitarian States creates an atmosphere comparable to that which exists in a time of war. It has been observed that this tends to stimulate the spirit of invention. This is offset by the fact that the permanent mobilisation entails a drop in the standard of life. To constrain a people to live as though a war were in progress not only gives the government the possibility of passing instantaneously from a state of peace to an actual state of war, but also incites the government to take that step in justification of its methods. An attitude of perpetual tension necessitates the conquest of results which legitimate the sacrifices imposed. If these results are obtained peacefully, the tension is not removed but is merely prolonged.139

Like Heilperin, Baudin maintained that economic interdependence helped foster peace, yet he too thought that it was not a sufficient condition for it. Indeed, Baudin pointed out that interdependence can only flourish where there is confidence that there would be no ‘theft and conquest’ and that this required that certain legal and political conditions must be satisfied.140 In this regard, Baudin noted an observation made by Lionel Robbins in Economic Planning and International Order in the context of discussing the deficiencies of nineteenth century economic liberalism: ‘It is not by the demonstration that burglary and gangsterdom do not pay that we restrain the activities of burglars and gangsters; it is by the maintenance of a mechanism of restraint.’141 Having considered at its administrative meeting on August 29 the ideas solicited by the executive committee prior to the conference concerning what should be the focus of the ISC’s 1939–1941 study cycle, the Bergen conference determined that the next subject of its the inquiries would be as follows: ‘International Organisation: its foundation, its forms, its possibilities, its limitations, with special reference to conditions essential for successful international co-operation, moral, spiritual, social,

138 Baudin,

Free Trade and Peace, 57n. 57. 140 Ibid., 30–3, 77–8. 141 Lionel Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (London: Macmillan, 1937), 240–42. See also Baudin, Free Trade and Peace, 32. 139 Ibid.,

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economic and juridical.’142 That the conference adopted this topic was based on a consensus reached at Bergen on the need for international organisation in the political and economic domains and because of the conviction among those present that at some point in the not too distant future, new international institutions would have to be constructed.143

A Successful Conference In a letter dated November 9 posted from Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he was staying in order to attend an IPR study meeting, Condliffe informed Gross that the Bergen documentation and discussion had received a very good reception in the United States. Most importantly, Condliffe was able to tell Gross that the Rockefeller Foundation’s view of the ISC’s 1939 study conference was highly favourable.144 That the proceedings and results of the Bergen conference had been received well by the foundation, was a great relief to those involved in its organisation 142 The Study Programme of the International Studies Conference, Conférence permanente des hautes études internatonales: Rapporteur général, 1939–1941, Rapporteur générale, 1939-1941, M. Pitman B. Potter, octobre 1939, 1939–1941, 1945–1947, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 143 Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, L’Institut Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 293–94. Conference members agreed that in the event of war they would stay in touch with each other and the conference secretariat. International Studies Conference: Suggested Study Programme, October–November, 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. Japanese members of the ISC proposed the topic of ‘Race as a factor in the construction of a new world order’ and ‘Colonies Raw Materials and Peace’. For these and other suggested topics see ‘Propositions pour le sujet d’étude de la Conférence permanente des hautes études internatonales pour la période 1939–1941,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 101–102 (1939): 933–37. 144 J. B. Condliffe to Leo Gross, 9 November 1939, Organisation materielle de la XIIe Session de la Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales (CPHÉI), 1er septembre 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-25.c, UA. See also Francis P. Miller to Bonnet, 12 December 1939, Conférence permanente des hautes études internatonales: Les politiques économiques et la paix, dossier générale, du 1er mai 1939 à 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-22.c. The memoranda submitted to the conference by invited experts were published by the IIIC. Two of these memoranda, namely, Free Trade and Peace by Louis Baudin and World Trading Systems: A Study of British and American Commercial Policies by Henry J. Tasca, both of which were published by the IIIC in 1939, were very favourably reviewed in the following review article: John Donaldson, review of Free Trade and Peace by Louis Baudin, and John Donaldson, review of World Trading Systems by Henry J. Tasca, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 210, no. 1 (1940): 146–47.

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given how mindful they were of the harsh criticisms to which its 1937 conference on the subject of peaceful change had given rise.145 By 1939, the ISC’s work on the topic of peaceful change had become something of an embarrassment. This was not simply due to the poor quality of many of the memoranda submitted to the conference on the subject of peaceful change and the woeful character of much of the debate that took place in Paris in 1937. Colonial Questions and Peace was a survey of the work undertaken by the ISC in regard to colonial questions. The survey was compiled by Moresco and published by the IIIC in 1939 at some point just before the war broke out. At the head of the title of the book appeared the following: International Studies Conference: Peaceful Change. Moresco observed in the opening sentence of the preface to the book that ‘[s]eldom will a book seem so hopelessly out of date on the day of publication as the present volume on the colonial aspects of the problem of Peaceful Change.’ Having observed this, he posed the following question: ‘Could anything...nowadays have a more out-of-date appearance than the memoranda prepared for the 1937 Conference?’ By way of explaining how the book had come into being, Moresco noted that in 1935, when peaceful change was chosen as the subject of the ISC’s next study cycle, ‘important sections of public opinion were prepared, and indeed anxious, to consider the possibility of allaying the growing international unrest by giving satisfaction to genuine grievances against the territorial and economic status quo.’146 Moresco further noted that since that time, ‘many changes, involving the disappearance of several independent States’ had taken place and that although these changes had ‘occurred without formal war’ they were ‘very unlike the “peaceful change” which the 1935 Conference had in mind.’ Indeed, Moresco observed that it seemed that in light of the political developments that had occurred since 1935, the expression peaceful change had ‘lost all meaning’: the ‘widespread conviction’ now was that ‘concessions would serve only to strengthen opponents who are bound soon to become open enemies in an unavoidable struggle.’147 From that perspective, Moresco conceded, a study which took seriously the claims of the so-called have not states to new or former colonies insofar

145 Gross

to Condliffe, 8 December 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-25.c, UA. Colonial Questions and Peace, 13. 147 Ibid., 13. 146 Moresco,

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as it sought to seriously test those claims, was bound to ‘read like literature of a former age.’ Indeed, Moresco claimed that the study’s remaining utility largely concerned the fact that it provided a historical record of how a range of experts viewed colonial problems and peace in the period between 1935 and 1937 and in this he was undoubtedly right.148

Early Thoughts on the Organisation of Peace The administrative council of the IIIC had decided in April 1939 that should war eventuate it would do its best to maintain its technical activities and the lines connecting intellectual activity throughout the world. This commitment on the part of the IIIC was restated by Bonnet soon after the outbreak of hostilities. In regard to the ISC, its preparations for its next study cycle commenced on October 15 when Bonnet began liaising with the person who was to become the general rapporteur for that cycle: Pitman B. Potter.149 Since 1930, Potter had been professor of international organisation at the Graduate Institute of International Studies. A keen student of the LON, he had served in 1935 as legal adviser to the Ethiopian government and as a member of the Italo-Ethiopian Arbitration Commission. Potter had attended the Bergen conference as a representative of the Graduate Institute of International Studies and had recently replaced Remer as director of the GRC. Like other organisations concerned with the study of international affairs such as the New Commonwealth Society, the centre had upon the outbreak of war immediately launched an investigation into problems of international reorganisation.150 Potter had prepared a detailed programme of study for the ISC and this was adopted by its programme committee and approved by its executive committee at a meeting at the Hague on December 21 and 22, 1939.151 Among the many topics Potter suggested for consideration by 148 Ibid.,

14. Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle (a), nos. 1–2 (1939): 1–2, and Bonnet to Hall, October 14, 1939, AG 1-IICI-B-V-10, UA. 150 Pitman B. Potter to Henri Bonnet, 4 and 12 October 1939, Geneva Research Centre, à parter du 1er juin 1939, AG 1ICI—K-I-16.b. For Pitman B. Potter’s background, see Potter, ‘League Publicity: Cause or Effect of League Failure,’ 399. 151 Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, L’Institut Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 294. For Potter’s programme of study, see International Studies Conference: Suggested Study Programme, November, 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 149 ‘Note,’

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the conference was the political breakdown of the LON; the economic breakdown in international relations; the non-political work of the League; the different juridical and political doctrines of states; the psychological obstacles to peace; the ethical basis of international cooperation and population questions in relation to numbers, race, religion and nationality.152 However, the most important topic that Potter proposed in his view, was that of the ends international organisation: the peace and security of nations and the health and welfare and economic and cultural development of the population of each nation.153 In respect to the question of the nature of any future international organisation, Potter was very keen to stress that the focus of research should rest primarily on the ‘contractual’ dimension of involvement in international organisation rather than on the ‘moral and voluntary’ dimension of it. Potter stated that recent history had shown that emphasis on the latter served as a means of obstructing or even sabotaging effective international cooperation. In addition to this, and in contrast with the more regionalist approach to international order that the New Commonwealth (which in September 1939 had temporarily transferred its headquarters from Thorney House to the ‘Windsor’ in Queen’s Road, Aberystwyth), had adopted in relation to the work in which it was currently engaged, Potter wanted to insist on the universality of any future international organisation. For this reason, he emphasised that views should be sought not only from European states, but from countries outside Europe, including those located in North and South America and in Asia.154 Potter’s views on international organisation ran parallel to those of his compatriot Shotwell. Indeed, in November 1939, at the very time when Potter was beginning to design the ISC’s new programme of study, Shotwell and Clark Eichelberger set about organising the Commission to Study the Organisation of Peace. This commission, the membership of which included John Foster Dulles, Clyde Eagleton, Charles G. Fenwick, Jessup, Staley and Wright, was organised under the auspices 152 Memorandum of the General Reporter For Program Committee Meeting, December 21–22, 1939. Conférence permanente des hautes études, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 153 ‘Propositions de programme d’étude de la Conférence part le Prof. Pitman B. Potter,’ Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 1–2 (1939): 14–15. 154 Potter to Bonnet, 14 December 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. See also New Commonwealth Institute to International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, September 1939, Rapprochement international: Généralités, 1927–1944, AG 1-IICI-B-V-4.

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of the American League of Nations Association, of which Shotwell was the chair, the American Association of University Women, the Church Peace Union, the American Union for Concerted Peace Efforts and the World Citizens Association.155 In December 1939, the commission announced that its aim was to ‘assist the American people in thinking through “the fundamental bases of lasting peace”’ and that it would assist the American people in this regard by undertaking expert studies on the means necessary for the organisation of peace. Explaining in brief its method of approach, the commission declared that it would first study the fundamental principles of the problem before us, including such subjects as the economic interdependence of peoples, the changing nature of war and its effects in our world, and the experience and experiments since the World War of 1914-18. Coming to the heart of the problem, the Commission will consider the world we want, a world of justice and peace, and the means of arriving at these ends. The problem will be viewed from political, economic and social angles. Lastly, of course, there must be faced the problem of the rôle of the United States in dealing with these profoundly vital questions. It is not enough, however, for a group of experts in this or any other country to reach agreement as to the bases of a lasting peace. People everywhere must be studying the same problems and reaching their own conclusions. Popular education in this field is an essential part of the effort.156

In order to encourage the public’s thinking through of the bases of peace, the commission launched on January 27, 1940, a series of weekly national broadcasts on the Columbia Broadcasting System. These broadcasts, which were put out by certain members of the commission, addressed the following topics: the changing nature of war; the 155 For the membership of the Commission to Study the Organisation of Peace see Charles DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ Political Science Quarterly 89, no. 2 (1974): 379–95, 392, and Smith Simpson, ‘The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace,’ American Political Science Review 35, no. 2 (1941): 317–24, 318–19. The Church Peace Union was founded by Dale Carnegie in 1914. The American Union for Concerted Peace Efforts was formed in New York on March 30, 1939. It had three aims: ‘to oppose aggression, to promote economic justice between nations and to develop adequate peace machinery.’ Shotwell was one of its honorary vice-presidents. The World Citizens Association was founded in Chicago 1939. See Simpson, ‘The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace,’ 318n–19n. 156 Pamphlet issued by the Commission to Study the Organisation of Peace, 1939, quoted in Simpson, ‘The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace,’ 318.

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aftermath of the World War; disarmament; existing international institutions; the problems of the Americas and the Far East; an inter-democracy federal union; the possible bases of organising peace in Europe; peaceful change; peace enforcement; markets and raw materials; and the possibilities of world organisation.157 The commission did not put its expertise solely at the disposal of the public: it placed it also at the disposal of the United States’ government and later a nascent United Nations.158 Shotwell was among those who wrote into part thirteen of the Labour Section of the Treaty of Versailles that ‘[p]ermanent peace rests upon social justice’.159 The basis for this statement concerning the relation between peace and social justice was the conviction that no nation can be regarded as ‘safe’ in its dealings with other nations unless it adhered to a high standard of justice in its dealings with its own citizens, a conviction which the behaviour of dictatorial regimes in the interwar years served to greatly reinforce.160 Charles DeBenedetti observes that Shotwell’s approach to international relations coincided with the belief ‘in the importance of independent expert authorities for the building of world order’ and with ‘evolving Functional beliefs in the primacy of international social welfare activities.’161 DeBenedetti states that where Shotwell differed somewhat from the leaders of the functionalist school was in his greater emphasis on collective security mechanisms.162 Shotwell’s emphasis on collective security mechanisms partly explains why Shotwell stated in a paper published in July 1940 in a volume of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science which was dedicated to the topic of ‘When Peace Comes,’ that France ‘had the right idea’ in saying ‘rightly that the way to disarm is to give nations that sense of security that will 157 Ibid., 320. The dates of the broadcasts on behalf of the Commission to Study the Organisation of Peace subsequent to the first broadcast were as follows: February 3, 10, 17, 24; March 2, 9, 16, 23, 30; April 6, 13, 20, 27 and May 11. There was another broadcast on November 9, 1940. 158 Ibid., and James T. Shotwell, ‘International Organization,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 210, no. 1 (1940): 19–23, 19. 159 Shotwell, ‘International Organization,’ 21. 160 Ibid., and DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 391. 161 DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 392. 162 Ibid.

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enable them to disarm.’163 I say partly because in making this statement, Shotwell was alluding not only to the maintenance of peace through sanctions. In the same context, he insisted that in order to disarm fears, one must in addition to establishing security mechanisms, erect and strengthen and fortify the institutions of international understanding—not only those of justice, but those that lead toward justice; confidence, diplomacy, and all those institutions in which the gathering storm of disagreement may be dissolved by a reasonable understanding of what the other party wants.164

In order to illustrate this point, Shotwell offered criticism of the United States’ approach to its relations with the Far East. He complained that the American attitude towards the region remained that of the ‘missionary’: the United States was determined to ‘save their souls somehow in the Far East without responsibility or risk’ to itself.165 Shotwell went on to state that the organisation of peace, a matter on which he would advise the State Department during the war in helping it to plan the structure of the United Nations, called for much greater international institutional developments than the League of Nations ‘gave us a glimpse of.’166 Reflecting his functional orientation and also his background in intellectual cooperation, Shotwell emphasised the need for institutional developments in the non-political fields, that is, in the economic, social and technical fields. He stated in relation to this the following: 163 Shotwell,

‘International Organization,’ 22–23. 23. 165 Shotwell, ‘International Organization,’ 23. Harold Josepson records that Shotwell was sympathetic to the Chinese claims in relation extra-territoriality and at the IPR’s conference in Kyoto in 1929, had sought to find a compromise between China’s insistence that extraterritoriality violated its sovereignty and the American, British and French unwillingness to accept its ‘unilateral termination’. In regard to the question of Manchuria, while ‘admitting the validity of some of the Japanese claims,’ Shotwell ‘thoroughly abhorred the method chosen’. At first, he had accepted the Hoover-Stimson Policy of ‘watchful-waiting in the hope that more liberal forces in Tokyo would regain control of the government’. However, in December of 1931, recognising that this policy would not work, Shotwell called for the United States to ‘strongly assert the validity of the Kellogg Pact and the Nine-Power Treaty.’ Harold Josepson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America (New Jersey: Associated University Press, 1975), 182, 193. 166 Shotwell, ‘International Organization,’ 23. For Shotwell’s advisory role, see DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 392. 164 Ibid.,

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[W]e can go a long way on the pathway toward permanent peace if at the present time, even in war-time, we plan and think and give vitality to those instruments and institutions which stand for world prosperity, world health, world understanding in the intellectual field and the common heritage in the culture of the race.167

Nutrition and the Changed Economic Outlook at the League The League’s so-called technical activities intensified and widened in scope at the very same time as its political activities entered a state of eclipse. Its work on the problem of nutrition is a case in point. A problem which for a long time was handled chiefly by the LON’s Health Organisation, in the latter part of the 1930s it came to be largely dealt with by the LON’s Economic and Financial Organisation to the extent that it concerned such matters as standards of living and the economics of consumption. The LON first broached the problem of nutrition in 1925 when, following a proposal by the Yugoslav delegation, the assembly requested that the Health Organisation’s Health Committee study ‘the methods to be recommended in the interests of public health for the regulation of the manufacture and sale of food products.’168 In light of this, the Health Section of the LON Secretariat published in 1926 a collection of memoranda prepared by the director of the Imperial Institute of Nutrition in Tokyo, namely, Saiki Tadasu, and his assistants: Progress of the Science of Nutrition in Japan. The following year, Saiki gave lectures on nutrition in Argentina, Brazil, Chile (the government of which would receive on May 9, 1932, the LON Council’s assent to its request for the assistance of the League’s technical organisations in studying popular nutrition in Chile), and the United States under the auspices of the Health Organisation.169 In October 1928, at the thirteenth session of the LON’s Health Committee (a committee which contained ‘more experts from private 167 Shotwell,

‘International Organization,’ 23. of Nations, The Problem of Nutrition, vol. 2, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition (Geneva: League of Nations, 1936), 4. 169 League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 4. See also League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Second Session of the Health Committee (Geneva: League of Nations, October 1935), 4. C. 426. M. 218. 168 League

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life’ than was ‘the case with most of the League’s other technical committees’), Léon Bernard requested in the name of the French government that nutrition be included within the committee’s programme of work. That same year, the Health Section published a report entitled The Food of Japan which had been prepared by Egerton Grey of the University of Cairo in the wake of Grey’s visit to the Imperial Institute of Nutrition, a visit that had been organised by the Health Section. In 1931, the Health Committee organised a collective tour to study the supply of milk in the United States. The results of this study were published in two numbers of the Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation in 1932. In 1933, the Quarterly Bulletin published a report on the hygiene of milk in the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle.170 The main intention behind the early work undertaken by the League’s Health Organisation concerning nutrition was to show the role of adequate nutrition in preventative medicine. However, the onset and deepening of the Depression saw the Health Committee expand its field of vision. At its nineteenth session in October 1932, the Health Committee decided ‘to undertake the study of the effects of the economic crisis on public health, with particular reference to conditions of under-nutrition produced by the crisis.’171 This decision gave rise to a study on the institutional means by which the nourishment of the poor was assured in the United Kingdom and a study of the relation between diet and low-incomes. The Health Committee also convened two conferences of experts in 1932, one in Rome in September and one in Berlin in December, both of which dealt not only with such medical questions as the principles of an adequate diet, but also with ‘the conditions brought about by the economic crisis’.172 The reports of these two conferences and the two aforementioned studies were subsequently published in the Quarterly Bulletin.173 170 Morley, The Society of Nations, 614, and League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 4. See also League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Second Session of the Health Committee 7; R. Burri, ‘The Milk Supply of North American Cities,’ Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 1, no. 1 (1932); G. S. Wilson, ‘The System of Grading Milk in the United States of American,’ Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 1, no. 4 (1932); and J. Parisot, P. Melnotte, and L. Fernier, ‘Milk Hygiene in the Department of Meurthe-etMoselle,’ Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 3, no. 4 (1934). 171 League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 4. 172 Ibid. 173 Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 1, no. 3 (1932), and Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 2, no. 1 (1933).

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Against this background, the Health Committee decided in 1934 that a general report on nutrition was warranted and charged two of the Health Section’s staff with undertaking it. In the early part of 1935, Étienne Burnet, a Frenchman, and Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd, an Englishman, prepared a report entitled ‘Nutrition and Public Health’ which was published in the Quarterly Bulletin in June of that year. The report inquired into nutrition policy and its implementation in the United Kingdom and France (including the colonial areas governed by these powers), as well as the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Soviet Union. Importantly and continuous with the work of the Rome and Berlin conferences, the report emphasised that nutrition was not only a physiological problem but an economic problem. It stated the following: Production, distribution and consumption have hitherto been considered mainly as economic problems without sufficient regard to their effect on public health, but the effect of the economic depression has directed attention to the gap which almost everywhere exists between dietary needs as determined by physiology and the means of satisfying them under existing conditions. The general problem of nutrition as it presents itself to-day is that of harmonising economic and public health development.174

The report of Burnet and Aykroyd received considerable attention and was used as a basis for discussion of nutrition at the Sixteenth Assembly following a request by twelve countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Union of South Africa, the United Kingdom and Venezuela), that the question be placed on the agenda.175 Also informing the discussion was a memorandum written by 174 League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 6. See also Étienne Burnet and Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd, ‘Nutrition and Public Health,’ Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 4, no. 2: 323–474. 175 League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Second Session of the Health Committee, 4; League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 5; League of Nations, The Problem of Nutrition, vol. 1, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition (Geneva: League of Nations, 1936), 7; League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health Agriculture and Economic Policy (Geneva: League of Nations, 1937), 12; and League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Fifth Session of the Health Committee Geneva, April 26th–May 1st (Geneva: League of Nations, 1937), Official No. G. 219. M. I59 e 1937.111, 12.

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Frank Lidgett McDougall in January 1935 called The Agricultural and the Health Problems in which the author suggested that improved efficiency in agricultural production and a reduction in tariffs, through making protective foods, that is, foods rich in vitamins, cheaper and therefore more accessible to the larger sections of the population, would assist in addressing (alongside education programs, wealth redistribution and social relief), the health and other problems that result from poor nutrition.176 McDougall was an economic advisor to the Australian High Commission in London and in that role he served as an advisor to the Australian delegation to the LON between 1928 and 1940. McDougall also advised the Australian delegation to the 1933 World Monetary and Economic Conference which agreed on little else but a drastic restriction of production. The thinking behind this policy restricting production was as follows: ‘create scarcity and wait for prices to rise.’177 Towards the close of this conference Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a former Australian prime minister and the leader of the Australian delegation to the conference, declared ‘that since [the] conference…only agreed on the desirability of the restriction of production in a poverty stricken world, the inevitable consequence must be greatly to strengthen the forces of fascism and communism.’178 Aykroyd, who had been working at the Health Section since 1931, later observed that the conference’s ‘one concrete proposal…ran counter to the findings of the new science of nutrition which, emerging from the laboratory, demonstrated that good health depends on good diet…. From the standpoint of nutrition, the main trouble was not the overproduction of food, but underconsumption.’179 McDougall, who was also dismayed by the advocacy of ‘restriction policies to control plenty 176 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 164–66, and John B. O’Brien, ‘F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 46, no. 2 (2000): 164–74, 170. John B. O’Brien points out that The Agricultural and the Health Problems ’drew on the work of Dr. Hazel Stibling of the United States Health Department of Agriculture, Dr. Rajchmann [Ludwik Rajchmann], director of the health section of the League of Nations, Dr. Burnet and Dr. Aykroyd in Australia and most important of all, on his colleague from the Empire Marketing Board John Boyd Orr of the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen and author of the book Food, Health and Income [1936].’ O’Brien, ‘F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,’ 169-70. 177 Wallace Ruddell Ackroyd, 1968, quoted in R. Passmore, ‘Obituary Notice: Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd,’ British Journal of Nutrition 43, no. 2 (1980): 245–50, 246. 178 F. L. McDougall, 1951, quoted in O’Brien, ‘F.L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,’ 167. See also Passmore, ‘Obituary Notice: Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd,’ 246. 179 Passmore, ‘Obituary Notice: Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd,’ 246.

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in a poverty stricken world,’ reached the same conclusion as Aykroyd in regard to the centrality of the issue of underconsumption, albeit from the standpoint of both public health and economic growth.180 In early November 1934, in consultation with John Boyd Orr, director of the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen and author of the National Food Supply and Its Influence on Public Health (1934), McDougall urged the following in respect to contemporary scientific views on nutrition: [They] should be pushed forward in every possible way, both nationally and internationally, in brief…the time has come when, in the interest of world recovery and the prosperity of the peoples of the British Empire, it is necessary to secure the greatest possible notice for modern ideas about nutrition.181

In order to secure such notice, McDougall enlisted the support of Australian officials, convincing them that policies conducive to an improvement in ‘worldwide nutritional levels were also in Australia’s best interest, by increasing demand for Australian agricultural exports.’182 He also sought support in Geneva. On a visit to the seat of the LON in March 1935, he introduced himself to Aykroyd. The latter read McDougall’s memorandum with interest, seeing in it confirmation of the finding in the Burnet-Aykroyd report that in various countries large numbers of people were not sufficiently or suitably nourished.183 The memorandum also excited the interest of Ludwik Rajchmann, director of the Health Section and the person who early had the ‘vision,’ Ackroyd later observed, to expand ‘the concept of International Health work to include nutrition.’184 Further support in Geneva came in the form of the International Labour Office which had been advised of the general plan of the BurnetAykroyd report and had expressed a desire to cooperate in a study of the nutrition of workers.185 By April 9, it was in the process of preparing 180 F. L. McDougall, 1940, quoted in O’Brien, ‘F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,’ 167. 181 F. L. McDougall, 1934, quoted in Way, A New Idea Each Day, 162. 182 O’Brien, ‘F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,’ 164. 183 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 166. 184 Passmore, ‘Obituary Notice: Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd,’ 246. See also Way, A New Idea Each Day, 266. 185 League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 7.

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a draft resolution concerning such a study. Wendy Way points out that collaboration between the International Labour Office and the Health Organisation ‘was rapid and effective’ and that League officials endorsed the office’s draft, albeit adding a specification that the Health Organisation should cooperate in producing a study with the LON’s Economic and Financial Organisation and the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) in Rome.186 At the nineteenth International Labour Conference in June 1935, the attention of participants was drawn to the question of nutrition in the report of its director and by statements made by Sir Frederick Stewart and Ada Paterson, delegates of Australia and New Zealand respectively, and by Grace Abbot, the head of the American delegation. Rajchmann informed McDougall that Abbot had expressed interest in The Agricultural and the Food Problems.187 Against this background, the following resolution was unanimously adopted: Seeing that nutrition adequate both in quantity and in quality is essential to the health and well-being of the workers and their families; And seeing that, in various countries, evidence has been brought forward to show that large numbers of persons both in town and country are not sufficiently or suitably nourished: Seeing, moreover, that an increase in the consumption of agricultural foodstuffs would help to raise standards of life and relieve the existing depression in agriculture: The Conference welcomes the attention drawn by the Director in his report to the problem of nutrition and requests the Governing Body to instruct the Office to continue its investigation of the problem, particularly in its social aspects, in collaboration with the Health and Economic Organisations of the League of Nations, the International Institute of Agriculture and other bodies capable of contributing to its solution, with a view to presenting a report on the subject to the 1936 session of the Conference.188 186 Way,

A New Idea Each Day, 167. of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 8. For Grace Abbot’s interest in the McDougall memorandum, see Way, A New Idea Each Day, 166–67. 188 League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 8. Pursuant to the International Labour Conference’s resolution, the International Labour Office in May 1936 published a general report under the heading of ‘Workers Nutrition and Social Policy.’ The Mixed Committee found the report to be of ‘the greatest value.’ League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health Agriculture and Economic Policy, 12–23. 187 League

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The discussion of nutrition at the Sixteenth Assembly was launched by Bruce on September 11.189 Echoing McDougall who was with him in Geneva, Bruce maintained that from both an agricultural and public health standpoint, underconsumption was the problem that needed to be addressed. Bruce told the assembly the following: Increased yields are being regretted and abundance is often officially deplored. At the same time Ministers of Health and their official and medical advisers are realising, more and more, that public health demands an increased consumption of many of the very products about which the Departments of Agriculture are so unhappy. Millions of pounds are being spent annually in subsidies, bonuses and other forms of assistance to agriculture. Side by side with that expenditure millions of pounds are being devoted to combating disease. Is it not possible to marry health and agriculture and, by so doing, make a great step in the improvement of national health and, at the same time, an appreciable contribution to the solution of the agricultural problem.190

A full discussion of the problem of nutrition ‘in relation to public health on the one hand, and social and economic organisation on the other,’ then ensued.191 According to Astor, who as noted was appointed as chair of what was informally known as the League’s Nutrition Committee, the striking interest shown by delegates to the Sixteenth Assembly in the problem was largely due to the realisation that major improvements in public health and social betterment could be achieved through better nutrition. According to Astor, the interest shown by delegates in the question of nutrition was also attributable to the conviction that through improved nutrition, ‘it should be possible to contribute first, towards a solution of national and international agricultural problems, and secondly towards an improvement in the world’s economic situation.’192 Following discussion at a plenary meeting and as result of a motion supported by Argentina, Australia, Austria, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, France, Italy, New Zealand, Poland and Sweden, the problem of nutrition was 189 Passmore,

‘Obituary Notice: Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd,’ 246. special supplement, OJ, no. 138 (1935), 42. 191 League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 7. 192 Ibid., 5. See also Loveday, ‘The Economic and Financial Activities of the League,’ 796. 190 LON,

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referred to the assembly’s Second Committee.193 Within the framework of this committee, the mandate of which concerned the League’s technical organisations, the problem was the subject of a three-day debate in which twenty delegations participated.194 In this forum too, the discussion was introduced by Bruce who emphasised the following: [T]he necessity for marrying agriculture and public health in the interests of the latter; of increasing the consumption of protective foods as a remedy for malnutrition and the agricultural crisis, and of changing the incidence of State protective subsidies so that they should serve to increase consumption rather than to restrict production. He pointed out the necessity for reducing the wide gap between wholesale and retail prices and of reducing the costs of distribution.195

Following consideration of a report issued by the Second Committee, the assembly, ‘having considered the subject of nutrition in relation to public health and the effects of improved nutrition on the consumption of agricultural products,’ adopted the proposal of the Australian delegate: it invited the Health Organisation to ‘continue and develop’ its work on nutrition and instructed the technical organisations of the League, in consultation with the International Labour Office and the IIA to ‘collect, summarise, and publish information on the measures taken in all countries for securing improved nutrition.’196 At the same time, the Assembly decided to establish a so-called Mixed Committee. The committee was named as such in order to emphasise the diversity of interests tied up with the problem of nutrition and, accordingly, was composed of experts in a diversity of fields: it included experts in the fields of agriculture, economics and public health. The committee had as its mandate the preparation of a report for the benefit of the next assembly on the problem of nutrition in its public health and economic aspects.197 193 League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 7, and Way, A New Idea Each, 168. 194 League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 7. 195 League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 6. 196 League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 7, and League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Fifth Session of the Health Committee, 12. 197 League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Fifth Session of the Health Committee, 12, and League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 8–10.

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In view of the assembly’s resolution and having considered the BurnetAykroyd report, the Health Committee decided in October to establish a Technical Commission on Nutrition composed of medical experts. This commission first met between November 25 and 29 in London where it drew up the following report: The Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition. This report was published in Geneva on December 6.198 As to the Mixed Committee, McDougall had suggested to League officials not only the kind of experts that should be on the committee but also that ‘decisions about membership should pay some regard to geographical representation; it should include “the best available men” from the United States, the overseas dominions, France, Scandinavia, Central Europe, the Mediterranean and South America.’199 In the event, the committee included experts recruited from all the countries and regions McDougall had specified, McDougall himself being among them. Also included on the committee at the suggestion of McDougall were representatives of the Health Committee’s Technical Commission and the International Labour Office.200 A representative of the League’s Child Welfare Committee was also appointed. Later however, following the absorption of the Child Welfare Committee by the Advisory Committee on Social Questions in January 1937, the representative of the former committee was replaced by a representative of the latter.201 The IIA was well represented on the committee, although it is noteworthy that its Italian representatives did not attend any of the committee’s sessions. One of those representatives was Baron Giacomo Acerbo, a former minister, dean of the Economic and Commercial Faculty at the University of Rome and the president of the IIA. The other Italian appointed to the committee was the IIA’s former president Giuseppe De Michelis. A senator since 1928 and a former Italian delegate to the League, De Michelis 198 League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Fifth Session of the Health Committee, 13, and ‘Physiological Bases of Nutrition,’ The Lancet 226, no. 5860 (1935): 1434–437. 199 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 190. 200 League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 9–10; League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 9–10, and Way, A New Idea Each Day, 171. 201 League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 9–10.

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was a member of the National Research Council in Rome and from 1920 to 1936 was the leader of the Italian delegation to the ILO.202 Appointments to the committee were in hands of the council and were largely complete by December 18. One appointment that had yet to be made at that point in time was the committee’s chair. McDougall had proposed to League officials that the chair be occupied by a Briton. The council evidently agreed as Bruce, then a member of the council, was charged with approaching potential British candidates.203 In regard to this, Way records the following: Bruce ‘sounded out Austen Chamberlain. Winston Churchill was interested and would have taken the role, had he not been preoccupied with defence problems. He did offer to make “a big speech on the subject” at any appropriate occasion. Bruce really wanted Astor, but had to wait until 18 January to see him in person,’ by which time Bruce was president of the council.204 In the event, Astor, chair of the British Milk-in-Schools Advisory Committee of the Milk Marketing Board, former parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Food and later the Ministry of Health, happily accepted the role.205 The Mixed Committee held three sessions and these took place on the following dates: February 10–16 and June 4–7, 1936, and April 12–17, 1937. At the conclusion of its first session, its members agreed that it would be impossible to produce a comprehensive report covering such a vast field in time for the next assembly. It thus decided that before completing the entirety of its investigations it would issue an interim report devoted primarily to explaining modern scientific ideas about nutrition and the dangers to public health of disregarding these ideas and exposing the principles that should guide national nutrition policies.206 202 For the international outlook of Giuseppe De Michelis, see Giuseppe De Michelis, World Reorganisation on Corporative Lines (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935), 171-4. See also Giuseppe De Michelis, La coporazione nel mundo (Milan: Bompian, 1934), and Giussepe De Michelis, La corporation dans le monde (Paris: Éditions Denoël et Steele, 1935). For nuanced portrait of Giuseppe De Michelis, see Jens Steffek, ‘Fascist Internationalism,’ Millennium 44, no. 1 (2015): 3-22. See also League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 9–10. 203 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 171–72. 204 Ibid., 172. 205 Ibid and League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 9. 206 League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 5, and League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 14, 21.

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In addition, the committee made, according to Alexander Loveday, director of the Financial Section and its attached Economic Intelligence Service, the ‘very sensible decision’ that before it drew up any kind of report, it would urge governments to establish national nutrition committees. As a result of this decision, Loveday stated, the nutrition movement, which although very strong in Great Britain and one or two other places at the time was weak everywhere else, gained visibility in wider and wider areas: scientists and social workers who had been ‘struggling – generally rather obscurely’ with the problem of nutrition now had the ‘ear of governments’ and this ‘focussed attention on the problem.’207 The interim report of the Mixed Committee was published on June 24 and comprised four volumes: the first volume was the interim report proper; the second volume was the aforementioned Technical Commission’s report as revised and amplified at the Mixed Committee meeting of June 4–7; the third volume was a report entitled Nutrition in Various Countries which was a summary of information provided by the countries concerned in light of a request by the secretary-general in November 1935 and relevant information from other sources; and the fourth volume was a report compiled by the IIA called Statistics of Food Production, Consumption and Prices which had been presented to the Mixed Committee in June.208 The publication of the interim report gave further impetus to the efforts of existing national organisations devoted to nutrition and to efforts to establish such organisations. In light of this and on the prompting of the Seventeenth Assembly, a meeting of representatives of a number of national nutrition committees was held in Geneva from February 22 to 26, 1937, under the chairmanship of Astor with a view to exchanges of information.209 On August 14, 1937 the Mixed Committee’s final report was published. Entitled The Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, its primary focus was on the economic and agricultural 207 Loveday,

‘The Economic and Financial Activities of the League,’ 796. of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 12, 14, and League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 8. See also League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, i. The interim report noted that as of June 24, the fourth volume of the report was still in preparation. 209 League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 15. 208 League

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aspects of the problem of nutrition, these aspects having been treated only in brief in the interim report.210 Like its interim report, the Mixed Committee’s final report was received extremely well by public opinion as evidenced by the fact that a second edition was published a few weeks after its initial release and that, owing to private efforts, it was translated into a variety of languages thus making it accessible to those not versed in the two official languages of the League.211 Frank P. Walters, who had been Drummond’s chef de cabinet, wrote in his history of the LON that ‘in spite of its cumbrous title and official character, the Nutrition Report enjoyed wide and immediate success. It became the best seller among League publications in both the official languages…[and]…its popular appeal was proved by the space devoted to it in the daily press of many countries. This, indeed, had been the ambition of its authors.’212 In June 1938, at a meeting at Chatham House chaired by Condliffe, Loveday gave an address in which he explained the evolution of the League’s activities in the economic field, dwelling at some length on the impact on those activities of the growth in interest in the question of nutrition. Loveday stated in his address, albeit somewhat inaccurately, that the League’s work on nutrition ‘naturally began as a health problem and nothing more.’ He then pointed out that ‘when the movement in Great Britain acquired considerable impetus, the whole question of nutrition in its widest aspects—social and economic—was submitted by the Australian delegation to the to the League.’213 Loveday observed that the national nutrition committees had been of invaluable assistance in the production of the Mixed Committee’s final report through collecting evidence about local conditions and providing information on national policy. He noted that the League’s Economic and Financial Organisation had helped arrange the meeting of some of these committees in February 1937 and that he had ‘sent an official round Europe’ to consult with representatives of the European nutrition committees

210 Ibid.,

1.

211 Loveday,

‘The Economic and Financial Activities of the League,’ 796. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 754–55. Frank P. Walters points out that ‘[w]hen Bruce laid his plan before the Assembly, nutrition committees existed in only three States; four years later, there were thirty’ (ibid., 755). 213 Loveday, ‘The Economic and Financial Activities of the League,’ 795–96. 212 F.

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before the final report was drafted.214 Loveday observed that it might strike people as curious that the Economic and Financial Organisation was undertaking work of this kind, adding that he had thought it so when it had fallen to him to undertake it some eighteen months earlier.215 However, he then stated the following: But the fact that it is being handled largely by…[the Economic and Financial Organisation]..reflects, I think, a change in politico-economic outlook of the utmost importance. We have been in the habit of looking on economics as the art or science of production, as being concerned with the amount of the national income or with man as a producer. To-day we are beginning to think of man as a consumer and of the economics of consumption. We are beginning to ask ourselves not simply how much is produced, but what is consumed and by whom. We are beginning to believe that, even though politics set limits to economic negotiations, many of our political worries may be solved not by talking politics but by satisfying wants, the wants of the individual consumer.216

As Loveday suggested during his address at Chatham House, the fact that the Economic and Financial Organisation extended its field of vision to include such issues as domestic standards of living, the economics of consumption and nutrition, must be viewed against the backdrop which was the growing conviction that economic policy must be much more oriented to social needs: there was a growing conviction that solving the problems of war and political turmoil demanded the satisfaction of wants within national communities no less than improvements in international commercial relations.217 It is telling of the growth of this conviction that a study by McDougall called Food and Welfare (1938), which had been

214 Ibid.,

796. 795–97. 216 Ibid., 796. 217 ‘During the past few years, the Economic and Financial Organisation of the League has tended to concern itself less exclusively with problems of international commercial relations in the strict sense and to devote increased attention to the study of national economic problems common to a large number of countries.’ League of Nations, Economic and Financial Questions: Report submitted by the Second Committee to the Assembly, September 26, 1938, 4–6, 10A/35282/1778 A.64.1938.IIB, League of Nations Archives, Geneva. 215 Ibid.,

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commissioned by the GRC, was distributed to participants at the Bergen conference.218 Way suggests that it may well have in recognition of his efforts at the LON that McDougall was appointed for a three year period in January 1937 to the Economic Committee of the LON’s Economic and Financial Organisation. Later that year, that committee would examine a memorandum McDougall completed in December 1936 called ‘Economic Appeasement’ in which he outlined the steps he thought should be taken at a national and international level to improve standards of living with a view to reviving world trade and, in turn, easing political tensions.219 Notably, McDougall stated the following therein: ‘If the nations learn to turn to the League for information, help and advice on economic and social questions, the prestige that has been lost on the political plane may be regained on a firmer basis.’220 Under the heading of ‘Economic Appeasement,’ an editorial published in the Times on September 22, 1937, opined that Bruce clearly had McDougall’s ‘instructive’ memorandum in mind the day before when giving what the newspaper hailed as a ‘noteworthy’ speech and which it cited as ‘proof that this year the League of Nations is wisely approaching its task of promoting international appeasement from a new angle’: through promoting economic cooperation among states, including both states which were members of the LON and states which were not.221 Bruce spoke at the assembly immediately after the Romanian foreign minister Victor Antonescu had delivered a speech. The latter’s speech is noteworthy in this context because in it Antonescu drew attention to the movement within the LON to reform the covenant through eliminating its collective security provisions. Antonescu told the assembly on September 21, 1937, that these were provisions to which the Petite Entente, of which he was president in office, was devoted precisely because it was devoted to the principle that ‘every nation has an 218 F. L. McDougall, ‘Food and Welfare,’ Geneva Special Studies 9, no. 5 (Geneva: Geneva Research Centre, 1938), and Marie Louise Berg, secretary of the Geneva Research Centre, to Gross, February 14, 1939, AG 1ICI—K-I-16.b. See also Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 99–100 (1939): 786–87. 219 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 177. See also ‘Standard of Living: Ways to Economic Appeasement,’ Times, September 18, 1937. 220 F. L. McDougall, 1936, quoted in Way, A New Idea Each Day, 199. 221 ‘Economic Appeasement,’ Times, September 22, 1937. See also Way, A New Idea Each Day, 202.

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inalienable right to choose its own form of national life.’222 Having noted that some claimed that the covenant was not in harmony with the fast-paced rhythm of contemporary international life, Antonsecu stated the following: It would indeed be a great error to invoke this dynamic character as a reason for making the League an institution that would relegate to the background those principles of justice, order, peace and security that are at the base of the Covenant in its present form in order to give a so-called juridical and moral foundation to any unilateral claims that could be satisfied only at the expense of others. It is not by urging views that are destructive of faith in international order, it is, on the contrary, by giving each state the certainty that its political independence and the existing integrity of its territory will be respected—that is to say, by creating a feeling of security, in the subjective sense of that notion, that we shall be able to put a stop to the armaments race. It is by… ensuring the efficacy of existing guarantees against acts of force and violence…that peace may be made a living reality….Hence it is not the reform of the Covenant that we should contemplate, but the means for giving full efficacy to its present provisions.223

Fittingly in light of Atonescu’s discourse, Bruce commenced his speech with the observation that it had become evident to all in recent years that the maintenance of security and peace the by LON had not achieved what its founders had hoped it would. He further noted that it was in light of this consideration that the last assembly had established a committee with a view to the development of proposals for the more effective implementation of the ideals embodied in the covenant: the Committee on the Application of the Principles of the Covenant. Bruce

222 LON,

special supplement, OJ, no. 169 (1937), 74–5. 74. Rebecca Haynes notes that Victor Anontescu’s public speeches concealed ‘a change in foreign policy which took place during his ministry. The breakdown of the Frenchbacked collective security system and the re-emergence of Germany as an assertive Great Power by the mid-1930s necessitated a re-alignment of Romanian foreign policy. Although there was no formal change of alliances, the Antonescu ministry inaugurated a shift towards a position of informal neutrality between the Great Powers and a corresponding diminution of Romania’s foreign-policy obligations.’ Rebecca Haynes, ‘Victor Antonescu and Romania’s Foreign Policy Readjustment, September 1936 to December 1937,’ in Romanian Policy Towards Germany, 1936–40 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 19, https://doi. org/10.1007/978-0-230-59818-8_2. 223 Ibid.,

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added that he very much hoped that as a result of this committee’s work, ‘a way will be found to restore the prestige of the League and to achieve the objects for which it was founded.’224 He then stated that one would have wished that during a period of such reflection, there would have been no major outbreak of hostilities, and that the Eighteenth Assembly might have been able to focus its attention on the LON’s work in the financial, economic and humanitarian fields. However, he added, the conflict which had ‘broken out in the Far East,’ had made ‘necessary some immediate and explicit consideration of the function of the League as a political organisation.’225 Bruce reaffirmed the declaration made by the Australian delegation at the assembly in 1936: that Australia remained committed to the principles enshrined in the covenant. However, he then observed that the events of recent years had ‘indisputably disclosed the practical impossibility of putting into full operation’ those principles when it came to action in response to international disputes ‘by a League from which some of the greatest States in the world are absent.’226 Turning to the situation of China which, as Bruce noted, had invoked three of the ‘vital political articles’ of the covenant, namely, Articles 10, 11, 17, in view of the recent Japanese aggression, Bruce stated the following: It is imperative that we should face unflinchingly the reality with which this action confronts us. Nothing could be more fatal to the prestige and future welfare of the League than that we should attempt, by some meaningless formula, to postpone or side-step facing the issues involved and defining the League’s attitude and position. Moreover, honour and the permanent interests of the League itself demand that China should not be misled into believing that she can rely on forms of assistance which may not be forthcoming.227

In regard to the Sino-Japanese dispute, Bruce recommended that the council should endeavour to arrange a conference of those powers, whether members or non-members of the LON, which had a vital

224 LON,

special supplement, OJ, no. 169 (1937), 75. 75–6. 226 Ibid., 76. 227 Ibid. 225 Ibid.,

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interest in the situation in the Far East with a view to ‘such Conference getting in touch’ with the parties to the dispute and attempting to arrive at ‘some settlement or concerting such measures as may be necessary and practicable.’228 After having stated that in the immediate term this was the only possible course of action open to the LON, Bruce addressed himself to the economic and financial work of the organisation, stating that he did not accept the view that ‘political appeasement’ must be realised before any advances could be made in terms of international economic cooperation. Of this view, he stated the following: I suggest it has been falsified by the actual events of recent years. Indeed, our political difficulties arise indirectly, if not directly, in a considerable measure from economic causes. With poor and insecure living standards, with low incomes, a poor scale of nutrition, with the fear of unemployment ever present, individual and family life becomes depressed and hopeless. In these circumstances, unrest and dissatisfaction are prevalent. People are driven to seek distraction and inspiration in exaggerated forms of nationalism and in dreams of national aggrandisement. If, however, we can by international co-operation improve living standards, bring about a higher standard of nutrition, lessen disease, increase health and remove the haunting fear of unemployment, I believe we shall change the whole world atmosphere, allay much of the unrest that exists to-day, and pave the way for the solution of the political problems that confront us. In attempting this task, we can derive great encouragement from the excellent work which the League has already accomplished in the economic and social fields.229

Bruce then pointed out that some important documents had been recently published by the LON on economic and social questions: the reports of the Raw Materials Committee; the report of the Economic Committee on the Present Phase of Economic Relations; the Note by the Secretary-General on the Economic Situation; and, most importantly in his view, the final report of the Mixed Committee on Nutrition. Bruce noted that the LON’s work in the economic field had been helped by the cooperation of states which were not members of the LON. In this regard he drew particular attention to the ‘active cooperation’ of the United States in the context of the International Labour Office and on the technical committees of the LON and noted that all the LON’s efforts in the 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid.

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direction of economic improvement in recent years had been fully supported by President Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull.230 The LON had been further encouraged in its pursuit international economic cooperation, Bruce noted, by the recent agreement among France, Great Britain and the United States which was the Tripartite Monetary Agreement and, according to Bruce, it looked forward with great interest to the report of Van Zeeland on ‘the important mission’ which he had undertaken at the request of France and Great Britain.231 Noting the ‘almost unlimited power of increased production’ that science now placed at the world’s disposal and suggesting that the success of LON ’s work in the economic field thus far would soon be overshadowed by the ‘immeasurably greater things’ it would achieve in that field in the future, Bruce declared that it was important to keep in mind ‘the fundamental human issues’ with which the LON’s economic work, in the final analysis, was concerned: the ‘raison d’être’ of international economic cooperation concerned the fact that such cooperation was required if the livelihoods of ‘the general mass of….ordinary men and women’ were to be bettered.232 Having observed that the report of the Mixed Committee on Nutrition was only a preliminary step in this direction, Bruce proposed that the assembly request the council ‘to organise another ad hoc enquiry to consider methods, both national and international, for bringing about a progressive improvement in standards of living.’233 By means of showing leadership in regard to social and economic questions, Bruce declared in concluding his speech, ‘we shall best restore the prestige of the League in the eyes of the world and carry out the great responsibilities that rest upon us.’234 An immediate upshot of Bruce’s proposal concerning an inquiry into the standard of living, was the production of a memorandum entitled ‘National and International Measures to be employed for raising the Standard of Living’ for the benefit of the Economic Committee’s discussion of Bruce’s proposal which was scheduled to take place in December 1937.235 230 Ibid.,

76–7. 77. 232 Ibid., 77. 233 Ibid., 78. 234 Ibid., 79. 235 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 202. Way notes that on the recommendation of McDougall, the memorandum was prepared by Professor Noel Hall and, according to Way, it reflected in many instances the thinking of the former on the subject. 231 Ibid.,

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The conviction that through showing leadership in regard to economic and social questions the LON would restore its prestige, caused Bruce and others to consider a constitutional change in the relationship between the LON Council and the League’s economic and social agencies. Walters explained why such constitutional change came under consideration: Hitherto, the general rules laid down by the First Assembly had continued in force, with only minor variations. The main committees—whether composed of States or individuals—were designated by the Council. They were debarred from taking up new questions until invited to do so by the Council. Their recommendations had no validity until approved by the Council. Their reports were made to the Council, and could not even be formally communicated to the Members of the League until the Council had so decided. Yet the body which thus controlled them at every turn was rarely capable of giving them help or guidance. Its members were almost always Foreign Ministers or professional diplomatists, who had no special knowledge of economic and social problems. The natural consequence was that while hours might be spent on the discussion of some minor political or constitutional question on the Council’s agenda, business connected with finance or economics, with health or transport, with child-welfare or intellectual co-operation, was dispatched with little sign of interest or attention.236

One of the main concerns in regard to the relationship between the council and the LON’s social and economic agencies was that precisely because the council appeared little interested in the social and economic aspects of its functions and dealt with these aspects in a more or less routine manner, the public profile of these agencies suffered and the work they undertook was starved of much-needed publicity. Another important concern in regard to council’s oversight of these agencies was the following anomalous situation: the United States had come to be represented on nearly all of the LON’s technical committees or subcommittees relating to social and economic affairs either in the form of government officials or individuals with the appropriate expertise yet the government of the United States had no say in such matters as the make-up of these committees, what their agenda should be and whether their recommendations should be implemented.237 Walters observes in relation to these considerations the following: 236 Walters, 237 Ibid.,

A History of the League of Nations, 758. 758–59.

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For all these reasons some leading figures in the various institutions of the League, with Bruce at their head, began to plan for a change in the system hitherto followed. Their purpose was to get rid of Council control; to introduce in its place a new directing organ which should be technically competent and capable of enhancing the authority of the various agencies; to ensure greater publicity; and to give to the United States, and other non-Member States which genuinely desired to collaborate, a proper share of responsibility and power in the management of the work.238

In July 1937, an even more radical proposal in regard to achieving collaboration between member and non-member states in the economic and social fields was put forward by the Belgian government in the shape of King Leopold and Prime Minister Van Zeeland: they proposed the creation of a new economic and social organisation that would be entirely separate from LON. In proposing this, according to Walters, their aim was to facilitate cooperation between Germany, which had refused to collaborate in LON undertakings since 1933, and a disaffected Italy on the one hand, and the democratic countries on the other.239 According to Walters, this proposal caught the attention of those members of LON who were coming to feel that what had once been regarded as a source of strength for the LON, namely, the covenant’s collective security clauses, were an embarrassment and a danger….Why allow the search for economic appeasement, for the restoration of trade and the promotion of health to be handicapped by being chained to an institution which the Axis hated, to which the United States did not belong, and in which many of its own Members no longer believed?240

Some, however, were sceptical of the Belgian proposal. For one thing, it was highly doubtful that Germany and Italy would participate in a new organisation on any other basis than their own unacceptable terms. It was also open to question as to whether plans to establish a new international organisation were at all feasible: amidst conditions of grave uncertainty it was unlikely that states would be willing to expend

238 Ibid.,

759. 759–60. 240 Ibid., 760. 239 Ibid.,

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the diplomatic energy required in order to create such a body.241 On February 2, 1939, the proposal for a new organisation was delivered a coup de grâce in the form of a letter sent by Hull to the secretary general in response to an invitation issued by the Nineteenth Assembly to non-member states to state their views on the direction of and their possible collaboration with the LON’s activities in the economic and social fields. In what was the only official response issued by a non-member state to the assembly’s invitation, Hull declared that the LON ‘has been responsible for the development of mutual exchange and discussion of ideas and methods to a greater extent and in more fields of humanitarian and scientific endeavour than any other organization in history.’242 According to Walters, Hull went further than this: the latter noted in his letter that there was considerably more work to be undertaken in order to address the world’s various social and economic problems and declared that the government of the United States wished to see the LON’s capacity for dealing with such problems enhanced. Having observed that the government he represented considered progress in the social and economic fields as a key part of the realisation of a peaceful international order, Hull additionally declared that the government of the United States intended to persist with its policy of collaborating with the LON’s technical organisations and to consider ways in which its involvement with them might be furthered.243 In the period intervening between the floating of the proposal for a new social and economic organisation and the airing of Hull’s letter to the secretary general, Bruce had been busy with plans for reforming the LON’s Economic and Financial Organisation. In May 1938, he chaired the Committee for the Co-ordination of Economic and Financial Questions which further developed proposals concerning the governance of the organisation that had been discussed in the context of a committee he had chaired in the previous year.244 In May 1939, against the background of Hull’s communication to the secretary general and at the urging of the secretary general, the LON Council invited Bruce to chair the Special Committee on the Development of International

241 Ibid. 242 Cordell

Hull, 1939, quoted ibid. A History of the League of Nations, 761. 244 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 204. 243 Walters,

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Co-operation in Economic and Social Affairs, a committee informally known as the Bruce Committee. Evidencing the importance attached to this committee is the fact that among its six members were Rist and Bourquin, the former being renowned for his economic expertise and the latter for his diplomatic and legal skills.245 On August 22, 1939 this committee issued ‘The Development of International Co-operation in Economic and Social Affairs: Report of the Special Committee’: what was generally known as the Bruce Report. This report proposed the creation of Central Committee for Economic and Social Questions which would be charged with overseeing and coordinating the various economic and social activities of the League. The idea was that at the outset, this committee would consist of the representatives of twenty-four members states as selected by the assembly and would be given the discretion to include among its number up to eight experts in relevant fields. At a later stage, the committee would have the right to choose its own members and ‘include non-Member States on terms to be negotiated with them.’246 245 Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 761. Walters described Rist as France’s ‘foremost economist’ and Bourquin as ‘a Belgian delegate of noted ability.’ In addition to Bruce, Bourquin and Rist, the committee included Harold Butler, ‘who had recently handed over to John Winant the headship of the International Labour Office; [Carl J.] Hambro, President of the Norwegian Parliament [and chair of the Christian Michelsen Institute of Science and Intellectual Liberty];...[and] Francisco Tudela of Peru, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose moderation and public spirit had won all hearts in Geneva’ (ibid.). See also Way, A New Idea Each Day, 202, 204, and Martin D. Dubin, ‘Toward the Bruce Report: The Economic and Social Programs of the League of Nations in the Avenol Years,’ in The League of Nations in Retrospect: Proceedings of the Symposium Organised by the United Nations Library and the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, 6–9 November, 1980 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 57. Martin D. Dubin points out that Kyriakos Varvaressos, the former Greek minister for finance and deputy-governor of the Bank of Greece was also a member of the Bruce Committee. Dubin notes that Avenol ‘properly is regarded as the father of the Bruce Report’ because of his sponsorship of it and that it was ‘the long-deferred product of discussions initiated by senior officials of the League of Nations Secretariat desiring to improve the organisation’s role in economic diplomacy after the failure of the London Monetary and Economic Conference in July 1933’ (ibid., 63). 246 Dubin, ‘Toward the Bruce Report: The Economic and Social Programs of the League of Nations in the Avenol Years,’ 59. Dubin notes that in late July, 1939, Avenol ‘received a cautionary warning Royall Tyler, an American Secretariat member, warning that any desire to recruit the United States [to the proposed new agency] had better remain hidden….A similar message had come earlier from Sweetser. Perhaps it was this sensitivity that motived

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As its use of the expression economic and social questions would suggest, the Bruce Report was further evidence of that change in the politico-economic outlook of which Loveday had spoken at Chatham House in the previous year. Indeed, one the report’s intentions was to spur the League’s technical agencies to much greater efforts in the socio-economic and humanitarian fields. After having noted the increasing extent to which social progress is ‘dependent of economic and human values,’ the report stated the following: State policies are determined in increasing measure by such social and economic aims as the prevention of unemployment, the prevention of wide fluctuations in economic activity, the provision of better housing, the suppression and cure of disease…Modern experience has also shown with increasing clearness that none of these problems can be entirely solved by purely national action. The need for the interchange of experience and the co-ordination of action between national authorities has been proved useful and necessary time after time in every section of the economic and social fields.247

It is also worth noting that the report did not treat social and economic problems as merely technical problems: as capable of being solved, once any confusion had been eliminated, by the application of the correct techniques. Indeed, the report stated that it considered the distinction customarily made between the ‘political’ and ‘technical’ work of the League ‘unfortunate’ because what were called ‘“technical problems” are in every country political questions, frequently the cause of internal controversy and often necessitating international negotiation.’248 On December 14, 1939, the Assembly met to consider the Bruce Report. It also had before it a report by the secretary general concerning decisions he had been compelled to make on the current and future [Avenol’s deputy] Sean Lester to indicate on July 19 that he did not think that the Bruce Committee would take action that might embarrass the United States….Americans serving in League bodies and some U.S. officials had encouraged Secretariat members to believe the U.S. might take a more active part if an autonomous organization existed. When the chips were down the U.S. would not join thee Central Committee’ (ibid., 58, 63–64). 247 League of Nations, Special Committee on the Development of International Cooperation in Economic and Social Affairs, The Development of International Co-operation in Economic and Social Affairs: Report of the Special Committee (Geneva: League of Nations, 1939), 6. 248 Ibid.

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economic and financial work of the League in light of postponement of the regular assembly due to the German invasion of Poland which had occurred within day of the release of the Bruce report, and the new circumstances attendant upon the outbreak of war. In his report, Avenol outlined a broad field of studies that seemed, in the view of the secretariat, advisable to pursue given the fact, as stated in the report, that whatever the ultimate outcome of current hostilities might be, society would eventually ‘have to readapt itself…to a peacetime economy.’249 The secretary general’s report insisted that consideration by governments of the problems to which this process of transition would give rise could not begin soon enough. Against this background and on the initiative of Great Britain, the assembly adopted a resolution ‘expressing the opinion that “the present condition of the world renders it all the more necessary that the economic and social work of the League…should continue on as broad a basis as possible.”’250 In view of this opinion, the assembly ‘took the necessary budgetary decisions to keep in being an efficient Economic Intelligence Service’ and adopted the Bruce reforms in the course of which it approved ‘the proposal to create a Central Committee to co-ordinate, direct and supervise the work of the League’s technical organisations.’251 The council, the regular meeting of which had also been postponed, met for what would be its last time on December 14. Among other actions taken that day (most notably the expulsion of the USSR from the LON because of its aggression against Finland), the council renewed the appointment of the members of the League Committees ‘until further notice’ in the expectation that the war in Europe would unfold in ways that would render the convening of international meetings very difficult and because it was ‘anxious to safeguard the framework of the League’s technical organisations’.252 As we have seen, in the context of 249 Report of the Secretary General, December 1939, quoted in League of Nations: Economic and Financial Committees, Report to the Council on the Work of the Joint Session London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, Princeton, August 7th–8th, 1942, 10-1, 10A/41803/1778 RS 384 C.52. M.52.1942.IIA, Geneva, August, 31, 1942, Archives of the League of Nations. 250 League of Nations: Economic and Financial Committees, Report to the Council on the Work of the Joint Session London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, Princeton, August 7th–8th, 1942, 11. 251 Ibid. Loveday observed on December 16 that ‘the Bruce reforms passed the Assembly “with the greatest ease”’ Dubin, ‘Toward the Bruce Report: The Economic and Social Programs of the League of Nations in the Avenol Years,’ 61. 252 Ibid., 3.

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discussions concerning the reform of the LON it had been proposed that the authority of the LON’s technical agencies should be enhanced. This proposal had been issued with the with a view to making the LON more effective in the economic and social fields. As we also saw, some hoped that through making the LON more effective in these fields, its prestige might be restored. However, by December 1939, it was no longer a question of how the technical agencies of the LON might be better utilised so as to restore the prestige of this politically damaged institution: as Martin D. Dubin observes, in December 1939 the LON’s technical agencies now ‘furnished the League with a means of survival as Europe was headed into a general war.’253 As Churchill told the House of Commons on January 17, 1940, in light of its adoption of the Bruce Report, the assembly approved on December 14 the appointment of an organising committee consisting of the representatives of ten countries ‘to form the nucleus and to determine the composition of the Central Committee’ that that report had proposed. 254 Dubin points out that following Hitler’s invasion of Denmark and Norway on April 9, ‘a meeting of the Central Committee scheduled for mid-June was abandoned.’255 He further points out that the ‘extension of Germany’s offensive into Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France finally ended prospects of implementing the Bruce reforms,’ although it is worth noting here that the proposed central committee for social and economic questions did in fact later take shape, albeit in the form of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.256 253 Dubin, ‘Toward the Bruce Report: The Economic and Social Programs of the League of Nations in the Avenol Years,’ 59. Dubin makes the important point that the Bruce Report was ‘not an instrument for appeasement. It contained a proposal for a Central Committee for Economic and Social Questions which would have been dominated by the British and French, as was the League’s Assembly which was to retain control over the Central Committee’s budget. Moreover, a prime purpose of this new agency was to promote the very kind of open international system the Germans and Italians had rejected. Even “economic appeasement” as proposed by Bruce had as its purpose expanding international trade and inducing Hitler and Mussolini to abandon autarchic policies. Finally, neither Loveday nor Avenol, thought that the aggressors would cooperate’ (ibid., 63). 254 356

Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), January 17, 1940, 104. ‘Toward the Bruce Report: The Economic and Social Programs of the League of Nations in the Avenol Years,’ 63. 255 Dubin,

256 Ibid. Walters points out that the Central Committee for Economic and Social Questions, ‘still-born, as it seemed, in 1939, came to life as the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.’ Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 762.

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Although the war in Europe meant that the Bruce reforms would not be implemented, it did not bring to an end the economic and social work of the LON. In February 1940 at The Hague, the organising committee that the assembly had established on December 14 met. At this meeting, the secretariat discussed with certain of the committee’s members the outline of a plan of studies on post-war problems to be undertaken by the staff of Department II: Economic, Financial and Transit Department.257 This new department resulted from the reunification of the secretariat’s Financial and Economic Sections, which had been separated following Salter’s departure from the role of director of the Economic and Financial Section in 1931, and the amalgamation of these reunified sections with the Communications and Transit Section. The Economic, Financial and Transit Department, which was under the direction of Loveday, was established against the background of ‘the onset of war, increasing member state defection, and a considerable reduction in the League’s budget and staff.’258 Although the plan of studies on post-war problems was revised and amplified over the next eighteen months, its execution, which continued down to 1946, remained guided by the following principle: Provided that political relations can be settled on a basis which assures the maintenance of peace, the core of the social and economic issues of the future is likely to be the problem of economic advancement and social security. The means by which this goal can be reached must therefore constitute the central thread of all constructive economic thinking for the future.259

257 League of Nations: Economic and Financial Committees, Report to the Council on the Work of the Joint Session London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, Princeton, August 7th–8th, 1942, 12. 258 Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of Its Economic and Financial Organisation,’ Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005): 465–92, 475, 475n-76n. 259 League of Nations, Report of the Work of the League 1941–1942, 1942, quoted in League of Nations: Economic and Financial Committees, Report to the Council on the Work of the Joint Session London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942. Princeton, August 7th–8th, 1942, 14.

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The Institute of Pacific Relations’ Study Meeting at Virginia Beach The position and policy of the United States in the Far East was much discussed at an IPR study meeting which was held between November 22 and December 2, 1939.260 The general nature of this meeting was decided at a meeting of the Pacific Council in Princeton, New Jersey, in January 1939: first, it was decided that the conference should be smaller than previous conferences, such that it would be limited to ten members from each National Council, and second, it was decided that the focus of the institute in 1939 should be the IPR’s Inquiry: a study on an international scale of the problems arising from the conflict in the Far East.261 Reflecting on the origins of the Inquiry, Holland recalled that in the autumn of 1937, he had received word from Carter ‘that the International Secretariat was thinking of starting a large research project on the consequences of the Japanese invasion of China and the issues that might be discussed at a subsequent peace conference.’262 The research project in question was launched in early 1938 under a heading that was doubtless intended to bring to mind the research group called The Inquiry which had been established by Wilson in September 1917 on the prompting of his close adviser Colonel House with a view to the peace negotiations that would follow the war’s end.263 Holland also recalled that during most of 1938, he alongside Jessup, who at that time was chair of the American unit of the IPR, had worked on developing ‘the research proposal for the Inquiry project, something which lead to a large supporting grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.’264 As stated in all the reports issued in its name, the purpose of the Inquiry was to relate unofficial scholarship to the problems arising from the present situation in the Far East. Its purpose is to provide members of the Institute

260 Mitchell

and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, v.

261 Ibid. 262 ‘The Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 21. 263 Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 219–20, and Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, v. 264 ‘The Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 22.

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in all countries and the members if I.P.R. Conference with an impartial and constructive analysis of the situation in the Far East with a view to indicating the major issues which must be considered in any future adjustment of international relations in that area. To this end, the analysis will include an account of the economic and political conditions which produced the situation existing in July 1937, with respect to China, to Japan and to the other foreign Powers concerned; an evaluation of developments during the war period which appear to indicate important trends in the policies and programs of all the Powers in relation to the Far Eastern situation; and finally, an estimate of the principal political, economic and social conditions which may be expected in a post-war period, the possible forms of adjustment which might be applied under these conditions, and the effects of such adjustments upon the countries concerned.265

According to Holland, it was at a weekend planning conference held at Jessup’s country home in Norfolk, Connecticut, concerning a number of specific studies that would form part of the project that Carter decided that the Inquiry should be administered by the relatively autonomous International Secretariat of the IPR rather than the IPR’s International Research Committee as he thought ‘difficulties might arise if Japan objected to it.’266 Under instructions from Carter, Holland notified the Japanese National Council of the IPR of the project on a visit to Tokyo in late 1937, albeit ‘in a general and unalarming way,’ because of the expectation ‘that they would be unhappy with anything that appeared to be an inquest into Japanese military policies in China.’267 Condliffe served as a specially appointed adviser to the Inquiry as did Angus and Dennery. On the invitation of Carter, who met him at the dock in New York upon his arrival from London in late 1938 in order to take up the position of professor of economics at the University of California, Condliffe attended the aforementioned Pacific Council meeting at Princeton. He later recalled that the meeting was convened because of Japanese objections to the proposed Inquiry series

265 IPR Inquiry, 1939, ‘Appendix 5: Organization of the Study Meeting, the Inquiry and the Research Program,’ in Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, 287–88. 266 ‘The Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 22. 267 Ibid., 21.

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of publications.268 He also recalled that his old friend Takagi Yasaka of the Imperial University in Tokyo, had informed him that the Japanese National Council was ‘bitterly opposed to the aims and methods of the Inquiry and to the role of the I.P.R. Secretariat in it’ and it was on behalf of that council that Takagi lodged a protest against the Inquiry while at Princeton.269 Although the meeting was characterised by a ‘strained pseudo-diplomatic atmosphere’ certain compromises were reached in regard to the Inquiry project.270 However, in July 1939, the Japanese National Council decided that it ‘could not participate in the Inquiry’ and therefore ‘dissociated itself from any responsibility for the results or organization of the project’.271 At the same time, the Japanese National Council affirmed that it would continue to participate in the IPR, declaring also that ‘on its own responsibility and quite separate from the Inquiry’ it would prepare ‘a series of reports on the Far Eastern situation for independent publication under the Council’s auspices.’272 The tense relations with the Japanese National Council over the matter of the Inquiry and the consequent uncertainty as to whether Japan would send a delegation to the IPR’s seventh conference which, based on the pattern of conferencing over recent years, would fall due in the autumn of 1939, suggested to figures such as Holland that holding a regular IPR conference would prove difficult. However, according to Holland the matter was decided not by the Japanese but by Hitler. When Germany attacked Poland in September 1939 and launched Europe into war, it became much more difficult for the Japanese to maintain contact as their country was Germany’s ally under the terms of the Axis Treaty. In the wake of all this, the 1939 conference…was cancelled, and a more modest

268 ‘Appendix 3: John B. Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 469. See also ‘Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 22, and ‘Appendix 5: Organization of the Study Meeting, the Inquiry and the Research Program,’ in Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, 289. 269 Ibid. For the protest of Takagi Yasaka, see ‘Appendix Two: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 254. 270 ‘Appendix Three: John B. Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 469. 271 Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, v–vi 272 Ibid., vi. See also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 219.

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‘study meeting,’ as it was termed, was held instead. The anticipated absence of the Japanese at this gathering also created a serious constitutional problem for the International Secretariat and the Pacific Council. Under the original constitution of the IPR, certain national councils— including the Japanese Council—had veto power over decisions of the Pacific Council. It was possible therefore, that the Japanese might be in position to subsequently veto any decisions taken. This consideration, thus, was also a factor in the decision to call the Virginia Beach gathering a study meeting rather than conference and, not incidentally, to forego a formal convocation of the Pacific Council.273

The original plan had been that the study meeting would be hosted by the Canadian Council of the IPR and would take place in Victoria in British Columbia. However, the outbreak of war in Europe caused the organisers to rethink this plan. On September 5, by which time representatives of three or four distant councils had already arrived in or were en route to North America, Carter informed the secretaries of the IPR’s national councils that Jessup, who had been elected chair of the Pacific Council in 1939, had consulted with Edgar Tarr, the chair of the Canadian Council, and had ‘discovered’ that the leaders of the Canadian Council did ‘not feel the outbreak of war…[would]…make it impossible for the Canadians to act as hosts at Victoria.’274 At the same time, Carter pointed out that Tarr had ‘indicated’ to Jessup that ‘if at a later date it should seem desirable to shift the locale of the November Study Meeting to a neutral country the Canadians would of course yield the privilege of host to whatever Council the Chairman might decide was best able to entertain the members.’275 On September 19, in a circular concerning the syllabus for discussion at the study meeting, Carter again drew attention to the Canadian Council’s declared willingness to yield the privilege of host. He indicated in the circular that by the time the circular reached the distant councils, the chair of the 273 ‘Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 24. 274 Edward C. Carter to the national secretaries of the IPR, 5 September 1939, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, Institutions internationales: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1935–1940, AG 1-IICI-K-V-5, UA. See also Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, v. 275 Carter to the national secretaries of the IPR, 5 September 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-V-5, UA.

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Pacific Council would have reached a decision on whether or not to shift the locale of the meeting.276 On October 9, Carter informed the members of the IPR that ‘[b]ecause of the European war,’ the chair of the Pacific Council had asked the American Council to take the place of the Canadian Council as host of the study meeting.277 Carter added that as it appeared that the Atlantic seaboard was a more convenient destination point for most of those attending, the location chosen for the meeting was the Cavalier Hotel at Virginia Beach, Virginia. He also informed members that because of the change of the meeting’s locale and because many of those who were going to participate in it were under pressure, the chair of the Pacific Council had decided to shorten the study meeting and that as a result it was going to commence four days later than originally planned: the dates now fixed for the study meeting were November 22 to December 2.278 As Jessup observed, the study meeting at Virginia Beach was ‘the product of two wars: had there been no hostilities in the Far East it would have been the seventh regular conference of the Institute; had there been no war in Europe it would have met (as was planned) in Victoria, British Columbia.’279 Against the background of these wars, it is not surprising that far fewer members attended the Virginia Beach gathering than had attended previous gatherings of the IPR. Difficulties of transport resulting from the war in Europe made it impossible for the Soviet and Dutch national councils to be represented. The British and French units of the IPR were not in a position to send full members and were instead represented by observers: five in the British case, one of whom was based in the United States and another in Australia, and two in the French case, both of whom were based in New York.280 No Japanese representatives were present as the Japanese National Council felt that it was unable to participate in a study meeting ‘so closely connected with the subject matter of the Inquiry.’281 276 Ibid. 277 Edward C. Carter to the members of the Pacific Council; to the members of the International Research Committee; to the national secretaries of the IPR; and to the members of the IPR Study Meeting, October 9, 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-V-5, UA. 278 Ibid. 279 Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, v. 280 Ibid., 273. 281 Ibid., vi.

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In the latter part of August and in response to suggestions by several of the national councils, revisions had been undertaken of a tentative agenda that had been circulated on April 5, 1939. Completed on August 28, the revised agenda was divided into four general topics in conformity with the division of the Inquiry reports (some twenty-five of which were available in preliminary form for use by the study meeting), into four general groups of studies: Japan’s position and policies; China’s position and policies; the position and policies of the Western powers in the Far East; and possible methods for the adjustment of specific problems. Under the heading of ‘Topic IV: Methods of Adjustment,’ members were invited to conjecture as to whether ‘in circumstances of a European war,’ the Sino-Japanese conflict was likely to result in a Chinese-dominated peace or a Japanese-dominated peace and, in connection with this, to reflect on what policies the Western powers might adopt in respect to the conflict in light those same circumstances.282 In the wake of the German invasion of Poland, the agenda of the study meeting, as Carter informed members in his circular of September 19, had to be redrafted to some extent.283 According to Holland who later observed that the meeting ‘turned out to be interesting’ despite the difficulties surrounding it, the meeting was ‘[v]ery much focused upon the impact of the European war on Asian international relations’; indeed, according Holland, at its meeting at Virginia Beach the IPR ‘concentrated more upon European developments than had ever before been the case.’284 In respect to the topic of the principal effects of the European war on the Sino-Japanese conflict and on the positions of the various powers in the Far East, the final draft of the agenda, before concluding with a question as to the extent to which any settlement in the Far East was now dependent on a European settlement, asked the following: 282 Carter to IPR members, September 19, 1939, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, Institutions nationales. Institute of Pacific Relations, Honolulu, 1935–1940, AG 1-IICI-K-V-5; Revised Agenda for I.P.R. Study Meeting, August 28, 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-V-5, and Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, v, 288. The Inquiry reports ‘constituted the greater part of the Meeting’s documentation and took the place, in all but a few instances, of the data papers normally supplied to the conferences by the National Council.’ 283 Edward C. Carter to members of the IPR, September 19, 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-V-5, UA. 284 ‘Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 24.

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(i) Is the war likely to weaken or strengthen Japan’s power to capitalise her conquest? (ii) How seriously will China be weakened by being deprived of material aid from the belligerent nations? (iii) How does the European war affect the position of (a) the United States and (b) the USSR in the Far East? (iv) Is it likely that the present stand of the Indian National Congress will effect the policy of the British Government with regard to the Far East, and, if so, in what ways? (v) Is the European war likely to result in a new alignment of forces in the Far East? e.g. what is the likelihood of Great Britain and France coming to terms with Japan and acquiescing in Japan’s conquest of China? Would the United States be likely to join in such an agreement and, if not, what alternative policy would it probably pursue?285

In the course of addressing the question of the position and policies of Japan, the first set of round table groups discussed the political structure of the New Order in East Asia as proclaimed by Konoe on December 14, 1938 and by Arita Hachirō on December 19. It noted the former’s declaration that the New order in East Asia would ‘be based on a tri-partite co-operation of a new China with Japan and Manchukuo’ and the latter’s insistence that Japan ‘does not intend to injure rights and interests of Third Powers, if they will “appreciate the real intentions of Japan and adopt such policies as will conform with the new situation in East Asia.”’286 In the view of the experts at the meeting, the so-called New Order in East Asia, like the Japanese doctrine of East Asia for the East Asiatics, was nothing but a smoke-screen behind which Japan was seeking to enslave China and dominate the Pacific and the Japanese ambitions in regard to East Asia entailed the elimination of American and European influences from the region.287 It was clear to members discussing the position and policies of China in the context of the second set of round table groups that the ‘Chinese will to resist [Japan]…was one of the crucial’ and dynamic ‘factors in whole Far Eastern situation.’288 Members noted that despite the overwhelming superiority of Japan in respect to military power and preparedness, Chinese resistance had been consistently maintained for over two years. Chinese members and members who had recently visited China, explained the 285 Mitchell

and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, 284–86. 27. 287 Ibid., 28. 288 Ibid., 40. 286 Ibid.,

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strength of the Chinese resistance in terms of its roots in an ‘astonishing political solidarity of a kind hitherto hardly considered possible in a country of such constantly shifting factions and military cliques.’289 According to Chinese members, this political solidarity was not a mere reaction to the war with Japan: a more important factor in explaining this solidarity was the programme of administrative consolidation that had been steadily pursued by the National Government over a period of many years. Chinese members pointed out that this underlying process of administrative unification was the product of a condition that foreign observers tended to overlook: ‘the persistence through all the period of civil wars and political intrigues of a deep-seated cultural and social unity which modern education, industry, communications and foreign aggression had served to intensify and bring to the surface.’290 The round tables concerning China could reach no conclusion as to whether or not Free China would be able to maintain its resistance. Members were uncertain as to the answer to this question principally because they felt that China’s future as with that of Japan was probably ‘destined to be determined more and more by events in the outside world and the policies of other nations.’291 The third set of round table groups explored the question of the influence of external events and the policies of other nations on the outcome of the Sino-Japanese conflict. According to the meeting’s proceedings, the discussion of the position and policies of the Western powers was ‘the most animated and controversial’ of all the discussions that took place at the meeting.292 The topics suggested by the meeting’s agenda under the heading of the position and policies of the Western powers were discussed in relation to each of the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, the USSR and the United States.293 According to the record of proceedings, a majority of members were convinced that neither China nor Japan would be able to definitively settle the conflict between them on their own terms and assumed that

289 Ibid. 290 Ibid. 291 Ibid., 292 Ibid., 293 Ibid.

76. 77.

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a settlement could only be reached with third power involvement. Members noted that the outbreak of war in Europe had heightened the significance of the international dimensions of the Sino-Japanese conflict. They were of the view that ‘[w]hether or not the two areas of conflict’ continued to be ‘physically separate,...the economic and political relations between them were so close that the developments in Europe would have far-reaching effects in the Far East.’294 Members were agreed that the European war had already affected the attitude of third powers, whether belligerents or neutrals, to the Far Eastern world as well as their capacity to defend whatever interests they might have in the region. Members noted that the European belligerents now found themselves in a weaker position vis-à-vis Japan as they had to focus their activities on the war at home. The European belligerents were also in a weaker position vis-à-vis Japan because they could not ‘afford to antagonize a Power which each side presumably…[hoped]…to secure as an ally.’295 Members thought that by contrast, the position of the United States vis-à-vis Japan had been strengthened: the European war meant that Japan was now ‘deprived of important European supplies and markets’ and that as a result, Japan had become ‘far more dependent upon her American trade for essential war materials and the foreign exchange necessary to finance her purchases abroad.’296 In regard to the USSR, the view of the meeting was that its position vis-à-vis the Far East had not changed in a material sense, although some expressed the view that ‘Soviet involvement in the European conflict was only a matter of time.’297 Many of the recommendations that came under the heading of ‘Methods of Adjustment,’ recommendations that would have been described as methods for peaceful change in the pre-World War II context, reflected the IPR’s traditional conviction that political conflicts can generally be resolved into a series of broadly economic problems capable of being overcome through an enlightened policy of cooperation. The fourth and final series of round tables, in addressing the essentials of a viable settlement of the Sino-Japanese conflict, discussed the prospect of ‘parallel and mutually beneficial economic development in China

294 Ibid. 295 Ibid. 296 Ibid. 297 Ibid.

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and Japan.’298 Members further discussed the adjustments that Western nations might make in order to ‘satisfy future legitimate Japanese needs’ through, for example, responding to Japanese demands for essential raw materials and trade outlets and removing or modifying ‘discriminatory migration restrictions and other legal disabilities on Japanese in other Pacific countries.’299 Against the background of these suggestions, members urged the view that Japan should examine the ‘possibilities of conscious control of population growth.’300 Members also discussed the adjustments that Western nations might make in order to satisfy China’s legitimate needs. Among the suggestions made in this regard were the following: the abolition or modification of systems of foreign concessions and extra-territorial rights in China and political and economic preparations to that end; further Western investment and provision of technical assistance to China ‘without impairing Chinese administrative independence’; and the ‘removal or modification of migration and other legal disabilities of Chinese abroad.’301 The members also considered what international adjustments might be made in order to promote conditions of security and orderly processes in the Far East. Among the suggestions made in this regard were the following: regional machinery for the exchange of information and technical assistance in the fields of communications, health, aviation, agriculture, colonial administration, education and cultural matters; the creation of a Far Eastern economic conference and council; and the establishment of an international development program for the region. That said, the members could not and did not pretend that behind Japan’s predatory actions in the region lay merely a set of economic and demographic pressures: they well understood that a will to aggrandisement animated the war-party in Japan and considered that it was this that largely explained the overthrow of international order in East Asia. The members thus recognised that adjustments of an essentially political nature were demanded: new international treaties and machinery for consultation to replace the Washington treaties in the form of treaties of mutual

298 ‘Appendix 299 Ibid. 300 Ibid. 301 Ibid.

4: Round Table Discussion Syllabus,’ ibid., 283.

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assistance, of non-aggression, on naval and air force limitation and on non-fortification among the principal Far Eastern nations.302 In their introduction to a summary of the discussions at Virginia Beach, Mitchell, who was now assistant to the IPR’s secretary general, and Holland provided a brief review of the developments that had occurred the Far East in the eight months that had lapsed since the meeting. Clearly, the authors considered that many of the views expressed at the meeting had been borne out by recent history. Commenting under the heading of ‘The Impact of the European War on the Far East,’ Mitchell and Holland noted that the situation in China continued to be in a state of deadlock. They noted that Japan had failed to establish an effective puppet regime in China. The terms on which the Nanjing regime had been established on March 20, 1940, had made it apparent to the Chinese of all classes that Japan was determined to subjugate China and to monopolise her national resources and industrial development. As a consequence of this, the regime had failed in its attempt to enlist the support of any key groups among the Chinese population. Lacking any political authority, the regime remained reliant on Japanese military force. Meanwhile, the political solidarity on which the Chinese resistance was based remained intact: as long as the Japanese continued to aggress in China there would be ‘no serious political split within Free China.’303 Mitchell and Holland observed that the effectiveness of the resistance movement had been enhanced ‘by the intensification of guerrilla warfare, the development of new economic bases in the interior, the training of vast numbers of new troops, and the gradual but still too slow mobilisation and training of the people for mass resistance.’304 Mitchell and Holland contended that against this background, the possibilities opened up by the war in Europe for depriving China of foreign support must have seemed like manna from heaven to the Japanese government. However, they added, with so much of Japan’s military assets tied up in China, the government of Yonai Mitsumasa ‘hesitated to take full advantage of the new situation by a direct attack on the holdings

302 Ibid. 303 Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, 1–2. For Mitchell’s new role, see ‘Appendix 1: Study Meeting Membership and Committees,’ ibid., 274. 304 Ibid., 2.

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of European Powers in Southeast Asia.’305 Instead, Foreign Minister Arita issued two formal statements in which he made it apparent that it was Japan’s intention to succeed the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies, a colony in which Japan declared it had a vital interest, and that Japan ‘claimed the right as the self-appointed guardian of “peace and stability” in the Eastern Pacific, to dictate the political and economic future of the countries of Southeast Asia.’306 The American State Department responded sharply, insisting on the United States’ concern for the status of the Indies and pointing out that the American government did not accept that Japan had a right to determine the destiny of the countries of East Asia. The American rejoinder aroused immense anger in Japan, especially among extreme nationalist groups who advocated a policy of aggression. However, the Yonai government, ‘fearing American retaliation, continued to move cautiously,’ preferring to ‘secure Japanese control of the resources of the Indies by a process of intensive economic penetration backed by threats of military force’ which it considered ‘would be sufficient to force the Dutch authorities to adopt economic and commercial policies suited to Japan’s needs.’307 The Japanese government’s next move was to attempt to force the closure of the Indochina route in order to stop supplies arriving in China from French Indochina. Against the background of a panic-stricken French government and the presence of Japanese forces and units of Japan’s naval fleet near to the French holding, Japan succeeded in making this move. The government then turned its attention to eliminating British assistance to China. The landing of Japanese troops along the Pearl River west of Hong Kong saw the British government agree to close the Burma and Hong Kong routes, through which war supplies entered China, for a period of three months dating from July 18.308 Mitchell and Holland pointed out that this decision was strongly condemned by…some members of the House of Commons where it was denounced as a betrayal of China and a shameful new ‘Munich.’ British government leaders, however, insisted that under the 305 Ibid. 306 Ibid. 307 Ibid., 308 Ibid.,

2, 5. 3.

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present circumstances it was essential that Britain concentrate all her attention upon home defence and remove all possible causes of friction with powers other than Germany.309

The successful closure of supply routes along with other concessions gained from France and Britain by Japan did little to appease the army and the extreme nationalists in Japan who were demanding alongside a policy of aggression in Southeast Asia, ‘a close alignment with the Axis Powers, and an end to all efforts to “conciliate” Britain and the United States,’ this last, in the form of Secretary Hull, having protested against the closing of the Burma route.310 On June 29, Arita addressed the nation via radio, explaining in his address the Japanese cabinet’s position in regard to foreign policy. The army and the extreme nationalists wanted Arita to make a blunt declaration in favour of an ‘“Asiatic Monroe Doctrine” which would demand the elimination of all Western influence from Eastern Asia and the South Seas and the bringing of all countries in this area under the political and military domination of Japan.’311 Arita’s failure to do so was taken as proof by the army of the Yonai cabinet’s reluctance to antagonise Britain and the United States. The Yonai cabinet, having lost the confidence of the army as declared by General Shunroku Hata, the Japanese war minister, on July 16 upon his resignation, promptly resigned. A new cabinet was then formed under Prince Konoe who had quit his position as president of the Privy Council on June 24 in order to organise a single political party of the fascist type.312 Mitchell and Holland noted that Konoe’s selection of Matsuoka Yōsuke as foreign minister and the appointment of General Tojo and Admiral Yoshida as ministers of war and navy respectively, signalled that the new Japanese government would ‘pursue an aggressive foreign policy in line with the wishes of the Armed Services’ and that most observers were ‘confident’ that this policy would be focussed on the extension of Japanese control to Southeast Asia.’ It was also widely expected that the 309 Ibid. 310 Ibid.,

4–5. 4. 312 Ibid. See also ‘Resignation of Japanese Cabinet: New Government Expected to Have Pro-Axis Tinge,’ Singleton Argus, July 17, 1940; and H. O. Thompson, ‘Japan Swings to Axis Tie,’ Madera Tribune, July 16, 1940. 311 Ibid.,

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new government would align itself with the Axis powers. Mitchell and Holland stated that although there had been no indication of this as yet, it was clear that the new government would adopt a much more aggressive stance in relation to Britain and the United States than had the previous government should these countries not accede to the imposition Japan’s New Order.313 Mitchell and Holland observed that the supporters of an expansionist policy in Japan appeared confident in the belief that Japan could directly attack Western holdings in the Far East with impunity because of the weakened position of Britain and France. They stated that this meant that in all likelihood the United States would have to decide at some point ‘whether to stand firm in opposition to further Japanese aggression or to reach some compromise arrangement with Japan at the expense of Chinese independence.’314 Mitchell and Holland further observed that although opinions differed in regard to the course it might choose, it was clear to all that the United States had moved to elevate its bargaining position vis-à-vis Japan, such as by abrogating its trade treaty with that country. They pointed out that many were of the view that the continued presence of the American fleet at Hawaii was a sign that the United States intended to be a dominant player in any peace settlement in the Far East. They added that recent statements by Senator (Arthur) Vandenberg, Walter Lippmann and others advocating a policy of accommodation with Japan as ‘essential for safe-guarding American security in the Pacific…[were]… significant indications of this trend in American opinion.’315 However, as Holland and Mitchell stated in concluding their account of political developments in the region since the conclusion of the study meeting at Virginia beach, the view of members at that meeting was that the interests of the United States in the Pacific were best secured not by accommodating Japan, but by establishing a ‘strong and independent China and discrediting Japan’s militarist policy.’316 Further to this, they pointed out that members had maintained at the meeting that the

313 Mitchell and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1939, 4–5. See also Singleton (NSW) Argus, July 17, 1940; and Madera Tribune, July 16, 1940. 314 Ibid., 5. 315 Ibid., 5–6. 316 Ibid., 6.

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United States would be much better placed to defend its own interests and those of China if instead of pursuing a unilateral policy in the region, it were to collaborate with the Soviet Union whose interests in the Far East they also considered to be best served by supporting China and opposing Japanese aggression.317

The Real Nature of the Interwar Debate The contents Edward Hallett Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939 concerned, not the details of plans for the future organisation of peace, discussion of which was already well underway by 1939, but rather on the lessons Carr derived from the experience of the interwar years. On the face of it, its aim was to debunk a way of thinking that Carr associated with figures such as Angell, Zimmern and Toynbee and which he labelled utopian.318 Such figures stood accused of perpetuating the intellectualist fallacy that under the guidance of reason a true harmony of interests can be established in human affairs. According to Carr, these interwar utopians had entertained the false belief that the LON was an emanation of a universalising reason and had brought into being a harmony of interests. Carr rejected outright such a representation of the League, arguing that it was an institutionalised means of promoting the interests of status quo powers and as such, it was hardly surprising that powers unhappy with the status quo would seek to revise prevailing political conditions. Carr’s characterisation of interwar debate concerning international affairs as a debate between utopians who had assumed that the creation LON marked the triumph of reason in international affairs and those realists who insisted on the abiding nature of power politics became in later years a widely accepted view of what took place in interwar discussions of international relations. However, it is noteworthy that at the

317 Ibid. 318 Peter Wilson claims that ‘although the work is generally considered to have had a devastating effect on the “utopian” thinking of the inter-war period, the “utopians” themselves did not feel particularly devastated’ by Carr’s critique. Peter Wilson, ‘The Myth of the “First Great Debate”,’ in ‘The Eight Year Crisis’ 1919–1999,’ Tim Dunne, Michael Cox, and Ken Booth, eds., special issue, Review of International Studies 24 (December 1998):1–15, 6.

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time of the publication of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Carr’s analysis met with some strong criticism.319 In a review appearing in the volume of the Annals of the American Academy entitled ‘When Peace Comes,’ Hans Kohn confessed that he doubted that Carr’s analysis was particularly ‘helpful’ and maintained that its positive part was ‘rather meagre and sterile.’320 Kohn observed that The Twenty Years’ Crisis ‘rightly’ emphasised ‘the element of power in politics’ and that there was much to agree with in terms of Carr’s critique of ‘utopianism of a certain kind, namely, wishful thinking not backed by force or by a clear vision of the ways of realization.’ That said, Kohn did not think that Carr had much to say that was new or insightful in regard to the element of power in politics or about utopianism. More importantly, he thought that the utopianism at which Carr took aim was alien to the thinking of those who were the subjects of Carr’s ‘sarcasm’.321 Kohn expressed surprise that in an English book dealing with the history of international relations in the interwar period ‘no attention.. [was]...paid to France.’322 Kohn did not explain the reason for his surprise but it is worth calling attention to a thesis frequently aired by a range of French figures in various forums during this period, namely, that ‘moral forces...[are]...more forcible when backed with good guns,’ a thesis that had been embraced under French influence in the 1920s by someone whom Madariaga described as that ‘untiring apostle’ of an International Police Force: David Davies.323 One could hardly charge the partisans of such a thesis with failing to emphasise the element of power in politics. Indeed, it was precisely because the French insisted on the point that good laws must be backed by good

319 Lucian M. Ashworth, ‘Did the Realist-Idealist Great Debate Really Happen? A Revisionist History of International Relations,’ International Relations 16, no. 1 (2002): 33–51, 42. Ashworth records that the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, International Conciliation, Journal of Politics and Political Science Quarterly did not print reviews of the book. 320 Hans Kohn, review of Frieden und Abendland, by Ernst Ferger; The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, by Edward Hallett Carr; and Modern Political Doctrines, by Alfred Zimmern, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 210, no. 1 (1940): 152–53. 321 Ibid., 152–53. 322 Ibid., 153. 323 Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ 177.

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arms and were thus deeply sceptical about the worth of bare pacts that they were often described in the interwar period as realists. The question of the LON’s role in respect to collective security which had somewhat slipped into the background in the course of the 1920s, was revisited in the context of the debates over disarmament in 1932 and 1933 in Geneva. Revisiting the question of collective security was unavoidable in the context of the disarmament negotiations because, as Madariaga explained, despite the fact that the Pact of Paris outlawed aggression, armaments retained their utility as instruments of policy and no disarmament was possible as long as this remained the case.324 The optimum way in which to reduce the utility of armaments, according to Madariaga and those who shared his outlook, was effective international government, with many of those embracing this position insisting on the need to supplement and strengthen the covenant with ‘specific and automatic guarantees for the enforcement of international obligations.’325 Frank M. Russell, a member of the American National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, observed in 1936 in Theories of International Relations, that France and certain other states on the continent who felt vulnerable because of their geographical proximity to the ‘defeated and dissatisfied powers,’ insisted on such guarantees because they were ‘the only safe alternative to a dependence on their own armed strength.’326 The issue of collective security was given sustained attention at the ISC’s 1935 session in London. In an opening address at that session, Austen Chamberlain offered what was a typically British assessment of the LON’s capabilities as an instrument of security: the League’s powers of deterrence consisted in the public opinion which it represented and the moral judgements which it could pass. As to the conception of the League as the institutional embodiment of a common system of mutual guarantees, Chamberlain observed that universal security guarantees called for sacrifices on the part of the nations undertaking them that they could not reasonably be expected to make.327 324 Frank M. Russell, Theories of International Relations (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1937), 442. 325 Ibid., 443. 326 Ibid., 445n. 327 ‘Addresses Delivered at the Inaugural Meeting,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 36. For Austen Chamberlain’s view of the League as a ‘moral force,’ see also Birn, ‘The League of Nations and Collective Security,’ 145.

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It was at this session of the ISC that Coppola had characterised the idea that a particular state’s security should be a universal obligation as an anti-human philosophy.328 Against the background of the unfolding Ethiopian crisis, Coppola warned of the dangers of attempting to restrain the vital and dynamic forces at play in the world by means of legal instruments; he affirmed that legal instruments would not in the end be able to contain these forces and that the more rigid the instruments of restraint were, the more ‘violent and destructive’ would be the outbursts in defiance of them.329 The contempt Coppola expressed for the system of collective security and his brazen advocacy of the pagan notion that nations should be free to make war ‘according to nature,’ were at best icily tolerated at the 1935 session of the ISC.330 Nonetheless, many participants agreed with the proposition that on occasion adjustments should be made to the international status quo in order to prevent violence breaking out. Jessup (who thought it better to abandon the term revision in favour of adjustments because the question of the revision of treaties in its juridical and political aspects was but a small aspect of the subject and because its ‘connotations’ had given rise to a ‘mental reaction in certain quarters’), stated in the course of the discussion in 1935 the following: it is only in dealing with those ‘fundamental disputes and conflicts out of which war arises…that one can speak of preventing war, whereas by... methods of pressure and the threat of force, we are merely postponing a struggle from time to time.’331 Thus, just as the discussion of the disarmament question lead to a discussion of collective security, the discussion of collective security lead to a discussion of peaceful change. The chair of the 1935 session of the ISC, Allan W. Dulles, observed in a closing address that in choosing the topic of peaceful change, the ISC was breaking new ground: whereas in taking the subject

328 Coppola,

‘The Idea of Collective Security,’ 145–46. 147. While one may be tempted to liken Coppola’s views to twentieth century realism, they are more properly described, as Ashworth insists, as a ‘20th-century continuation of Social Darwinism’ in their representation of ‘war and state conflict as a way of maintaining the strength and vitality of civilization.’ Ashworth, ‘Did the Realist Debate Really Happen?’ 46. 330 Coppola, ‘The Idea of Collective Security,’ 146. 331 ‘Discussion: Prevention of War,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 269–71. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 5. 329 Ibid.,

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of collective security the conference had been ‘in some ways behind or following the various Governments and Foreign Offices of the world which had been examining this subject from every aspect for a period of years, in taking the subject of “Peaceful Change” for the Conference two years hence,’ the conference was ‘leading’ and not ‘following any governmental initiative’. He further observed that if the coming conference faced this subject with ‘frankness and courage,’ it would ‘add a real and lasting contribution to world thought and possibly to world action.’332 In the course of the discussions of collective security at 1935 session of the ISC and in the course of the discussions of peaceful change at its 1936 and 1937 sessions, many participants demonstrated a willingness to countenance the idea that changes to the status quo should be made in order to preserve peace, although there were differences over methods of procedure and the extent of the changes that might be made. However, the more fundamental division in relation to the question of peaceful change concerned how such a policy was to be ranked in relation to collective security. For many, the question of peaceful change was a question that could only be addressed against a background of international security: against a background in which non-recourse to force was guaranteed so changes could not exacted through threats of force. From this perspective, peaceful change is not to be conceived as an alternative to collective security in a situation in which war threatens: peaceful change, properly so-called, presupposes the general acceptance of the proposition that there shall be no war or threats of war. As noted in chapter one, in December 1935 Toynbee gave an address at Chatham House entitled ‘Peaceful Change or War?’. In the course of that address, Toynbee declared that on the one hand, collective security is needed in order to ‘safeguard the international order against attempts to change it by violence’ and that on the other, a ‘method of peaceful change’ is needed ‘as an alternative to the violent method of change’.333 In discussing this address in chapter one, I called attention to the criticism aired by Salter to the effect that Toynbee was treating peaceful change not as a supplement to collective security, but as a substitute for it. In the discussion which followed Toynbee’s address, Salter stated that he ‘understood Dr. Toynbee to suggest that, having

332 ‘Address

by Mr. Allan W. Dulles,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 462. ‘Peaceful Change or War?,’ 27.

333 Toynbee,

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failed to achieve peace by the road of collective security, we should perhaps start again by another road, that of peaceful change.’ Vigorously disagreeing with this proposition, Salter declared that proposals for changes to the status quo should only receive consideration in an environment free from menaces of aggression. Otherwise, he pointed out, encouragement would be given to the belief that claims far in excess of what most would consider just and reasonable can succeed through adopting a belligerent posture. Salter insisted that concessions should follow ‘as the expression of justice and good-will’ in response to claims that are just and moderate. However, he added, should changes be made to the status quo in the face of threats or acts of aggression, those changes will be and will appear to be nothing but ‘the expression of the weakness and disunion of the supporters of the peace system.’334 In his discussion of the British LNU and collective security, Birn notes that there was ‘broad sympathy’ for revisionism among many rank and file members of the LNU. He adds that the mid-1930s both Conservative supporters of appeasement and pacifists were citing the fact that the League had failed to ‘provide for peaceful boundary revisions in their arguments against enforcing the Covenant.’ For example, Astor, adopting a position that Birn insists was ‘typical,’ explained to Murray in November 1937 ‘that he could support a system of collective security only after the irrational Versailles settlement was revised.’335 Birn points out that by the time the LNU had moved to embrace the idea of a collective security mechanism and to support Churchill in his ‘Arms and the Covenant’ campaign, many of its Conservative members had departed.336 He adds that some pacifists not only transferred their support to the appeasement lobby, but also attacked collective security proponents at the LNU and elsewhere for supposedly aggravating international tensions and ‘causing the arms race.’337 Demands for peaceful change in response to the grievances of certain states were viewed by the LNU leadership as part of multi-pronged attack on League: pacifists and conservatives had made common cause 334 Salter, 1935, quoted in Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War?,’ 50-1. See also Antola, ‘Theories of Peaceful Change: An Excursion to the Study of Change in International Relations in the 1930s,’ 240. 335 Birn, ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security,’ 155–56. 336 Ibid., 143, 145. 337 Ibid., 143.

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in embracing peaceful change as an alternative to collective security and with little heed as to whether or not the grievances in question were just.338 Against this background, the LNU put out a statement in early 1938 insisting that ‘collective security must precede the redress of grievances,’ a statement which was welcomed by Wickham Steed precisely because he considered ‘the whole revisionism argument…the most damaging fallacy the League cause had to contend with.’339 Gilbert Murray gave vent to his feelings concerning the drift of British policy in a letter to Edward Lyttelton in April 14, 1938, stating in relation to Neville Chamberlain the following: I am profoundly shocked at the way he absolutely ignores the moral element in politics. Germany and Italy break their treaties and announce their intention to make war whenever the like, and Chamberlain treats this as a mere difference of policy, morally indifferent, and claims that we should be equal friends with those who keep the law and those who break it; and when we suggest that the nations which mean to abide by their covenants should stand together and support one another diplomatically, he says that is dividing Europe into two camps.340

There were moves among the rank and file within the LNU following the Munich Agreement (an agreement which lead to the resignation of the Hodža government and that of Beneš), to have the LNU incorporate a policy of peaceful change in relation to Germany. The motivation behind these moves concerned a felt-need to respond to the charge that LNU members were ‘war-mongers who talked about resisting aggression without providing the means to alter the status quo peacefully’ against a background in which Neville Chamberlain’s efforts at Munich were being widely applauded.341 The LNU leadership, feeling the need to 338 Ibid.,

155.

339 Ibid. 340 Madariaga,

‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ 183. ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security,’ 156. ‘M. Hodža’s Government in Czechoslovakia resigned after accepting the terms proposed [by the French and British governments], and was succeeded by a new one under General Sirovy, which, however, declared itself bound by the decision of its predecessor....[E]xcept for the Czechoslovak State, whose sacrifice was consummated by the resignation of her President, Dr. Beneš, all the parties [to the Munich Agreement] had solid grounds for satisfaction.’ Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs 1919–1939, 472, 475. 341 Birn,

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reunite the deeply fractured peace movement against the background of the Munich Agreement, ultimately bowed to this pressure. Thus, in December, it issued a policy statement which called for ‘effective machinery…for the ventilation of grievances and the removal of injustices’ in order that ‘all conditions likely to impair the good understanding between nations should be remedied before they become acute and result in war.’342 The policy statement issued by the LNU in December underlined the economic causes of international tensions and also called for international congresses to address grievances in relation to ‘territorial arrangements in Europe and elsewhere, including the Colonial problem’ with a view to forestalling ‘future disturbances’.343 These concessions to the cause of peaceful change, however, did not entail the abandonment of the LNU’s primary commitment to collective security and certainly did not signify endorsement of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, a policy to which figures such as Murray were vehemently opposed.344 The LNU’s executive committee strongly condemned the Munich Agreement. Birn records that the committee rejected the agreement on the ground that it was a case of ‘seeking peace by surrender to force’ and that in the view of the committee, the agreement was not only ‘disastrous to British interests and fatal to British honour’ but would ‘in the end lead to war’345 The German government, according to a resolution of the executive committee on September 22, was determined to achieve

342 General Council of the LNU, 1938, quoted in Birn, ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security,’ 157. 343 Birn, ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security,’ 156–57. 344 Ibid., 146, 154. The General Council of the LNU in June 1938 called on the executive committee to consider a motion calling on the Government ‘to enter into negotiations with the German Government with a view to a general settlement of all grievances, and especially the colonial question, to the satisfaction of all concerned.’ General Council of the LNU, 1938, quoted ibid., 156. 345 LNU Executive Committee, 1938, quoted in Birn, ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security,’ 154. Birn notes that in 1938 the LNU ‘kept up a steady broadside against the Government’ with the LNU’s monthly journal Headway listing various ‘promises Hitler had broken in the past’ and predicting he ‘would run true to form in the future.’ He adds that Churchill ‘used the pages of Headway to attack the Munich agreements and plead for support for the League and the Union’ and that from October 1938 the journal became a ‘“focus” of opposition to Chamberlain’s policies’ (ibid.).

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‘domination in central Europe’ and would succeed in this ‘unless the peace loving nations resolve that shall be stopped, and a return resolutely made to the maintenance of law and the resistance of force in the settlement of international disputes.’346 In sharp contrast with this attitude was the attitude displayed by Carr in defending the Munich Agreement in the first edition of the The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Therein Carr applauded the agreement as the ‘nearest approach in recent years to the settlement of a major international issue by a procedure of peaceful change.’347 In what respect was the Munich Agreement a case of peaceful change from Carr’s perspective? Carr explained his view of peaceful change in relation to Munich as follows: If the power relations of Europe in 1938 made it inevitable that CzechoSlovakia should lose part of its territory, and eventually her independence, it was preferable (quite apart from any question of justice or injustice) that this should come about as the result of discussions round a table in Munich rather than as the result either of a war between the Great Powers or of a local war between Germany and Czecho-Slovakia. If we consider peaceful change merely as a more or less mechanical device, replacing the alternative device of war, for readjusting the distribution of territory and of other desirable things to changes in the equilibrium of political forces, it performs a function whose utility it would be hypocritical to deny.348

In treating peaceful change as a mechanical device in order to effect changes to the status quo in light of a new balance of forces and as such an alternative to the device which is war, Carr seemed to be trying ethically neutralise the policy of peaceful change. This point would appear to be reinforced by his dismissal of an inquiry into the question whether or not the intention behind peaceful change should be to ‘establish “justice”, by remedying “just” grievances”, or to maintain “peace”’ as a ‘rather unprofitable…academic exercise.’349

346 LNU

Executive Committee, 1938, quoted in Birn, 154. Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939), 282. 348 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, 278. 349 Ibid., 265. 347 Edward

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However, Carr did not, ostensibly at least, eliminate the question of justice entirely from the frame of his analysis of peaceful change. Rather, what he did was to present justice and peace as potentially competing values between which compromises may need to be made. Munich was one such compromise. For Carr, however, this compromise, while certainly involving submission to the power element, that is, to threats of force, was not devoid of a moral element: ‘the common recognition by the Powers…of a criterion applicable to the dispute: the principle of self-determination’.350 Indeed, Carr gave himself grounds for adding to the supposed moral dimension of the Munich Agreement: in commencing a chapter devoted to the topic of peaceful change he opined that where a change is ‘necessary and desirable,’ those who employ or threaten to employ ‘force to maintain the status quo may be more morally culpable’ than those who employ or threaten to employ force in order to change it.351 Carr suggested that once the dissatisfied states had discovered that their grievances might be remedied by peaceful means, a discovery which he stated would be ‘preceded no doubt in the first instance by threats of force,’ they would embrace a process of conciliation.352 As we saw, Toynbee had strongly denounced the British ‘efforts [in 1935] to seek a solution to the “Italo-Ethiopian dispute” which would accommodate both aggressor and victim’. However, according to Donald Cameron Watt, in 1936 Toynbee would find himself under attack by anti-appeasement forces because of his ‘apparent efforts to accommodate his work to a much more dangerous threat to Britain and to his view of civilisation than that constituted by Mussolini’s Italy.’353 As we have seen, Toynbee was at least willing to consider the prospect of colonial appeasement. He seemed to think that it might be possible to appease Germany in this respect while at the same time upholding the principle of trusteeship as enshrined in Article 22 of the covenant and retaining the League’s system of mandatory supervision. McNeill

350 Ibid.,

282. 264-65. 352 Ibid., 272. 353 Donald Cameron Watt, foreword to Bosco and Navari, Chatham House and British Foreign Policy 1919–1945, iii. 351 Ibid.,

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observes that Toynbee’s initial response to Chamberlain’s declaration in the wake of the Munich Agreement of ‘peace for our time’ was equivocal. He records that in a letter dated October 1, 1938, Toynbee wrote the following: ‘[i]t is of course possible that Chamberlain’s policy is a delusion…But I still have the feeling that [the Germans’] mischief making power will turn out to have been much clipped.’354 In a paper entitled ‘First Thoughts on September 1938 and After,’ Toynbee asserted that as a result of Munich the ‘principle of self-determination of nations has now at last been applied equally for the benefit of all the nations that happened to be on the losing side in 1919-21.’355 It should be clear that Toynbee and Carr shared much more in common in regard to interwar policy than Carr’s characterisation of their respective positions would suggest: both advocated a policy of accommodation with Germany, seeing this as a realistic alternative to war.356 Taking into account the fact that those who supported the League’s collective security system and who thought that all the talk of peaceful change was a dangerous distraction viewed themselves as the real realists, one might suggest that the dichotomy which Carr set up between realism and utopianism and the way in which he applied this dichotomy in his analysis of interwar international relations, not only serves to obscure important nuances in regard to interwar debates on international relations but also conceals their real contours.

354 Toynbee,

1938, quoted in McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: Life, 173. n.d., quoted in McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: Life, 173. McNeill notes that in a paper entitled ‘After Munich’ and dated November 18, 1938, Toynbee expressed pessimism about the outcome of Munich. He records that Toynbee argued therein that the ‘principle of national self-determination in Europe was “bound to produce a Mitteleuropa under German hegemony.”’ McNeill adds that Toynbee also claimed in this paper that ‘[f] urther resistance to Germany…had become impossible’. Arnold J. Toynbee, 1938, quoted in McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: Life, 174. McNeil records that these saw G. M. GathorneHardy ‘assigned the task of informing Toynbee that for now at least Chatham House would not publish his paper, lest it become “a most dangerous encouragement to Hitler.”’ McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: Life, 174. For the censure of Toynbee’s paper see also Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 234–35. 355 Toynbee,

356 Christopher Brewin observes that Carr and Toynbee had ‘much in common’ both politically and intellectually. Christopher Brewin, ‘Arnold Toynbee and Chatham House,’ in Bosco and Navari, eds., Chatham House and British Foreign Policy 1919–1945, 156.

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Appeasement: Failing the Test of Realism? In an article addressing the Munich settlement, Wright attempted to establish the conditions under which the expression peaceful change can reasonably and justly be applied to a situation. Noting that what Chamberlain saw as a triumph of the conference method, in the sense that Munich appeared to have forestalled Hitler’s threats of violence, others saw as a ‘deplorable instance of the use of threats of war as an instrument of national policy,’ Wright posed the following question: In what degree must violence, threats of violence, or violations of international law contribute to the result in a given transaction, in which actual war does not occur, in order to render the transaction non-peaceful?357

Wright responded to his question in describing the process of peaceful change as follows: Let us define peaceful change as change in law or rights through procedures other than war which are in accord with the international obligations of the parties concerned, or which the law recognizes as competent in emergencies to override normal rights and obligations in the interest of either justice or the welfare of the community of nations as a whole.358

Applying this definition to the Munich settlement, Wright observed that war had been avoided and peace, in a strict sense, had not been disturbed. However, Wright then went on argue that if one were to conceive of peace in broader terms, then it may well have been breached at Munich. Wright concluded by observing that the fundamental legal criticism of the settlement rests on the fact that the statesmen responsible for it placed the substance of the settlement ahead of the procedure by which it was achieved…Constitutional government consists in the determination of the citizens of the state that adherence to the procedures set forth in the constitution shall be treated as more important than any specific grievance, demand or reform.359 357 Quincy Wright, ‘The Munich Settlement and International Law,’ American Journal of International Law 33, no. 1 (1939): 12–32, 13. 358 Ibid. 359 Ibid., 31. Wright further stated that the statesmen at Munich ‘thus duplicated the error of the statesmen at Versailles twenty years earlier. The Versailles settlement may not

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In a powerful critique of The Thirty Years’ Crisis, Leonard Woolf contended that was not driven to support Chamberlain’s policy based upon a sound and sophisticated theory of international relations. Rather, Woolf stated that Carr was ‘unconsciously infected with the temporary social psychology of the time,’ a psychology that vulgarly assumed that ‘power, violence and conflict are more “real” elements in society than… beliefs, law, and co-operation for a common end of common interests.’ Based upon this ‘completely unscientific’ assumption, Woolf declared, Carr had proceeded to dismiss any policy ‘inconsistent with existing facts’ and the reality of ‘power, violence and conflict’ as utopian and therefore doomed to failure.360 It is worth noting here that Woolf had some years earlier levelled a charge at Zimmern similar to the charge that he now levelled at Carr: according to Woolf, Zimmern had set out in his The League of Nations and the Rule of Law to demonstrate that the League had been ‘failure, that it was bound to be so, and that anyone who “believes in” or “supports” it is one of “discordant congregation” of impossible “idealists.”361 This assessment is misleading and I will explain why this is the case below. For the moment, let us note how Woolf turned Carr’s allegedly unscientific assumption against Carr himself. Woolf attacked Carr for entertaining the crude and fallacious notion ‘that failure…proves somehow or other that the attempt itself was discreditable and unattainable.’ If Carr discerned in the collapse of the League evidence of the utopianism on which it was based, why did he not see, Woolf asked, evidence of utopianism in the policy of appeasement. The aim of this policy, Woolf pointed out, was ‘certainly not attained and was probably unattainable,’ adding the observation that it had now been ‘abandoned for its exact opposite.’362

have been seriously unjust in substance, but it eventually succumbed because it had been achieved by procedures of dictation which did not provide assurances that it was just. Germany’s resentment at the treaty was mobilized less against the terms of the treaty than against its dictated origin’ (ibid., 31–32). 360 Leonard Woolf, ‘Utopia and Reality,’ Political Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1940): 167–82, 173–74. 361 Leonard Woolf, review of Survey of International Affairs, 1934, by Arnold J. Toynbee, assisted by V. M. Boulton; The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 1918– 1935, by Alfred Zimmern; International Law, by J. Oppenheim; and The Anti-Drug Campaign, by S. H. Bailey, Political Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1936): 288–91, 289–90. 362 Woolf, ‘Utopia and Reality,’ 172–74.

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Indeed, Woolf suggested that the policy of appeasement failed the test of realism, precisely because it involved in an attempt to placate Hitler, the ‘abandoning of any common resistance to aggression’ and ‘any obligation to aid victims of aggression.’363 In other words, Woolf suggested that one of the important reasons why the policy of appeasement failed was because it was not grounded in morality: a policy that bypasses moral considerations is unrealistic as it is likely to prove self-defeating. This same line of argument was evident in Kohn’s review of The Twenty Years’ Crisis as he stated therein the following: Carr’s ‘realism easily becomes unrealistic’ because of its ‘underestimation of the moral element.’ Indeed, Kohn criticised Carr for conveying an attitude which on certain key points was ‘almost indistinguishable from that of many German political thinkers and propagandists’: it displayed an attitude ‘in very many points’ that was comparable to ‘the predominant German contempt for what is called in Germany the western or natural-law conception of law and thought.’364 In this regard, one might recall a distinction that Berber drew in Paris in 1937: the distinction between the abstract method which insists on universal norms and the concrete political approach according to which one responds to specific situations as they present themselves. In all likelihood, Carr heard Berber insist on this distinction as Carr had attended the 1937 conference on peaceful change in Paris as a member of the BCCIS, although going by the conference proceedings it appears that Carr made no contribution to the debates that took place in that forum.365 Irrespective of whether or not Carr was present on the occasions when Berber spoke in Paris, in The Twenty Years’ Crisis he certainly displayed a familiarity with Berber’s work: in the course of discussing a 363 Ibid.,

174. review of Frieden und Abendland by Ernst Ferger; The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939 by Edward Hallett Carr; and Modern Political Doctrines by Alfred Zimmern, 153. In regard to Neville Chamberlain’s policy Murray wrote in a letter on April 14, 1938: ‘I am profoundly shocked at the way he absolutely ignores the moral element in politics. Germany and Italy break their treaties and announce their intention to make war whenever they like, and Chamberlain treats this as a mere difference of policy, morally indifferent, and claims that we should be equal friends with those who keep the law and those who break it; and when we suggest that the nations which mean to abide by the covenants should stand together and support one another diplomatically, he says that is dividing Europe into two camps.’ Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ 183. 365 ‘List of Participants’ in Bourquin, ed., Peaceful Change, 622. 364 Kohn,

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‘Realist View of Law,’ he approvingly cited Berber’s Security and Justice on two occasions.366 Unlike Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Kohn applauded Zimmern’s Spiritual Values and World Affairs, a book based on lectures Zimmern had delivered at Oxford between January 24 and March 4, 1939, ‘before the change in British public opinion and in Mr. Chamberlain’s mind.’367 Therein Zimmern reflected on what he viewed as the ‘prevailing moral and mental confusion’ which, according to Zimmern, had resulted in the League’s effective collapse and in the policy of appeasement.368 In terms of the failure of the League, Zimmern attributed a great deal of responsibility to those whom he characterised as ‘pseudo-Quakers’: pacifists who had posed as friends of the League but who were, according to Zimmern, among its ‘most dangerous opponents’. Elaborating on this point, Zimmern observed that whether ‘in the press, on the platform, or in the pulpit,’ the pseudo-Quakers had proved to be a menace because of their inability to accept that the League was not a peace-organisation as they understood that term, but an organisation consecrated to the prevention of war and that this entailed a commitment to mutual assistance should a member be attacked.369 Borrowing from a speech of Lord (Robert John) Parker in 1918 in which Parker underlined the importance of stabilising the foundations of the League, Zimmern referred to this commitment as the principle of the ‘Hue and Cry’. In the words of Parker, according to this principle the ‘hand of every man is against the wrong doer. He becomes an outlaw’. For Zimmern, the League’s failure concerned the tacit abandonment by the great powers of the Hue and Cry, an abandonment which dated from September 18, 1931, when Japan violated the covenant, the Pact of Paris and the Nine-Power Washington Treaty.370 366 Carr,

The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 226–28, 267.

367 Kohn,

Review of Frieden und Abendland, by Ernst Ferger; The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, by Edward Hallett Carr; and Modern Political Doctrines, by Alfred Zimmern, 153. For the dates between which Zimmern delivered his on spiritual values and world affairs, see his preface to Alfred Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). 368 Kohn, Review: Frieden und Abendland by Ernst Ferger; The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939 by Edward Hallett Carr; Modern Political Doctrines by Alfred Zimmern, 153. 369 Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs, 117–19. 370 Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 176, 418, 485.

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That governments had not stood by this principle, in Zimmern’s view, was in part because they were unscrupulous; in part due to a lack of diplomatic vision such that they failed to understand that the Hue and Cry was ‘practical politics’; and in part because of public opinion from which statesmen had shielded the ‘unpleasant facts’ regarding treaty obligations.371 Zimmern observed that many well-meaning people felt that the Versailles treaty had been unjust and that it was Britain’s ‘duty’ to compensate for this injustice through extending a ‘hand of friendship’ to Germany. Such a gesture, Zimmern declared, was utterly futile after the Nazis came to power as they showed ‘no signs of reciprocating our sentiments and of adopting a conciliatory policy, either at home or abroad.’372 At the same time, Zimmern questioned whether or to what degree the British really had suffered from an attack of conscience in relation to Germany. He pointed out that the treatment of the Armenians, who had fought alongside Britain and its allies against Turkey and who had been promised unequivocally ‘liberation from Turkish rule,’ had been ‘shameful’. He noted that when Mustapha Kemal Atatürk rallied his people in opposition to the Treaty of Sèvres which was intended to embody this pledge, Britain and the United States ‘lost interest and left the Armenians to their fate.’ Yet, Zimmern asked, *‘how many of us really do feel ashamed about it?’ The truth, he suggested, was that Armenia unlike Germany, was too weak and poor to get its grievances heard.373 Zimmern then posed the question as to whether Britain’s putative bad conscience, was really only a ‘certain timidity’ or ‘perhaps prudence’ in the face of a Germany ‘rearmed and menacing,’ prepared to overthrow the established international order and ‘enforce her claim to what she entitles dynamic justice.’374 Anticipating an aspect of Carr’s analysis, Zimmern posed the question for his readers as to whether upholding the existing order and Britain’s place within it or yielding to Germany’s ‘demand for dynamic justice,’ was a ‘pure question of force against force’ on which morality had no bearing. In responding to the question he posed, Zimmern conceded

371 Ibid.,

210, 424; and Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs, 119. Spiritual Values and World Affairs, 84–5, 105. 373 Ibid., 87–89. 374 Ibid., 98–99. 372 Zimmern,

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the point that ‘between an abstract dominating or exploiting Britain and an abstract dominating or exploiting Germany there is nothing to choose.’375 However, Zimmern refused to accept the framing of the choice between upholding the existing order or yielding to Germany’s demands in these terms. He stated that if one were to ‘descend from the nebulous heights of speculation to the ground of historical reality and concrete detail,’ one could have no doubt as to which state of affairs ‘our and Germany’s near neighbours’ would choose and no doubt as to which state of affairs was desirable from the point of view of the world as a whole’. In concluding Spiritual Values and World Affairs and against a background in which Hitler was becoming even more insistent on the German need for colonies, Zimmern turned to the question of colonial retrocession.376 Zimmern acknowledged that the mandate system was ‘something of a make-believe’ as too often only lip-service had been paid to the principle of trusteeship. He also acknowledged the many ‘shortcomings’ in British colonial government. Nonetheless, he reiterated the point so often made by retrocession’s critics, namely, that Germany’s current leaders would not ‘even pretend’ to accept the mandatory obligations outlined in the covenant.377 Although he clearly did not accept the following position, Zimmern insisted that if for reasons of prudence it was thought necessary for Britain to make ‘substantial concessions’ to Germany, then ‘common decency’ required that such ‘sacrifices be made out of our own substance rather than at the expense of our wards’. Zimmern warned that should the ‘politically immature’ Africans or South Sea Islanders be placed in the hands of ‘politically immature’ Germany, they would be ‘pressed under the German steam-roller’ and their social fabric ‘would be broken beyond repair, like so many other social fabrics…that have been disintegrated under the impact of imperialism.’378 In Kohn’s assessment, in Spiritual Values and World Affairs, Zimmern had shown himself, in contrast to Carr, to be ‘truly realistic’ and this was because, according to Kohn, Zimmern judged political issues in moral terms. Kohn added that

375 Ibid.,

105–6. Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 141. 377 Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs, 172–74. 378 Ibid., 175–76. 376 Wood,

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this way of judging political issues had been ‘amply justified by subsequent events.’379 The outbreak of war in Europe was quickly seized upon by those who had argued the case for collective security in the 1930s as a vindication of their stance. In an article published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in July 1940, Cecil condemned those who had cried in the face of aggression that it was ‘unreasonable or even immoral to ask that British blood and treasure should be expected to defend distant countries’ and who urged that Britain should avoid ‘commitments’. Cecil observed that Britain and France, the ‘natural leaders’ of the League, had chosen to avoid their responsibilities no matter the consequences for the Chinese, the Abyssinians and Czechs. He noted that having avoided their responsibilities the leaders of these countries had proclaimed in front of their countrymen and ‘still more their countrywomen…[that] they had kept them out of war’. Cecil then pointed out that ‘in the end…[their]…policy was not even successful in its avowed object, as unhappily we have seen.’380 At the very time when Cecil’s piece was published in the Annals, a debate was taking place in the United Stated between those who favoured American military aid to the allied cause and those who adhered to policy of national isolation. This was the beginning of so-called ‘battle of committees’: the battle between the American Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies on the one hand, and the America First and the No Foreign Wars Committees on the other.381 It is testimony to the ignominy into which the policy of appeasement had quickly fallen, that it was invoked by American proponents of United States’ military intervention in the war in Europe in order to shame those who insisted on continued American isolation. Frederick L. Schumann, in an essay entitled ‘War, Peace, and the Balance of Power,’ counselled that

379 Kohn, Review: Frieden und Abendland, by Ernst Ferger; The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939, by Edward Hallett Carr; and Modern Political Doctrines, by Alfred Zimmern, 153. 380 Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, ‘Peace Through International Co-operation,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 210, no. 1 (1940): 57–65, 61. 381 Simpson, ‘The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace,’ 317–18.

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our isolationists might well model their public utterances on those of Mr. Chamberlain in his appeasement phase, because they are determined that American shall repeat the tragic mistakes that Mr. Chamberlain’s Britain repeated for so long …[T]he risks they urge for America are not very different from the risks involved in the course which Messrs. Daladier and Chamberlain pursued for so long…[T]hey may discover too late that the cost to America of such a course, the cost of abandoning China or Great Britain or France to the flames, is no likely to be very different from the present cost to Great Britain and France of having earlier abandoned other peoples to the flames.382

Schumann attacked as irresponsible those who framed policy in Downing Street and the Quai d’Orsay between 1931 and 1939, observing that they had failed to maintain the ‘overwhelming preponderance of power’ which they, along with their allies, at first possessed in the post-war period. Instead of maintaining their dominant position, he observed, they chose to ‘condone Japanese, Italian and, German aggression and to acquiesce in, and even welcome, the steady enhancement of fascist fighting to a point at which a balance of power was restored.’ The sacrifices offered up to this policy of appeasement, Schumann stated, were the French alliance system and the League of Nations. He added that although this policy was publicly promoted as a means of preserving peace, the real motivation behind it and the only basis that it arguably had in Realpolitik was the belief that the Fascist Triplice would counter-balance the power of the USSR: that in the end there would be a clash of arms between the USSR and the fascist powers. Schumann noted that no such clash had materialised and that in the absence of such a clash and that of an alliance between Moscow, Paris and London, ‘the strategic results of “appeasement” insured war between the western powers and one or more of the fascists states.’383 Schumann warned his American readers that should France and Britain be defeated, and he considered that they could not achieve victory without the assistance of either the United States or the USSR, then the totalitarian alliance would repartition the world to its satisfaction. The power of this coalition, he further warned, would be so

382 Frederick L. Schumann ‘War, Peace and the Balance of Power,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 210, no. 1 (1940): 73–81, 74. 383 Ibid., 77–78.

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overwhelming it could not be ‘successfully challenged by America or Russia in most quarters of the globe.’ Schumann thought that it was very unlikely that this coalition would become permanent or transform itself into a confederation because of the totalitarian state’s exaltation ‘racial and national fanaticism’ and its contempt for the ideal of international cooperation and organisation: the more likely outcome of fascist aggression were wars of resistance and counter-revolutions.384 Thus, the defeat of France and Britain, Schumann maintained, would entail the ‘end, at least for this generation, of any possibility of organized international peace in the world to come.’385 Presuming that the United States would in fact eventually join the war against Germany and that the latter would be defeated, Schumann concluded that the task that lay ahead was that of transforming the grand alliance of the victorious powers into a new order: a permanent coalition or league of nations ‘whose members will act in unison to enforce their collective will upon any member violating its covenants or upon any outside aggressor’.386 As Schumann’s analysis suggests, the idea of a permanent system of collective security was firmly back on the agenda from the outset of the war: the idea of an enduring organisation enjoying an overwhelming preponderance of power. As to the fate of the debate on peaceful change, it died against the background of the war. Esko Anatola has suggested two possible reasons for the death of this debate. First, the debate was ‘too closely connected with the experiments of the League,’ the negative sentiments towards which tainted the peaceful change tradition. Second, the debate was not sufficiently theoretical and was ‘too much oriented towards actual problems of the international system of the 1920s and 1930s.’387 Anatola’s first explanation as to why the debate on peaceful change evaporated might hold to the extent that post-World War II, much that had an association with the League was tainted. However, it must be said that the association between peaceful change and the League was of a very thread-bare nature. Indeed, it should be recalled that a major criticism of the Covenant of the League in the interwar years was that although it provided for an elaborate system of sanctions in order to maintain a peace, it

384 Ibid.,

77. 77–78. 386 Ibid., 76. 387 Anatola, ‘Theories of Peaceful Change,’ 238. 385 Ibid.,

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failed to provide for an effective mechanism to enact changes to the status quo in order to preserve the same. As what this particular criticism claims about the covenant is correct, it should of be of no surprise that the concept of collective security was far more associated with the League than ever was the concept of peaceful change. Anatola’s second explanation as to why the debate on peaceful change evaporated, has more force. While some approached the debate on peaceful change from the perspective of legal and moral principle, as evidenced by the contributions to that debate of Webster, Wright, Zimmern and others, approaches of this kind were fewer in number than those which were oriented towards the actual problems of the day: oriented towards the problems thrown up by the actions of the unruly states of Italy, Japan and Germany. The main reason why peaceful change did not survive the war was not because of any connection between it and the League, but was because of its association with appeasement. The term appeasement and the expression peaceful change were often used interchangeably in the context of the debates concerning treaty revision and the granting of colonial and other concessions which took place against a background in which certain states were advertising their dissatisfaction with the status quo. It is thus hardly surprising that by the time of the onset of the war, the expression peaceful change had acquired the same negative connotations that had lately been acquired by the term appeasement. Schumann’s 1940 essay ‘War, Peace and, the Balance of Power’ touched on the main reason why the notion of peaceful change fell out of favour in arguing that the problem of organising peace ‘is only remotely and indirectly one of rectifying “injustices” and promoting “peaceful change and thereby diminishing deprivations, insecurities, aggressions and national wills-to-fight.’ The conflagrations witnessed in the twentieth century, Schumann insisted, were not the result of injustice or the absence of procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes. Rather, they were a consequence of the supposition of certain powerful states that engaging in violence and ‘playing the power game’ held out more advantages than dangers. Schumann observed that such a supposition could only be made in a context in which the instruments of coercion were dispersed among states or alliances of roughly equal fighting capacity and that it would fall to the future organisers of international peace to ensure that such a supposition could no longer be rationally entertained.388 388 Schumann,

‘War, Peace, and the Balance of Power,’ 75.

CHAPTER 4

Intellectual Cooperation in War-Time and Plans for Reconstruction

The Activities of the IIIC: December 1939–May 1940 In April 1939, the IIIC’s administrative council decided that in the event of war, it would try as far as possible to continue to maintain lines of communication among and support for all those dedicated to the defence of culture.1 Accordingly, at the end of the year and in the wake of the brief meeting of the LON Assembly and Council on December 14, the IIIC sent communications to the delegates of states accredited to the IIIC of which there were forty in all, the national committees of intellectual cooperation and the groups of professors, writers, savants and intellectuals which had collaborated in its work, declaring that the IIIC would continue to ‘function in its seat.’2 In informing its constituencies of its intention, the IIIC posed two questions: what should be the ‘conditions under which it should continue its work’ and how could it ‘openly take a stand against aggression.’ Hundreds of responses flooded in from nearly every free country, both belligerent and neutral. According to Bonnet, the respondents were united in insisting that the IIIC must carry on in its work and that the ICO should not ‘continue by taking an attitude of indifference in the face 1 Informations

sur la Coopération Intellectuelle (a), nos. 1–2 (1939), 1. 1, and Henri Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), 22. 2 Ibid.,

© The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part Three, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31827-7_4

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of war’. The respondents urged the IIIC to rally the ‘leaders of spiritual and intellectual activities in defence of the principles of civilization and the moral rules that Nazi philosophy threatened’ and that these rules ‘should be proclaimed as the idea for which free nations were fighting.’3 As Jean-Jacques Renoliet observes, despite its professedly apolitical stance in the past, the IIIC saw its role in late 1939 as being that of ‘reinforcing the cohesion of the democracies in the face of the aggressions of the dictators.’4 The IIIC’s executive committee held its annual meeting for 1939 on December 15 and 16. At the meeting, it confirmed the decision that the IIIC would continue to function in Paris, at least for as long as Paris remained the seat of the French government and the focus of diplomatic activity in France.5 At the same time, it had become clear that financial and logistical difficulties arising from the fact of war would mean that the IIIC’s activities would have to be curtailed. As a consequence of this consideration, a number of meetings planned to take place in Paris in 1940 were adjourned, including the third General Conference of National Commissions of Intellectual Cooperation.6 It should be recalled that the second general conference of these commissions had met in Paris in 1937 during the Month of Intellectual Cooperation, the major upshot of this conference being the convening of a diplomatic conference at the French Foreign Ministry. This conference culminated in a special meeting on December 3, 1938, under the chairmanship of Fakhry Pacha, the Egyptian minister in Paris, during which the International Act Concerning Intellectual Cooperation was signed.7 In closing the General Conference of the National Commissions of Intellectual Cooperation, Herriot had stated that ‘[j]ust as the modern airman, flying across the frontiers, dominates land and sea, mountains and plains, so human thought which seeks to establish unity among men, should abstain from judging the forms which national will

3 Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 22, and Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle (a), nos. 1–2 (1939), 1. 4 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 148. 5 Ibid., 149. 6 Ibid. 7 League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939), 6–10, 16.

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has given to institutions. It makes no distinction between the different regimes or between the different races.’8 The first article of the International Act Concerning Intellectual Cooperation affirmed that the ‘work of intellectual co-operation is independent of politics and based entirely on the principle of universality,’ an affirmation that was seen as one of the most important features of the act at the time.9 However, by the time this act came into force on January 31, 1940, a development which Renoliet notes was not greeted by any sense of ‘triumphalism’ given the circumstances, the commitment to ‘apoliticism and universalism’ that it enshrined had been effectively abandoned: the ICO had ‘joined the camp of the democracies’ and it had ‘thus made a political choice.’10 Although deciding that it was to too logistically difficult to convoke entretiens as long as the war endured in Europe, the ICIC’s executive committee encouraged the IIIC to undertake the more manageable task of publishing new instalments in the Open Letters series in addition to publishing other works.11 The IIIC thus proceeded to insert in its monthly bulletin extracts from letters it had elicited from correspondents residing in what were at that stage neutral countrie. These letters addressed the feelings their authors had about the war and the problems it posed for intellectual life. The extracts of these letters were published between December 1939 and April 1940. The letters in question were authored by such wellknown savants as Brazil’s Miguel Ozorio de Almeida, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral among others. In their letters, some of the respondents touched on the distinction that President Roosevelt had made between the neutrality of the state, to which the citizens must adhere, and the neutrality of the individual conscience which is a matter of moral choice. However, irrespective of whether or not they remarked on Roosevelt’s distinction, all the correspondents were of the view that it would be unconscionable to adopt a position of ethical neutrality in relation to the European war then taking place. The various correspondents observed that ideologically, the war took the form of a struggle to reaffirm the ideal of humanity and the 8 Ibid.,

14. 10, and International Act Concerning Intellectual Cooperation, 1938, quoted ibid., 11. 10 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 149–50. 11 Ibid., 149, and ‘Correspondance: Extraits de la lettre de M. Ozorio de Almeida,’ Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle (b), nos. 1–2 (1939): 3–6, 3. 9 Ibid.,

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existence of universal norms to which all nations must bow in the face of doctrines steeped in notions of racial and biological difference which furiously denounced the existence of noms of universal applicability.12 In addition to seeking to reduce the influence of the dictators and increase support for the democracies, the correspondence in question served as a means of defending the legacy of the ICO and the League itself. For example, Mistral, in a letter entitled ‘On the Originality of Peoples,’ observed that it was somewhat dishonest to say that the ‘root principles’ of the ICO had failed as had the political principles of the League of Nations. She noted that in the messages of peace being sent throughout the world whether emanating from the American president or from more humble sources, one could not fail to discern ‘the features of a well-known face’: underlying them all was the otherwise ‘despised “Geneva spirit”’.13 Adopting a slightly different emphasis to that of the other contributors, Mistral commenced her letter by stating that what was commendable about the ICO was that in the tradition of French humanism, it had distinguished between political power and culture: the directors of the ICO and the IIIC had embraced the idea that ‘individuality’ of small and ‘exotic cultures’ may be as valuable as the ‘universality of the major cultures’.14 After having observed that it could have done more in regard to smaller cultures, she urged the ICO to speedily advance its efforts to ‘save the household gods of all the cultures that seem to go under with the sacrifice of the smaller peoples.’15 Mistral, who was of mixed Basque and Indigenous descent and who described herself as Indo-Spanish, insisted that the work of the ICO was needed more urgently than ever. She concluded her letter in stating the following: Admirably loyal to the people illustrious for their arts but unable to spread knowledge of them, the Organisation should widen its scope to include treasures which it knows but of which the masses are ignorant; the 12 Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle (b), nos. 1–2 (1939), 4; ‘Extraits de la réponse de M. J. Huizinga,’ Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 3–4 (1940): 47–9; ‘Extraits de la lettre de M. Carlos Silva Vildosola’; ‘Extraits de la lettre de M. Louis Piérard’; and ‘Extraits de la lettre de M. Edgard Jannsens,’ Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle, no. 6 (1940): 185–89. 13 ‘Open Letters: Extracts from the Letter of Mlle. Mistral,’ Intellectual Co-operation Bulletin, no. 5 (1940): 122–28, 128. 14 Ibid., 122. 15 Ibid., 122, 128.

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literature, so full of humanity, of the so-called ‘backward’ peoples, who are ‘backward’ only for the standardising judge; the so-called indigenous folk arts so overflowing with freshness and vitality; and the feeling for life of these small nations, much deeper than might be thought and much worthier of posterity than might be imagined.16

One reason why I have highlighted Mistral’s observations concerning the originality of peoples is because they foreshadow much of the debate that would take place at UNESCO at its inception on the question of culture. It suffices to say here that Mistral’s letter suggests that the ICO was more open to cultural variety than was later thought. The contributions of Latin American writers and intellectuals to the work of the ICO were particularly important in demonstrating this. At the same time, these same writers and intellectuals rendered an important service to the ICO by unhesitatingly reminding it on occasion of the degree to which it was culturally insular. It is noteworthy that the last piece of correspondence published by the IIIC was an extract from a letter written by the Mexican writer Francisco Garcia Calderon, a letter which was intended to be the point de départ for a planned volume entitled L’Amérique et l’Europe and which was to be devoted exclusively to Latin American writers. Planned as a follow-up to the Conversation sponsored by the Permanent Committee of Letters and Arts in Buenos-Aires in 1936 under the rubric of EuropeAmérique latine, this volume, as well as the planned volume based on the letters of Almeida, Huizinga, Mistral et al., was not destined to appear.17

The Organisation of International Studies in Geneva: February–April 1940 It was due to the political situation and in order to try and maintain the ICO’s politically neutral image and uphold the idea of the political impartiality of the League, that the League Secretariat, (which would remain under the direction of Avenol until August 31, 1940, the date on which Avenol would quit Geneva), informed Bonnet, to the displeasure of both Bonnet and Murray, that the December meeting IIIC’s executive and administrative committees would be held in Geneva rather than where they 16 Ibid.,

124, 128. sur la Coopération Intellectuelle (a), nos. 1–2 (1939), 3, and ‘Lettre de M. Francisco Garcia Calderon à M. Aita,’ Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 7–8 (1940): 253–55. 17 Informations

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had previously been held: Paris.18 The instruction of the secretariat probably explains why the ISC’s program committee, which had been elected at Bergen, and its executive committee met at the Hague on December 21 and 22 respectively, rather than at the Palais Royal offices of its secretariat as was customary. The purpose of these meetings was to discuss the study programme that had been drawn up by the conference’s new generalrapporteur Pitman B. Potter. The instruction of the secretariat also may explain why on February 15, 1940, the ISC’s conference bureau (which comprised Davis, who remained chair of the ISC’s executive committee, Bonnet, now the conference’s secretary and Potter), gathered in Geneva in order to review the work completed by conference members thus far on the topic chosen at Bergen for the ISC’s next study-cycle: International Organisation, its Forms, its Possibilities and its Limits.19 At its February meeting, the conference bureau endorsed Potter’s proposal that a number of international experts be invited to submit reports on some of the more specific or specialist topics mentioned in the programme of study or which had otherwise been suggested. A list of these topics and of the names of proposed experts had been forwarded by Potter to Bonnet on January 20. Among the names Potter listed was that of Rappard, whom Potter thought might be invited to discuss the economic breakdown of the League. At the same time, Potter suggested to Bonnet that were Rappard not available, it might be a good opportunity to seek an Italian contribution. In this regard, Potter put forward the name Francesco Vito, a person whom he described as a ‘competent economist, on good terms with his Government but occupying a rather independent position at the Catholic University of Milan’.20 Vito, who had contributed a paper to the 1932 session of what was then called the CISSIR in Milan, was by this time a member of the 18 Renoliet,

L’UNESCO oubliée, 149. Studies Conference: Informal (Fourteenth) Meeting of the Executive Committee and Members of the Conference, London, Sunday, November 18, 1945: International Studies Conference, 1939–1945: Report by the Secretary-General, Comité exécutif à partir du 1er septembre 1937–décembre 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2, and Institut Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle, L’Institut Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 294–95. 20 International Studies Conference: Informal (Fourteenth) Meeting of the Executive Committee and Members of the Conference, London, Sunday, November 18, 1945, International Studies Conference, 1939–1945: Report by the Secretary-General, AG 1-IICIK-I-2, and Pitman B. Potter to Henri Bonnet, January 20, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 19 International

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governing board of the GRC. Other relatively recent recruits to this board were were Berber, Potter, Macadam and Condliffe this last now being its chair.21 Concerning the topic of ‘Dominant Political Principles,’ Potter proposed that three experts should be invited to air their views: Berber, Georges Scelle (professor of public international law at the University of Paris, secretary general of the Academy of International Law at The Hague and a participant in the ISC’s conference on collective security in Paris in 1934 and in its conference on peaceful change in 1937), and Zimmern. In regard to Berber, Potter stated that it seemed ‘the best point to call upon Prof. Berber for a contribution,’ adding that ‘I do not believe I need to argue that point any further just now.’22 In regard to the experience of the LON in what was known in League circles as the technical field, Potter proposed that McDougall be invited to direct a series of studies on what Potter considered to be a topic of ‘exceptional importance’ and the field where perhaps the ‘greatest success…[had been]…reaped by the League.’23 In the course of their subsequent exchanges on the expert studies, two points of contention arose between Potter and Bonnet. First, Bonnet informed Potter that he was ‘somewhat alarmed’ that the selection of experts to address the LON’s work in the non-political field was biased towards individuals residing in Geneva. Bonnet advised Potter

21 For the paper submitted by Francisco Vito to the session in Milan in 1932, see Giovanni Gentile to Werner Picht, December 7, 1931 and the following attached paper: ‘Rapport preliminare per la conferenza internazionale sul tema “Les rapports du politique et de l’économique en théorie et en pratique”’ by Francesco Vito. Conférence des institutions pour l’études scientifique des relations internationals, 1er Octobre 1931–31 mars 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c. For Vito’s membership of the GRC’s governing body, see L. Lederman, assistant-director of the Geneva Research Centre, to Bonnet, January 31, 1940, AG 1ICI-K-I-16.b. See also League of Nations, A Record of a First International Study Conference on the State and Economic Life with Special Reference to International Economic and Political Relations, Held at Milan on May 23–27, 1932, and Organised by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation in Collaboration with the Italian National Committee of Intellectual Co-operation (International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation for the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations, 1932). 22 Potter to Bonnet, January 20, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 23 Ibid., and Pitman B. Potter to Henri Bonnet, April 19, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA.

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that as a result, he may not get that ‘variety of expression which you might have received from people living in their respective countries.’24 Potter’s response was to deny any bias in favour of League experts. He stated that it was ‘quite natural that many of the people most competent to write on the experiences of the last twenty years’ had or still resided in Geneva given that it was there that the ‘chief experiment in organised international co-operation had been carried on during this period.’ Potter implied that perhaps Bonnet was being too mindful of the ‘curious anti-Geneva feeling’ that appeared to be ‘developing in some quarters recently,’ adding that he hoped this feeling would not infect the planned ISC conference.25 In his letter of reply, Bonnet denied that his expression of concern was prompted by a putative ‘anti-Geneva spirit’. Bonnet then explained that he was convinced that ‘the interests of the Conference, of the study of International organisation, and of the League itself,’ were best served ‘if the appeal to experts in international matters were addressed as far as possible to people chosen from the various countries where there are groups taking part in the work of the Conference,’ adding that this presented ‘no difficulties…as many of the first-class authorities on the world of the League do not live in Geneva.’26 In another written exchange with Potter, Bonnet indicated his alarm concerning a letter that Potter had written to Viktor Bruns, the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Volkerrecht in Berlin, inviting him to contribute a submission on the future of international organisation. In the offending letter, Potter had stated that he ‘personally felt it very desirable to obtain a contribution from a German scholar’ and that ‘Mr. Malcolm Davis…who is…Chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Studies Conference, warmly agreed.’ Potter further stated that Davis had agreed that it would be ‘most fortunate and advantageous in every way if you [Bruns] could be persuaded’ to make such a contribution.27 24 Henri

Bonnet to Pitman B. Potter, April 24, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. B. Potter to Henri Bonnet, April 30, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 26 Henri Bonnet to Pitman B. Potter, May 9, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 27 Pitman B. Potter to Viktor Bruns, March 19, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. Viktor Bruns, who died in 1943, was among the German international lawyers participating in the work of the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Weimar period. Detlev F. Vagts notes that Bruns tried to maintain the independence of the Kaiser Wihlelm 25 Pitman

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Bonnet felt that Potter’s letter could ‘easily’ be interpreted by Bruns as an invitation to participate in the ‘general work’ of the ISC and that Bruns was being asked ‘for an ordinary contribution to be circulated in some way as any other one in connection with the work of the Conference’. Bonnet reminded Potter that the ISC’s executive committee had resolved that Potter would ‘attempt to obtain in…[his]…“personal capacity” information…from contributors like Professor Bruns’. Bonnet added that he thought the letter sent to Bruns should have been drafted differently from the letters that Potter had sent members of the conference or to ‘specially invited international experts.’28 There was one further point of contention between Bonnet and Potter. In a letter addressed to Potter, Bonnet called attention to a paragraph in the minutes of the Eighth Meeting of the GRC’s executive committee which dealt with an item entitled ‘Correspondence with Professor Berber’. It should be noted that at this stage Berber remained a member of the GRC’s governing board. The paragraph in question stated that the GRC’s director had ‘mentioned a letter received from Professor Berber and a visit of Dr. [Wolfgang] Krauel, the German consul in Geneva.’ It noted that Krauel had ‘expressed much interest in the work’ of the GRC and the ISC and had offered ‘to facilitate correspondence by transmitting any letters to Professor Berber in the consular bag’. The paragraph concluded with the statement that ‘the members saw no inconvenience in using this method of communication.’29 In relation to this matter, Bonnet offered Potter the following stern advice:

Institute under the Nazi regime and to ‘continue to relate to foreign writers and literature.’ However, Vagts also notes, that Bruns was ‘arguably the greatest servant of the Third Reich among the international lawyers. Without raising his voice in Nazi frenzy, Bruns provided the regime with the respectability that his long career as scholar, arbitrator and negotiator had built up. As chair of the German academy’s committee on international law, he greeted foreign scholars and diplomats, and by remaining in the post assured them that the regime could not really be so bad.’ Detlev F. Vagts, ‘International Law in the Third Reich,’ American Journal of International Law 84, no. 3 (1990): 661–704, 669, 673, 680. 28 Henri Bonnet to Pitman B. Potter, April 6, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. See also Potter to Bonnet, April 15, 1940. Potter told Bonnet that ‘on every single point I disagree vigorously and completely with your criticism.’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 29 Henri Bonnet to Pitman B. Potter, April 9, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA.

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As a member of the Governing Body of the Centre, I tell you frankly that I do not think it was a good idea to invite the German Consul to visit the Centre. In the present circumstances, the German Consulate in Geneva cannot be anything but an agency for information and propaganda of the Nazi Government, and I do not think any good can be expected, in international work, from people representing the National Socialist ideology. The members of the Governing Body who attended the last meeting at Geneva had, as the Chairman [Condliffe] told me, a clear idea of what the Nazi officials think of any plan or programme of international organisation in the world.30

In concluding his letter, Bonnet stated that the GRC had no authority to ‘arouse the interest’ of the German consul in the activities of the ISC ‘nor to correspond about it through the German diplomatic bag.’31 In his response to Bonnet, Potter insisted that no invitation had been issued by the centre to the German consul. He stated that Krauel had rung the centre to say he had a letter to deliver on behalf of Berber and that he had been given an appointment to this end. Potter added that neither the governing board nor the staff of the centre would seek to excite the interest of the German consul in the ISC and that they had no intention of corresponding about it via the German diplomatic bag. Somewhat testily, Potter then stated the following: [I]t must be manifest that it would be impossible for the Centre to tell German nationals or even German government officials that they were not free to visit the Centre, even if that were the attitude of the Centre, which I am sure it is not, or refrain from discussing with them the work of the Centre…In my capacity as General Rapporteur during the present period of the International Studies Conference I feel free to make contact with belligerents and neutrals alike within other limitations governing the organisation and operation of the Conference. I am well aware that the Conference does not deal with or through governments in developing its organisation or activities and you may be assured that I shall observe that principle, with which I fully agree, with the greatest fidelity.32

30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Pitman

B. Potter to Henri Bonnet, April 15, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA.

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The IIIC and the Occupation On May 20, Bonnet was informed by the secretariat that the meetings of the IIIC’s executive and administrative committees which had been scheduled to take place on May 24 and 25 in Paris would be cancelled in light of German advances in Western Europe. On June 9, 1940, under the direction of the Quai d’Orsay, Bonnet transferred the archives and remaining staff of the IIIC to the town of Guérande and soon after to Bourdeaux.33 On June 19, immediately after the Armistice, Bonnet left Bourdeaux following which he quit France for the Free World.34 Bonnet journeyed first to London and then to New York. During his stay in New York, he vigorously campaigned on behalf ‘of a free France’ and served, dating from 1941, as vice-president of the committee ‘with the eloquent name of France Forever and as an editor of the French exile publication Monde Libre [Free World].’35 In June 1943, Bonnet went to Algiers at the request of General Charles De Gaulle. In Algiers, he served as director of information in De Gaulle’s Committee of National Liberation.36 On the closure of the IIIC, two of its secretaries, namely, Vranek and Oliver Jackson, left to join respectively the Czechoslovakian Army and British Royal Air Force. Another of its secretaries, namely, Gross, found refuge in the United States after a year-long journey via Vichy and Pau and then via Madrid and Lisbon. Following in the footsteps of Kelsen, Gross would pursue in the United States an academic career in the field of international law.37 Chalmers Wright, the former chief of its Social

33 Renoliet,

L’UNESCO oubliée, 150. Studies Conference: Informal (Fourteenth) Meeting of the Executive Committee and Members of the Conference, London, Sunday, November 18, 1945, International Studies Conference, 1939–1945: Report by the Secretary-General, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2. See also Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 150. 35 ‘Henri Bonnet, Ex-French Ambassador,’ St. Petersburg Times (Florida), October 27, 1978. See also Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 151. 36 St. Petersburg Times (Florida), October 27, 1978. 37 For Jackson and Vranek’s war-time roles, see Institut Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle, L’Institut Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 294–95. For Gross’s war-time exit from Europe and his post-IIIC career, see Vagts, ‘In Memoriam: Leo Gross (1903–1990),’ 149–50. 34 International

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Sciences and International Relations Section, would serve during the war as an agent of the Special Operations Executive.38 In the middle of July 1940, the IIIC’s remaining personnel returned to Paris only to discover that the IIIC’s offices had been sealed by the German authorities and that these offices were in the process of being ransacked and looted by the German Army’s secret police. One of these personnel, a Hungarian named Étienne Lajti, went to the German authorities and demanded that the premises be evacuated and reopened.39 These demands lead to the appointment by Ribbentrop of a ‘Reich Commissar for Intellectual Cooperation’: Berber. On his arrival in Paris on August 24, Berber assured certain of the IIIC’s personnel that he considered the IIIC to be a ‘precious moral capital of which the preservation [is] in the interest of all.’ He added that the only barrier to German collaboration with the institute was its link with the League and that therefore this link should be broken. 40 What followed was a series of negotiations between Berber and representatives of the Vichy government concerning the severance of the IIIC’s ties with the LON, this being a condition of its reopening. These negotiations resulted in an agreement that a reopened IIIC would come under Franco-German direction, although it was well understood that the German plan was that this proposed Franco-German collaboration would be directed from Berlin: the Reich wished to ‘control an international institution in order to make it a vector of its cultural influence (and of its propaganda).’41 Li Yu-ying (Li Shizeng) was a sometime Chinese delegate to the LON who had been collaborating with the ICIC since 1932. He had attended the conference on peaceful change in Paris in 1937 as an invited observer and was one of two Chinese plenipotentiaries who signed the Act of International Co-operation. In an editorial appearing in Free World, Li stated that the Germans wanted to control the IIIC in order to ‘use it as a nazi propaganda instrument in South America’.42 38 For

Chalmers Wright’s experiences as an agent of the Special Operations Executive, see Chalmers-Wright, Fergus Camille Yeatman (Oral History), Imperial War Museum (production company), Laurie Milner (recorder), Chalmers-Wright, Fergus Camille Yeatman (interviewee/ speaker), no. 1, 1984–1985, Imperial War Museum, Sound Archive, Catalogue no. 8188. 39 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 151. 40 Fritz Berber, 1940, quoted ibid., 152. 41 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 152–54. 42 Li Lu [sic] Ying, ‘International Intellectual Cooperation,’ Free World 8, no. 4 (1944): 299–300. For Li Yu-ying’s activities in connection with the LON and its intellectual

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Renoliet records that by then end of the year the negotiations between Berber and Vichy had been abandoned on both sides. He notes that the Quai d’Orsay wanted to ‘defend in the face of the Occupier what remained of French interests even in a minor domain’ whereas the Occupier had decided to ‘retire from all negotiations exceeding the framework of the Armistice.’43 While negotiations resulted in the evacuation of the German Army from the IIIC’s premises at the Palais Royal, it would remain closed for the duration of the Occupation.44 The progress of the war also called to a halt the activities of the ISC. A planned meeting of its programme and executive committees in Geneva on June 28 and 29 was cancelled.45 Although its conference bureau managed to hold a meeting in New York on November 10, 1941, this was primarily in order to suspend the ISC’s activities. Davis, as chair of the executive committee, informed ISC members following the New York meeting, that the obstacles the war had placed in the way of international collaboration and the absence of a conference secretariat meant the ISC could no longer continue its work. Davis advised members that this suspension was not intended to be definitive, not least because there was an ‘urgent need for the study of problems of International Organisation in preparation for action at the end of the war now in progress.’46

cooperation organisation, see William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, eds., Li Yu-ying (Li Shizeng): History of His Work with Soybeans in France, and His Political Career in China and Taiwan (1881–1973): Extensively Annotated Bibliography and Sourcebook (Lafayette, CA: Soyinfo Center, 2011), 8, 89–90, 94, 107. For his presence at the 1937 session of the ISC in Paris, see International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw Materials, Colonies, 627. In the list of participants in the conference’s proceedings, Li Yu Ying, as Li Yu-ying’s name appears in that list, is described as the ‘President of the National Academy, Peiping’ (ibid.). 43 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 154. 44 Ibid., 155. Renoliet provides a highly detailed account of this chapter in the IIIC’s history, discussing also the attempt in April 1941 to transfer the institute to an unoccupied zone in France as well as moves to suppress it entirely. 45 Pitman B. Potter to Henri Bonnet, April 1, 1940, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2. See also Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 150. 46 For Davis’s communication to the members of the ISC, see International Studies Conference: Communication by the Chairman of the Executive Committee, December 19, 1941, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA.

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A Joint Meeting of the Economic and Financial Committees Not long before he attended the meeting of the committee charged with organising the proposed Central Committee for Economic and Social Questions at The Hague in February 1940, McDougall sent a letter to John H. Willits, director of the Social Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation. According to Way, McDougall sought in his letter budgetary assistance for the LON secretariat in light of the fact that its funding had been severely cut at the previous assembly.47 It is worth noting here that according to Walters, despite the cut to its funding, the financial situation of the secretariat at this time was not entirely dire: The budget was cut to a fraction of its former figure. Even so, very few Members continued to pay their contributions; almost the whole income of the League was supplied by Britain and the other Commonwealth Members, in spite of their war burdens. However, thanks to the skilful and prudent manner in which the financial affairs of the Secretariat had been conducted, it possessed large reserve funds. Thus a nucleus of officials was kept together in Geneva, which continued to be the headquarters of the Secretariat. The immense palace of the League was empty and silent, save for a small group of offices clustered round the Secretary-General’s room, and a still smaller group in the Rockefeller Library.48

In his letter to Willits on June 5, McDougall, who a few weeks later would express his eagerness to see parts of the LON transferred to America, stated that although the need to begin considering ‘the problems of postwar reconstruction’ may not appear to be a matter of urgency, those who felt ‘vitally concerned with this subject may be convinced that there is little time to lose,’ and to this end he hoped that ‘decisions may be taken to preserve a strong economic and social organization of the League’.49 47 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 207. McDougall attended the 1939 LON Assembly as a delegate of Australia. In Geneva, ‘he stressed the need to reduce Secretariat expenses, especially on political activity. The total League budget was cut by one-third, and League and ILO staff agreed to accept salary reductions ranging from 2 to 20 per cent. A policy of staff reduction would continue’ (ibid.). 48 Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 810. 49 McDougall, 1940, quoted in Way, A New Idea Each Day, 207–8. For McDougall’s desire to see part of the League transferred to America, see ibid., 223.

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Relative to the circumstances, a strong economic and social organisation of the LON was indeed preserved. In June 1940, the LON Secretariat received an invitation from Princeton University, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, ‘suggesting that the technical services of the League might take up their work in Princeton and offering offices and other facilities.’50 As a result of this invitation, Loveday and the majority of the staff of the Economic, Financial and Transit Department, relocated to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton in August 1940.51 The staff who remained in Geneva specialised in European economic developments while those on mission at Princeton concentrated on developments in the rest of the world. Responsibility for the production of the principal publications of the Economic Intelligence Service, the preservation and efficacy of which the assembly had sought to ensure by making certain budgetary decisions in December 1939, was divided between both groups. The Statistical: Year-Book and the Monthly Bulletin of Statistics continued to be published in Switzerland and without interruption. However, World Economic Survey, 1939–4, which appeared in the autumn of 1941, was prepared in Princeton.52 The Princeton-based staff of the Economic, Financial and Transit Department, which had

50 League of Nations, Economic and Financial Committees, Report to the Council on the Work of the Joint Session London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, Princeton, August 7th–8th, 1942, 12. See also Walters, History of the League of Nations, 809. Walters pointed out that the government of the United States were favourable to the idea of relocating the LON’s technical services to the United States. 51 League of Nations, Economic and Financial Committees, Report to the Council on the Work of the Joint Session London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, Princeton, August 7th–8th, 1942, 12. See also Clavin and Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of Its Economic and Financial Organisation,’ 476n. In regard to the war-time location of some of the LON’s other technical services and the ILO, Walters noted the following: ‘That same autumn the League Treasury moved to London, where the Refugees Department was already established; and in the spring of 1941 the Section dealing with the Drug Traffic was officially invited to set up its office in Washington. As for the International Labour Organization, [John G.] Winant decided to transfer not merely certain departments, but its main headquarters, to Montreal. For the duration of the war it carried on its work with energy on Canadian soil, leaving only a caretaking staff in its Geneva home. Meanwhile, the process of dissolution went on apace.’ Walters, History of the League of Nations, 809. 52 Ibid., 11–13.

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been voted a grant of $50,000 dollars for the years 1941–1942 by the Rockefeller Foundation with a further grant becoming available at the close of 1942, were charged with preparing the great majority of the department’s studies of post-war problems.53 Neither the LON’s Economic Committee nor its Financial Committee met in 1940 and 1941. However, as a result of consultations between members of these committees and the secretary-general, it was decided in early 1942 that the time was right to organise a meeting in the form of a joint session of the two bodies. As it proved difficult in view of travel conditions to organise a single meeting which could be attended by all of the available members of these committees, it was decided that two meetings would be held: ‘one in England and the other in the New World.’54 The first of these meetings was held in London from April 27 to May 1, 1942, and the second in Princeton, New Jersey, on August 7 and 8, 1942. In a report to the LON Council on its work, the joint committee, observed that the problem of relief and reconstruction would be much vaster at the end of he present war that it was in 1918: the scale of the field of battle was much vaster; the social upheavals it had caused were much graver; and many more countries had had been invaded and occupied. Moreover, the report noted, even before the war commenced ‘the process of disintegration was already far advanced. We shall be faced with the necessity of building a new system from the foundations.’55 Having noted that relief operations, however efficiently organised, were only a temporary response to the deep and widespread disruption caused by the war, the report pointed out that the governments of the United Nations had set forth the general principles which would determine the shape of their long-term plans for reconstruction in the social and economic fields through endorsing the terms of the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, and in signing the Mutual Aid Agreements of 1942.56 Both the Atlantic Charter and the Mutual Aid Agreements, the report observed, were inspired by President Roosevelt’s pronouncement

53 League of Nations Economic and Financial Committees, Report to the Council on the Work of the Joint Session London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, London, April 27th–May 1st, 1942, Princeton, August 7th–8th, 1942, 12. 54 Ibid., 3. 55 Ibid., 5. 56 Ibid., 6, 8.

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on January 6, 1941 on the ‘ideal’ of the Four Freedoms and the intention to ensure the utmost cooperation among nations in the economic field with the following objects in view: [T]he enjoyment all states of access on equal terms to the trade and raw materials of the world, the fullest collaboration between all nations with the object of securing for all improved labour standards, economic advancement and social security, the assurance that all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.57

Having declared their complete agreement with the emphasis in the secretary-general’s report on the work of the League in 1941–1942 on the priorities of economic advancement and social security, the joint session noted that the LON’s Economic and Financial Organisation and its committees had long taken an active interest in the problems of free access to raw materials and to the world’s trade on the one hand, and in the question of social security and the raising of living standards on the other. In regard to the organisation’s interest in the latter subjects, the report drew particular attention to the ‘pioneering work on problems of nutrition initiated by the technical services in Geneva in 1925.’58

McDougall and Plans Post-War Reconstruction As a member of the Economic Committee, McDougall attended the London joint session and the Princeton joint session. McDougall attended the latter session while on an extended visit to the United States where he spent nearly all of his time in Washington conferring with key government officials.59 Way notes that against the background of his visit Washington and the subsequent entry of the United States into the war, McDougall gave up the notion of reforming the LON because this would ‘not be acceptable to the US Congress or to the USSR.’60 Nonetheless, he felt that the skills of

57 Ibid.,

9, 14–15. 14–15. 59 Ibid., 3–4, and Way, A New Idea Each Day, 234. McDougall had visited Washington in the summer of 1941 when serving as an Australian delegate to the International Wheat Conference. 60 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 240. 58 Ibid.,

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the League’s technical experts should continue to be exploited in the context of post-war planning.61 While in Washington in 1942, McDougall conferred with such leading figures in the Roosevelt administration as Henry Agard Wallace, the vice president, Sumner Welles, the under secretary of state, and Dean Acheson, the assistant secretary of state. McDougall had met these three men when in Washington in the previous year and all three had recently made statements on post-war planning in which they envisaged a better way of living for all peoples after the war.62 With the onset of war, McDougall’s responsibilities at Australia House in London came to encompass what was known as ‘political warfare’.63 In May 1942, he described such warfare in the following terms: Its object is to achieve the political purposes of the State, either without bloodshed or, after hostilities have commenced, to ease the tasks of the Armed Forces. Its purpose is to undermine enemy morale, to secure Allies, and to strengthen the will to victory of our own people and those associated with us. It is the war of Ideas.64

For McDougall, as with others, the promise of improved conditions of life after the war was an essential element of Allied propaganda. However, for this promise to be credible, it was necessary to for the United Nations to beginning planning for the post-war world: such plans would give much-needed substance to the broad commitments made in the Atlantic Charter and to Roosevelt’s pronouncement on freedom from want.65 With Wallace’s encouragement, McDougall arranged a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt on August 15 as a consequence of which he was issued an invitation to dine at the White House which he did on August 24.66 There McDougall talked to the president ‘about the war of

61 Ibid. 62 Ibid.,

236, 244–45, 252. 221. 64 McDougall, 1942, quoted ibid., 240. 65 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 242–43. 66 Ibid., 252. 63 Ibid.,

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ideas and the need for ammunition for that war in the shape of concrete schemes to give real meaning to the Atlantic Charter and to the phrase Freedom from Want.’67 He later recalled suggesting to the president ‘that it was necessary to given them [the United Nations] something to do, something perhaps not too controversial…such as an international agency for food and agriculture.’68 McDougall’s time in Washington concluded in October, following the completion of a document that he had prepared in association with a group from the Department of Agriculture: ‘Draft Memorandum on a United Nations Program for Freedom of Want from Food.’69 One of the memorandum’s concluding observations was that at war’s end, the United Nations must be ‘ready with measures and organisations to carry out its pledges.’70 Early in the following February, McDougall was excited to learn that Roosevelt ‘had decided to summon the United Nations to their first conference and that was to be on food and agriculture.’71

The Americas and International Intellectual Cooperation in War-Time As an institution, Intellectual Cooperation did not cease to exist entirely during the war years. Between November 15 and 22, 1941, the Second American Conference of National Committees of Intellectual Cooperation (Segunda conferencia Americana de comisiones nacionales de Cooperación intelectual), took place in Havana in Cuba. The origins of this conference lay with two resolutions of the Second Conference of National Commissions of Intellectual Co-operation in July 1937 in favour of ‘intellectual co-operation of a regional character’ with a special emphasis on co-operation among ‘new and distant’ countries. To this end, the Chilean National Commission organised the First American Conference of National Committees of Intellectual

67 McDougall, 68 F.

1942, quoted ibid., 252. L. McDougall, 1951, quoted in O’Brien, ‘F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,’

174. 69 Way, A New Idea Each Day, 269–70. 70 ‘Draft Memorandum on a United Nations Program for Freedom of Want From Food,’ 1942, quoted ibid., 262. 71 McDougall, 1951, quoted in O’Brien, ‘F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,’ 174.

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Co-operation at Santiago in Chile. This conference took place from the January 6 to 12, 1939.72 Fourteen states of the Americas were represented at the second American conference of the national committees, the inaugural meeting of which was held at the Salón de sesiones de la Cámera de representantes at the Capitiolo Nacional. The Cuban prime minister, Carlos Saladraigas, opened the conference.73 In his speech at the inaugural meeting, Saladraigas stated that it was with a touch of ‘emotion’ that he tried ‘in vain to hide’ that he wanted to speak of the work of the IIIC. He underlined his appreciation of the fact that amidst the IIIC’s ‘profound preoccupations,’ it had found the time to consider on repeated occasions cultural life in continental Americas; he then went on to affirm the ‘solidarity in the order of ideas and of spiritual values’ of the people of the Americas.74 In the midst of a series of resolutions, the conference expressed its great appreciation for the ‘fruitful and humanitarian labour in favour of connections between cultures whatever be their origin’ undertaken by the Sociedad de las Naciones and ‘all its sympathy’ for the IIIC in light of its closure.75 The conference’s first plenary session, which was held at the Salón de sesiones de la Academia de ciencias, heard that it now fell to the Americas to carry on the work of Intellectual Cooperation in solidarity with the democratic governments which were now combating the totalitarian onslaught against civilisation in Europe.76 Francisco Walker Linares, a member of the Chilean delegation to the conference, made the same point in observing that the ‘various nations of free America’ have come to this meeting as ‘crusaders for intellectual independence…[and]…in order to defend the rights of human thought’. 72 ‘Resolutions adoptées par la C.I.C.I. à sa séance du 16 juillet,’ La Coopération Intellectuelle Bulletin, nos. 91–92 (1938): 442–44. See also Comision Cubana de Cooperatión, Intelectual, Segunda Conferencia Americana de Comisiones Nacionales de Cooperación Intelectual (15–22 noviembre 1941): Actas y Documentas (Habana: Ucar, Garcia y Cia, 1942), xi. 73 Comision Cubana de Cooperatión, Intelectual, Segunda conferencia americana de Comisiónes Nacionales de Cooperación Intelectual, xiii, 1. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, the Dominican Republic, the United States of America, Uruguay and Venezuela were all represented in Havana. 74 Ibid., 3–4. 75 Ibid., 66–7. 76 Ibid., 33.

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He declared that those present at the conference wanted to ‘solemnly affirm before…[their]…Continent, that culture has a universal value’ and that as such it is the ‘common patrimony of humanity’ and is to be enjoyed without restrictions of any kind. Human thought, he stated, should not have imposed on it pre-determined forms, much less should it ‘serve as an instrument of doctrines based in material force’ or be ‘converted into the monopoly of a dominant race.’ For Walker Linares, considerations such as these were well encapsulated by Valéry’s notion of a sociedad de los espiritus, a notion which, Walker Linares insisted, must be kept in view if an ‘authentic fraternity’ amongst minds is to be realised.77 In accordance with Walker Linares’s comments, the second plenary session of the conference approved, by acclamation, a recommendation that ‘all the governments of the American nations study the possibility of establishing in one of them, for the duration of the war…[the IIIC] or its Secretariat,’ the functionaries of which, the resolution noted, had been ‘obliged to disperse themselves throughout the world’ due to the German Occupation.78 In a further resolution it was proposed that an inter-American committee comprised of seven persons experienced in the field of intellectual cooperation should be established under the chairmanship of Almeida, with a view to examining the possibility establishing in one of the American nations an institution devoted to intellectual cooperation and the practical form it might take. This committee was duly established and with the assistance of one of the IIIC’s dispersed functionaries, namely, Bonnet, who had been present at the Havana meeting.79 In the event, this committee met only once: in October 1943 in Washington where it held sessions at the buildings of the Pan-American Union and the Carnegie Endowment. At these sessions, the committee outlined projects for an inquiry into the current state of intellectual cooperation, the duties and rights of intellectual in the political and social struggle, education as a means of ensuring peace, post-war intellectual and cultural exchange, the protection of works of art and monuments in times of war as well as a range of other projects.80 Irrespective of the 77 Ibid.,

20–1. 30. 79 Ibid. See also Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 159. 80 Malcolm W. Davis, ‘The League of Minds,’ in Harriet Eager Davis, ed., Pioneers in World Order: An American Appraisal of the Leauge of Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 248. The inter-American committee endorsed a proposal by the Cuban government to set up a committee secretariat in Havana. 78 Ibid.,

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outcome of the Second American Conference of National Commissions of Intellectual Cooperation, its proposal to move the IIIC or its secretariat to the Americas served to demonstrate prominence achieved by the countries of Latin America within the framework Intellectual Cooperation.81 Shotwell had attended the Havana meeting as a member of the United States’ delegation, which also counted Davis amongst its members. In a speech that he gave at the inaugural meeting, Shotwell stated that it was important to initiate discussion on what he envisaged would be an essential element in any post-war settlement: the establishment of a new international ‘organism of cultural relations and intellectual cooperation,’ an organism which must be ‘much more capable’ of realising its aims than had been the League’s ICO.82 Renoliet points out that the proposition of the North American delegation reflected an attitude that any successor to the ICO should strive to promote, not simply relations among intellectuals in the narrow sense of that term, but cultural exchanges in a more extensive sense.83 This point is evidenced by another resolution the Havana conference: that ‘the concept of “Intellectual” must not be interpreted as the denomination of an activity conditioned by the exclusive interests of a group or cast’ but must be interpreted in a sense ‘ampliamente humano’: as an activity that unfolds in contact with ‘los problemas reales’ that arise in the ‘en la vida común.’84

The Institute of Pacific Relations: The Mont Tremblant Conference Since the time of the Berlin Pact of September 27, 1940, under which Berlin, Rome and Tokyo forged a common front, the IPR had grown in importance. According to its general secretary, namely, Carter, with the conclusion of this pact American audiences had finally awoken ‘to the tragic fact that that what was happening in the Pacific was as much 81 Renoliet,

L’UNESCO oubliée, 159. Cubana de Cooperatión, Intelectual, Segunda conferencia americana de Comisiones Nacionales de Cooperación Intelectual, 9. Renoliet quotes the American delegation as stating that any new organisation must have ‘ample financial assistance.’ Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 159. 83 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 159. 84 Comision Cubana de Cooperatión, Intelectual, Segunda conferencia americana de Comisiones Nacionales de Cooperación Intelectual, 33–4. 82 Comision

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the concern of every American as events in Europe’ and that the war in Europe was ‘inextricably linked’ to the war in the Pacific.85 In a letter to Raymond B. Fosdick at the Rockefeller Foundation, a body which continued to be a great supporter of the IPR’s work, Carter stated that the Berlin Pact signalled that the United States, the British Dominions in the Pacific and the ‘orphaned French and Dutch colonies in the Far East and the Pacific’ were facing ‘new and critical dangers.’86 In terms of the inextricable link between the wars in both regions, Carter might well have been referring not simply to the formal link which was the Berlin Pact, but to the consideration that unchecked aggression in Asia could not be dissociated from subsequent acts of aggression elsewhere. Indeed, the view that there was a link between unchecked aggression in the Pacific region and acts of aggression elsewhere had been for some time a common-place view. In this regard, the following statement of the Chinese Ambassador to London in 1936 is worth noting: ‘Today the sky is positively darkened with chickens coming home to roost’.87 Following the attack on Pearl Harbour, the American Council of the IPR swung its full support behind the American people’s prosecution of the war against the Axis powers, promising to provide all that it could by way of ‘reliable information and analysis.’88 It was against this background that the first IPR conference held during the Pacific War convened. The conference ran from December 4 to 14, 1942, and, like the ‘Study Meeting’ that the IPR had held in 1939, took place on the Atlantic rather than Pacific coast: at Mont Tremblant in Quebec. Holland observed in the preface to a preliminary report of the 85 Edward C. Carter, 1940, quoted in Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 250. For the continuing Rockefeller support for the IPR during the war years, see Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 330, n.35. 86 Edward C. Carter, 1940, quoted in Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 250. Morley noted that the ‘original plan of organization’ for the LON Secretariat ‘called for an American Under Secretary-General and Mr. Raymond B. Fosdick was actually appointed to the post in 1919. He resigned his post ‘following the Senate’s failure to ratify the Peace Treaty, and thereby the Covenant.’ Originally, there were only two under secretary generals: Inazō Nitobe from Japan and Dionisio Anzilotti from Italy. ‘[A] German Under-Secretary was added when Germany entered the League on September 8, 1926.’ Morley, The Society of Nations, 274. See also Walters, History of the League of Nations, 78. 87 William Arnold-Forster, review of The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of Nations, by Westel W. Willoughby, Political Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1936): 305–6. 88 Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 251–52.

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conference’s proceedings entitled War and Peace in the Pacific, that the international conditions surrounding the conference rendered it very different from all previous conferences, including even the study meeting at Virginia Beach. Although that meeting was held some three months after war broke out in Europe, a number of member countries of the IPR, namely, the United States, the USSR, the Philippines and the Netherlands and Netherlands Indies, ‘were still at peace, and except in China and Japan, war had not yet begun to make its full impact felt, even upon the belligerent nations.’89 By contrast, all the member-countries participating at the Mont Tremblant conference were at war or had been occupied by enemy forces.90 Despite the difficulties involved in overseas travel at the time, representatives of Australia, China, India, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Netherlands Indies, and Fighting France came by plane to North America. In terms of the composition of its membership, the conference was noteworthy for the fact that for the first time an Indian delegation participated in an IPR conference. India’s only previous involvement in the conference consisted in the presence of an observer at the study meeting at Virginia Beach. It was also the first time that a representative of Thailand attended, the representative in question being Mom Rajawongse Seni Pramoj, the Free Thai minister to the United States and it was the first time since 1927 that there was independent Korean participation.91 Absent from the conference were representatives of the Japanese Council of the IPR: with Japan now at war with the Allied powers and firmly in the Axis camp, the Japanese Council was no longer playing a part in the international work of the IPR. In connection with this, it should be noted that the constitutional problem that saw the ‘modest’ gathering at Virginia Beach termed a study meeting rather than a conference and lead to the decision being taken that no formal meeting of the Pacific Council would be held there, was resolved at Mont Tremblant: 89 W. L. Holland, preface to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific: A Preliminary Report of the Eighth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations on Wartime and Post-War Co-operation of the United Nations in the Pacific and the Far East, Mont Tremblant, Quebec, December 4–14, 1942 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1943), v. Holland stated that a preliminary report was issued in response to requests that a summary of the meeting be produced as quickly as possible. He added that a fuller report of the conference proceedings would be issued later as Problems of the Pacific, 1942. In the event, this volume was never published. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., vi, 157.

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the veto power over decisions made by the Pacific Council that certain national councils, the Japanese Council among them, enjoyed by virtue of the IPR’s original constitution, was abolished.92 The USSR Council was also unrepresented at the conference a fact which, while keenly regretted by all those assembled, was viewed as understandable in light of the circumstances then facing the Soviet Union.93 Reflecting on the Mont Tremblant conference in early 1943, Holland observed that the conference took place during ‘a momentous period of world history and at a point which future historians will probably recognise as a crucial stage in the second world war.’94 Holland pointed out that the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbour fell in the middle of the conference and that the American naval and air losses resulting from that attack had greatly contributed to Japan’s lightning conquests in the `Southwest Pacific during the first four months of fighting….Earlier illusions about Japan’s weaknesses were rapidly shattered as the enemy showed himself to be a fierce, tough, amazingly stubborn and skilful fighter and as Japan took over the great raw material prizes of Southeast Asia.95

Holland further observed that the Japanese conquests were grave setbacks for the Allied cause, however, he added that developments in the last few months of 1942 indicated that the tide of the war was turning in a significant, although not yet definitive, way. Hence, the guiding premise of the discussion at the conference was that of Allied victory. Holland explained the shift in the course of the war as follows: Japan’s territorial advances had been stopped and she had suffered heavy naval, air and shipping losses, India, though still suffering from a grave internal impasse and official repression of the Congress Party for its attempt at civil disobedience, had been spared an actual invasion. With painful slowness and in pathetically small amounts, supplies were being carried by air into Western China from India.

92 ‘The Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 24. 93 Holland, preface to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, vi. 94 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 1. 95 Ibid.

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A large American loan to China had been made party to help in stabilising China’s fast depreciating currency and a similar British loan was being negotiated. Substantial American forces had reinforced Australia and had begun to drive the Japanese slowly from New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. After many difficulties the enormous industrial machine of the United States had been switched over substantially to an all-out war program and American troops in large numbers were going into action on several battle fronts—most notably and dramatically in North Africa. Most important of all, the Soviet Union, though neutral in the Pacific theatre of war, was still delivering by far the heaviest blows against the major Axis power and was beginning its astonishing counter-drive to expel the German armies from Stalingrad and the Caucasus.96

In what was a significant departure from previous practice, the IPR invited those occupying roles in government to participate in the discussions at the conference, albeit only in a personal capacity. Although the IPR had always emphasised its unofficial character, it felt it necessary to take this step because so many experts in the field of Pacific problems, among them numerous IPR members, were now serving in government positions and because a serious and informed discussion of such matters as cooperation of among Allied powers in the Pacific demanded expert guidance.97 Akami notes that almost half of the representatives at the 1942 conference served in government, whether in the military, the diplomatic corps, the civil service, or legislature. She further notes that the IPR’s 1942 conference and the IPR’s 1945 conference, functioned as ‘Allied policy forums’ and that governments regarded it as important to send representatives to them.98 The presence of governmental figures at the 1942 conference explains why it was conducted entirely in private and why the press, as had also been the case at the IPR’s 1939 conference, were not invited. In keeping with previous IPR practice, the identity of the speakers was not revealed in the reports of the discussions.99 In light of the Declaration of the United Nations in January 1942 and, indeed, the formation of the very concept of the United Nations, the main themes of the conference were as follows: 96 Ibid.,

1–2. vi, and ‘The Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 38. 98 Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 258. 99 Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, viii. See also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 258. 97 Ibid.,

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(1) What steps can jointly or severally be taken by the United Nations… to aid in the better prosecution of the war and in the establishment of conditions of racial, political and economic justice and welfare? (2) How far and by what means can the conclusions drawn from the discussions under point (1) above be made the basis of a practical program for the United Nations during and after the war?100 Although the Declaration of the United Nations was viewed as a major advance in the joint conduct of the war, it was recognised that as a nominal association the United Nations fell far short of being a functioning executive body. Both Walter Nash, the New Zealand minister to Washington, and Soong, who was now the Chinese foreign minister (and who in May 1931, as vice-president of the Yuan Executive Council and finance minister, had initiated a programme of technical cooperation between China and the LON with a view to China’s total reconstruction), had called for the transformation of the United Nations into an active policy-making entity, comprising at least the larger members of the United Nations and with a view to not only the better prosecution of the war but also to post-war planning.101 Alfred Sao-ke Sze, the acting chair of China Defence Supplies in Washington, was a former ambassador to London and Washington and had been the head of the Chinese delegation to the Washington Conference which took place from November 1921 to February 1922. In September 1931, Sze had served as the chief delegate of China to the LON Assembly.102 On September 14, 1931, China was elected as a non-permanent member of the LON Council and it was in that forum that Sze, following the capture of the city of Mukden by Japanese troops on the night of September 18–19 and further incursions by Japanese forces into Manchuria, had vigorously prosecuted the Chinese case against Japan.103 In one of two opening addresses at the conference at Mont Tremblant, Sze, the head of the Chinese delegation, noted that in a speech in New York on October 10, 1942, Soong had advanced a proposal in favour of the establishment of an executive council of the United

100 Ibid.,

vi.

101 International

Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 2. 155. 103 Morley, The Society of Nations, 435. 102 Ibid.,

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Nations in the hope ‘that such a body will bring about greater unification and closer cooperation in the formulation of a more effective war strategy, a clearer understanding of war aims and a more regular exchange of views in the post-war world for which we are fighting and working.’104 Sze pointed out that the Chinese further hoped that such a body would serve as the basis for the development of international instruments for the provision of justice and, as Soong had suggested a few weeks earlier, lay the groundwork for collective security in a post-war world.105 Soong’s proposal should be viewed in part against a background of concern about the inadequacies in the existing machinery for consultation in respect to the administration of the war. This concern had seen China plead for an increased presence in the higher war councils. Like several other Allied countries, China protested against ‘excessive Anglo-American dominance in the conduct of the war’: as stated by both Chinese and Indian members at Mont Tremblant, the administration of the war was ‘not nearly democratic enough to correspond with the concept of “equal partnership.”’106 While the question of national prestige was implied by such criticism, the conference proceedings suggested that the two main motivations behind it was the desire to better coordinate the war effort on all fronts and to ensure that all members of the United Nations were afforded the opportunity to fully participate in international post-war planning.107 In connection with the motivation which was the desire to better coordinate the war effort, it should be noted that Chinese members were keen to stress against the background of the loss of Burma, the importance of the China front in the general strategy of the United Nations. They argued that the failure to appreciate its importance on the part of the American and the British authorities meant that urgently needed supplies were not finding their way to China.108 In connection with the motivation relating to post-war planning, it should be noted that Sze observed at the conference that the Chinese were very keen to see some of the 104 Sao-Ke Alfred Sze, ‘A Chinese View of China’s Position in the Post-War World,’ in International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 18–20, 23. 105 Ibid., 19, 23. 106 William L. Holland, introduction to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 2, and International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 21, 75. 107 Ibid., 21–22. 108 Ibid., 30–31, 33–34.

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ideas underlying the statement jointly issued by Roosevelt and Churchill on August 14, 1941, by which he meant the Atlantic Charter, with the intention of making ‘known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they…[based]…their hopes for a better future for the world,’ translated into practice ‘at an early date…before there…[was]…a chance for them to become cold.’109 It became evident during an introductory discussion concerning the problems of war and peace that affected the Pacific as a whole, that few participants in the conference were disposed to discuss the conduct of the war in a strictly military sense: it was not military strategy that excited their interest but rather political strategy. An important feature of the discussion of political strategy that took place at the conference was the question of the need for regional coordination in respect to information services. While the need for strict censorship of information that might be of assistance to the enemy was not disputed by anyone, some felt that a lack of candour in several of the countries in the region ‘had led to an unhealthy and even dangerous growth of “grapevine” channels of information and rumour, which, it was said, tended to undermine morale.’110 There was strong agreement among members on the need to coordinate the propaganda produced by the United Nations, although in connection with this the following question was raised: what could the peoples of the Pacific possibly be told by their governments in order to raise their morale when the United Nations had yet to decide on the post-war future of the region?111 Once this question was raised, the discussion of the topic of political strategy seamlessly lead into a discussion of the topic of the future of colonial policy. As stated by Astor in his role as chair of the RIIA in the foreword to the preliminary report of the conference which was published by the RIIA in 1943, the latter topic ran through ‘the warp and woof’ of the conference’s discussion in general.112 In response to the question concerning the post-war future of the Pacific region, it was suggested that as a first step, information should be widely diffused by 109 Sao-Ke

Alfred Sze, ‘A Chinese View of China’s Position in the Post-War World,’ 18. Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific,

110 International

20, 23. 111 Ibid. 112 Waldorf Astor, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, iii.

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the United Nations, whether individually or collectively, in regard to what progress had actually been made ‘in the direction of the accepted war aims,’ by which was meant the eight clauses of the Atlantic Charter (which, among other things, condemned territorial aggrandisement and the use of force, insisted on the right of peoples to choose their own government and live in freedom from fear and want and called for a permanent system of collective security), with a view to giving ‘the native peoples of the East confidence in the sincerity of the announced purposes.’113 Information of this kind, it was suggested, would make mention of such developments as the following: the effective recognition by the Pacific War Council in Washington of Philippine independence; the agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States that the extraterritorial regime in China must come to a complete end; and the plan which had been announced by Queen Wilhelmina while the conference was in progress, to reconstitute relations between the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies such that the latter would achieve ‘full and equal partnership with the mother country’ after the war.114 In respect to the joint propaganda emanating from the United Nations, most members thought it was of the essence that all doubts be removed that the principles enshrined in the Atlantic Charter (support for which had been pledged in a declaration signed by the USSR and the nine governments of occupied Europe, namely, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Yugoslavia and by the representatives of France’s General de Gaulle at a meeting in London on September 24, 1941), were intended to apply to the whole world and not to Europe alone. Here, it is worth noting that the third clause of the charter, after having insisted on ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,’ stated that ‘they [the signatories] wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.’ Responding to the insistence that all doubts should be removed concerning the universal applicability of the principle of self-­determination as enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, some members

113 International

Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific,

24. 114 Ibid.,

24, 54, 87. See also Hailey, ‘A British View of a Far Eastern Settlement,’ 6.

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warned against the danger of encouraging unrealistic expectations in an effort to stimulate ‘the war morale’ of the peoples of Southeast Asia.115 Countering this warning, other members observed that if the war aims that the United Nations had announced were ‘kept in terms so uncertain, with so little evidence of serious attempts at their realization… suspicion rather than enthusiasm’ would be the result; they urged ‘forceful propaganda’ within the terms of the charter ‘not least as a means of binding the United Nations themselves to their promises.’116 As was noted at the conference, several speeches made by the British prime minister had been ‘interpreted abroad as either denying or leaving in doubt’ the question of whether or not the charter was intended to apply outside of Europe.117 An Indian member of the conference stated that he feared that Churchill’s qualifications to the Atlantic Charter put in serious doubt the prospect of ‘immediate post-war self-determination for India’ and that India would be offered no more after the war than the ‘undemocratic proposals’ put forward by Sir Stafford Cripps during his mission to India in April 1942.118 In response to the expression of these fears, a member of the British group declared that he could ‘say categorically that there would not be the slightest disposition in any part of Great Britain to object to any decision the people of India make’ in regard to their constitutional arrangements.119 In regard to the matter of qualifications to the Atlantic Charter, it should be noted that the conference was particularly exercised by a speech given by Churchill at a mayoral dinner at Mansion House on November 10, 1942. Therein Churchill, after having declared that Britain had not ‘entered this war for profit or expansion’ but only for reasons honour and the duty to do what is right, stated the following: ‘Let me, however, make this clear, in case there should be any mistake about it in any quarter: we mean to hold our own. I have not become 115 Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill, Atlantic Charter, August 14, 1941, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp, and International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 53. 116 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 53. 117 Ibid., 24. 118 Ibid., 87. See also Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 249. 119 Ibid.

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the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. For that task, if ever it were prescribed, someone else would have to be found’.120 Churchill’s Mansion House speech had given rise to consternation in the United States, with one American senator stating that he found it chilling. How could he suggest to young American men, the same senator asked, that they were being sent to war to restore the British Empire?121 Perham, mindful of the consternation in the United States to which Churchill’s speech had given rise, almost immediately penned two articles for the Times. In those articles, she warned of the danger of America drawing away from Great Britain in order to distance itself ‘from the contamination of Imperialism of which Britain is the main exponent’ and of America outflanking Britain in ‘liberalism.’122 She stated that there had been signs of the latter danger in recent months, pointing in this regard to the talks that the American Republican politician Wendell Wilkie, who had stated that he was shocked by Churchill’s stance in regard to British colonial policy, had held with ‘the leading men’ in China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Turkey, during which he ‘found them in substantial agreement as to the necessity of abolishing imperialism.’123 Perham observed that Churchill’s ‘declaration of. tenacity’ in the face of growing American criticism, may well have matched ‘a mood of justifiable self-confidence,’ but it did not ‘answer American doubts.’124 Perham called for leadership on the question, urging the government to undertake the urgent task of convincing American audiences that Britain was indeed ‘liquidating’ what the Americans ‘strongly, if somewhat vaguely’ felt to be an ‘obsolete and dangerous’ idea, namely, that of colonial possessions, both ‘from above by a readiness for international cooperation and from below by strenuous education in self-government.’125 120 ‘Prime

Minister Churchill’s Speech,’ New York Times, November 11, 1942. Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific,

121 International

121. 122 Margery Perham, ‘America and the Empire—An Outline of the British Position: II—The Need for Definitions,’ Times, November 21, 1942. See also Margery Perham, ‘America and the Empire—The Aftermath of Mr. Wilkie’s Broadcast: I—The Dangers of Misunderstanding,’ Times, November 20, 1942. 123 Times, November 21, 1942. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid.

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In editorialising on Perham’s contributions, the Times stated that it would be delusional to think that when the tide of battle turned in the Pacific that a return to the status quo of 1941 was possible or desirable: the cataclysmic events that had unfolded in the region since that date had left their mark and the aim of future policy must be that of progress towards independence for colonial territories in the Pacific. Further to this, the Times observed that the joint nature of military action in the region rendered the question of its future organisation a matter of common concern. It stressed the importance of the American people taking an interest in and sharing responsibility for the process of transition leading to independence. Like Perham, the Times warned against minimising the significance of ‘advanced American opinion’ on British colonial policy, noting that a leader of this opinion, namely, Wilkie, ‘had stood out courageously in the ranks of the Republican party as the champion of full American participation in the risks and responsibilities of the postwar world.’126 The other opening address at the conference at Mont Tremblant was delivered by the head of the British delegation, Lord Malcolm Hailey, in the context of which he defended current British colonial policy. Hailey was a former governor of the Punjab and of the United Provinces, director of the Africa Research Survey from 1935 to 1938, a former member of the LON’s Permanent Mandates Commission, head of the Economic Mission to the Belgian Congo in 1940, and chair of the governing body of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.127 Outlining the British view of a settlement in Southeast Asia, Hailey noted that with the exception of Thailand, all of the countries in that region were dependencies of either European powers or of the United States. He observed that an ‘indirect result’ of the Japanese aggression was that the position the colonial powers occupied in relation to their dependencies was now subject to scrutiny and severe questioning.128 He noted that the demand for the liberation of subject peoples was then being dramatically and emphatically expressed in America and that it had 126 ‘A

Colonial Debate,’ Times, November 21, 1942. Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 157–58. 128 Lord Hailey, ‘A British View of a Far Eastern Settlement,’ in International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 8. 127 International

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been suggested that unless such liberation proceeded or was guaranteed to proceed as some fixed date, then American cooperation in respect to maintaining the security of or advancing standards of living in Southeast Asia could not be expected.129 Hailey stated that as Britain recognised the need for the cooperation of the United States and other members of the Pacific group, Britain could not fail to take this demand into account. He then stated the following: ‘Nor can we fail to be conscious that the substance of it secures a strong response within our own circle in Asia, insistent in the case of India and Burma, far less vocal in Malaya, and not yet heard in Borneo, yet bound in the natural order of things to be heard in due time there also.’130 Hailey was keen to stress that the current advocates of colonial liberation could not claim to be the sole authors of the demand for the liberation of subject peoples as that demand was wholly continuous with the two guiding principles of British colonialism: ‘the moral principle of trusteeship…[and]…the political tradition derived alike from our own history and from our relations with the one-time colonies which are now the great Dominions, that the natural destiny of a dependent unit is independent and responsible government.’131 The British members of the conference were emphatic that the British public were unreservedly of the view that the Atlantic Charter applied to the whole world. Indeed, representatives of all the major colonial powers in Southeast Asia present, including the Fighting French, ‘hailed the charter as giving added force to the progressive movements of native welfare and native self-determination.’132 The representatives of Fighting France and the Netherlands-Netherlands Indies joined with the British representatives in arguing that the full embrace of the Atlantic Charter did not involve a sharp break from past practices: rather, it entailed an increase in the ‘speeding up of tendencies long at work.’133 Further to

129 Ibid.,

9.

130 Ibid. 131 Ibid.,

9–10.

132 International

Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 25, 52, 106, 122. 133 Astor, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, iii, and International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, ed., War and Peace in the Pacific, 24–5.

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this and like the rest of the conference, they too assumed that the fate of peoples living in colonial situations could no longer be treated as a concern of the colonial powers alone: the ‘watching world’ had an interest in their destiny.134 Nonetheless, although the representatives of Britain, Fighting France and the Netherlands-Netherlands Indies at the conference were more than willing to accept the view that the colonial powers ‘owed a moral obligation to the rest of the world to account for their stewardship’ and the view that this obligation might be discharged via some form of international supervision, they were not willing to countenance the idea of international administration of the colonial areas in the Pacific region.135 The reasons given for their rejection of the idea of international administration encompassed the following: that it would be impractical, that is, an international administrative authority would lack the requisite experience and knowledge; that it was doubtful whether any of the subject peoples would favour sovereignty over them being transferred from a national to an international authority given the disruption that that might entail; and that it was unnecessary given that the colonial administrations of the major colonial powers in the region were already governed by the moral criteria that inspired calls for international administration.136 Many members expressed unhappiness with Churchill’s qualifications in respect to the Atlantic Charter and thought it was a matter of urgency that the British government, preferably in the form of Churchill himself, clarify the question of the charter’s applicability to India. Without such a clarification one member argued, the United Nations, and in particular the Chinese and Americans, would continue to entertain suspicions that the British were not sincere in their promise that India would have the fullest self-determination after the war.137 134 Astor, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, iv, and International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, ed., War and Peace in the Pacific, 54. 135 Astor, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, iv, and International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 52, 56. 136 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 56. 137 Ibid., 66, 119, 123.

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A member of the British group responded to the criticism of the British prime minister by stating that he thought Churchill ‘was perfectly genuine’ in stating that ‘the original intention’ was that clause three of the charter ‘would apply to those nations overrun by the Axis which already had been fully independent’ and whose independence it was necessary to restore. He then suggested that Churchill although had not initially declared that as a matter of course the British accepted that clause three of the charter applied to India and that the British were ‘determined that India shall have the fullest power of self-determination,’ it was a declaration that Churchill certainly would want to make now in light of the mission to India lead by Sir Stafford Cripps in March 1942. The British member added that there was no doubt in his mind that ‘the Cripps Mission took to India the absolute promise of self-determination’ and that if any British leader tried to renege on that promise, including Churchill himself despite his ‘prestige,’ they would not survive in their role.138 As to the application of clause three to the colonies, the same British member agreed that Churchill had hesitated on that question, however, he added that this was not unreasonable because one ‘cannot apply self-determination to a people who are not qualified in any of the principles of self-government.’139 He stated that certainly the spirit of the charter applied to colonies, however, he added that what this meant was that self-determination would apply as soon as they arrived ‘at a stage at which they can themselves set up form government consistent with modern ideas of civilization.’140 By way of example, the British member observed that would not be ‘logical to suppose’ that the Atlantic Charter required that the immediate restoration of ‘the rule of the peoples of the Malay peninsular to the Malay sultans.’141 As its members conceded, the tone of the British group during the discussions of the Atlantic Charter was somewhat defensive. This was in part because the members of that group felt that the criticisms of British colonial policy were based on false assumptions and in part because they felt that the British in particular had been singled out for criticism in

138 Ibid., 139 Ibid., 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid.

119, 122. 119.

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relation to the charter even though there were serious question-marks about the American commitment to all of its principles.142 One British member observed that the words in the charter concerning freedom from fear would have no meaning should the United States once again retreat into isolation. Indeed, the British group as a whole maintained that there was a crucial link between American support for the charter’s promise of freedom from fear and the British commitment to help in the dismantling of the old colonial order: although American opinion urged its dismantling the United States had yet to offer any assurances as to what would replace it.143 Britain was one of those powers whose security interests were tied up with old colonial order and thus Britain simply could not be expected to cooperate in dismantling it unless the United States pledged its share in the establishment of a new and different system of security.144 Australian and Canadian members expressed disappointment in regard to the views expressed by British members on the question of self-determination, with one Canadian member stating that they seemed to complacently accept that progress towards implementing clause three of the charter would ‘proceed at a leisurely pace.’145 Nonetheless, Australian and Canadian members joined the British members in expressing disappointment with some of the American delegates who, while criticising the British attitude, appeared unable to affirm that American public opinion would support the post-war participation of the United States in the establishment of a general system of security as foreshadowed in the charter’s eighth clause.146 As a British member observed, ‘public opinion in some of the United Nations, especially in Britain, had become alarmed over the seeming discrepancy between the enthusiasm shown by the government and people of the United States’ for the clauses of the charter urging political freedom, economic advancement and social security for all, and the ‘lukewarmness of feeling’ for the clauses pledging the signatory powers ‘to effective participation in the maintenance of external security.’147

142 Ibid.,

76, 123, 125. 46, 123. 144 Ibid., 46, 49, 77–8. 145 Ibid., 120. 146 Ibid., 77, 120, 123, 127. 147 Ibid., 24. 143 Ibid.,

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Like the British members, the Australian, Chinese, Indian and New Zealand members stressed that the question as to what extent the other United Nations could count on the United States carrying out its commitments under the Atlantic Charter was of central importance to the determination of their own future policies.148 Against this background and in light of the probability that come the end of the war the United States would be the strongest power in the world, the conference was almost unanimously of the view that ‘there can be no lasting peace unless the American people assume the full burden of their responsibility under the tenets of the Atlantic Charter.’149 Despite the apprehensions expressed at the conference, the belief prevalent among members was that the tide of public opinion in the United States was moving in the direction of American involvement in the organisation of post-war security, in particular in relation to the Asia-Pacific region. As evidence that the Americans felt a special sense of responsibility for that region, the conference proceedings recorded the following declaration by an American delegate: ‘We are in the Pacific to stay.’150 It was a prevalent view at the conference that an unambiguous expression of American support for the principle of collective security would ‘in turn encourage further steps in the colonial field.’151 The import of the Atlantic Charter was discussed at Mont Tremblant not only in relation to the question of the liberation of subject peoples and the question of the organisation of security in and the economic development of the Pacific region: it was also discussed in relation to the immigration policies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Chinese and Indian members stated that to them, the immigration question was mainly a matter of ‘racial discrimination.’ They further stated that as immigration laws that discriminated on ethnic grounds carried ‘an implication of national inferiority,’ and they were a cause of suspicion and hostility among the groups affected.152 Both the Chinese and Indian members insisted that such laws were contrary to the spirit of the Atlantic Charter. This was a point on which most members appeared to converge: the conference proceedings record that ‘[i]n general, there 148 Ibid.,

76. 49, 146. 150 Ibid., 78. 151 Ibid., 46, 117. 152 Ibid., 74. 149 Ibid.,

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seemed to be an agreement that an obligation existed for a removal of the sting of discrimination’ from current immigration laws.153 Yet the question of the means by which this sting might be removed was left largely unexplored. American members stated that popular opposition to legislation repealing America’s ‘Oriental Exclusion Laws,’ which were driven, they claimed, by a concern to maintain living standards, might mean that such legislation would not win congressional approval. Canadian, New Zealand and Australian members, also cited the perceived threat to living standards that would be posed by a ‘substantial influx of Asiatic peoples’ as the reason why a revision immigration polices was not on the table in their respective countries.154 The rapporteur of the round table that addressed the issue of immigration discrimination, observed that ‘the thorny problem of the immigration of Asiatic peoples was cast about like a hot potato.’155

The Institute of Pacific Relations: The Hot Springs Conference The next IPR conference was held at Hot Springs in Virginia and took place from the January 6 to 17, 1945. The membership of the conference comprised men and women from the following countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, India, Korea, the Netherlands and Netherlands Indies, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The French group, which in this instance was substantial, included three delegates from Indochina, and the British group, which was even larger than the French group, included one delegate from Burma. The leader of the USSR Council of the IPR had sent a cable to in December 1944 expressing its regret that it could not pariticipate in the conference. In his preface to what was intended as a preliminary report of the ninth conference of the IPR, Horace Belshaw, then the IPR’s international research secretary, wrote that the principal reason why the USSR Council had been prevented from fully participating in the international work of the IPR, was that the Soviet Union was not at war with Japan. Indeed, according to Belshaw, because ‘members of the Institute in all 153 Ibid.,

75.

154 Ibid. 155 Ibid.,

108.

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other member countries’ had been ‘publicly committed to the defeat of Japan, the Soviet IPR leaders’ had expressed the desire ‘to be released temporarily from active participation.’ Also militating against Soviet representation was fact that, as in other countries, almost all the country’s ‘scientific personnel’ had been recruited to the war effort.156 Like the conference at Mont Tremblant, numerous government and political figures participated in the conference at Hot Springs and again, many of these were former IPR members seconded to government for the duration the war. According to Holland, their presence ‘added to the substance of this gathering.’157 Observers at the conference included the League of Nations’ Secretariat in the form of two representatives of the Economic, Financial and Transit Department, one of whom was Loveday. It was the eighth and final occasion on which the League would be represented at an IPR conference. Reflecting the changing framework of international organisation, three observers of from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) attended the conference, two of whom were from its Far Eastern Division.158 The Hot Springs conference took place at a time when victory in Europe and the Pacific was certain and against a background in which the foundations of a new world order were being laid. Indeed, it was at the very same hotel where the IPR’s 1945 conference took place, that between May 18 and June 3, 1943, the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture ‘met to consider the goal of freedom from want in relation to food and agriculture’ and lay the basis for a permanent organisation which would ‘aim to insure higher standards of nutrition and improved agricultural efficiency rural welfare.’159 The hotel in question was the Homestead Hotel which, according to Holland, was luxurious. Earlier, the hotel had been the place of 156 Horace Belshaw, preface to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific: A Preliminary Report of the Ninth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, January 6–17, 1945 (New York: Comet Press, 1945), v–vi. 157 ‘The Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 38. 158 ‘Appendix 3: Conference Membership,’ International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 160. 159 United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, Hot Springs, Virginia, May 18–June 3, 1943: Final Act and Section Reports (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 1, and International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 1945, x.

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internment of Japanese diplomatic and consular officials.160 Fittingly, the IPR conference at the Homestead Hotel attached much importance to the organisation of international collaboration for the improvement of health and nutrition in discussing social, political, and economic development in dependent territories.161 Post-war planning proceeded apace in the wake of the Food and Agriculture Conference. On November 9, the same forty-four nations who had sent delegates to that conference, participated in a meeting at the White House which saw the establishment of the UNRRA. In July 1944, the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference took place at Bretton Woods. In late August and early of October of that year at Dumbarton Oaks, representatives of the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States met in order to deliberate over the design of the successor organisation to the League. Roosevelt’s victory in the presidential election later that year, during which he had campaigned for the creation of a United Nations, serve to quell much of the lingering apprehension about whether the United States would fully assume its responsibilities for promoting world freedom from want and fear.162 In a foreword dated February 12, 1945, the editor of what was billed as a preliminary report of the conference, namely, War and Security in the Pacific, commenced by noting that while writing his introduction to the report, the radio had announced that on April 25 that the members of the United Nations would meet at San Francisco ‘to fashion the Dumbarton Oaks proposals into the new pattern of world security.’163 The editor of the report went on to state that the conference at Hot Springs was a ‘fitting prelude’ to San Francisco because it covered a great number of the problems which would call for a decision there.164 One of those problems covered at the conference was collective security, the discussion of which was preceded by an opening statement by Percy 160 ‘The Memoirs of William L. Holland,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 38. For the internment of Japanese officials at the Homestead Hotel see Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: American’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 116. 161 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 114. 162 Ibid., x, 24, 124. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid.

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E. Corbett, a Canadian specialist in international law and the then chair of the Pacific Council. In his statement, Corbett, who had prepared a study for the Inquiry series on international organisation called Post-War World (1942), sought to explain the reasons for the failure of all the attempts at establishing a general security system after the First World War. He noted that the common view in respect to League’s failure in this field was that the League lacked ‘direct executive power,’ adding that in the eyes of many this lack was rendered a fatal deficiency by ‘the absence of the United States from its Councils.’165 Corbett went on to state that the common view in regard to the League’s failure was the same as the principal criticism of all the other attempts at preventing war in the interwar period. He pointed out that the Nine-Power and Four-Power Treaties which had issued from the Washington Conference and which concerned security in the Pacific region provided for nothing more than consultation in the event of their violation. He also pointed out that the Pact of Paris did not even provide for consultation were its terms to be breached. The Pact of Paris, Corbett stated, should be kept ‘in mind, as an example of the futility of declaring principles without any provision for their realisation in policy.’166 Corbett observed that not everyone accepted this assessment of the weaknesses of interwar attempts at collective security. There were those who still maintained that the limited attempt at organising economic and military sanctions in order to enforce international obligations in the form of the covenant had advanced too far in the direction of compulsion. Those who entertained this view, Corbett stated, thought that no scheme relying on the use of force in order to maintain peace should be implemented in a world organised on the basis of state sovereignty. However, according to Corbett, those who held this view were now without doubt in the minority. If there was one major issue on which the Dumbarton Oaks plan for post-war international security parted company with League of Nations Covenant, Corbett maintained, ‘it is in its insistence on the necessity of being prepared to use force in any serious organisation for preventing aggression.’167

165 Ibid., 99. For Percy E. Corbett’s contribution to the Inquiry series see Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 250. 166 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 99. 167 Ibid., 100.

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Nonetheless, Corbett must have thought that there was something to be said for the minority view as he contended that the real reason why the League had not proved to be an effective political body was that it was a ‘superstructure without foundations’: in the end, however much people wanted peace and a just distribution of the world’s resources, they were not willing to sacrifice ‘the advantages or illusions of national sovereignty.’168 Corbett considered that the peoples of the world were still not willing to make such a sacrifice which was why, in his view, the governments at Dumbarton Oaks could not be accused of betraying their peoples in failing to go down the federal path and create a supranational body. Such a body, he advised, was the only assured means of maintaining peace between small and great powers alike.169 Corbett noted that it was commonly thought that the participation of the United States might be a guarantee of the success of the collective security machinery of the new organisation then under construction. However, he pointed out that as it now seemed certain that the major powers would retain the right of veto accorded to them under the Dumbarton Oaks Agreement irrespective of the objections of smaller powers the obligation of the United States to use force in order to maintain peace would ‘always depend wholly on their willingness to do so at the moment.’170 Although favouring the adoption of a rule whereby the major powers would give up their right of veto in respect to disputes to which they were party as was the case under the League, Corbett thought that all the evidence pointed in quite the opposite direction.171 Having accepted Corbett’s view that the Dumbarton Oaks plan was an imperfect but workable instrument, the conference’s round tables on collective security proceeded to focus on what were perceived to be its most serious flaws, chief among these according to members being the aforementioned veto and the inadequate role the plan accorded small and middle powers.172 Criticism was also voiced of the composition of the military forces that the plan proposed to place at the disposal of the world security organisation. An Australian member with the enthusiastic support of a Chinese member, suggested that the plan be modified so 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid.,

100–1. 101. 171 Ibid., 102. 172 Ibid., 104. 170 Ibid.,

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as to provide for an international force, preferably, in the form of an air force at least at the outset. The same member pointed to the success of combined operations during the war, adding that these operations set a precedent for an international military arm.173 Military members, however, expressed the view that the Dumbarton Oaks plan ‘provided all that was necessary by way of an alert and mobile force’.174 One of the several arguments that they advanced in objecting to an international force under the jurisdiction of the UN Security Council was that a force which ‘has no national roots fights under no nation’s flag’ would lack ‘the necessary esprit de corps’ and might ‘attract merely adventurers and mercenaries.’175 Certain members argued in response that ‘the ideals and practical objectives of a world-wide security organisation would provide incentives fully as appealing as those under which soldiers now give their lives throughout the world.’176 In connection with this, it was pointed out that recent public opinion polls showed that on being asked whether they were in favour of an international police force, seventy-four per cent in Great Britain, seventy-four per cent in America and seventy-eight per cent in Canada had responded in the affirmative. The conference proceedings noted that the general impression left by the discussion of the question of an international force was that having listened appreciatively to views of the military experts, a majority of the lay members remained convinced that to equip a world security organisation ‘with its own air force would imbue the conception of international action with a reality and a personality that otherwise might be lacking.’177 Although members differed on the exact treatment of the Japanese imperial structure and the Zaibatsu, there was ‘very general agreement’ on the following policies toward Japan: that Japan must surrender unconditionally; that Japan’s overseas empire must be dismantled; that the Allies must remain united in ensuring that Japan was kept disarmed; and that an economically sound Japan was desirable subject to the proviso that the economic well-being of other Pacific countries be given

173 Ibid., 174 Ibid.,

115–16. 116.

175 Ibid. 176 Ibid., 177 Ibid.,

117–18. 118.

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prior consideration.178 By contrast, although there was ‘little denial’ that the aim of post-war policy in regard to so-called dependent peoples should be preparation for self-government, there was no unanimity on the question ‘on the timing and method to be applied’ in respect to such preparation.179 The report of the conference’s proceedings recorded that European members who had not participated in previous IPR conferences were ‘rather shocked by the outspokenness with which the colonial system as such was attacked’ at Hot Springs and that these attacks had been inspired by the ‘continued deadlock in India and the belief of many that acceptable colonial policies had not yet been clearly formulated’.180 The same report noted the resentment felt by the representatives of those countries with colonial interests in the Pacific in the face of criticisms which they viewed as ‘over-simplified generalisations based on insufficient knowledge of the facts.’181 A former senior official of the Netherlands-Indies government, gave expression to this feeling and identified the causes of it in stating the following: The international interest shown in the advance to self-government of dependent peoples was helpful; but it was equally desirable that world opinion should recognise the special responsibility which rested on the metropolitan powers to bring their colonial peoples into the new world alignment. It was they who brought civilization to these countries, were now bound to them by growing ties of partnership, knew how to develop them along the shortest lines to political and economic self-government.182

The European delegates showed particular annoyance when criticisms of colonialism were issued by American members whom they accused of appealing rather too frequently to American public opinion on the subject

178 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, xi. 179 Ibid. 180 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 93, and International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, x. 181 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, x. 182 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 128.

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as if that were the only opinion that mattered.183 They were doubtless discomforted to hear an American member insist that the gathering needed to be reminded of ‘the important part that colonial ambition played in the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese menace.’184 The same member advised the gathering that ‘however delicately we trod in the use of words like colonial areas, dependencies and self-government, the fact remained that one-half to one-third of human beings lived in a condition…of “collective slavery.”’185 The reason why European members especially resented attacks of this nature when they came from members of the American group can be discerned in the following statement by a British member: there are ‘some…who would like to check up on the treatment of coloured people in the United States.’186 Holland later recalled the ‘sensitivity’ of the European councils about American attitudes towards post-war colonial policy and that there were ‘sharp exchanges’ between the American and Europeans at Hot Springs over what that policy should be in respect to Southeast Asia.187 He pointed out that the British, French, and Dutch IPR Councils viewed the American Council of the IPR as naive when it came to colonial questions. Holland suggested that this view of the American Council probably dated to the time of the Mont Tremblant conference. In particular, he attributed it to the ‘anti-colonial’ sentiments expressed there by Ralph J. Bunche, a senior social science analyst on colonial affairs at the Office of Strategic Services in Washington.188 Holland remembered that Bunche ‘made a very great impression’ on most of the gathering and that this spread alarm amongst the British delegation particularly in relation to the question of India.189 In explaining why the tension between the American and European councils at Mont Tremblant and Hot Springs when discussing the future of the European colonies was so acute, Holland pointed out that the 183 Ibid. 184 Ibid.,

15.

185 Ibid. 186 Ibid., 93. ‘Especially were they irritated by such criticisms when they came from America, where, in their view, the problem of racial minorities still awaited determined attempts at a solution’ International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, foreword to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific. x. 187 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 38, 252. 188 Ibid., 345. 189 Ibid., 345–46.

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European IPR councils served as a ‘conduit’ between the IPR and government and ‘perhaps in both directions.’190 He observed that the role of the European IPR councils as conduits became especially clear during the war years against a background in which the French, British and Dutch governments were eagerly seeking to ensure that their outlooks on their colonial administrations and the future of their dependencies were appropriately understood by the Americans.191 Holland pointed out that the British Foreign Office and even the British cabinet attached such importance to the IPR as a forum for putting across the British point of view, that they covered the cost of sending British delegations to attend the Mont Tremblant and Hot Springs conferences when it became apparent that Chatham House could not afford to do so.192 The argument in favour of government assistance was that ‘it was necessary to have a group of knowledgeable people present to refute what they considered to be the irresponsible views of some of the Americans.’193 It was not only the ill-informed American views of the colonial system that the British, Dutch and French IPR Councils sought to counter: they were also highly critical of much of the research work commissioned by the International Secretariat of the IPR on the subject under the leadership of Carter.194 The Americans were far from alone in pressing the question of future colonial policy at Hot Springs. A Canadian delegate, Hugh L. Keenleyside, who would later be appointed a member of the Canadian cabinet, declared at one meeting that ‘no people is morally good enough to rule another; that such rule led to the corruption of both ruled and rulers.’195 According to Holland, whereas Keenleyside’s strong words greatly pleased the Indian delegation, the British, French and Dutch delegations were considerably angered by them.196 190 ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 229. 191 Ibid. 192 Ibid., 353. 193 Ibid., 353–54. 194 Ibid., 111. 195 International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 93. See also ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 354. 196 ‘Appendix Two: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 354.

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Meanwhile, Chinese speakers made it clear that the Chinese people in general wanted to see the colonial system dismantled in the not too distant future. They pointed out that the Chinese people would be ‘disillusioned’ if they were to discover that ‘the main function of an international system after the war would be that of conserving empires.’197 One Chinese member stated that the Chinese became suspicious whenever they heard the government of one nation say that the people of another nation were not capable of governing themselves as this was precisely what the Japanese government had argued in justifying its actions in respect to China.198 The Indian delegation at Hot Springs was more assertive than the Indian group at Mont Tremblant the latter having been, according to Holland, ‘hand-picked’ by the British who had quickly become suspicious of Carter’s intentions in bringing India into the IPR.199 Although it included a number of distinguished figures, the 1942 Indian delegation did not include members of the Congress Party, many of whom had been imprisoned on the grounds of their opposition to the war effort and for this reason the delegation was widely seen by members of the other groups as unreflective of political conditions in India.200 By contrast, the Indian delegation in 1945 included Congress Party members, the most notable among these being the delegation’s leader, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru. It was Pandit who at Hot Springs pointedly raised the issue of Churchill’s caveat in respect to the Atlantic Charter.201 Holland later observed that the Indian group at Hot Springs spoke ‘eloquently and at times angrily about British policy during the war years in India.’202 Criticisms of the colonial powers saw a French member with an extensive record of colonial service protest that experienced administrations over the last fifty years had brought about ‘great improvements’ 197 International

Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 91. 92. 199 ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 346. 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. See also International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 11–2. 202 ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 346. 198 Ibid.,

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in colonial countries and had ‘greatly benefited the welfare of the people.’203 In response, an Indian member stated that one must simply accept that ‘the urge to self-expression which is one of deepest needs of every nation must be given full sway,’ adding that the desire for freedom was an essential element of this urge and that no material gains can ‘compensate for the loss of freedom.’204 Noting that Japan had cleverly exploited the felt-need of Asiatic peoples to uphold their self-respect, the same speaker suggested that Allied propaganda should embrace without hesitation ‘the principles of freedom and human equality’ as this was the only way that the United Nations could ‘gain the whole-hearted and enthusiastic and unreserved support of the nations of Asia.’205 The exploitation of ‘“interracial grievances” by Japanese propagandists’ was examined by the two round tables convened to discuss how the war had affected cultural and race relations and how these relations might be improved.206 Although the members of these round tables agreed that Japanese propagandists had made clever use of these grievances both before and during the war, the effectiveness of the Japanese effort to establish a united anti-Western front in Asia was questioned on two grounds. First, it was pointed out that the Japanese treatment of peoples in occupied areas in the region, that is, ‘their enslavement of men and rape of women—had weakened, and in some instances destroyed, the arguments which correlate[d] oppression with white domination.’207 Second, it was pointed out that in its propaganda, Japan, for obvious reasons, had not dared stress the right of subject peoples to political independence or to revolt against oppression.208 Irrespective of the last two points, the members of one of the round tables were in full agreement that the United Nations ‘should as soon as possible issue a joint declaration of policy repudiating every kind of racial discrimination’ with a view to reassuring Asiatic peoples of the intentions of the Allied powers.209

203 International 204 Ibid.,

Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 16.

17.

205 Ibid. 206 Ibid., 76. See also Belshaw, preface to International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, v. 207 International Secretariat, of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 76. 208 Ibid. 209 Ibid.

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Later at the conference and in the midst of a discussion on the future of dependent areas, the American group took up this proposal. They urged the view that the United Nations should issue a declaration ‘denouncing the doctrine of master races and stressing the equality of all people.’210 Against this background, a committee was appointed and given the task of drafting a preliminary statement. In accordance with conference procedures, the statement prepared by the committee, which took the form of a memorandum, was not put forward for either adoption or rejection by the conference but was treated as a supplement to the conference agenda. The statement…welcomed the international concern shown in problems of human rights by the UN Declaration of Jan 1, 1942, the Philadelphia Recommendation of the ILO, and the Dumbarton Oaks proposals. It rejected the claims of “master races” to an inherent superiority entitling them to rule or guard over other races or peoples. It proclaimed the fundamental equality of all peoples and pledged the United nations to unceasing efforts to enable all peoples to enjoy the benefits of that equality. It announced the principle of universal international accountability for colonial and dependent peoples and for all peoples or groups within any country who do not possess full social, economic and political rights.211

In discussing cultural and race relations, the conference found itself in full agreement on the need to address forms of discrimination which had their roots in racial and cultural differences and at a number of different levels. Seeking to place the focus of the discussion on colonial policy, an Indian member offered the view that putting an end to political domination would go a long way towards eliminating racial cultural prejudices. This view was challenged by other members who insisted that political domination was but one manifestation of such prejudices. Indeed, the 210 Ibid.,

93. 93–4. On May 10, 1944, the General Conference of the ILO meeting at its twenty-sixth conference in Philadelphia issued a declaration concerning the aims and purposes of the ILO. Among other things, the conference affirmed the following: ‘all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity’. ILO Declaration of Philadelphia: Declaration Concerning the Aims and Purposes of the International Labour Organisation, ILO_dec_ philadephia.pdf. 211 Ibid.,

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British group asserted that the Western powers were in ‘full retreat’ from the attitude of superiority that had so informed their relations with the peoples of Asia in the past.212 Along with French and Dutch members, the British members denied ‘the existence of race prejudice as an important factor in colonial policy.’213 Certain members reminded the Indian group that ‘sharp class and caste differentiation had existed in India long before British domination.’214 They further pointed out that race discrimination existed in both free and dependent countries: it prevailed as much in the United States as it did in any of the Pacific dependencies.215 A Chinese member joined the attack on the effort to frame the question of racial prejudice largely in terms of European colonial policy on the basis that ‘prejudices and discriminations similar to those between white and non-white peoples’ affected social relations among Asian peoples.216 In this connection, the Chinese member drew attention to the painful experiences of Chinese residents in Thailand. The Thai member then observed that the discriminations to which the Chinese member alluded had their basis in economic concerns and were not at all based in racial prejudice. As the summary of the conference proceedings noted, this was the same argument that an Australian member had mounted earlier at the conference in defence of the administration of Australia’s immigration law. It is telling, however, of the changing tide of international opinion that the same Australian member had gone on to concede that Australia would have to reappraise its immigration policy after the war ‘in order that the relevant laws and regulations should more fully express the racially non-discriminatory nature of the essential restriction.’217 The Chinese members were dissatisfied by the Thai members response to the observation that Chinese residents in Thailand experienced discrimination. They insisted that the discriminations experienced by Chinese nationals in Thailand ‘and in other countries of the Nan Yang were not limited

212 International 213 Ibid.,

77. 214 Ibid., 69. 215 Ibid., 70. 216 Ibid., 71. 217 Ibid.

Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Security in the Pacific, 77.

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to matters of economic competitiveness.’218 Exemplifying their point, they drew attention to the ‘social segregation’ between Europeans, Malays and Chinese in Malaya, observing that this segregation had resulted in a ‘lack of psychological cohesion’ in Malaya and that this in turn was ‘mainly responsible for the military defeats and the rapid fall of Singapore.’219

War-Time Plans for Educational and Cultural Reconstruction Discussion of the need to reconstruct lines of intellectual cooperation throughout the world had been underway since the very outset of the war. Murray, to whom homage was paid at the Havana conference, expressed the hope upon the outbreak of the war in Europe that when peace returned the work of building a société des esprits would resume. At the same time, he expressed the view that the problems arising in this area would ‘be much deeper and more far-reaching’ than most of the problems with which ICIC had had to grapple.220 With these concerns in mind, Murray chaired in January 1941 at Oxford a meeting of the British Council for Education in World Citizenship to which were invited professors and teachers and the Allied Ministers of Education.221 Cecil noted in article on the London Assembly appearing in the first part of 1943, that meetings and conferences or joint committees of a similar nature were subsequently organised by a number of other associations. He added that as ‘admirable’ as most of these arrangements were, they mainly served ‘some particular interest’ and thus ‘did not quite cover the ground.’ Cecil recorded that a view emerged ‘that something should

218 Ibid. 219 Ibid. 220 Gilbert Murray, From the League to U.N. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 199, 212. See also Gilbert Murray, ‘Intellectual Co-operation,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 235 (1944): 1–9. See also Shotwell, ‘International Organization,’ 23; Eagleton, ‘Peace Means More Than Political Adjustment,’ 37; and Cecil, ‘Peace Through International Co-operation,’ 63. 221 James P. Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics: Engaging in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 35n. See also Viscount Cecil, ‘The London International Assembly,’ Contemporary Review 163 (1943): 193–97, 193, and Walter H. C. Laves and Charles A. Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 19. The Commission for Education in World Citizenship was established by the British League of Nations Union in 1939.

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be done to bring together for purposes of study and discussion people drawn from wider circles, who would almost certainly have some share in deciding the future course of their country,’ a view which was subsequently endorsed by members of some of the Allied governments.222 It was to this end that the British LNU set up a preparatory committee chaired by Lytton. This committee first met on July 8, 1941, whereupon it proceeded to lay the basis of what would be known as the London International Assembly. The committee decided at the same meeting that the assembly should seek to foster mutual understanding between Great Britain and the Allied and Associated Nations of ‘each other’s history, economic development, institutions, way of life and national aspirations’ and ‘consider the principles of post-war policy and the application of those principles to national and international affairs.’223 The committee stressed that the assembly did not advocate any particular policy, was completely independent of government and was to serve as a forum of study and the ‘free exchange of views.’224 The committee also sought to ensure that the assembly was as ‘representative as possible of all sections of opinion’ among those who were committed to the war effort in the Allied and Associated Nations.225 The London International Assembly was finally established at a meeting on September 15, 1941, by which time its membership numbered 189. At the meeting, Cecil was elected president. René Cassin, the Fighting France Commissioner for Justice and Public Instruction, deputy-delegate to the LON Assembly from 1924 to 1935 and member of the Commission française de coordination des hautes études internationales, and Jan Masaryk, foreign minister and deputy prime minister of Czechoslovakia, were elected as two of its four honorary vice-presidents.226 In a speech at the meeting, Masaryk attacked the ‘vulgar goose stepping extravagance 222 Cecil,

‘The London International Assembly,’ 194.

223 Ibid. 224 Ibid. 225 Ibid. The general approach of the London International Assembly to recruitment to its ranks was to ask one or two individuals from each country to draw up a list of candidates for the consideration of the assembly’s preparatory committee. Importantly, the chosen candidates were to vote at the assembly as individuals. 226 Ibid., 195. The other two honorary vice-presidents of the London International Assembly were Charalambos Simopoulos, the Greek minister in London, and August Zaleski, the president of the Civil Chancellery of the president of the Polish Republic. Among the countries represented were Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia,

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of exclusive nationalism’.227 He insisted that that it was ‘essential to the preservation of civilisation to return to the conceptions of internationalism’ and ‘pleaded for an international structure in which even the smallest nation could be sure of its place.’228 In November 1941, members of the London International Assembly combined with members of the Council for Education in World Citizenship to form a Joint Commission for Education in World Citizenship under the chairmanship of Murray in order to undertake a study of the ‘place of education, science, and learning in post-war reconstruction.’229 The British Government sent observers from the British Board of Education and the British Council (a body established by Royal Charter several years earlier in order to coordinate the dissemination of British culture abroad), to witness the Joint Commission’s proceedings. The ensuing report, which was issued in March 1943 and which was entitled Education and the United Nations, recommended that the United Nations ‘should agree to establish as soon as may be practicable an International Organisation for Education,’ a recommendation that was later submitted to the Allied governments and which quickly became a staple of wider British discussions concerning post-war reconstruction in Europe.230 Ethiopia, Fighting France, Great Britain, Greece, the Netherlands, India, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, United States of America and Yugoslavia. Brazil and Mexico were later invited to join. The USSR sent observers to its meetings. In addition to education the Assembly examined such issues as ‘War Aims and Peace Aims’; ‘The Present Position in Enemy-Occupied Countries’; ‘Point III of the Atlantic Charter’; ‘The Role of Small States in the Post-War World’; ‘The Work of the International Labour Organisation’; ‘The Trial of War Criminals’; ‘Unemployment’ and ‘The Situation in America’ (ibid.). For an account of the meeting see also ‘Inaugural Meeting of the London International Assembly,’ Keesing’s Record of World Events 4 (September 1941): 4808. 227 Jan Mararyk, 1941, quoted in ‘Inaugural Meeting of the London International Assembly,’ Keesing’s Record of World Events, 4808. 228 Ibid. 229 Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 19. On the British Council, see ‘La Conférence des ministres de l’éducation à Londres,’ numéro spécial Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre, 1945): 57–60. 230 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 35. The Joint Commission for Education in World Citizenship submitted on July 2, 1943, a very favourable report on the work of Intellectual Cooperation between the wars. See Jan Kolasa, International Intellectual Cooperation: The League Experience and the Beginnings of UNESCO (Wroclaw: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1962), 133. The Joint Commission’s report on Intellectual Cooperation was authored by Gwilym Davies a member of the Council for Education in World Citizenship.

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Even before Education and the United Nations was issued, moves were underway at an official level to organise post-war education. In the autumn of 1942, at the prompting of the British Foreign Office and of Richard Austen Butler, the president of the British Board of Education, the chair of the British Council invited those ministers of education or acting ministers of education of the Allied governments currently in exile in the United Kingdom to a series of meetings. The purpose of these meetings was to consider what assistance might be needed and what assistance might be given in order to help occupied countries in the reconstruction of their educational systems.231 The Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME) as these bi-monthly meetings came to be known, was officially inaugurated on the 16 November in front of representatives of occupied Europe: representatives of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia.232 At the time of its inauguration, CAME was a much less diverse body than was the London International Assembly, some members of which were also members of CAME. However, it was not long before CAME’s membership became more diverse: its meetings in the spring of 1943 would witness the presence of observers from Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America. In October of the same year, the British government invited these observer states to join Britain and the continental governments in exile as members of CAME.233 This broadening of CAME’s base reflected the realisation that assistance would have to be forthcoming from a wide range of countries and not just Britain, and that certain non-European countries, China and the Philippines for example, also urgently required educational reconstruction.234

231 Laves

and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 18. UNESCO and World Politics, 36. The chairman of the British Council, Sir Malcolm Robertson, had met with the Allied Ministers of Education the month before Richard Austen Butler convened the CAME meeting. See Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 210. See also ‘La coopération intellectuelle internationale: U.N.E.S.C.O,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 1–2 (1946): i–xxiii, ii. 233 Richard A. Johnson, ‘The Origin of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,’ International Conciliation 24, no. 424 (1946): 441–48, 442. See also Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 1–2 (1946), ii. 234 Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 5, 18. 232 Sewell,

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CAME’s immediate agenda concerned the replacement of those educational and cultural institutions and resources that had been deliberately and systematically decimated in parts of Europe and Asia by the Axis powers. Richard A. Johnson, a youthful American diplomat based in London and a participant in the meetings of CAME, observed in 1946 that from the very outset CAME’s members ‘groped toward a broader conception of their functions’.235 Cassin, for example, had advocated from the time of the first meeting that CAME should be guided by the general principles underpinning the IIIC in Paris.236 Renoliet contends that Cassin’s advocacy in this regard, along with his strong defence of the IIIC in the context of CAME, reflected a desire to maintain the ‘position of Paris as the capital of intellectual co-operation’.237 Cassin, however, was not the only CAME member urging the cause of the IIIC or, at least, the principles on which it was based. F. R. Cowell, a British Foreign Office official who had participated in CAME, later recorded that many of its members still had fresh memories of both the ICIC and the IIIC and that they ‘looked forward vaguely to their revival’ even though they well understood that the work of these institutions had not been supported as ‘enthusiastically’ and ‘widely’ as it should have been.238 Beyond this, there was a growing conviction that it was necessary to look beyond the immediate demands of intellectual and cultural reconstruction: CAME members understood that in order to deal with the ‘generation of warped minds’ which was part of the Nazi legacy and in order to prevent such systematic warping of minds in the future, ‘a continuing long-range program would be needed to open windows in the minds of men to the cultural heritage of other nations and to promote respect for the individual.’239 Thus, the question of mental and moral disarmament, 235 Johnson, ‘The Origin of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization,’ 441–42. See also Julian Huxley, ‘Science and the United Nations,’ Nature 156, no. 3967 (1945): 553–56, 553. For Richard A. Johnson, see Raymond E. Wanner, ‘The United States and UNESCO: Beginnings (1945) and New Beginnings (2005),’ 6, http://www.channelingreality.com/UN/UNESCO/UNESCO_Pre_Founding_History.pdf. 236 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 37. 237 Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 160. 238 F. R. Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1966): 210–36, 219. 239 Brenda M. H. Tripp, ‘UNESCO in Perspective,’ International Conciliation 30, no. 497 (1954): 323–83, 335–36. See also Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 5. This concern would be repeatedly expressed at the London Conference of November 1945 which established UNESCO.

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which had been a key preoccupation of the ICO throughout the interwar period, soon came to be a feature of CAME discussions.240 As the projects planned under the auspices of CAME increased in number and scope, it became apparent that a larger organisation with a clearer mandate was needed. At the ninth CAME meeting in London on April 5, 1944, plans for a United Nations Organisation for Educational and Cultural Reconstruction were discussed. This meeting issued in a draft constitution which was very quickly subject to revision, not least because it was felt that what was needed in the fields of education and culture was a permanent body: a body whose life extended beyond the period of reconstruction.241 The need for a United Nations’ organisation in the field of education and culture was subsequently urged at the commencement of the San Francisco Conference by the Chinese delegation and in urging this the Chinese delegation enjoyed the support of the delegations of Ecuador, Haiti, Norway, the Philippines, Lebanon and Uruguay. Bonnet, who had been appointed French ambassador to the United States in December 1944, following some months spent as Information Officer of the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers and then as a member of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, attended the San Francisco conference. In the midst of the conference, he called upon the United Nations to convoke within some months a ‘general conference charged with establishing the statutes of an organisation international de coopération intellectuelle’ with a view to fostering ‘mutual comprehension and understanding among peoples’ and ‘assuring the access of all citizens to culture.’242 However, Bonnet was careful to point 240 Sewell,

UNESCO and World Politics, 40. ‘The Origin of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,’ 443. By the time of the ninth CAME meeting on April 5, 1944, those states which had previously sent observers to CAME had been invited to become full members. See also Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 20–21. China was also a proponent of a permanent institution for educational and cultural co-operation. 242 ‘Les questions éducatives et culturelles dans les récentes conferences internationales numéro spécial,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre 1945): 27–9. The Inter-American Conference at Chapultepec in Mexico City in February and March 1945 saw twenty states resolve in favour of ‘an international agency especially charged with encouraging intellectual and moral cooperation between nations.’ See also Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 68, and Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 23. It was ‘under the inspiration’ of Bonnet, Dennery and Louis Joxe that the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique of the Centre d’études de politique étrangère was reconstituted in Algiers. ‘L’Activité du Centre,’ Politique Étrangère 10, no. 3 (1945): 296–301, 300. 241 Johnson,

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out that four major conditions had to be met if there were to be intellectual cooperation in the future: First, a new world agency in this field must be stronger, larger, and wellfinanced, Second, it should deal comprehensively with all cultural aspects of international life. Third, the educational problem must be tackled directly, along with the general cultural problem. Fourth, an international agency in this field must possess a substantial measure of autonomy and yet be legally and consciously included in the general framework of international society.243

Preparations for UNESCO Following the endorsement of the French proposal at San Francisco, the British Government on July 1, 1945, announced that a general conference on the subject of international cooperation in the educational and cultural fields would be held London between November 1 and 16.244 Representatives of forty-four governments and observers from seven international organisations attended this conference which was held at the headquarters of the Institution of Civil Engineers on Great George Street near to Westminster Abbey. Cowell, who served as technical adviser to the British delegation at the conference, applauded the Institution of Civil Engineers for its generosity in lending the conference the use of its headquarters. He later pointedout that due to bomb damage, there was at that time simply no other venue available in central London large enough to accommodate a gathering of the size of what would turn out to be UNESCO’s constituent assembly.245 Under consideration at the conference were the plans for a United Nations’ Educational and Cultural Organisation (UNECO) put forward 243 William G. Carr, Only by Understanding: Education and International Organisation (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1945), 39. 244 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 69. Present at the London Conference in November 1945 were Clement Attlee the British prime minister, Hu Shih the Chinese philosopher and China’s ambassador to the United States, Archibald Macleish, a ‘poet and scholar, formerly Librarian of Congress and Assistant Secretary of State,’ Murray, Zimmern and two individuals who would serve in succession as directors of UNESCO: Julian Huxley and Mexico’s Jaime Torres Bodet (ibid.). 245 Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946,’ 223. See also Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 3–4.

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by CAME in association with the United States State Department and a competing French plan.246 A statement attached to CAME’s proposed statute for UNECO acknowledged the enormity of the task of reconstruction that lay ahead. The statement called attention to the unprecedented level of destruction of intellectual and cultural facilities and resources wrought by the war. It also issued a warning in regard to the future, stating that the deliberate and systematic destruction by the enemy countries of cultural resources in vast regions of the continents of Europe and Asia; the murder of teachers, artists, scientists and leading intellectuals; the burning of libraries, the pillage and mutilation of works of art, the destruction of archives and the theft of scientific apparatus have created dangerous conditions for civilisation and, as a consequence, for peace, not only in the continents ravaged by the enemy powers, but in the entire world. To deprive the modern interdependent world, of human and material cultural resources, thanks to which its children are educated and its people informed, is to destroy in the same measure the common knowledge and mutual comprehension on which the peace of the world and its security must rest.247

The preamble to the statute of the Organisation International de Coopération Intellectuelle des Nations Unies, which was prepared by the IIIC in collaboration with the French government, gave expression to similar sentiments and concerns.248 However, it is interesting to note that the preamble to CAME’s proposed statute, in contrast with the statement that CAME attached to its proposed statute, made no mention of the material and moral devastation caused by the war. Indeed, although stating in its first paragraph that ‘all possible steps…[will]… be taken to favour the attainment of international security and peace and 246 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 72. See also ‘Conférence des ministres Alliés de l’éducation: Projets de propositions pour an organisation éducative et culturelle des Nations Unies,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (a) (octobre– novembre 1945): 44–55, 44. 247 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (a) (octobre–novembre 1945), 45. The statement attached to the proposed statute presented by CAME was published in French in Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale. 248 ‘Les questions éducative and culturelle dans les récentes conférences internationales,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre 1945): 27–9, 29.

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to advance the welfare of the peoples of the world,’ the preamble to the statute proposed by CAME did not mention the war at all, let alone the intellectual or cultural background to it.249 By contrast, the first paragraph of the preamble to the statute proposed by France, commenced with the following declaration: the ‘world war in which civilisation and humanity had almost perished has been rendered possible by the abandonment of democratic ideas and the unchaining of ideologies exalting in violence and proclaiming the inequality of the races’. Accordingly, the same paragraph stated that it was the duty of the United Nations to ensure that the principles of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity that lie at the base of their Charter’ are triumphant throughout the world.250 Among the points of difference in respect to the content of the constitutions proposed by CAME and France respectively, was that the proposed French statute specified that the IIIC should serve as the secretariat of the new organisation whereas the statute proposed by CAME said nothing of the IIIC.251 Although declaring that he did not wish to claim for France a spiritually or intellectually privileged position, Léon Blum, who was the leader of the French delegation and associate-president of the conference, drew attention in London to what he described as the French ‘tendency towards universality’ and its ‘age-long tradition of generosity, of liberality in the sphere of thought’.252 However, in light of the growing acceptance at the conference that the new organisation would have its seat in Paris, the French delegation (which also included

249 ‘Conference of Allied Ministers of Education: Draft Proposals for an Educational and Cultural Organisation of the United Nations,’ in UNESCO Preparatory Commission, Conference for the Establishment of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation: Held at the Institute of Civil Engineers, London, from the 1st to the 16th November 1945, ECO/CONF./29 (1946), 1. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/ pf0000117626, UA. 250 ‘Projet français de statut de l’Organisation de Coopération intellectuelle des Nations Unies,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (b) (octobre–novembre 1945): 30–43, 30. 251 Ibid., 32. 252 UNESCO Preparatory Commission, Second Plenary Meeting, Thursday November 1st, 1945, at 2.45, Conference for the Establishment of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation: Held at the Institute of Civil Engineers, London, from the 1st to the 16th November 1945, 28.

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Bonnet and Cassin), eventually retired from its campaign on behalf of the IIIC.253 In the end, the French delegation simply expressed the wish that a new Paris-based organisation would make use of ‘the contacts, the experience and the documentation’ of its predecessor.254 The question of the title of the new organisation was also a matter of dispute. The English translation of the French title for the organisation, namely, United Nations Organisation of Intellectual Cooperation, did not enthuse the British and the Americans delegations. They contended that although intellectual cooperation is important, the new organisation’s ‘role must not stop with the élite.’255 In relation to this point, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, a Sorbonne professor who assumed the role of interim director of the IIIC in February 1945, pointed out that the translation of the French word intellectuel into English as intellectual, was unfortunate since in English the word intellectual had the connotation of cerebral. Mayoux observed that by contrast, the French word intellectuel is ‘synthetic’: it encompasses the ‘trinity’ of culture, education and science. Mayoux thought that this last point explained why certain powers misunderstood the ICO’s work and consequently failed to provide it with the support that it needed to undertake its many tasks.256 However, in the context of the London Conference, the term intellectuel continued to be interpreted by many English-speaking participants in a restrictive sense. Indeed, the word

253 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 72. See also Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 230, and Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 3, 25. 254 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 77. 255 See Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 7, 28. For the lack of British and American enthusiasm for the proposed French title for the nascent UNESCO, see Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 77. 256 Jean Jacques Mayoux, ‘La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale: UNESCO,’ La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale 1, no. 2 (1946): i–xxiii, vi. French officials did not see any inconvenience in there being an English language title for the organisation that included the words education and culture. However, in a letter attached to its proposal and addressed to the British foreign minister, the French foreign minister maintained that the title ‘organisation de Coopération Intellectuelle’ was more in keeping with French ‘thought and the demands of the French language.’ See also Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (b) (octobre–novembre 1945), 43. For Mayoux’s interim status and appointment, ‘Sommaire de numéro spécial,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre 1945), and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 161.

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intellectual was not to be included among the titular adjectives that the American and British delegations would ultimately endorse in relation to the planned educational and cultural organisation.257 As a group, scientists were better organised than those engaged in other scholarly pursuits at the time. Throughout 1945, they lobbied at both a national and international level for science to be accorded a prominent place in the educational and cultural organisation of the United Nations. As part of this effort, they sought to ensure that the word science was included in its title. With this end in view, they lobbied for the word science to be included in the title of this new organisation. Very active on these related lobbying fronts were two British scientists: the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley and the biochemist Joseph Needham. Both of these men had long been prominent figures in Social Relations of Science, this being a movement which emphasised the social functions of science and the social responsibilities of scientists.258 Needham had spent much of the war in China. In February 1943, he went to China to head the Sino-British Science Cooperation Office, a newly established office which ‘Whitehall had decided was to be officially attached to the British embassy in Chongqing,’ and to represent the British Royal Society. Needham’s role in China was that of aiding that war-torn country in its scientific development and renewing and extending cultural relations between Britian and China.259 In February 1945, Needham visited Washington where he was asked about the possibility of enlisting the support of the International Science Cooperation Service, the creation of which he had announced in July 1944, for the 257 Sewell,

UNESCO and World Politics, 77. 78–9. See also Huxley, ‘Science and the United Nation,’ 553–56; R. Baker, ‘Julian Sorell Huxley: 22 June 1887–14 February 1975,’ Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 22 (November 1976): 206–38, 227; and Aant Elzinga, ‘UNESCO and the Politics of International Cooperation in the Realm of Science,’ in Patrick Petitjean, ed., Colonial Science: Researchers and Institutions, 20th Century Sciences: Beyond the Metropolis, vol. 2 (Paris: Ostrom, 1996), 163. For the Social Relations of Science movement, see Robert E. Filner, ‘The Roots of Political Activism in British Science,’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 32, no. 1 (1976): 25–9, 25. 259 Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China (New York: Harper Perennial, 209), 54, and Gail Archibald, ‘How the “S” Came to Be in UNESCO,’ in Patrick Petitjean, Vladimir Zharov, Gisbert Glaser, Jacques Richardson, Bruno de Padirac, and Gail Archibald, eds., Sixty Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005 (Paris: UNESCO, 2006), 37, 45. 258 Ibid.,

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proposed educational and cultural organisation then under discussion. Needham’s response was in the affirmative, although he insisted that in order for such support to be forthcoming, the word science would need to be included in the organisation’s title.260 Gail Archibald points out that it was as a result of Needham’s influence that the American plan for the new organisation, which was issued in March 1945, ‘contained multiple references to scientific cooperation as a contribution to peace and security.’261 However, despite its references to scientific cooperation, the American draft, which was adopted by CAME in April, did not suggest that the word science be incorporated into the title. Indeed, an American delegate to CAME stated in response to exactly such a suggestion that ‘for the American public, the word “culture” covered “science”’.262 Needham persisted with his campaign, producing in April 1945 upon his return to China, a memorandum in which he ‘prescribed the acronym “UNESCO,” and thereafter “UNESCO” entered some internal Department of State papers.’263 On October 24, Huxley was assured by Ellen Wilkinson, the British minister of education, that she would press for science to be given titular recognition. In an article which was published in Nature during the course of the London Conference, Huxley challenged the contention that the term culture denoted science. He stated that although ‘“culture” is a term of such loose definition it may be stretched to include enough in its meaning to signify the totality of man’s social activities,’ it is generally associated with ‘the humanities, literature and the arts and in contradistinction to science.’ He added that ‘even if culture in a partially restricted sense can be taken to include pure science, it is difficult for most people to envisage applied science and technology as falling within its sphere.’264 In the event, the arguments of

260 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 78; Archibald, ‘How the “S” Came to Be in UNESCO,’ 38, and Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, 165n. 261 Archibald, ‘How the “S” Came to Be in UNESCO,’ 38. 262 Ibid. 263 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 78. See also Archibald, ‘How the “S” Came to Be in UNESCO,’ 38. 264 Huxley, ‘Science and the United Nations,’ 554. For Ellen Wilkinson’s assurance concerning the titular recognition of the word science, see Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 78.

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Needham and Huxley prevailed. Wilkinson, who had been elected chair of the London Conference, announced on the first day of the conference that the British delegation would be calling for science’s recognition in the title. The other delegations soon fell into line.265 In explaining the reason for her announcement, Wilkinson stated that ‘when we are all wondering, perhaps apprehensively, what the scientists will do to us next, it is important that they should be linked closely with the humanities and should feel that they have responsibility to mankind for the result of their labours.’266 This observation touched on a very important reason for the stress laid on science in the context of establishing UNESCO: the lethal union of ‘psychopathic nationalism’ and sophisticated military technology to which Second World War had borne witness. This was a union of which the founders of UNESCO were deeply conscious: a major part of their aim was to ensure that science and its fruits were not put to destructive ends but rather, as groups such as the Social Relations of Science urged, served the cause of social progress.267 As indicated by Wilkinson’s observation above, this concern had been powerfully reinforced by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.268 Johnson, who served as technical secretary to the delegation of the United States, observed that overall, the London Conference was conducted in a cooperative and efficient manner. Issuing from the confrères’ cooperative efforts was a document entitled Instrument Establishing a Preparatory Commission for the United Nations Educational Scientific 265 Sewell,

UNESCO and World Politics, 78. Preparatory Commission, Conference for the Establishment of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 24. See also Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 78–9. 267 Johnson, ‘The Origins of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,’ 441. Johnson claims that the union between fanatical nationalist and technology was a ‘major force’ behind the foundation of UNESCO (ibid.). Thibaud Boncourt notes that it was clear from the outset that UNESCO intended that the ‘young social sciences were to be a tool for controlling the natural sciences, following on from the disillusionment brought on by their exploitation for military purposes.’ Thibaud Boncourt, ‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ Participation 33, no. 1 (2009): 4–7, 4. 268 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 78–9. On the impact of the atomic bomb see also E. F. Armstrong, ‘United Nations Educational and Cultural Organisation: Introduction,’ Nature 156, no. 3967 (1945), 553. E. F. Armstrong was an adviser to delegates of the British government. 266 UNESCO

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and Cultural Organisation, this being a matter of a new draft constitution for the nascent educational and cultural organisation, and a resolution stipulating that UNESCO would be located in the French capital.269 That the London Conference proved to be a success can be, in some measure, credited to Zimmern who worked tirelessly throughout the conference, serving as an advisor to the British Ministry of Education and as the conference’s secretary general. It is thus not surprising that it was Zimmern who was elected executive secretary of UNESCO’s Preparatory Commission at the first meeting of its executive committee on December 3, 1945.270 Against the background of Zimmern’s election as executive secretary both Zimmern and his wife, Lady (Lucie) Zimmern, Cowell later recalled, ‘looked forward with natural anticipation’ to Zimmern’s subsequent appointment as UNESCO’s first director-general which they saw ‘as the crown and reward for a life-times effort in the cause to which UNESCO was dedicated.’271 However, not long after the conclusion of the London Conference, Zimmern fell ill and had to undergo surgery. People expressed concern that Zimmern would not be able to bear the burden of the work involved in preparing for UNESCO’s first general conference. Ostensibly for this reason and on the initiative of Wilkinson and her permanent secretary John Maud, Zimmern was replaced by Huxley who assumed the post of executive secretary on March 1, 1946 and it was Huxley who would go on to become UNESCO’s first director-general.272 Upon recovering from surgery, Zimmern returned to the Preparatory Commission in the hope of resuming his role as executive secretary.

269 Johnson, ‘The Origin of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,’ 444. The Conference also issued a Final Act that recorded its work. For Johnson’s role, see Wanner, ‘The United States and UNESCO: Beginnings (1945) and New Beginnings (2005),’ 6n. 270 D. J. Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited: Fifty Years On,’ Review of International Studies 12, no. 4 (1986): 279–92, 281; Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 227; and Archives of UNESCO, Chronology of UNESCO 1945–1987 (Paris: UNESCO, December 1987), 3, LAD.85/W5/4, UA. 271 Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 62. Note that Zimmern had been knighted in 1931. 272 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 85, and Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 229. See also ‘Nomination à l’U.N.E.S.C.O.: Dr. Julian Huxley,’ Coopération Intellectuelle International, nos. 1–2 (1946): 1.

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However, as Cowell later pointed out, he was confined instead to being ‘little more than a spectator’: Zimmern’s formal position as of May 1946 was that of technical counsellor.273 At this point, Lady Zimmern proceeded to energetically campaign on behalf of her husband, an undertaking which, as Cowell diplomatically put it, gave rise to ‘difficulties’.274 John and Richard Toye note that these so-called difficulties encompassed efforts by the Zimmerns to generate fears concerning Huxley’s ‘political reliability.’275 In light of this, Huxley informed the executive board that if Zimmern remained in Paris he, Huxley, would resign.276 Thus, in early October, the executive board charged Zimmern with a special mission: he was to ‘pay particular attention to the question of the establishment of a plan for world peace through the study of international questions.’277 This mission meant that Zimmern was absent from later meetings of the Preparatory Commission. He returned to Paris only at the time of the inauguration of UNESCO’s General Conference.278 It was doubtless this disappointment and not simply his jaded feelings about European international relations and excitement at the prospect of an America-lead new world order, that caused Zimmern to move to the

273 Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 230. See also ‘Nominations,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 3–4 (1946): 1–4, 1–2; ‘Au Comité Éxecutif de la commission d’U.N.E.S.C.O.,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 3–4 (1946): 5–8, 5, and Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 86. 274 Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 230. 275 John Toye and Richard Toye, ‘One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern and Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO,’ History 95, no. 319 (2010): 308–31, 310, 326. Alfred and Lucie Zimmern apparently encouraged the idea that Huxley was a communist sympathiser. 276 Toye and Toye, ‘One World, Two Cultures?,’ 326. 277 Alfred Zimmern, 1946, quoted in UNESCO, ‘General Conference, First Session, Paris, 20 November–10 December 1946, Programme Commission II, Sub-Commission on Social Sciences, Philosophy and Humanistic Studies,’ C/Prog.Com./S.C.Soc.Sci./ V.R.2.E, 30. See also Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 230, and Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 86. 278 Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 230. The Preparatory Commission met in London from November 16, 1945 to September 15, 1946 and in Paris from September 16, 1946, to December 7, 1946.

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United States and take up a visiting professorship at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.279 Leaving aside the administrative problem posed by his illness, one cannot help but observe that Zimmern’s conception of UNESCO seemed rather out of line with that entertained by other key actors involved in its founding. Before he fell ill, Zimmern drafted a report in which he elaborated on his vision for UNESCO and this was presented on his behalf at a meeting of the Preparatory Commission on February 1. In this report, Zimmern insisted on the need to place the discussion of UNESCO and its role on a ‘higher plane’: he urged that at least in the first instance, rather than focus on specific plans of action, UNESCO should seek to ground itself in an intellectual and a moral sense. Zimmern stated that if UNESCO were to be ‘launched upon a course of creative evolution, it must be endowed with the élan vital which Bergson revealed to us.’280 Cowell claimed that Zimmern’s conception of UNESCO was simply that of an effective and better funded IIIC ‘but not much more’.281 Zimmern certainly invoked the work of the ICO throughout his report. However, it should be noted that he suggested therein that to the extent that the ICO was found wanting, this was because it did not sufficiently debate the ‘high themes’ that some had wanted it to debate and had focussed instead on developing the ‘tools of intellectual and artistic life.’282

279 Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited,’ 282. D. J. Markwell observes that Zimmern was a strong supporter of America’s international mission after World War II and adds that in the United States Zimmern promoted the cause of UNESCO. On Zimmern’s enthusiasm for the American mission, see also Rich, ‘Reinventing Peace,’ 125. 280 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, ‘Preparatory Commission, Report on the Framework of the Organisation,’ February 1946, UNESCO/ Prep.Com./16, 1–2, ‘Preparatory Commission, London–Paris, 1945–1946, vol. 2, Records of Plenary Meetings’, UA. 281 Cowell states that Zimmern viewed UNESCO as a more effective and better endowed IIIC ‘but not much more’. Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 229. For the plan that UNESCO be a more representative organisation that its predecessor, see UNESCO Preparatory Commission, Second Plenary Meeting, Thursday November 1st, 1945, at 2.45, ‘Conference for the Establishment of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation: Held at the Institute of Civil Engineers, London, from the 1st to the 16th November 1945,’ 24. 282 Ibid., 6.

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Here, it is useful to note here that in 1927, when Zimmern occupied the role of deputy director of the IIIC, he had come into conflict with Julien Luchaire, the IIIC’s first director, because Zimmern wanted the IIIC to focus on high themes rather than involve itself in the quotidian aspects of intellectual and artistic life.283 Zimmern’s conception of UNESCO would not have thrilled those who wanted the new institution to be more representative, more wide-ranging in its activities and more practically oriented than its predecessor. James P. Sewell suggests that Zimmern’s report was evocative of the ‘ethereal universalism’ which many associated with the ICO, an association that Zimmern’s report could only have reinforced.284 One can contrast Zimmern’s vision for UNESCO with that of Huxley and Needham. In April 1946, while still in China, Needham was beckoned by Huxley to join the UNESCO secretariat. Not, long after this, Needham, whose work on behalf of the British Scientific Mission to China had impressed Huxley, became the first head of UNESCO’s natural sciences division.285 Far from conceiving of UNESCO as occupying some lofty intellectual plane, Huxley and Needham envisaged it as an agency actively devoted to the enrichment of the lives of the world’s people, in particular, the world’s most deprived peoples, by scientific means.286 Needham powerfully evoked this vision of the organisation in stating the following: I see the job of UNESCO as that of pumping scientific knowledge into the arteries of the world, until it flows to the service of the worker in the field,

283 Renoliet,

L’Unesco oubliée, 79–80. UNESCO and World Politics, 85. 285 Archibald, ‘How the “S” Came to Be in UNESCO,’ 45; Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 94, and Huxley, ‘Science and the United Nations,’ 554. 286 Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, September 15, 1946), 38, 1 C/6, UNESCO/C/6, UA. For the attitude of Huxley and Needham towards colonialism, see Patrick Petitjean, ‘The Ultimate Odyssey: The Birth of the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind Project,’ in Petitjean, Zharov, Glaser, Richardson, Padirac, and Archibald, eds., Sixty Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, 86; Gavin Schaffer, ‘“Like a Baby with a Box of Matches”: British Scientists and the Concept of “Race” in the Inter-war Period,’ British Journal for the History of Science 38, no. 3 (2005): 307–24, 321; and Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 87. 284 Sewell,

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the man at the factory workbench, the woman in her home. One big part of the task ahead is to equalize the flow of scientific benefits, so that people may enjoy the broadest possible advantages everywhere, even in those regions that we look upon as the most backward today. There must be no backward areas, for human misery is indivisible. There can be no end to wars so long as the map of the world shows areas of high living standards and areas of want, sickness and despair….Everyone will grow richer as science expands to cover the earth.287

The ICO: Ethereal Universalism? One of the reasons why the ICO’s gained a reputation for conjuring castles in the air was that its means were so limited that it was unable to make the various aspects of its work known among the vast majority of people. Where there was any wider awareness of its work, this awareness usually concerned the celebrated names who served on the ICIC or participated in the ‘Entretiens’ (‘Converations’) and the ‘Correspondance’ (the ‘International Series of Open Letters’): according to the depictions of some, the work of the ICO largely took the form of clusters of highminded savants meditating on high-brow themes beside the calm waters of Lake Geneva or amidst the elegant interior of the IIIC’s grand salon in the rue de Montepensier wing of the Palais Royal.288 The observation of an American commentator in a 1949 essay concerning UNESCO reflects well this understanding of the work of the ICO: as ‘[n]ice and even significant though it might be for Paul Valéry, French poet, and Thomas Mann, German novelist, to encounter each other through the good offices’ of the IIIC in Paris, the ‘influence of such a meeting counted for less than nothing in the political and economic struggle between France Germany.’289 It was precisely because he was a staunch defender of the ICO’s reputation, that Mayoux lamented the fact that the whole of the work of the ICO had come to be viewed through the prism of the ‘Entretiens’ and ‘Open Letters’, activities which

287 Joseph

Needham, 1946, quoted in Vitray, ‘UNESCO: Adventure in Understanding,’ 27. La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations (Paris: Librairie Minard, 1962), 2. 289 James L. Henderson, UNESCO in Focus (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1949), 19. 288 Pham-Thi-Tu,

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he regarded as the ‘most light, the most decorative, the least useful’ of all the ICO’s work.290 Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not this is a fair characterisation of the various intellectual and cultural exchanges sponsored by the Permanent Committee of Letters and Arts, it is important to also note that many of the projects undertaken by UNESCO in its early years were in fact continuous with or simply an amplification of projects that had earlier been launched by the considerably less wellfunded ICO. As Pham-Thi-Tu observed in his 1962 study of both the ICO and UNESCO, the reform of school text-books, the conservation of museums, the coordination of libraries, the translation of classic works and the promotion of the creative arts were all inscribed in the programmes of both institutions.291 Mass communications was a key heading under which UNESCO’s work was grouped and was an aspect of UNESCO’s programme that was represented by Huxley as sharply distinguishing the work of the new organisation from the old. Huxley stated that if UNESCO were to exert a more powerful and more extended influence than its forerunner…and become an organisation of peoples instead of one only of governments and intellectuals, it must also concern itself with the methods which alone can ensure the wholesale spread of information and culture and exert a mass influence on opinion—modern printing, wireless and cinema; and the whole field of mass communications.292

Yet even in regard to the matter of mass communications, the difference in the nature of the work undertaken by the two institutions can be overstated: from the late 1920s, the ICO studied the role that popular media (in the form of radio, cinema and the press) might play in 290 Mayoux,

‘La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale: UNESCO,’ vi. La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 2. The legacy of the ICO was not entirely unacknowledged. For example, its considerable work in the area of the reform of teaching materials was detailed in a UNESCO report on the same topic. See Chapter II, ‘The Work of the League of Nations and the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation,’ in A Handbook for the Improvement of Textbooks and Teaching Materials as Aids to International Understanding (Paris: UNESCO, 1949). 292 Report of the Director-General for 1947, quoted in David Hardman, introduction to UNESCO, General Conference, Reflections on Our Age: Lectures Delivered at the Opening Session of UNESCO at the Sorbonne University, Paris (London: Allan Wingate, 1948), 11–2. 291 Pham,

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the promotion of international understanding. In the 1930s, the ICO’s study of the role that popular media might play in this regard was extended to include television. Nonetheless, a one-dimensional image of the ICO remained entrenched. On June 17, 1946, in a letter sent to Murray, who, it should be noted, had represented the ICIC at the London Conference, Mayoux highlighted the poor reputation of the ICO from the UNESCO point of view. In particular, Mayoux lamented the fact that Needham (whom he described as an ‘attractive and powerful’ figure), did not know of the work that had been undertaken by the ICO in the years dating from 1936 in relation to the sciences, by which he meant the exact and natural sciences.293 Sewell points out that Needham ‘had never heard of the…[IIIC] at Cambridge during the twenties and early thirties’ in and that ‘when later Needham did learn of its activities he was determined to see that the postwar international scientific organization tendency avoided…[the IIIC’s]… tendency toward “mandarinism,” toward aims “too vague, academic and contemplative”’.294

The ICO and the Problem of Neutrality Yet even if those involved in the creation of UNESCO had had a greater awareness of the nature and extent of the ICO’s work, there still may have been a strong inclination to distance the new organisation from the old. One obvious reason for this was the fact that the political failures associated with the League seemed to cast a pall over all the other

293 Mayoux to Murray, June 17, 1946, Correspondance avec le Président de la CICI (H. Bergson, G. Murray), AG 1-IICI-A-I-16. 294 Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 94. Huxley entertained a similar conception of UNESCO to that of Needham. See La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 1–2 (1946), 1. Huxley stated that he wanted to see UNESCO develop into a ‘really democratic organisation, operating not only among the high intellectual spheres but in the minds of men in general, and capable of establishing the case of a world culture. The place accorded to science in the new organisation will allow for the introduction with profit, scientific methods in the new domains, social and political…The immediate task of UNESCO consists in raising the standard of education and promoting scientific knowledge in the entire world.’ Huxley stated on being appointed to the position of director-general that UNESCO would not be too ‘highbrow or academic’ but would respond to the vital interests of people the world over. Julian Huxley, ‘The Future of UNESCO,’ Discovery: A Monthly Popular Journal of Knowledge 72, no. 3 (1946): 72–3.

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activities associated with it.295 In addition, the reputation of the LON’s international intellectual cooperation organisation had been tainted because of its accommodation of representatives of states which pursued policies in outright defiance of the covenant and the very humanism which the ICO sought to promote, this being a consequence of the pretence that it was purely intellectual in character and above the political fray.296 Fascist Italy was represented on the executive of the ICIC until its resignation from the League at the end of 1937 and a militaristic Japan, although announcing its withdrawal from the League in March 1933, continued to be represented at the ICIC until discontinuing its cooperation with its technical organs in early November 1938. As for Nazi Germany, as we saw, it withdrew from all the League’s organs in October 1933. However, as we also saw, the ICO’s governing body determined shortly after that the ICO would remain open to German participation. This openness to German participation took the form of Reich-approved German involvement in the ISC and through this, Reich-approved German collaboration with the IIIC. In relation to these matters, Aant Elzinga notes that the ICO’s ‘[o]fficial ostrich-like neutrality was

295 Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 2. Henderson, UNESCO in Focus, 19. James L. Henderson’s essay reflected the tendency to view the ICO through he spectrum of the League’s putative failure. See also Charles S. Ascher, ‘The Development of UNESCO’s Program,’ International Organisation 4, no. 1 (1950): 12–26. 296 Jan Kolasa observes the following: ‘League intellectuals tried to separate the activities of the League of Nations from those of its agency for intellectual cooperation. They maintained that the League of Nations approached the subject from a political point of view, whereas the intellectual cooperation agency looked at it from the “pure intellectual point of view.” Undoubtedly, the strong emphasis on the “pure intellectual character” of the League international intellectual cooperation in the late 1930s reflected the difficulties of contemporary political circumstances. The pretended apolitical attitude excused, for example, the collaboration of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation with countries which withdrew their participation from the League of Nations. It resulted in a scandalous toleration of and collaboration with the Nazi-regime which was the very negation of culture and humanism. But the apolitical aspiration of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was not only the direct result of the existing political situation in the second half of the 1930s, From the very beginning, the organization was opened to every country, irrespective of its political regime, of the role it played in the war, of the attitude to the League itself.’ Kolasa, International Intellectual Cooperation, 61.

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exploited by aggressor nations to groom a false of image of their still being civilised and cultured’.297 While such criticisms of the ICO had been aired before the war they became, as one would expect, especially current after its outbreak or rather, when it became a matter of a war involving all the Axis powers. Li gave three reasons for the ICO’s apparent lack of success. Two of the reasons he gave were, firstly, the fact that LON member states ‘were no more inclined to let this activity [of intellectual cooperation] become a powerful instrument than they were to favor collective security’ and, secondly, the acceptance of the theory that ‘intellectual preoccupations must stand aloof from political facts, from collective security, and from ideological problems.’ In order to illustrate the second reason he gave for the ICO’s apparent lack of success, Li recalled the occasion of a meeting of the Fifth Committee of the League Assembly in 1939. At the time, he stated, he was struck by how surprised most of the members… were …when as a representative of China he protested against the abandonment of Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany. Most of his colleagues seemed to indicate that they did not think it was within the competence of a commission dealing with intellectual problems to touch upon such a “political matter” as the abandonment of a member of the League of Nations to a powerful aggressor.298

The third reason Li gave for the apparent lack of success of the ICO was its ‘attempt at universalism’ as it was this that had seen it admit all countries, ‘even fascist countries to the councils of international intellectual cooperation.’ As Li pointed out, it was the ICO’s mutually informing

297 Elzinga, ‘UNESCO and the Politics of International Cooperation in the Realm of Science,’ 165. For Italian and Japanese membership of the ICIC, see Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 184–85, 281–82, The Japanese National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation submitted a submitted a substantial report on Japanese culture and on its activities in the field of intellectual cooperation on the invitation of the IIIC for consideration at the Second General Conference of the National Committees of Intellectual Co-operation in 1938. The chair of the Japanese Committee, Count Ayské Kabayama, stated in the introduction to the report that Japan felt ‘most keenly’ the need to submit a report because of its geographical isolation from Europe and America. National Committee of Japan on Intellectual Cooperation, Intellectual Cooperation and the Mutual Knowledge of National Cultural Genius (Tokyo: National Committee of Japan on Intellectual Cooperation, 1937). 298 Li, ‘International Intellectual Cooperation,’ 299–300.

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policies of political neutrality and universalism that gave rise to such ludicrous spectacles as debating ‘free thought all over the world’ with a representative of Fascist Italy. In this context, one might usefully observe that a no less ludricous spectacle was that of debating peaceful change with a representative of Nazi Germany.299 Without disputing the force of the criticisms of the ICO’s stance of political neutrality, it is nonetheless important to consider the wider setting in which the ICO operated. In a speech given in the midst of the proceedings of the Institute on World Organization in Washington in September 1941, Bonnet declared that peace probably could have been preserved had a ‘wholehearted application’ of the covenant been favoured at the appropriate time. However, its full application was hindered, Bonnet declared, due to the ‘acceptance by governments of the idea of the League’s neutrality, and the inclination on the part of too many people to believe that…[the League]…could display a so-called impartiality in the face of aggression.’ He added that this acceptance and inclination ‘was bound to be fatal to the international organization.’300 It would appear that in his speech, Bonnet was implicitly acknowledging that acceptance of the idea of League neutrality and the inclination to believe that it could display impartiality in the face of aggression had influenced the actions of its intellectual organ and that, as a result, the ICO’s reputation had suffered. This is evidenced by the fact that Bonnet went on to point out that the LON’s intellectual organisation was ‘not neutral about the war in Europe’. Bonnet noted that when the European crisis ‘reached its climax, there was no meeting of the Assembly and the Council was not convoked in spite of the attack against one of the member states’. He pointed out that in contrast with this inaction on the part of the League’s two deliberative bodies, the IIIC immediately swung into action: it proceeded to consult the ICIC, that is, its governing body, ‘all the available the national committees [of intellectual cooperation] and many of the other national or international groups collaborating with the League as to the conditions under which it should continue its work and how it could openly take a stand against aggression’.301

299 Ibid.,

300. Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 21. 301 Ibid., 22. 300 Bonnet,

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Alluding to the letters published in the IIIC’s monthly bulletin between December 1939 and April 1940, Bonnet pointed out that in light of this consultation, the LON’s intellectual organisation proceeded to ‘launch intellectual action’: in the pages of its monthly bulletin it sought to give expression to the ‘great desire in many of the nonbelligerent but free countries, notably outside Europe, for a united front of the people who were defending values threatened with destruction.’ Doubtless in view of the forthcoming Havana conference, Bonnet urged in his speech action of this kind on the American continent, although not just the American continent, for as long as the war continued.302 Bonnet’s watch over the IIIC did not end with his exile from France. Li pointed out that while in London in 1940, and against a background in which the LON’s Secretariat and the ICIC had ceased their activities, Bonnet poured his energies into opposing ‘every Nazi-Vichy attempt to use…[the IIIC]…for nazi ideologies.’303

302 Ibid. Bonnet stated that the LON’s intellectual organisation was ‘at most, was prevented by censorship from publishing some truthful statements about fascism because too many people, in the belligerent as well as in the neutral countries, maintained incredible illusions about Mussolini’s policy’ (ibid., 23). 303 Li, ‘International Intellectual Cooperation,’ 300.

CHAPTER 5

The Post-War Decline of the International Studies Conference

Everything Begins Again The IIIC reopened its doors in February 1945, whereupon Mayoux immediately proceeded to oversee the renewal of its various activities: its activities in relation to cinema, archives, libraries, museums, literature and the exact, natural and social sciences. The IIIC even launched a new initiative in the form of radio transmissions emanating from the Palais Royal. Radio-Monde, as this service was called, broadcast at least twenty transmissions of an ‘intellectual and international character’ between April and October 1945. Courtesy of the antennae of Radiodiffusion française, these transmissions could be heard throughout the world.1 Such measures were consistent with the French efforts within the context of CAME to promote French interests in matters of intellectual cooperation and to ensure the survival of the IIIC.2 Mayoux, like Cassin and Bonnet, was worried about the fate of the IIIC in light of Anglo-Saxon ambitions, especially the ambitions of the all-powerful ­ Americans. The fact that in the context of CAME ‘people reproached 1 ‘Note,’

numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [c] (octobre–novembre 1945): 1–5, 3. See also Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 161. 2 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 160. Cassin lead these efforts in the context of CAME wherein he defended the reputation of the IIIC. In May 1944, Cassin warned the Consultative Assembly in Algeria that it must not neglect ‘the interests of France in matters of intellectual co-operation’ (ibid.).

© The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part Three, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31827-7_5

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France in matters of culture’ and accused it of ‘trying to guard acquired positions, in particular the Institute,’ concerned him, especially because the war had seen a reduction of the ‘power and prestige’ of France.3 More generally, Mayoux was concerned that the acceptance at San Francisco that there was a place for ‘culture seemed above all a concession to old European habits.’4 As a result, in the period between the CAME meeting of July 1945 and the London Conference of November that year, Mayoux expended all his efforts in order to secure the IIIC’s future and promote the cause of culture.5 In August, Mayoux sent a letter to Zimmern who was at that stage the secretary of CAME as well as an advisor to the British Ministry of Education. In that letter, Mayoux associated the maintenance of the IIIC with the flourishing of a métapolitque conducive to international cooperation. Mayoux informed Zimmern of what he saw as ‘one of the possible points of friction’ between the Anglo-American project on the one hand, and the French project on the other, stating that this possible point of friction was linked to the ‘ideological’ question. The care to very strongly maintain the cultural side and to not let it be drowned by ‘education,’ the care, at the very moment when the great nationalisms affirm themselves on the political plane much more strongly than they did in 1919, to go much further on our terrain than the Charter of San Francisco and to recommence forging a new and universal esprit is not separable from our preoccupation of maintaining the Institute.6

Renoliet records that in a letter sent to Georges Bidault the minister of foreign affairs in the Provisional Government of the French Republic in September 1945, Mayoux pointed out that the IIIC had covered ‘all the directions indicated in recent projects, Anglo-Saxon or others,’ adding that if its work was not well known it was because it lacked the 3 Renoliet,

L’UNESCO oubliée, 169–70. Mayoux, ‘La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale: UNESCO,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 1–2 (1946): i–xxiii, iii. 5 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 169–71. See also Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 227. CAME was dissolved in December 31, 1945, after a final formal meeting with the executive bureau of UNESCO. 6 Jean-Jacques Mayoux, 1945, quoted in Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 172. For Mayoux’s notion of a métapolitque see Jean Jacques Mayoux, ‘Conjoncture,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 3–4 (1946): i–iii. 4 Jean-Jaques

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resources to publicise its work and because of the ‘apathy of numerous governments, such as that of Great-Britain.’7 Mayoux told Bidault that the IIIC had never served as an instrument of the Vichy government or Nazi Germany and that the IIIC had never succumbed to the ‘temptation of serving French cultural imperialism’.8 At the same time, it should be noted that Renoliet records that in a letter sent to Bidault in August, Mayoux, after having noted that the IIIC had faithfully served the internationalist cause, pointed out that the IIIC had ‘contributed strongly to the influence and prestige of France’ and insisted that it was because of its contribution in this regard that it was now being challenged by ‘rival ambitions’.9 Mayoux’s dedicated campaign was carried on in the pages of a special issue of the institute’s bulletin which appeared in the period leading up to the London Conference and which went under the heading of Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale. The special issue, which was dated October– November 1945, was the first IIIC bulletin to be published in the period immediately after the Occupation. Within its pages, it detailed the history of recent discussions of educational and cultural questions at international conferences: at Dumbarton Oaks, Chalpultepec, and San Francisco.10 In view of the forthcoming London Conference, the special issue reproduced both the CAME and the French proposals for the organisation of educational and culture on an international basis. In addition, it reproduced a letter that had been annexed to the French proposal and which was addressed by Bidault as minister of foreign affairs to Alfred Duff Cooper, the British ambassador at Paris. The letter commenced by noting that it was a French initiative, which had been conveyed to the League by Bourgeois, that had lead to the creation of the ICIC and that it was France which through the offices of Herriot had offered the IIIC to the League.11 The same letter went on to outline what the French government considered to be important points of difference between the French and 7 Mayoux, 1945, quoted in Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 174. Renoliet points out that the words all the directions were underlined in the letter (ibid., 174n). 8 Ibid. 9 Mayoux, 1945, quoted in Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 171. 10 ‘Les Questions Éducatives et Culturelles dans les récentes Conférences Internationales,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre 1945): 27–8. 11 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [c] (octobre–novembre 1945), 40.

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the CAME proposals. One of these points of difference concerned the French view, as reflected in Mayoux’s letter to Zimmern, that the distinction made in the CAME proposal between education and culture, did not sufficiently establish the goal of diffusing and advancing knowledge. The letter warned that there was a danger that certain elements of the programme would be ‘sacrificed to others.’ Notably, the letter concluded in stating that the IIIC had two decades of experience in the domain of intellectual cooperation in all its diversity and that this rendered it an ‘extremely precious instrument of work for the new Organisation’ and that the new organisation ‘must use this instrument as its secretariat’.12

The Awakening of the Organisation of Intellectual Cooperation Much of the rest of the special issue consisted in the following: a defence of the IIIC’s record, a demonstration of its continued vitality and a plea for its survival. Included in it were reports of the activities that the IIIC had undertaken in the past and of the activities which it had recently recommenced. There was also a report concerning one of its new initiatives, namely, Radio-Monde. These various reports all sought to illustrate a point that had been made by Mayoux in one of this letters to Bidault: that the work that the ICO had undertaken in the interwar years encompassed all the fields which were being mentioned in connection with certain rival projects.13 In order to further demonstrate this point, the special issue provided a detailed list of all the works the IIIC had published up until its closure in 1940. It also provided a list of the works it had published in the immediate aftermath of the war. Notably, the first item on the latter list was a work in the field of the exact sciences.14

12 Ibid., 40–3. The letter sent by Georges Bidault, the French foreign minister, to Alfred Duff Cooper, the British ambassador at Paris was dated August 21, 1945, and was signed by J. (Jean) Chauvel. 13 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [c] (octobre–novembre 1945), 3. 14 The first book itemised in the list of works published by the IIIC in the immediate aftermath of the war was entitled Les fondements et la méthode dans les sciences mathémathiques. This book was the result of a meeting organised by the IIIC and the École polytechnique fédéral de Zurich which was held in Zurich from December 6 to 9, 1938. ‘Premières publications d’après guerre de l’I.I.C.I.,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre 1945): 89–90.

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The special issue of the IIIC’s bulletin also reported on the gradual return to life of the ICO, noting that from the first day of resuming its activities, the IIIC had sought to re-establish its links with the other organs of the organisation. It was thus that Mayoux travelled to England to consult with Murray who continued in his role as president of the ICIC.15 Contact was made with other members of the ICIC: Argentina’s Victoria Ocampo, Peru’s Francisco Garcia-Calderon and Brazil’s Almeida (this last being president of the Provisional International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, that is, of the aforementioned inter-American committee that was formed in 1941), all of whom pledged their support for the maintenance of the IIIC. Also pledging their support were the following ICIC members: Czechoslovakia’s Bedrich Hrozny, Egypt’s Taha Hussein, Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch, Portugal’s Julio Dantas, Switzerland’s Gonzague de Reynold and Shotwell. In addition to receiving written communications, the IIIC received a visit from Li, who at that time on the point of leaving Paris for China. The purpose of Li’s visit was to confirm the attachment of his country to Intellectual Cooperation and to transmit the same sentiments on behalf of the Chinese member of the ICIC: Wu Zhihui.16 According to the special issue, it seemed that the telegrams that had been sent from Paris to the Indian and Lithuanian members of the ICIC, respectively Sir Abdul Qadar and Martin Primanis, had not reached them. There were three members of the committee who could never be reached. Nicolae Titulescu, who had served from 1921 to 1936 as the permanent delegates of Romania to the LON, had died in exile in France on March 17, 1941; Teleki, who had resumed the role of Hungarian prime minister in 1939, had been found dead in his chamber on the morning of April 3, 1941, just as the Germans began their march into Hungary; and Huizinga had died on February 1, 1945, following his detention by his country’s occupiers, ‘a victim,’ the IIIC’s bulletin observed, ‘of the Nazi rage’.17 15 ‘Nouvelles

des Membres de la Commission Internationale,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [d] (octobre–novembre 1945): 61–2. 16 Ibid. 17 ‘Hommage: Jean Huizinga,’ numéro spécial Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [e] (octobre–novembre 1945): 11–2; ‘Hommage: Comte Paul Teleki,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre 1945): 13–14; and Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [d] (octobre–novembre 1945): 61. See also ‘Count Teleki’s Suicide: Budapest Confirmation—Nazis Blamed,’ West Australian, April 5, 1941.

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News of members of the ICIC’s executive committee was also sought. Contact was very quickly resumed with Malcolm W. Davis. Davis had spent the first year and a quarter of the war representing the American Red Cross in Geneva, acting at the same time as associate secretary general of the League of Red Cross Societies. At the time when the IIIC resumed contact with him, he was occupying the role of acting director of the Carnegie Endowment in New York.18 The IIIC’s bulletin was pleased to report that another member of the executive committee, namely, Julien Cain, had been liberated by the Americans from Buchenwald concentration camp in April. It was there that Cain had spent the last sixteen months of the four years of captivity he had endured, following his removal by Vichy from his post as secretary of the Bibliotèque nationale de France. The bulletin was also pleased to report that Herriot, the French member of the ICIC and the head of the IIIC’s administrative committee, had returned to France via the USSR. Herriot, the bulletin reported, had been recently released by the Soviet Army from Germany where he had been detained due to his opposition, somewhat belated though it was, to the Vichy government.19 The reopened IIIC also preoccupied itself with renewing contact with the national committees of intellectual cooperation, although this proved difficult because certain of these committees had disintegrated in whole or in part. However, contact was soon made with nearly all the national committees of South America: the Argentinian, Brazilian, Bolivian, Chilean, Cuban, Dominican Republican, Mexican, Peruvian, El Salavadorean and Venezuelan national committees all remained intact. The committees in the ‘countries of the English language,’ namely, in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, India, the Union of South Africa and the United States also remained intact.20

18 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [d] (octobre–novembre 1945), 61. For Davis’s role with the Red Cross and then in New York, see Davis, ‘The League of Minds,’ 240, and Malcolm W. Davis, ‘Experiences of the Committee for International Cooperation,’ Journal of Educational Sociology 20, no. 1 (1946): 49–52. 19 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [d] (octobre–novembre 1945): 61–2. See also ‘5,400 Deaths Buchenwald Toll,’ The Maple Leaf, April 20, 1945. 20 ‘Reprise des relations avec les Commissions nationale de C.I.,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre 1945): 62–5, 62–3.

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All the national committees mentioned above as well as Iran in the form of the University of Tehran expressed in telegrams of support their fidelity to the IIIC. Most of these telegrams urged the members of Intellectual Cooperation present at San Francisco to ‘seize every favourable occasion in order to support the idea of International Intellectual Cooperation within the framework of the United Nations.’ In contrast to the situation of the South American committees and the committees in the so-called countries of the English language, the situation of the national committees in Europe remained uncertain. Noting that there was not any country on the continent which had not been ‘upset by the terrible events which had recently covered the world in blood,’ the IIIC’s bulletin pointed out that tragically a great number of the members of the European committees had lost their lives ‘in the torment, in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, in France, in Holland, in Norway, in Poland etc.’21

Post-War Reconstruction: The Fear of Failure The IIIC’s bulletin of October–November 1945 paid homage to Huizinga as it did to a number of others associated with the ICO who were now deceased. In the obituary dedicated to Huizinga, it drew attention to a passage taken from one of his interventions during the course of a conversation held at the Palais Royal between 16 and 18 of October, 1933, on the subject of the future of the European mind.22 In the context of this conversation, which Bonnet claimed presaged the debate on appeasement, the German philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling declared that recent events in Germany were a manifestation of a growing revolt against the forces of mind and spirit by ‘earthly forces’ (les forces telluriques). According to Bonnet, even though Keyserling was not a totalitarian, in advancing this line of argument he was attempting to excuse in

21 Ibid., 62–5. ‘The Institute [of Intellectual Coooperation] has received a letter from Professor Carlo Antoni from the “Institut Nazionale per la relazioni culturali con l’estero” (alias I.R.C.E.) which confirms some conversations with the Italian government about proceeding with the nomination, on the proposal of the I.R.C.E., with a new committee [on intellectual cooperation]’ (ibid., 69). 22 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [e] (octobre–novembre 1945), 12.

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some measure the Hitler phenomenon. Keyserling stated during the conversation that the earthly forces of which he spoke put an accent on ‘soil, blood, race’ and that these forces had placed themselves in the service of Hitlerism. He insisted that the earthly forces would in the end prove ‘irresistible’ and that the spiritual forces in contention with them would be crushed. All that could be done, Keyserling declared, was ‘to make the best of this terrible prospect.’23 Huizinga, like the others participating in the conversation, recoiled from Keyserling’s dark prophecy and in rejecting it, he affirmed a humanistic philosophy; Today’s Europe finds itself exposed to a force which threatens a return to barbarism. The organisation of groups, organisation, in principle, always hostile to a general sentiment founded on intellectual values and which tends to link together what differs, presents itself under a new and frightening light. Technical progress has permitted a rapidity and solidity of the organisation of the masses from which profits madness and crime as well as or better than wisdom and law. I want to say that all organisation bears in itself a negative element of rigidity, of a reduction of the life of free thought, which renders its dangerous by itself. A disturbing weakening of ethical principles in the life of nations as in that of individuals is ceaselessly making its way. It is…political power, the purity of race which have taken the place of the generous aspirations for liberty and truth of other times. Realism, people will say, in place of illusions and fictions. The fact remains that these old concepts have a manifest and general ethical value.24

This statement was reproduced in the homage to Huizinga appearing in the October–November 1945 special issue of the IIIC’s bulletin and this was because the editor felt that the humanist ideal to which it gave expression spoke to the needs of the hour.25 This last point should be considered against the background of an editorial which Mayoux penned and published in the same special issue. The editorial was an eloquent 23 Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 13, and Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ 204. See also Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, L’avenir de l’esprit européen, Entretiens 3 (Paris: Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 1934), 21. 24 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [e] (octobre–novembre 1945): 11–2, and Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, L’avenir de l’esprit européen, 63–4. 25 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [e] (octobre–novembre 1945), 12.

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appeal to governments to preserve the IIIC or, if not that, to keep faith with the ideals which inspired its creation. However, what is of most interest from the perspective of this study, is the fact that this editorial offers proof of the slippery manner in which the words realism and idealism were employed at the time in the context of quasi-theoretical discussions concerning international affairs. Mayoux addressed the meaning of the concepts of idealism and realism in the context of a discussion of the complex feelings that were attendant upon the war’s end and of how these feelings conduced to a determination to close the chapter that was the League experience, however misrecognised was that experience. In elaborating on contemporary feelings, Mayoux explained that those charged with building a new world order did not approach their task lightly. Mayoux observed that this was not just because so much pain and sadness had been visited upon so many victims over the previous five years, it was also because they had, in putting themselves to work, a ‘double sentiment’: they were conscious of the ‘immense effort’ that was required in order to ‘change everything’ so that the ‘worst’ would not reoccur, while also feeling an ‘overwhelming doubt’ about the possibility of ‘translating the ideal into reality’. He maintained that this doubt was felt because people had tried to translate the ideal into reality after 1918 only ‘to arrive at 1939’.26 These considerations explain why, according to Mayoux, in the coming out of the ‘savage period’ of the past several years or more, there was in some quarters ‘praise only for realism’. He stated that at times, this praise surprised Europeans because for them ‘realism signifies very bad memories’.27 In stating this last, Mayoux was alluding to the maxim that force surpasses right. However, in observing that in the aftermath of the war there was much praise for realism, Mayoux was most definitely not alluding to that particular maxim. Rather, he was making the point that there was abroad in the aftermath of war a certain ‘mistrust’ of humanity’s ability to achieve social progress. Elaborating on the causes of this mistrust, which, in his view, was ‘rather justified,’ Mayoux suggested that the sentiment ‘réaliste’ that was abroad in the midst of the war’s aftermath did not stem from cynicism, but rather stemmed from a

26 Jean-Jacques Mayoux, ‘Éditorial,’ numéro Internatioanle (octobre–novembre 1945): i–vii, i. 27 Ibid., i.

spécial,

Coopération

Intellectuelle

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fear of failure. The memory of the unhappy failure of the Geneva experiment, Mayoux insisted, obsessed ‘more or less consciously the builders of today’ who feared that they too would be lead astray by the ‘vain’ pursuit of ‘woolly’ ideals or ‘too noble ambitions’.28 Mayoux stated that at San Francisco, people sensed that in several of the great nations there was a ‘systematic hostility’ to everything that had been done in the interwar period and that these same nations were determined to sweep away all traces of that period and begin life anew.29 Although stating that this desire to sweep away all remnants of the League experience was understandable, Mayoux was obviously saddened by it, not least because of what this desire meant in terms of the fate of the IIIC. As previously noted however, outside of the specific case of the IIIC and its fate, Mayoux was concerned to see preserved what had been the essential idea behind the interwar movement of intellectual cooperation: the ‘idéal’ of enlightenment, of comprehension. At the same time, Mayoux, in his aforementioned editorial and after having recalled his remarks concerning the ‘réaliste mood of today,’ insisted that an ideal of this kind can only be conceived in relation to a ‘perfect realism of methods’.30 Mayoux then proceeded to promote the ideal of intellectual cooperation, albeit in a way that he hoped might invite a sympathetic hearing in Anglo-American circles. His desire to win over Anglo-American audiences to the cause of intellectual cooperation explains at least in part his insistence on the need for a realism of methods. However, at this point in his editorial, Mayoux ceased to use the term realism in either of the two senses mentioned above: in the argument which he now mounted, realism did not denote the rule of the iron fist or adopting a cautious attitude in the face of grand schemes of social improvement. The realism that Mayoux now invoked, as should evident, was of a methodological character and as such it came in two forms: ‘one perhaps more French, the other perhaps more Anglo-Saxon’.31 The ‘more French’ form of methodological realism concerned the ‘great Cartesian tradition’ and the ‘more Anglo-Saxon’ form, the ‘great

28 Ibid.,

i–ii. v–vi. 30 Ibid., ii. 31 Ibid. 29 Ibid.,

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tradition of Anglo-American empiricism.’32 It worth noting here that a good number of observers of international affairs in the interwar period had explained the different attitudes of the French, on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxons, on the other, to collective security in terms of these somewhat contrasting intellectual traditions: the French insistence on automatic guarantees of security according to some, was informed by a turn of mind which insisted on system and rigour whereas the AngloSaxon aversion to such guarantees, was often said to be informed by a turn of mind which was piece-meal and pragmatic. In regard to the Anglo-American tradition, Mayoux stated that it follows very closely ‘the present reality’ and attaches itself ‘with an extreme vigilance, a sensitivity very exact, to what is essential and vital’: it seeks to ‘resolve problems as they present themselves’ and to ‘transform and improve what is.’ This approach, it should noted, is more or less consistent with the approach that Mayoux associated with the term idéal: idealism signified for Mayoux a ‘perfectioning perfectly possible’ and not a ‘pursuit of impossible perfection’.33 Mayoux explained that the Cartesian tradition insisted on ‘the proper ordering of the steps of thought’ and consists in a ‘method, solid, vigorous…[and]… regular, yet still réaliste.’ It is a tradition which, he added, borrows from Descartes ‘above all perhaps, the principle of the gradation of difficulties’ and that in this respect it too ‘holds account of things as they are, of the problems as…they present themselves.’34 Mayoux stated that the Cartesian tradition as with the AngloAmerican empirical tradition, ‘would obey [reality] in order to command.’ He then posed the following question: ‘is it not in fact indispensable to bring together method,’ by which he meant the Cartesian method alone, and empiricism?35 If experience is to be commanded at all, Mayoux declared, then method must hold account of things as they are and equally, empiricism must submit to method. Mayoux translated this unification of method and empiricism into a plan for United Nations’ action in the cultural field, advocating the creation of an organisation charged with the ‘rigorous and quotidian’ task of ensuring that

32 Ibid.,

iii. i, iii. 34 Ibid., iii. 35 Ibid., iii. 33 Ibid.,

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‘esprit under all its forms can accomplish its immediate functions’. What was required, Mayoux further declared, was the ‘systematic coordination…[of]…all the efforts of thought, all its works, all its techniques and its plans’ and it was this rather than ‘brilliant manifestations,’ Mayoux stated in an allusion to the ‘Entretiens’ and the ‘Open Letters,’ that should ‘dominate in the future’.36 By the time the IIIC’s next bulletin was published in early 1946, the fate of the IIIC was sealed. This was implicitly acknowledged on its cover: below the bulletin’s title, namely, Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, was printed the name of the successor organisation to the ICO and in the following format: U.N.E.S.C.O. In an editorial appearing in this bulletin, Mayoux, after having given an account of the history of intellectual cooperation in the context of the LON and of the origins of UNESCO, turned his attention to the challenges that the new organisation would face. He advised that among these challenges was that of the ‘eternal problem of the unity and diversity of men’.37 Similarly to leading figures in the field of intellectual cooperation, Mayoux envisaged that the resolution of this problem would require a policy that affirmed diversity at the outset and then encouraged ‘the free orientation of diversity towards unity’.38 Yet Mayoux, like many others, knew that the problem of establishing a ‘fruitful diversity of cultures’ (a phrase contained within UNESCO’s constitution and coined by a French member of its drafting committee, namely, the philosopher and historian Étienne Gilson), would prove more challenging for UNESCO than it had for its predecessor.39 An important reason why UNESCO would find establishing a fruitful diversity more challenging than had its predecessor was because it was simply no longer possible to pretend that European civilisation had any claim to universality. It should be noted that the rejection of this claim had been presaged in the context of the ICO on a number of occasions. A particularly powerful example of this rejection in the context of the ICO concerns an exchange of letters between Gilbert Murray and Rabindranath Tagore which was sponsored by the Permanent Committee of Letters and Arts and which appeared under the heading

36 Ibid.,

iii.

37 Mayoux,

‘La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale: UNESCO,’ xxii–xxiii. ‘Éditorial,’ iv. 39 Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 12. 38 Mayoux,

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of East and West (1935). It should be noted that East and West was the fourth volume in the International Series of Open Letters.40 Although confessing that there was much to admire in European civilisation, Tagore nonetheless affirmed in his letter to Murray that the unfortunate fact was that the ‘one outstanding visible relationship of Europe with Asia today is that of exploitation.’ He further affirmed that the Asian spirit sickened in the face of the extent of Europe’s material power and its endless appetite for power.41 There are ‘no people in the whole of Asia today,’ Tagore declared, ‘which does not look upon Europe with fear and suspicion’ and it was in order to ‘retain her self-respect,’ he added, that all of Asia now denied the ‘moral superiority’ of Europe.42 Referring to Western countries, Murray stated in the letter he addressed to Tagore in response to the latter’s letter the following: that ‘our own national habits are not the unfailing canon by which those of other peoples must be judged’.43 In the aftermath of the Second World War, concessions of this nature received more frequent and more emphatic expression, not least because the chorus of denials regarding the moral superiority of Europe was growing much louder and was becoming more widespread. As Lucien Febvre declared during a discussion of a possible inquiry into the world’s civilisations in the context of UNESCO’s Sub-Commission on Social Sciences, Philosophy and Humanistic Studies on November 28, 1946, ‘[i]t is not as if…[western civilisation]…were the prototype—a marvellous thing to which all the world should approximate. Not all the world to-day will accept that suggestion. The idea encounters a good deal of resistance.’44

40 Gilbert Murray and Rabindranath Tagore, League of Nations, East and West, An International Series of Open Letters 4 (Paris: League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1935). See also L’avenir de l’esprit européen Europe, Amérique latine, Entretiens 7 (Paris: Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 1937). 41 Murray et al., East and West, 43–4. 42 Ibid., 44, 46. 43 Ibid., 15–6. 44 UNESCO, ‘General Conference: First Session, Paris, 20 November–10 December, 1946,’ Programme Commission II, Sub-Commission on Social Sciences, Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. C/Prog.Com./S.C.Soc.Sci./V.R.1.E, 19, UA.

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Another outstanding, reason why UNESCO was to face greater challenges than had its predecessor was as follows: as Mayoux put it, one of the ‘most grave responsibilities’ that was to soon confront UNESCO was the ‘liquidation of the colonial era’. This responsibility, Mayoux observed, raised a number of questions in regard to cultural policy and in this regard he posed the following questions: What to make, for example, of the “primitive” cultures? Where to place the limit of the adaptable? Is all pre-logical thought to be abolished purely and simply? Is it necessary to align, purely and simply, all currently non-civilised people with the current European civilisation? Can we conceive of something else?45

Mayoux insisted that it would be fatal for UNESCO were it to act as an ‘agent of uniformity,’ adding that to act in this manner was not in the interests of ‘true civilisation’. Invoking Mistral, Mayoux maintained that far from promoting uniformity, UNESCO should act as a guardian of ‘particularity,’ that is, of ‘heterogenity,’ adding that particularity was ‘one of the most precious attributes of man’ and that it should be respected in relation to the smaller as much as to the larger cultures.46 Given his approval of Mistral’s observations concerning the smaller cultures, it is very likely that he would have agreed with following declaration on the part of Febvre: ‘[i]n the final civilization that we envisage there must be reflected everything that is of value in the civilizations we know to-day. The humblest and the most remote of them has its contribution to make to human progress.’47 In addressing the question of how UNESCO was to preserve the ‘individuality of nations…and the diversity of cultures,’ Mayoux stated that it was essential to preserve or relieve a ‘certain number of cultures, or indeed the immense majority of individuals… from a mortal sense of inferiority’ in the face of the civilisation of the ‘white western man’ which, whatever its spiritual failings, had been able to ‘subjugate matter

45 Mayoux,

‘La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale: UNESCO,’ xxii. xxi. 47 UNESCO, ‘General Conference: First Session, Paris, 20 November–10 December, 1946,’ Programme Commission II, Sub-Commission on Social Sciences, Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. C/Prog.Com./S.C.Soc.Sci./V.R.1.E, 19, UA. 46 Ibid.,

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through scientific knowledge.’48 Mayoux warned against the error of viewing the ‘imitation of the exterior forms and accessories’ of European civilisation as a form of homage. Such imitation, he insisted, did not prevent feelings of rancour in relation to Europe’s enormous material power. According to Mayoux, the task which lay ahead for UNESCO in terms of preserving cultural diversity was that of encouraging among non-European peoples ‘pride’ in their own culture and of fostering the ‘cultural fertility’ which depends on that pride. Such an approach, he affirmed, would involve a ‘difficult effort of redistributive justice’: great material resources needed to be placed in the hands of all nations in order that they would not be obsessed with the fear of taking a path that would distance them from their legitimate material aspirations.49

The International Studies Conference Revived In addition to seeking to preserve the IIIC, Mayoux expended considerable energy throughout 1945 in seeking to revive the ISC, an organisation which he considered to be one of the IIIC’s ‘most successful initiatives’.50 Prompted by Mayoux’s communication on the subject, Potter, who remained in the role of general rapporteur but who had shifted from Geneva to Washington in light of his new position as secretary and managing editor of the American Journal of International Law, consulted Bonnet. Bonnet, who had become French ambassador at Washington in December 1944, declared himself in favour of the ISC’s continuance. By contrast and somewhat surprisingly, Davis informed Potter that although he had ‘no opinion’ on the future of the conference, he thought it might be ‘desirable to reconsider its usefulness.’51 Davis’s attitude was perhaps a reflection of the fact that there was little enthusiasm in the United States, as was also the case in Canada, for the revival of the ISC.52 Potter was exception in this regard, although 48 Mayoux,

‘La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale: UNESCO,’ xxiii. xxiii. 50 Jean-Jacques Mayoux to Malcolm W. Davis, June 22, 1946, Dotation Carnegie, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, de 1945 à décembre 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA. 51 Pitman B. Potter to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, April 23, 1945, and Pitman B. Potter to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, October 23, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 52 Potter to Mayoux, October 23, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 49 Ibid.,

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he too had his reservations: in informing Mayoux that in this view the ISC’s activities should be resumed, he suggested that it would be timely to consider once more the ISC’s organisation and procedures. In particular, Potter thought that attention should be paid to the pre-war criticism that the ISC had not been sufficiently ‘independent of government influence’.53 Potter advised Mayoux that the future of the ISC might well depend on the future of the IIIC, about which, he noted, there was some uncertainty in light of the proposals for a new and comprehensive international educational and intellectual centre which were being aired at that time and which were destined to be addressed in London in November.54 Against this background, Mayoux organised an informal meeting of the executive committee of the conference and some of the conference’s members. This meeting took place on Sunday, November 18, 1945, at Chatham House.55 That arrangements were made to hold the meeting in London and at this particular time, was because of the presence in Europe of Davis who, despite his seemingly ambivalent attitude in regard to the ISC’s future, continued in a role that he had enjoyed since 1935: chair of the ISC’s executive committee. The location and timing of the meeting was also informed by the fact that a great many members of the ISC would be present in London in November: a great many members would be among the various national delegations to the London Conference on post-war international educational and cultural policy.56 Despite the meeting’s convenient scheduling, Zimmern was unable to attend: in a brief note written from his base at the Institution of Civil Engineers, Zimmern informed Mayoux that in the ‘press’ of the London

53 Potter

to Mayoux, April 23, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA.

54 Ibid. 55 International Studies Conference: Report on the Informal (14th) Meeting of the Executive Committee and Members of the Conference. London, November 18, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2, UA. Among the participants were figures who were associated with the ISC’s pre-war activities: in addition to Davis, these included Waldorf Astor, Margaret Elisabeth Cleeve; Halfdan Olaus Christophersen, Ivison S. Macadam, Charles Anthony Woodward Manning, David Mitrany, Alfred Rappard, Toynbee and Vranek. The national committees from America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden and Switzerland were represented at the Chatham House meeting. The IPR was the only international organisation represented. 56 Jean-Jacques Mayoux to Pitman B. Potter, March 1, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA.

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Conference, it was ‘quite impossible’ for him to represent the Geneva School of International Studies at the Chatham House meeting.57 Davis was the only national of the United States present at the meeting. In a letter to Mayoux, Edward Mead Earle, the head of the American unit of the ISC, explained that the end of the Pacific war had seen men returning from the armed forces to the universities in large numbers. American academic personnel, he stated, felt under a ‘very heavy obligation to give them…[their]…best efforts in the continuation of their education’ that had been in very many instances ‘disrupted by the war’ and this meant not taking leave from their posts. This was not the only consideration Earle raised in his letter when explaining the obstacles in the way of American participation in the London meeting. Earle pointed out that the continuance of the American national committee hinged on its receipt of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. He then observed that the foundation was not ready to commit to projects such as the ISC and its national off-shoots until one of its representatives had surveyed the overall situation in Europe.58 In fact, what Earle was hinting at was that the Rockefeller Foundation had a ‘negative attitude towards any future development of the Conference,’ a consideration that certainly would have given Davis pause.59 In opening the London meeting, Davis solemnly observed that those who had been present at Bergen during the last days of August 1939 would ‘recall that we had colleagues among us whom we shall not see again,’ adding that those colleagues ‘never bowed their heads in the circumstances they had to face, nor lowered their standards.’ Davis then called for a moment of silence in honour of their memory at the very moment when the ISC had reunited for the first time after so many sad years in order to deliberate on its future.60 Recalling Bonnet’s scrupulous respect for the autonomy of the ISC, Davis then introduced Bonnet’s 57 Alfred

E. Zimmern to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, November 12, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2,

UA. 58 Edward

Mead Earle to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, November 3, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24,

UA. 59 Jean-Jacques

Mayoux to Malcolm W. Davis, September 30, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d,

UA. 60 International Studies Conference: Report on the Informal (14th) Meeting of the Executive Committee and Members of the Conference, London, November 18, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2, UA.

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replacement as the ISC’s secretary general, namely, Mayoux, who then proceeded to report on this history of the IIIC and the ISC in the years between 1939 and 1945.61 In his report, Mayoux underlined the fact that the recent work of the conference secretariat had faced a number of difficulties. Mayoux noted that during the Occupation the Germans had confiscated the index cards of the institute which contained data concerning correspondence with the ISC’s members. He further noted that all the copies bar one of the documents pertaining to the planned study cycle on international organisation had disappeared. Finally in this context, Mayoux pointed out that in June 1940 the IIIC had been on the point of publishing three manuscripts which had resulted from the Bergen conference, the proofs of which had been corrected and paginated. He added that at the beginning of the Occupation, the type, which had been set up by the Firmin-Didot printing firm, had been broken up and that the original manuscripts had disappeared without a trace.62 Following Mayoux’s report, the meeting turned to the question of the future of the ISC, specifically, the question of whether it would should consider attaching itself to UNESCO or whether it should become an independent organisation with its own secretariat. In the course of the ensuing discussion, it was ‘stressed emphatically’ that the ISC was an association of ‘free scholars’ and that it was of the essence that its members maintain liberty and independence of thought. Indeed, it was argued at the meeting that the freedom to express individual views was all the more important and necessary given that the world was ‘moving into a period in which official and unofficial interests in policy would

61 Ibid. 62 International Studies Conference, 1939–1945: Report by the Secretary-General, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2, UA. The three manuscripts which disappeared were as follows: The Problem of Raw Materials by Étienne Dennery; Le contrôle des changes by André Piater; and Exchange Control by André Piatier. The last of these three manuscripts was an English translation of Le contrôle des changes. A third of the proofs of Dennery’s manuscript was later found at the printer and an incomplete set of proofs of the Piatier volumes were saved by the author. The Dennery manuscript was not in the end published as it was considered out of date. However, the French version of the Piatier manuscript was published by the ISC in 1947 as it was considered to be of great interest. See also A. Basch, review of Le Contrôle des Changes: Rapport General [sic], by A. Piatier, American Economic Review 41, no. 3 (1951): 584–86.

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come to the fore.’63 Considerations of this nature caused the Norwegian group in their submission to the meeting Chatham House to call attention to the tendency of delegates at pre-war conferences to pose as the representatives of particular policies or States.64 On the afternoon of November 18, the meeting arrived at the view that the topic chosen at Bergen was ‘too broad and vast’ and that, in any case, it had been rendered redundant by the formation of the United Nations. Thus, the meeting appointed an informal programme committee and charged it with formulating a new and ‘more precisely limited and concrete’ subject of study. Davis, Toynbee and Christophersen were among the members of this committee and it was assisted in its work when it met the following day by Mayoux and Vranek.65 Among the topics proposed at programme committee’s meeting were the technological aspects of security including the problem of inspection and control; the relationship between regional organisation and world security; the significance of the provisions of the United Nations Charter for non self-governing territories; the question of whether the traditional conception of state sovereignty was compatible with the effective operation of the security provisions of the charter; and what conception of life is represented by the term democracy as it is employed in different parts of the world.66 In the end, the programme committee decided in favour of a study of a particular aspect of the United Nations Charter: a study of the functions and problems of the United Nations Security Council, a subject which, the committee insisted, was of ‘crucial importance’. In particular, and in a clear divergence from a prominent feature of pre-war thought and policy, the programme committee suggested that a study in this area should focus on the problem of how to apply the charter’s strictures

63 International Studies Conference: Report on the Informal (14th) Meeting of the Executive Committee and Members of the Conference, London, November 18, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2, UA. 64 Memorandum presented by the Norwegian Group to the Fourteenth Meeting of the Executive Committee, London, November 18, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2, UA. 65 Report of the Informal Programme Committee held at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, November 19, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2, UA. 66 Ibid. See also Politique Étrangère 10, no. 3 (1945), 299–300.

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‘so as to avoid the risk of war’ between the council’s permanent members ‘without trying to purchase peace at the price of injustice to weaker States.’67

Preparations for Liquidation The lack of enthusiasm of the French government for the IIIC in its final year of existence saddened Mayoux who had hoped that the institute would depart the world of intellectual cooperation with a flourish. One can thus understand his lament: ‘we are nobody’s baby.’68 The IIIC’s orphan status was formally underlined at the last LON Assembly in Geneva on April 8, 1946. Delegates of forty-three member states attended this assembly where they voted voting unanimously that as of April 20, the League would cease to exist. In view of this, the assembly also had to take a ‘final and official disposition’ in regard to the transfer of the LON’s assets to the United Nations.69 It was in regard to this matter, that the assembly’s First Committee under the chairmanship of Bourquin, met on April 17 in order examine among other questions pertaining to the dissolution of the LON, the question of the disposition of the property of the IIIC.70 In the course of this meeting, homage was paid to the great service rendered by the IIIC and its many happy initiatives were enumerated and commemorated. Indeed, at the same meeting, Noel-Baker offered an apology on behalf of the British Commonwealth for the disdain sometimes shown by its members for the work of Intellectual Cooperation.71 Noel-Baker recalled that Lord Arthur Balfour had observed in a speech at the assembly in 1922 that the six delegations of the British Commonwealth ‘never voted together at the Assembly except to oppose 67 Report of the Informal Programme Committee held at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, November 19, 1945, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2, UA. 68 Jean-Jacques Mayoux, 1946, quoted in Renoliet. L’UNESCO oubliée, 177. 69 The United Nations Library at Geneva and the League of Nations Archives, ‘The End of the League of Nations: The Last Assembly,’ in the United Nations Library at Geneva and the League of Nations Archives, The League of Nations 1920–1946, Organization and Accomplishments: A Retrospective of the First Organization for the Establishment of World Peace (Geneva: United Nations, 1996), 153. 70 ‘L’I.I.C.I. devant la XXIe Assemblée de la Société des Nations,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 3–4 (1946): 9–18, 9. 71 Ibid., 16.

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intellectual co-operation.’72 That said, it is important to note here Bonnet’s insistence that India never manifested any of the ‘reticence and even hostility’ towards Intellectual Cooperation that was manifested by the other members of the British Empire in the assembly.73 Noel-Baker then informed the meeting that the attitude of the British delegations had now changed: the members of the Commonwealth wished that in the future, intellectual cooperation would play a significant role in international relations, a sentiment warmly endorsed by his Australian and Canadian counterparts. Alluding to the French expression of pride in the fact that UNESCO’s seat was in Paris, Noel-Baker stated that he was very happy to see France once more taking the lead in this domain.74 Also present at this meeting was Scelle who noted in that context the intellectually ‘very elevated’ character of the ICIC and who suggested that UNESCO desired to place itself on a ‘terrain…more practical.’ Responding to Noel-Baker on behalf of France, Scelle expressed delight in hearing that the heart of the British Commonwealth now beat in unison in favour of intellectual cooperation.75 The next day, the Twenty First Assembly adopted a resolution commending the IIIC for its ‘precious collaboration’ with the LON since 1925. In the same resolution, the assembly recalled the accord between the French government and the president of the LON Council in 1924 which had seen the IIIC, an institution which was a creature of French law and whose premises and annual budget were dependent on the

72 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 3–4 (1946), 16, and Cowell ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 219. Note that Bonnet always maintained that India was a strong supporter of intellectual cooperation at the LON and from the very beginning. Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 6. 73 Henri Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1966): 198–209, 200. See also Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 6. H. Wilson Harris recorded that at the assembly in 1922, the French delegation moved to reverse a cut to the ICIC’s annual budget made by the LON Assembly’s Fourth Committee and that the French motion was ‘supported in admirable speech by the Jam Sahib of Nawarnaga’, a delegate of India. The French motion, which was, in the event, successful, was opposed during the vote by Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and South Africa. H. Wilson Harris, Geneva 1922: Being an Account of the Third Assembly of the League of Nations (London: League of Nations Union, 1923), 53. 74 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 3–4 (1946): 16–7. 75 Ibid., 15–7.

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French government, placed at the disposition at the LON.76 In particular, the assembly recalled that this accord had stipulated that ‘in case of the suppression of the Institute’ its property, with the exception of the premises and furniture placed at its disposal by the French government, would be transferred to the LON and in view of this resolved to transfer the IIIC’s right of property to the United Nations.77 Fittingly, the Twenty First Assembly was closed by one of the League’s founders, namely, Cecil who declared the following: ‘The League is dead, long live the United Nations!’78 On April 19, an accord was signed by Séan Lester, a former Irish diplomat who, after having served since 1937 deputy secretary general succeeded Avenol in the role of secretary general after the latter quit Geneva, and Walter Moderow, who represented the United Nations, transferring the assets of the League to the United Nations, among these being the property of the IIIC, ‘notably…[its]… archives and collections of documents’.79 To the delight of Mayoux, the assembly had also voted the IIIC a sum of 300,000 Swiss francs in order that it could undertake its liquidation, a sum which he hoped would be greatly augmented by the French government. In this he would be disappointed. Although the French government allocated to the IIIC an amount of 5,357,000 francs* for the period between April 1946 and 1947, it was not enough for the institute to continue to fully function throughout the year.80 As Mayoux later explained in a letter to Davis, a ‘decision of the French Government’ had rendered it ‘imperative to close down the work of the sections’ of the IIIC on September 30, the date on which twenty out of at total of thirtynine functionaries would depart. There was one exception to this: the Section of Political and Social Sciences would remain open. In light of

76 Hsu Fu Teh, L’activité de la Sociétié des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1929), 64–5, 67. The Polish Government offered the IIIC at the outset 100,000 French francs in order to undertake a study of assistance to universities. 77 Ibid., 10, 18. 78 The United Nations Library at Geneva and the League of Nations Archives, ‘The End of the League of Nations: The Last Assembly,’ 153. 79 Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 3–4 (1946), 18, and The United Nations Library at Geneva and the League of Nations Archives, ‘The End of the League of Nations: The Last Assembly,’ 153. 80 Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 177.

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this, it would continue to serve as the secretariat of the ISC ‘until the date of the final liquidation,’ which was scheduled for December 31.81 At this point, Potter informed Mayoux that he did not think that ‘any effort should be made to maintain the Studies Conference independent of UNESCO’ and that he did not believe any such venture would succeed outside of that framework. At the same time, Potter stated that he was ‘inclined to believe, that the UNESCO people will wish to start all over again’ and that this ‘would mean wiping out the Studies Conference as it has existed hitherto’. Based on these considerations and in light of the discontinuation of the topic chosen at Bergen, Potter resigned as general-rapporteur.82 Mayoux was determined that Potter’s forecast in regard to the fate of the ISC would not come true: he was determined that one of the IIIC’s ‘most cherished and valuable creations’ should not be left an ‘orphan’ as its parent had been. Thus, he began to campaign as tenaciously to preserve the ISC as he had the IIIC.83 It was doubtless important that in the pursuit of this cause, Mayoux had gained an ally in the form of Holland. Holland had recently replaced Carter as secretarygeneral of the IPR and it was in his capacity as secretary-general that Holland visited the Palais Royal on June 7, 1946. In a memorandum concerning this visit which was later forwarded to Davis, Vranek recorded that Holland had declared at the outset that the IPR’s official view was that the ISC should be ‘maintained and developed.’ Having 81 Jean-Jacques Mayoux to Malcolm W. Davis, September 19, 1946, AG 1-IICI-KV-2.d, UA. On the reduction of the IIIC’s in staff numbers, see Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 177. See also Institut International de la Coopérational Intellectuelle, L’Institut International de la Coopérational Intellectuelle: 1920–1946. The institute’s last publication was an account of its history. L’Institut International de la Coopérational Intellectuelle: 1920–1946 was published to coincide with the UNESCO’s first general conference. This work was prepared by Mayoux and Vranek, the latter writing its section on the social sciences. 82 Jean-Jacques Mayoux to Pitman B. Potter, May 14, 1946; Pitman B. Potter to JeanJacques Mayoux, June 14, 1946; and Pitman B. Potter to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, August 27, 1946, Rappoteur Générale: Pitman B. Potter, 1939–1947, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. Potter had ‘tactfully’ offered to resign from the position after the London meeting decided to discontinue the subject chosen at Bergen. Mayoux to Potter, March 1, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 83 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, AG 1-IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 48.

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stated this, the memorandum recorded, Holland reported that Carter, at a meeting of the American consulting group on the ISC on April 18 and in his capacity as executive vice-president of the American Council of IPR, had ‘expressed…very strongly his personal view that the… [ISC]… should be totally independent of any governmental agency and therefore also from UNESCO.’ However, according to Vranek’s memorandum, in the course of his visit to the IIIC, Holland stated that Carter’s position was not shared by the rest of the American group. To the contrary, Vranek’s memorandum noted, Holland wanted to make it clear that in regard to the ISC’s future relationship with UNESCO, it was the view of the American consulting group and the ‘official point of view’ of the IPR, that the ISC ‘should be in some clearly defined relationship’ with UNESCO and that its secretariat should be provided by UNESCO. At the same time, Holland made it clear that the view of those whom he represented was that the ISC ‘must retain its entire independence in regard to its choice of study subjects, the scope of its scientific research and the quality, type and volume of its publications.’84 Holland observed that recent decisions of the IPR, such as its request that national councils of the IPR replace ‘such of their representatives who hold a senior government office by others who have no direct connection with their own governments,’ meant that the IPR was on its way to becoming a ‘really expert scientific body totally divorced from policy making agencies.’ In an echo of the view of the ISC’s 1935–1937 study cycle that Condliffe had communicated to Davis in the aftermath of the ISC’s 1937 session in Paris, Holland stated during his visit to the IIIC in June 1946, that although the IPR considered that the ISC’s technique of ‘biennial study cycles on subjects of world importance’ was ‘novel and worthwhile’ and therefore should not be ‘abandoned,’ it also considered that the ISC’s technique should be refined and made ‘much more precise both on the purely administrative side and on the side of scientific planning, research and execution.’ Reiterating a common criticism of the ISC’s conferences, Holland advised Vranek that the ISC ‘must rule out as far as possible public meetings, public speeches and great gatherings attended by important, but not necessarily well-informed, personalities’ 84 Jiri F. Vranek, Memorandum for the Director on the visit of Dr. William L. Holland at the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, June 7, 1946, AG 1-IICI-KV-2.d, UA.

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and in connection with this advice he reiterated the point that the IPR had recently ruled to ‘reduce the attendance at its study meetings strictly to experts.’ In concluding his visit, Holland announced that the IPR would be represented at the administrative meeting of the ISC later that year, a point on which Vranek noted in his report, Holland was ‘emphatic’.85

UNESCO and the International Studies Conference The first General Conference of UNESCO took place in Paris between the November 19 and December 10, 1946. It was held at what was formerly the Hôtel Majestic on avenue Kléber, a short distance from the Arc de Triomphe. The hotel had recently served as the headquarters of the German Military Government and the Gestapo during the Occupation and as the American Base Headquarters after the liberation. Following the departure of the Americans, the name Hôtel Majestic was removed from the building’s door to be replaced with the name of its new occupant. Laura Vitray, an American journalist visiting what was now called UNESCO House, saw irony in the hotel’s latest incarnation, noting that the civilians who had established themselves there were the ‘direct antithesis to Hitlerian notions of a “master race,” being in fact of as many races, complexions and national backgrounds as…[one]… care[s] to imagine’.86 Forty-four nations were represented by around two hundred delegates at the first UNESCO Conference. Present also were observers from many international organisations, both governmental and private, among them being Mayoux, who represented the IIIC, Lévy, who represented the IPR and Vranek who represented the ISC, this last having rejoined the staff of the IIIC following his period of service in the Czechoslovakian army.87 85 Ibid. 86 Laura Vitray, ‘UNESCO: Adventure in Understanding,’ Free World 12, no. 4 (1946): 23–8, 23, 28. See also Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 230. 87 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 5, 89. See also Jir F. Vranek to Malcolm W. Davis, October 29, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA.

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Much of the uncertainty about UNESCO’s attitude towards the ISC had been cleared away well before the assembly. On the Friday of the week that had seen UNESCO settle into its Parisian headquarters, that is, on September 27, a small meeting was held at UNESCO House in order to discuss the future of the ISC. Among those representing UNESCO was Howard E. Wilson, an American who was one of two assistant secretaries-general under Huxley and who had been seconded from the Carnegie Endowment where he had been associate director of the international relations and teaching section, Zimmern and André De Blonay, this last being head of UNESCO’s Department of External Relations. Among the non-UNESCO participants were Mayoux and Vranek, both of whom represented the IIIC, Roger Sedoux, who represented the French delegation to UNESCO, and Jacques Vernant, who represented the Commission française de coordination des études internationales. Happily for the latter group of participants, the UNESCO representatives at this meeting indicated that UNESCO was ‘interested in the continuation of the work of the International Studies Conference,’ was prepared to ‘grant it complete autonomy’ and even ‘furnish it direct grants-in-aid for…[its]…scientific studies.’88 The outcome of this meeting came as a great relief to Mayoux in particular. In a letter written a few days after its conclusion, he told Davis, the latter being not only a colleague but also a personal friend of Wilson, that he had feared, especially in light of the negative attitude of the Rockefeller Foundation, that the ISC would die for lack of funds or worse ‘degenerate into a regional organism’.89 That it might become a regional organisation, was the proposal of certain members of the British group, the general attitude of which was that UNESCO should not serve 88 Mayoux to Davis, September 30, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA. See also JeanJacques Mayoux to Pitman B. Potter, October 7, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. For Howard E. Wilson, see Vitray, ‘UNESCO: Adventure in Understanding,’ 24. In 1951, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to make a substantial grant in order to fund an independent survey into ‘the position of refugees under his mandate.’ The leader of the investigative team was Jacques Vernant. Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), viii. 89 Mayoux to Davis, September 30, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA. For the association between Wilson and Davis, see International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, ii, 48.

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as the ISC’s secretariat on the basis that this would impair its ‘liberty of expression’. Leaving aside this question for the moment, the idea that the ISC should become a regional organisation met with opposition from Mayoux who argued that to adopt a regional approach would be to ignore the social and economic unity of the world. Mayoux further argued that the adoption of such an approach entailed the risk that the study of certain questions would be confined to groups defined, not only by a common geography, but also by a common ideology.90

An Administrative Session: Paris, 1946 For administrative reasons and doubtless in order to demonstrate that the ISC was a going concern, Mayoux initially had been keen to hold a plenary administrative session of the conference before the first UNESCO Assembly commenced. However, as he communicated to Potter, the meeting he attended at UNESCO on September 27 where the question of the timing of the plenary administrative session was discussed had convinced him that holding the session after the UNESCO conference had commenced would not hamper the realisation of his aim: that ‘some kind of contract’ would be drawn up between UNESCO and the ISC. Mayoux told Potter that he wanted to see such a contract adopted at the administrative session which he hoped could be held on December 3 and 4, just a week before the UNESCO Assembly terminated on December 10.91 In the event, the administrative session of the conference, the last international meeting of savants organised by the IIIC before the termination of its legal existence, was delayed until December 16 and 17, the venue for it being the offices of the Centre d’études de politique

90 Mayoux to Davis, June 22, 1946, enclosure no. 2, Conversations de Londres avec le Comité de coordination Britanique de la Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA. See also Vranek to Davis, October 26, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA. 91 Mayoux to Potter, May 14, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA, and Mayoux to Davis, September 30, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA. See also International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 4. A plan to hold a plenary administrative conference in June and then a plan to hold one in October were postponed.

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étrangère at 54 rue de Varenne.92 Among those attending the meeting were representatives of the national coordinating committees of Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Great Britain, India, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. The Chinese Institute of Political Science sent an observer. International non-government institutions which were members of the conference were also represented: The Hague Academy of International Law, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the IPR and the Graduate Institute of International Studies. Zimmern’s Geneva Institute of International Studies and the Belgian, Hungarian, Mexican and New Zealand national committees excused their absence while the Chilean and Greek national coordinating committees reported that were prevented from assisting at the meeting.93 One by one, many of the national groups present gave an account of their respective activities in recent times and of recent developments in their respective countries in respect to international studies. For example, Grayson Kirk, who represented both the American national committee and the IPR at the meeting, reported that a great deal of activity had been undertaken by the CFR in relation to the preparations for the peace conference and in view of the creation of the United Nations organisation. Kirk pointed out that his own university, namely, Columbia, with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation had established an Institute of Russian and Far Eastern Studies, a development which he considered very important.94 Shanti Gupta of the Indian Institute of International Affairs, reported that despite the strain of the war, the institute’s research efforts had expanded, adding that these were largely devoted to the Middle and Far East.95 Continental European countries had less to report than some others due to the impact of the war. Speaking on behalf of the Centre d’études de politique étrangère, Maurice Pernot and Lévy, respectively 92 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 5, and ‘Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales,’ Politique Étrangère 12, no. 2 (1947): 242–44. 93 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, i–iii. 94 Ibid., 9. 95 Ibid., 11.

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the president and secretary general of the centre‘s Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique, explained that the centre had only resumed its activities in Paris in November 1944: its offices had been occupied during the war and were returned in a very bad state.96 Lévy pointed out that among those activities it had reprised following the Liberation, was its close collaboration with the IPR secretariat in New York. Lévy reported that the Comité d études des problèmes du Pacifique, which was the centre’s permanent committee for Far Eastern and Pacific questions and point of connection with the IPR, had sent a large delegation to the IPR’s Hot Springs conference. Later in 1945, the Comité d études des problèmes du Pacifique hosted a series of lectures, one of which was given by the IPR’s general secretary, namely, Carter, who at that point was still the IPR’s general secretary. Carter’s lecture was entitled The Far East and the Pacific after the Japanese Defeat. The fact that the Comité d’études des problèmes du Pacifique was reconstituted in Algiers in 1943, is indicative of the importance attached to the IPR by official France, which, it should be noted, was well represented in the French delegation to Hot Springs. In 1943, the committee was represented by Lévy at a meeting of the IPR’s governing body, namely, the Pacific Council, in Atlantic City. It should be noted that Lévy took a great interest in the situation in Indochina as did the other members of the Comité d’études.97 Speaking on behalf of the Graduate Institute of International Relations, Mantoux observed that although the institute had been in the privileged position of being able to continue its work during the war, it had, ‘suffered from the grave consequence of the war and lost several members— some died, others went to the United States.’ He added that following the invasion of France, both Kelsen and Mises had quit Switzerland for the United States and had ‘not yet returned.’ He added that at the same time, the institute had benefited from the presence of many refugees in Geneva.98 Constantin Vulcan was among those who had found refuge 96 Ibid.,

11–2, and Politique Étrangère 10, no. 3 (1945), 300–01. Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 12, and Politique Étrangère 10, no. 3 (1945), 296, 300–01. 98 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-KXIV-12, UA, 13. 97 International

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in Geneva during the war years. Vulcan told the meeting that he was an observer at the UNESCO conference then taking place and it was at a session of that conference that he had learnt of the scheduling of an administrative meeting of the ISC. Vulcan then stated that upon learning of the meeting, he had decided that he would attend in order to represent the Romanian Centre for Advanced International Studies of which he had become the secretary general. In respect to the situation of the centre he represented, Vulcan told the meeting the following: I was able to communicate with Bucarest, but unfortunately, I am not in a position to give you any determinate information as I left Bucarest some time ago. I have been living in Switzerland but I know that the Centre has resumed its activities—in fact, it never ceased to exist and, from 1942 onwards it remained, as it were, ‘under a bushel.’ Between 1940 and 1942, we lost several members of our committee, one of the most distinguished of whom was Professor [Virgil] Madgearu, who took part in the Conference at Bergen [and at Milan and Prague]. He was assassinated by the Iron Guard. While the Guard was in power it was impossible to engage in any activity of any kind. After 1942, when the Guard had been ousted from authority, the Committee was able to hold a few meetings and to publish the review ‘Danubian Affairs.’99

The report on behalf of the Austrian committee was presented by Ernest (Ernst) Lemberger, a war-time resistance fighter in France and Austria who had undertaken a ‘dangerous but successful mission to Vienna’ in March 1945, under the direction of Allen W. Dulles who had been station chief of the United States Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland.100 Lemberger, who would later become an ambassador at Washington, recalled the dissolution of the Austrian committee at the time of the German occupation, following which he touched on a 99 Ibid., 12–13. Virgil Madgearu was a leading economist and former minister. An anti-Fascist, he was assassinated by the Iron Guard on November 27, 1940. For Constantin Vulcan’s position at the Centre for Advanced International Studies in Bucharest see Pitman B. Potter to Constantin Vulcan, December 16, 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-I-24, UA. 100 Siegfried Beer, ‘Target Central Europe: American Intelligence Efforts Regarding Nazi and Early Postwar Austria,’ University of Minnesota, Center for Austrian Studies (1997), retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://hdl. handle.net/11299/90609, and William B. Breuer, Daring Missions of World War II (New York: Wiley, 2001), 206–8.

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concern which he insisted was shared among Austria’s post-war leadership. Thanking the conference for its invitation, Lemberger stated that he hoped that the reborn Austrian committee would show itself ‘worthy’ of the ‘trust’ placed in it by the conference and that through maintaining contact with the conference, the committee’s members would be able ‘after an interval of seven years—to take up …[their]… place again among the scholars of the free nations.’101 While most spoke at the conference as if they thought the ISC should continue, a strong feeling was apparent that it was sorely in need of modernisation and that there were defects in its organisation. As Mayoux expressed it speaking in his capacity as secretary general of the conference, it was a question of whether the ISC was a ‘living animal capable of evolution’ or whether it was a fossil.102 In a report in which he summarised the criticisms of the conference, Mayoux addressed a concern that had been raised on numerous occasions before the war, namely, that the conference was too ‘ceremonial’: there were too many inaugural and closing speeches and there was too much in the way of formal receptions and dinners.103 A conference of such a ceremonial character, Mayoux stated, was even more ill-suited to the post-war period than it was to the pre-war period. Mayoux elaborated on this point in stating that ‘[t]oday, we are living in a new world, in that post-war democracy, [is] a little more revolutionary than the prewar democracy; we have become enemies of…“elegance diplomatique”, which was perhaps a too conspicuous feature of the conferences held in those days.’ Echoing the advice that Holland had dispensed while in Paris, Mayoux stated that it would be advisable to reduce the number of formal speeches and instead concentrate on involving discussions amongst ‘useful participants.’104 Suggesting that the scientific reputation of the ISC had suffered somewhat due to the oratorical dimension of conferences, Mayoux stated that most of the official addresses given at the conference were ‘sterile from…[its]…intellectual standpoint’. He added that ‘even at the study 101 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 12. 102 Ibid., 22. 103 Ibid., 18. 104 Ibid.

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meetings, some delegates gave speeches prepared in advance in which they repeated what had been stated in the national memoranda.’105 In regard to the defects in its organisation, Mayoux noted in what was the first item in his report to the meeting the following criticism: that the subjects of the conference’s study cycles had been ‘too extensive and improperly controlled’ and that as a consequence of this the memoranda submitted to the conference sometimes amounted to a ‘heterogeneous mass of documents of widely varying quality.’106 Mayoux’s suggestion as to what should be done to overcome this problem was that the role of the general rapporteur should be transformed into that of director of research and that this director should be granted wider powers than those possessed by the general rapporteur. He further suggested that the director of research should have an office within the conference’s secretariat and ‘a staff of one or more assistants to help him in his scientific work.’107 There was general agreement at the meeting that the subjects chosen for the conference’s study cycles were of an unwieldy nature and that, as Kirk put it, there should be within the conference a ‘“screening device”—a system whereby the papers could be reviewed, to ensure what is submitted is of the highest possible quality.’108 There was some apprehension in regard to Mayoux’s proposal that the general rapporteur should be transformed into a director of research. Arnold Plant, who had formerly been a member of the BCCIS but who represented the South African Institute of International Affairs at the meeting, pointed out that it was in order to obtain ‘more precision’ that a general rapporteur had been appointed in the years before the war. Referring to Bourquin’s role as general rapporteur in the years 1934 to 1937, he added that ‘this remote control broke down’ because it appeared that ‘certain committees found it difficult to conform to the instructions of this rapporteur, particularly the British committee. We tried very hard but we could not always conform to his wishes.’109 105 Annex 2: Report of the Secretary General on the Criticisms of the Work of the Conferences, ibid., 2–3. 106 Ibid., 1–2. 107 Ibid. 108 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 38–9. 109 Ibid., 39.

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Another criticism mentioned by Mayoux was that past conferences had witnessed the ‘[e]xcessive postulation of ideas of little scientific value’: the debates at the conference were of an ‘extremely varied scientific standard’ not least because some delegates claimed to ‘represent a specific policy or a state’ and therefore ‘political considerations…seemed to determine the trend of the discussion.’110 In responding to this criticism, Mayoux put forward the somewhat contentious view that if the conference was to be a ‘live body’ and it was ‘to accomplish real work with the help of live members,’ then a political atmosphere was unavoidable. Indeed, he argued, that given that the current world framework was based on national structures, it was desirable that participants should know each other as ‘as representatives, to a certain extent, of the interests of a State’ and proceed from there to arrive at mutual understanding. It was more fruitful and enlightening, he suggested, to engage in ‘free and frank discussion’ on this basis, than to exclude, in a ‘Pharisaical manner,’ the political element.111 The view that the conference should not serve as a forum for advancing the interests of the states from which participants hailed, as had often been the case in the pre-war period, was strongly defended at the meeting. Webster was part of a three-person delegation of the BCCIS, the other members of which were Chalmers Wright, Cleeve and Manning. On behalf of the BCCIS, Webster stated that the conference should cease to encourage collective research by national committees as this conduced to the formation of national points of view; rather, it should base its discussions on contributions by individual specialists.112

110 Annex 2: Report of the Secretary General on the Criticisms of the Work of the Conferences, International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris. 111 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 18–9. 112 Ibid., 24–26, 32–33. See also Annex 1: Memorandum of the British Co-ordinating Committee for International Studies submitted to the Conference, The Future Organisation of Relations Among Scholars and Non-Official Institutions Interested in the Study of International Affairs, International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA.

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The British group maintained that ‘in a world where the truth’ had become ‘dangerously collective,’ it was necessary to ‘enfranchise as far as possible the individual savant and to give him the occasion to express himself personally’ in the meetings ‘outside of any “national” framework.’113 Based on a similar concern to avoid politicising the work of the conference, Scelle and Lazare Kopelmanas, both of whom represented The Hague Academy of International Law, told the meeting that the topic of security was the ‘worst topic’ at that time for the conference to study since it was a ‘political question in full evolution’. They maintained that in regard to this issue, the national committees could bring to the conference nothing but the national points of view which had already been aired in the various international political bodies. Further, according to Scelle and Kopelmanas, it would be futile to debate the topic of the United Nations Security Council as the conference could do nothing to affect what was key to the Council’s operations: the ‘opposition, balance or unanimity of the Big Five, Four…or…even the Big Two,’ this being essentially a political matter. Scelle and Kopelmanas suggested that the conference could make a valuable contribution if it were to assemble ‘a number of social facts‘ based on an investigation of what the Charter of the United Nations calls the ‘[p]rotection of the rights of man, liberty, economic life and full employment.’114 As another alternative to the topic of the United Nations Security Council, the French delegation proposed that the conference study the impact of world organisation on national sovereignty, with a view to persuading the public to accept the restrictions on sovereignty entailed by formation of the United Nations. In this context, Maurice Pernot pointed to the strict limits on sovereign rights resulting from the ‘introduction of certain controls on armaments, such as the production of atomic energy’; by the new regime concerning colonies and trusteeships; by the need to protect the essential human rights of and ensure ‘respect for the human person against the excesses of State power’; and

113 Politique

Étrangère 12, no. 2 (1947), 243. Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 92–3, 102. 114 International

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by the ‘introduction of certain principles and procedures of international justice’. In particular, and continuous with the position adopted by the French delegations to the League and to ISC in the pre-war period, Pernot drew attention to the restrictions on sovereignty entailed by the United Nations collective security system and the impact of that system on the century-old tradition of neutrality. It was perhaps by way of vindicating the posture of pre-war France, that Pernot, having noted that neutrality had been conducive to Hitler’s aggression in 1939, called attention to a recent observation made by Rappard: that the United Nations Organisation is an ‘Association of repentant neutrals.’115 The question of a future subject of study was not settled at the administrative meeting but was referred to a programme committee. The major item on the agenda of the administrative meeting was the question of whether or not the conference should enter into a relationship with UNESCO. Determining the answer to this question was a matter of urgency in light of the pending closure of the IIIC: the secretarial, financial and other forms of assistance provided to the ISC by the IIIC were about to be terminated. Mayoux, who favoured the idea that the conference should join UNESCO, advised the meeting that despite his pleas on the conference’s behalf, there were serious doubt as to whether funds would be forthcoming from the Rockefeller Foundation in the future. Mayoux told the meeting that the foundation, which had sent R. T. Crane as an observer to the Paris meeting on the invitation of the ISC, was concerned about ‘divergencies of points of view’ within the conference in regard to its programme and other matters, including whether or not it should associate itself with UNESCO.116 Towards the conclusion of the discussion, Davis, speaking not as conference chair but as a representative of the Carnegie Endowment, declared that his impression was that the Rockefeller Foundation valued the conference and that it might consider funding precise and limited projects as might, he added, the Carnegie Endowment. However, he stated that such an arrangement would only be considered by these philanthropic bodies if an accord between the ISC and UNESCO was

115 Ibid., 116 Ibid.,

103–4. ii, 62–63.

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reached. He thus urged the conference to enter a provisional arrangement with UNESCO until that time early in the next year when UNESCO would take on some of the functions of the IIIC.117 At the start of the meeting, Mayoux had highlighted the fact that the ISC had been invited to send an observer to the UNESCO conference. He stated that this was a point which needed to be stressed because it showed how hard he and his associates had fought to maintain the ISC as a ‘live institution’ outside of the framework of the IIIC. Mayoux drew attention to the fact that the ISC had been mentioned on a number of occasions during discussions taking place within the confines of UNESCO’s Sub-Committee 2 (Social Sciences), discussions which both Mayoux and Vranek had attended. The ‘most important reference’ to the ISC in the context of those discussions, Mayoux told the meeting in Paris, was on the occasion when Zimmern reported to the sub-committee on his special mission.118 In his report, Zimmern ­recommended that UNESCO establish a Study Centre in International Relations and suggested that the ISC, which Zimmern’s report insisted was ‘very much alive,’ might continue its work ‘in connection with, but independently of UNESCO.’119 That the ISC would maintain its autonomy if it entered an arrangement with UNESCO was affirmed at the same meeting by De Blonay. De Blonay told the meeting that based on a discussion that he had had with Huxley, the person who had appointed De Blonay to his position, he could say that it was ‘definitely understood that in any agreement concluded between UNESCO and the Conference, the first article would be, precisely, that this agreement would in no way affect the autonomy

117 Ibid., 77–78, 91. For the funding policies of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, see Politique Étrangère 12, no. 2 (1947), 243. 118 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 5. 119 UNESCO, ‘General Conference, First Session, Paris, 20 November–10 December, 1946,’ Programme Commission II, Sub-Commission on Social Sciences, Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, C/Prog.Com./S.C.Soc.Sci./V.R.2.E, 30–31, 34–35, UA. See also UNESCO, ‘General Conference, First Session, Paris, 20 November–10 December, 1946,’ Programme Commission II, Sub-Commission on Social Sciences, Philosophy and Humanistic Studies,’ C/Prog.Com./S.C.Soc.Sci./V.R.3.E, 16, UA, and Vranek to Davis, December 2, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA.

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and independence’ of the conference and that it was understood that this was in the interest of both parties.120 That UNESCO was interested in bringing the conference under its umbrella was reflected in the status and number of observers from UNESCO who attended the Paris meeting. In addition to De Blonay, UNESCO was represented by Mahomed Bey Awad, an Egyptian geographer who was head of its Social Sciences Division and Wilson. This last, who had already written to Mayoux about UNESCO’s desire for a ‘close working relationship’ with the ISC and about the ‘mutual interests’ of the two bodies, also affirmed at the Paris meeting that any such relationship would not impair the ISC’s independence.121 At the same time and based on certain remarks made at the Paris meeting, it would seem that those members of the ISC desirous of a relationship with UNESCO felt that the prospect of such relationship should not be taken for granted. It was perhaps this feeling that caused some at the Paris meeting to articulate a conception of the ISC that was tailored to fit UNESCO House thinking. Some insisted that the ISC should be more than simply an organisation of scholars and a forum for their professional concerns: it should engage with ‘mass interests’.122 Scelle, like other French participants in the meeting, favoured the idea that the ISC should forge a relationship with UNESCO. He maintained in this regard that the aim of the ISC should not be to ‘engage in pure science,’ this being, he added, the proper object of a teaching institution. 120 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-KXIV-12, UA, 75. 121 Annex 3: Letter concerning the relationship between UNESCO and the International Studies Conference, Howard E. Wilson to Jean-Jacques Mayoux, October 29, 1946, and Annex 4: Letter concerning the relationship between UNESCO and the International Studies Conference, Wilson to Mayoux, December 12, 1946, International Studies Conference, International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA. For the views of Mahomed Bey Awad, André De Blonay and Wilson on the role of UNESCO, see Vitray, ‘UNESCO: Adventure in Understanding,’ 24–25, 27. Mayoux and Vranek had attended a meeting on the invitation of Wilson on November 4. At this meeting, in addition to Wilson, was De Blonay and Mahomed Bey Awad. Also present were two councillors from the Social Sciences Division one of whom was Arvid Broderson. See Jiri F. Vranek to Malcolm W. Davis, November 19, 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-V-2.d, UA. 122 H. Howard Arnason, representative of the United States to UNESCO, 1946, quoted in Vitray, ‘UNESCO: Adventure in Understanding,’ 26.

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Scelle contended that the ISC’s objective should be to ‘make it possible for higher organisations—of a more political character than ours… to lay a finger on and find out what the world public thinks of a specific problem, at a given moment’. He urged that the ISC should be an ‘essential instrument’ of UNESCO as well as other organs of the United Nations. Elaborating on his point, Scelle stated that if the ISC were to gain UNESCO sponsorship it would be because the latter felt that the ISC could serve some purpose other than that of facilitating ‘purely academic debates among scholars.’123 Speaking in a similar vein, Mayoux declared that he considered the ISC’s past tendency to ‘keep itself on a lofty, scientific and, perhaps, rather restricted plane’ and to avoid publicising its work to be a mistake. Indeed, Mayoux suggested that in the interest of peace, it was a duty of an organisation such as the ISC to publicise its work, the obvious implication of this suggestion being that publicising its work was something that UNESCO would expect of the ISC.124 In urging the conference to reach an accord with UNESCO, Mayoux stated that in the course of his conversations at UNESCO that year, he too had been assured that UNESCO would never attempt to interfere with the conference’s liberty in regard to its ‘programme, thought or research.’125 Cassin agreed with Mayoux that UNESCO needed the ISC, although he warned that not all those associated with UNESCO appreciated this fact. He cautioned that at UNESCO there were far more voices raised on behalf of the exact sciences, on behalf of education and of the other social sciences than there were on behalf of the study of international relations. He noted that at the UNESCO committees there were a great number of persons who believed that ‘[s]cience by itself can dispense with everything else and that international relations do not constitute a science.’ Cassin added that many in attendance at the UNESCO’s First General Conference held this view and that such a view would only be strengthened should those who specialised in international relations bypass UNESCO and ‘withdraw into their shell.’ Echoing Mayoux’s 123 International Studies Conference, Verbatim report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 33, 47, 51. 124 Ibid., 20. 125 Ibid., 49.

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sentiments, Cassin maintained that scientists who spurned the opportunity that was being offered to them by UNESCO to disseminate their work, would be ‘guilty towards the people of the world’: they would have failed in their duty to educate the public and have left the field open to ‘charlatans’.126 British delegates to the Paris meeting were the principal opponents of the ISC coming under the administrative tutelage of UNESCO. They argued that instead of entering a relationship with the UNESCO, the ISC should find the means necessary to secure a completely independent existence.127 This attitude was based on a different conception of the conference to that promoted by the French delegates: the British conception of the conference was that it should be a strictly scholarly forum in which studies by individual specialists were undertaken and discussed. As indicated above, this view was articulated by Webster who, in addition to attending the San Francisco conference and the constitutive assembly of UNESCO in London in 1945, was a member of the Legal and Administrative Committee of UNESCO’s first general conference: he was a member of the committee which drew up the provisions governing its relations with non-government international organisations.128 Webster objected to Scelle’s suggestion that the ISC might serve as a conduit for public opinion on the ground that this not in the interest of scholarship. He warned that financial dependence on UNESCO would result in one or the other of the following two outcomes: either it would give ‘great power to…[UNESCCO]…officials’ in terms of directing the ISC’s research, or it would mean that the ISC would be forced to compromise its work because it would be exposed to ‘pressure from government quarters’. Despite being highly sceptical of the notion that UNESCO could serve the conference in the same way as the IIIC had served it given UNESCO’s inter-governmental nature, Webster did not rule out the possibility that some form association might be established between UNESCO and the ISC. However, he insisted that any association between the two bodies must be subject to the condition that the

126 Ibid.,

52–54. Étrangère 12, no. 2 (1947), 242–43. 128 International Studies Conference, Verbatim Report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 55–6. 127 Politique

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ISC remained a ‘free association of scholars.’129 With the dissolution of the IIIC pending, the meeting adopted a resolution authorising the bureau of the conference, over which Davis presided, to negotiate a provisional arrangement with UNESCO and to explore other avenues for ensuring the conference’s continued viability. It should be noted that the British delegation was particularly insistent that avenues for ensuring the conference’s survival other than the UNESCO avenue be explored.130

An Accord with UNESCO As it soon became apparent that other avenues for ensuring the ISC’s continued viability were not likely to materialise, negotiating an accord with UNESCO became almost inevitable. For the purpose of negotiating this accord, the French Government granted the ISC the status of an international non-governmental organisation and along with that special extra-territorial privileges.131 On March 3, 1947, the IIIC’s facilities at the Palais Royal, of which the library, archives, bookshelves and mechanical equipment had been transferred to UNESCO earlier in the year, were placed at the disposal of the ISC for the duration of the negotiations.132 129 Ibid., 49, 55–6. Roger Seydoux, a French delegate at the Paris session, was also a member of the Legal and Administrative Committee of UNESCO’s first general conference. He argued at the 1946 session of the ISC that Webster’s interpretation of the Provisional Directive on Relations between UNESCO and Non-Governmental International Organisations was too restrictive and that it was not intended by the committee that ‘rigorous control’ be exercised by UNESCO over private organisations in order to ‘keep them in a state of dependence.’ He noted that Article 2 of the Provisional Directive stated the following: ‘In its co-operation with the organisations…UNESCO will recognise and fully respect their independence and autonomy within the field of their competence’ (ibid., 56–57). See also Politique Étrangère 12, no. 2 (1947), 242. 130 International Studies Conference, Verbatim Report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 84–7, 91. 131 Ibid., 116–17. 132 For the transfer of the institute’s effects to UNESCO, see Edward J. Carter to JeanJacques Mayoux, January 13, 1947, and the attached Memorandum of Edward J. Carter Counsellor for Libraries and Museums at UNESCO, AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. For the ISC’s use of the institute’s premises, see the letter of Vranek to Guy Dorget, February 7, 1947, and L’ accord entre la Conférence des hautes études internationales et la Commission nationale provisoire pour la éducation, la science et la culture, March 3, 1947, AG 1-IICIK-I-3, UA. The ISC had no legal personality of its own but was a ‘dependence’ of the IIIC and thus had no property of its own. With the termination of its existence, the institute’s

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As a result of these negotiations, a Project of Accord between UNESCO and the ISC was approved by UNESCO in April 1947. The accord came into force on June 16 following its approval by members of the ISC.133 As De Blonay had promised at the November meeting of the ISC, the first article of the agreement, after having noted that the purpose of the ISC was the ‘objective and scientific study of international relations,’ offered a guarantee that UNESCO would ‘fully respect its independence and its autonomy.’134 In 1947, the outlook for the ISC appeared very bright. Lodged within the framework of UNESCO it was once again in possession of a secretariat. Funds flowed in its direction: the Executive Council of UNESCO voted it a subvention of $5000 dollars to cover the period between June and December 1947 for the purpose of renewing its activities.135 That was not all: it was awarded an additional sum of $3000 for the purpose of organising a meeting of its executive board and received a special grant of $27,000 for the purpose of preparing a study at the request of UNESCO’s Social Science Department.136

property became that of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations which then placed them at the disposal of UNESCO. International Studies Conference, Verbatim Report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 116–17. 133 Jir F. Vranek to Jean Cahen Salvador, April 24, 1947, UNESCO, AG 1-IICIK-I-3, UA. See also UNESCO, ‘Report of the Director General on the Activities of the Organisation in 1947: Presented to the Second Session of the General Conference at Mexico City November–December 1947,’ 82, UA. 134 Project d’Accord entre l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour la Éducation, la Science et la Culture et la Conférence des hautes études internationales, AG 1-IICI-K-I-2. Under the accord between the ISC and UNESCO, the latter offered secretarial facilities to the ISC. The accord stated that UNESCO would consider offering financial assistance to the ISC based on an assessment of the ISC’s proposed projects as submitted to UNESCO’s General Conference. The accord was for a duration of two years, although either party was permitted to terminate it at any time with six months notice. 135 UNESCO, ‘Conseil exécutif,’ vol. XVII (1951), 26-27-28 Sessions, 28 EX/17-15, Annexe IX, octobre 23, 1951, UA. 136 UNESCO, ‘Conseil exécutif,’ vol. XIV (1950), 20-21-22 Sessions, 20 EX/2 (SS)10-11, March 21, 1950, UA. See also Jacques Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ International Social Science Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1950): 56–61, 59.

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The study requested by UNESCO was entitled ‘Ways of Life’ and formed part of the ‘Unesco Plan for the Study of States of Tension,’ that is, the study of those states of tension that conduce to war. It should be noted that ‘The Study of States of Tension’ was one of the first projects proposed by UNESCO in 1947.137 In regard to the particular study which was ‘Ways of Life,’ the intention was that it would take the form of a series of monographs authored by experts who would describe therein the ‘ways of life and the aspirations’ of peoples in different countries as well as their understanding of themselves, their neighbours and the world at large. In addition to this, the researchers preparing the ‘Ways of Life’ monographs would be expected to identify those influences, familial, religious, ideological, political and so on, which shape peoples’ identities and attitudes.138 According to Vernant, the general secretary of the Centre d’études de politique étrangère and Mayoux’s replacement as secretary of the ISC following the latter’s resignation from the role at the December 1946 conference, that the ISC had been asked to undertake the study known as ‘Ways of Life,’ showed that UNESCO had great ‘confidence’ in it. Vernant stated that the ISC was the only organisation that was ‘broadly and solidly enough constructed, and possessing enough independence, to be entrusted’ with a study which, in his view, was especially important and delicate.139 Vernant insisted that it was not a question of researching a ‘pretended national character but of showing the realisations and the sentimental or ideological aspirations—however contradictory—of a nation, in integrating them into the social milieu which explains them as much as they themselves model it.’140 137 Report of the Director-General for 1948, quoted in Tripp, ‘UNESCO in Perspective,’ International Conciliation, 343. See also ‘Dr. Quincy Wright: Letter,’ International Social Science Bulletin 1, nos. 1–2 (1949): 22. 138 Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 59, and Jacques Vernant, ‘La Conférence Permanente des Hautes Études Internationales,’ Bulletin International des Sciences Sociales 1, nos. 1–2 (1949): 120–22, 121. See also Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 253–56, 404. The Ways of Life studies were focussed on seventeen different countries: Australia, Austria, Egypt, France, Hungary, Greece, Italy, India, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Poland. Switzerland, the Union of South Africa and the United Kingdom. Six of these studies (one each on Australia, Canada, Norway, Pakistan, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), were published. 139 Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 59. 140 Vernant, ‘La Conférence Permanente des Hautes Études Internationales,’ 121.

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In addition to the ‘Ways of Life’ study, the ISC, on its own intiative, commenced in 1947 a research project entitled ‘The Sovereignty of Nations in Modern International Life’.141 As discussed at a meeting of its provisional executive committee in January 1948, this project would address the question, in line with the proposal put forward by Pernot in Paris in 1946, of the limits on sovereignty and national independence in light of the evolution of international relations in the juridical, political and economic spheres. The board expected that in the context of the project special attention would be paid to the United Nations and to regional organisations, to the ‘fundamental inequality of power between States’ and to the possibility of economic cooperation and expansion.142 In 1947, the ISC resumed its study of the university teaching of international relations.143 As Vernant noted, this was largely due to the efforts of the conference’s rapporteur on university teaching, namely, Manning and the BCCIS. In light of request made by the conference secretariat and suggestions made at the November 1945 meeting at Chatham House, Manning had submitted a memorandum on the subject of university teaching to the ISC’s 1946 administrative meeting. At the time of its submission, his expectation was that the memorandum would form the basis of part of the discussion at what was the thirteenth administrative meeting of the ISC.144 In the memorandum, Manning noted that from the very outset the ISC’s premise had been that there ‘existed a subject-matter, “international relations”, patient of scientific study’.145 Manning pointed out that knowledgeable people in the contemporary context viewed the subject seriously, adding that in Britain at least, ‘no apology is made for it’ even if some conservative minds dismiss it as ‘mere popularisation of “current affairs”.146

141 Vernant,

‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 58. ‘La Conférence Permanente des Hautes Études Internationales,’ 120–22. 143 Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 60. 144 Jiri F. Vranek to Charles W. Manning, March 20, 1946, and Communication aux members de la Conférence des hautes études internationales, July 19, 1946, Enseignement universitaire des relations internationales à partir du 1er mai 1938 jusqu’à octobre 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-I-14.c, UA. 145 International Studies Conference, XIIIth Session: Memorandum on the University Teaching of International Relations by Professor C. A. W. Manning, 1, AG 1-IICI-K-I14.c, UA. 146 Ibid., 1, 3. 142 Vernant,

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As he had contended in previous ISC forums, Manning stressed in his memorandum that international relations is a ‘unitary subject,’ albeit only in the sense that it had been born of a ‘single need’: the need for a ‘profounder insight into a specific aspect of community experience’. As Manning’s view was that the specific aspect of community experience which is international relations is multiform, he considered that there is no end to the ‘number and variety’ of angles from which the subject might be illuminated.147 Finally in respect to Manning’s memorandum, it should be noted that although insisting on the intrinsic intellectual value of the study of international relations, Manning, someone who had been known to complain of the missionary approach to the subject, did not hesitate to maintain that had the populations in democratic countries in the interwar years had a better understanding of their diplomatic environment, the ‘troubles’ the world had endured in recent times might have been avoided. Referring to the political crises of the 1930s, Manning stated the following: [T]he evil men, for all their astuteness, could scarcely have accomplished what they did, were it not for the support they obtained from ill-informed, simple-minded, suggestible men of good will. That sort of response would hardly have come from populations better versed in the fundamentals of international life, less amenable to crude indoctrination, more capable of weighing for themselves the issues on which they were being lead to take a stand. It is further perceived that, even with all the domestic backing which was thus so tamely provided, the enemies of man might yet have lacked their opportunity, but for that state of confusion and spiritual paralysis which they were able to induce in a portion of the public in the countries they designed to dominate. Had the democratic peoples had a deeper, less uncritical, appreciation of their diplomatic environment, the dictators might have found themselves at a standstill relatively early on.148

147 International Studies Conference XIIIth Session: Memorandum on the University Teaching of International Relations by Professor C. A. W. Manning, 3, AG 1-IICI-K-I14.c, UA. 148 Ibid., 1–3. See also C. A. W. Manning, ‘The “Failure” of the League of Nations,’ in Carol Ann Cosgrove and Kenneth J. Twitchett eds., The New International Actors: The United Nations and the European Economic Community (London: Macmillan, 1970), 109–10, 122. Manning’s discussion of the putative failure of the LON was first published in 1942. See C. A. W. Manning, ‘The “Failure” of the League of Nations,’ Agenda: A Quarterly Journal of Reconstruction 1, no. 1 (1942): 59–72.

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Warning Signs Due to a shortage of time as a result of the extensive discussion of the UNESCO question at the ISC’s thirteenth administrative meeting, Manning’s paper was not explored in any depth. Rather, at the suggestion of Manning himself, the question of the teaching of international relations was referred to the ISC’s provisional executive committee, the conference having recognised that discussion of this question was ‘one of the essential elements of the continuation of the Conference.’149 Although the ISC would not fully discuss the university teaching of international relations until 1950, the subject was hardly neglected in this and in other forums in the intervening years. For example, in August 1948 at Utrecht, a conference convened by UNESCO which was comprised of representatives of universities and which Manning attended as an observer on behalf of the ISC, issued the following resolution: ‘all universities where there are as yet no chairs or special sections for the teaching of and research in international relations and that offer no facilities of this type [should] be invited as soon as possible to establish such chairs or sections or to discover all other available means of organizing systematic teaching or research in this subject’.150 In January 1949, in the wake of the Utrecht conference, a meeting of representatives of nearly all the universities and university colleges in the United Kingdom was held under the auspices of the BCCIS at the LSE, the sole focus of which was the teaching of international relations.151 In an account of this meeting, Paul A. Reynolds noted that the discipline of international relations met with opposition from the older academic disciplines on the ground that the scholarship in the field of international relations was superficial. Reynolds also noted that while the majority 149 International Studies Conference, Verbatim Report of the XIIIth Administrative session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, i, iv, 114. 150 Resolution of the Conference of Representatives of Universities held under UNESCO, Utrecht, 1948, quoted in Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 60. See also C. A. W. Manning, ‘International Relations: An Academic Discipline,’ in Geoffrey L. Goodwin ed., The University Teaching of International Relations (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1951), 11, and C. A. W. Manning, ‘Out to Grass—And a Lingering Look Behind,’ International Relations 2, no. 6 (1962): 347–71, 356. 151 Manning, ‘International Relations: An Academic Discipline,’ 13.

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present at the LSE meeting saw international relations as a synthesis of different approaches or subjects, what he termed the London view, that is, the view of Manning and certain of his colleagues, was that it had a ‘disciplinary value and unity of its own.’152 For Vernant, who shared Manning’s view that international relations was a distinct discipline, the import of the Utrecht resolution on the organisation of systematic teaching or research in the field of international relations in universities concerned the necessity, at least in the European context, of regrouping the social sciences in the universities and of inscribing within that framework the instruction of international relations.153 This issue was a feature on the agenda of the Fourteenth Session of the International Studies Conference which took place in Paris between August 29 and September 3, 1949. Although the ISC received financial assistance from UNESCO for the purpose of holding the conference as well as grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Endowment, for ‘reasons of economy’ official invitations to it were confined to European members of the conference and to United Nations’ representatives.154 Among the few non-European-based groups represented were the following: the American Coordinating Committee for International Studies which was represented by Davis; the CFR; and the IPR, this last being represented by Mitrany and Katherine R. G. Greene. Another non-European organisation represented at the meeting was the Indian Council of World Affairs, this body having replaced the more colonialist Indian Institute of International Affairs as the Indian member of the conference. Other new members admitted to the conference that year were

152 P. A. Reynolds, ‘The Study of International Relations in the United Kingdom,’ India Quarterly 5 (1949): 112–21. Paul A. Reynolds noted that the meeting of representatives of universities and university colleges in the United Kingdom in January 1949 was the fourth in a series as there had been three such meetings prior to September 1939. 153 Vernant, ‘La Conférence Permanente des Hautes Études Internationales,’ 121. See also Geoffrey L. Goodwin, preface to Goodwin ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 5. 154 ‘Fourteenth Session of the International Studies Conference,’ International Social Science Bulletin 1, nos. 3–4 (1949): 93–5, 93. See also UNESCO, ‘Conseil exécutif’ XIV (1950), 20-21-22 Sessions, 20 EX/2 (SS)–14, UA. UNESCO provided a some of $3000 to facilitate the 1949 conference of the ISC.

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the Italian Committee of International Studies (which was also elected a member of the ISC’s executive committee), the Finnish Committee of International Studies, the Greek Society of International Studies, the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute of Public Law.155 Discussion at the conference mainly centred on the aims, means and working methods of the ISC with a view to their refinement. In what was seen as an important breakthrough, the conference decided that in future, the conference’s programme committee rather than the conference as a whole, would have the final say in regard to the topics addressed by the conference in order to ensure that they were of a ‘limited and specific’ character.156 The conference determined that the programme committee, which was to be appointed by the executive committee on the basis of merit and would not necessarily include within its ranks individuals belonging to member institutions, would choose from among topics on which serious and advanced research was being undertaken in various countries. Very importantly, the conference decided that the work that the programme committee would distribute to members of the conference, would be undertaken on a collective basis rather than by national groups, ‘though without it being necessary for all members of the Conference to share in the same work.’ According to a report on the 1949 conference appearing in UNESCO’s International Social Science Bulletin, in embracing these measures the ISC had ‘adopted the procedure for reach and comparison of theses applied in the field of the exact sciences.’157 According to the same report, although the 1949 conference decided that the topic chosen in 1946 as the next subject of study was ‘too vague,’ it nonetheless heard reports on the work that had already been carried out ‘on the independence and sovereignty of nations’ in modern international life. The report on the conference observed that the conference’s discussion of the reports on the independence and sovereignty of nations was remarkable for its degree of cordiality given that participating in it were experts from both Western and Eastern Europe and

155 International

Social Science Bulletin 1, nos. 3–4 (1949), 93. 94. 157 International Social Science Bulletin 1, nos. 3–4 (1949), 93–5. 156 Ibid.,

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given that it touched on so many controversial issues.158 In addition to the reports on sovereignty and national independence, the conference heard reports on the methods employed by the prospective authors of UNESCO’s planned ‘national way of life’ monograph series. In regard to the focus of discussion at its next meeting, the conference resolved that in light of the Utrecht resolution, a small group of experts should meet in the first part of 1950 to discuss the ‘teaching of international relations as an independent subject in universities.’159 In relation to the status of international relations as an independent subject of study, it is worth drawing attention to a speech given by Jaime Torres Bodet, who had been appointed director-general of UNESCO in 1948, at the conference’s inaugural meeting of which Torres Bodet was the chair. In his speech, Torres Bodet alerted conference participants to a problem on which he thought they needed to reflect: ‘the relations between the ISC and the new associations being formed in the social sciences’ under the auspices of UNESCO.160 158 Ibid., 94–95. Vernant noted in 1950 the following: ‘The work thus set on foot by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation through the International Studies Conference was finally crowned with success. To it is due, today, the desire, which has been expressed repeatedly since the end of the second world war, to underline yet more firmly the scientific and non-official character of an Organization whose members are pledged to work together to bring about a greater understanding of international matters and to refuse to be the mere echoes of official views. It was in this spirit that the International Studies Conference undertook, in 1947, a new enterprise in research: “The Sovereignty of Nations in Modern International Life”. Its members were to present 15 important statements on this subject at the Conference’s Fourteenth Session. These statements have not so far been published, except for a few of which were issued by the National Institutes or Committees that were responsible for drafting them. The members of the Conference. have, in fact, since the war taken the view that in the case of subject matter as delicate as that with which they had to deal it was better only to resort to publication in cases when, after careful consideration such publication was deemed especially useful.’ Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 58. 159 International Social Science Bulletin 1, nos. 3–4 (1949), 95. See also Goodwin, preface to Goodwin ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 5, and Manning, ‘International Relations: An Academic Discipline,’ 11. 160 Jaime Torres Bodet, 1949, quoted in International Social Science Bulletin 1, nos. 3–4 (1949), 93–4. Before taking up his post at UNESCO, Jaime Torres Bodet had served as a diplomat and minister in the Mexican government. His view of international relations was ‘shaped by an acute awareness of the limitations imposed by national attitudes on the international scene.’ See T. V. Sathyamurthy, ‘Twenty Years of UNESCO: An Interpretation’, International Organization 21, no. 3 (1967): 614–33, 618.

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More specifically, Torres Bodet suggested that the conference should consider its relations with the International Political Science Association (IPSA), a creature of UNESCO which was soon to be formally inaugurated. Torres Bodet stated in relation to the prospective relationship between the ISC and IPSA the following: ‘International relations are only a small part of the field covered by…[IPSA]…but your studies perhaps require greater familiarity with aspects of contemporary problems not strictly political (economic, financial and legal). I therefore feel that a rational demarcation of your respective spheres of interest would, if you so desire, give you ample opportunity of collaborating in your particular field with…[IPSA]’.161 Seemingly feeling the ISC’s existence might be under threat as a result of the formation of IPSA and in order to make clear ‘from the outset’ the differences between the ISC’s and IPSA’s ‘respective interests in social science,’ the conference passed a resolution in which it sought to define its particular aims and approach. The resolution affirmed that delegates desired that the ISC ‘retain its…status’ as an international association ‘qualified to represent institutions concerned with scientific research and teaching in the field of international relations’; to this end the resolution welcomed the accord reached on June 9, 1949, that ensured the renewal of the ISC’s relations with UNESCO. While the resolution stated that the conference was desirous of entering into relations with any scientific international organisation whose work touched on the field of international relations, it also ‘affirmed that international relations represent a specific branch of research and education.’162 The planned meeting on the University Teaching of International Relations was in the end held between the March 16 and 20, 1950, at St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park. It was to be the last general assembly held under the auspices of the ISC. A few of the issues raised within the framework of the meeting by Manning, its general rapporteur, help explain why this was the case. In a report 161 Ibid.,

94.

162 International

Social Science Bulletin, nos. 3–4 (1949), 94.

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prepared for the meeting entitled ‘International Relations: An Academic Discipline,’ Manning noted that there were many who, although aware of the claim of international studies, were ‘yet to be persuaded’ that it had or ought to have a ‘separate existence’.163 In defending the claim of international studies to a separate existence, Manning was specifically targeting those who considered that the study of international relations was a branch of the study of political science. A major argument in favour of locating international relations within the domain of political science that was advanced at the time, was that interwar international relations scholars had failed to develop a scientific technique appropriate to the subject matter. The view that the approach of interwar academics to the study of international relations was unscientific and that the effect of this was deleterious not only in intellectual terms but also in political terms, had much currency in the early post-war period in Anglo-American circles. For example, in a book sponsored by the CFR which was entitled The Study of International Relations in American Universities and Colleges (1947), Grayson Kirk, citing Carr’s ‘provocative analysis,’ insisted that much of the interwar scholarship in field of international relations was simply ‘propaganda’. Kirk maintained that interwar scholarship had manifested an exaggerated belief in the League as an agency that would ‘usher in an era of somewhat mystical “international cooperation”’ and, as a result, had failed to appreciate the realities of the power politics of the day. He maintained that due to their misguided ‘Utopianism,’ teachers of international relations in the interwar period had caused ‘a generation of American college students to underestimate the strength of the divisive forces of international society’ and had ‘cast a shadow of academic disrepute over the new field,’ thereby inviting derision from more established disciplines.164 In a paper prepared for the Committee on International Relations Research for the Social Science Research Council of the United States, William T. R. Fox, also surveyed the American experience interwar scholarship in the field of international relations. Although more elaborate than that of Kirk, his survey painted a broadly similar picture. In

163 Manning,

‘International Relations: An Academic Discipline,’ 14. Kirk, The Study of International Relations in American Universities and Colleges (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1947), 4–5. 164 Grayson

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his paper, Fox maintained that the ‘analytical model’ of interwar international relationists ‘was a world commonwealth characterized by permanent peace’ with the ‘real world’ being represented ‘in terms of a deviation from this model.’165 Fox maintained that the prevalence of the ‘unexamined assumption of an underlying harmony of interest’ meant that the ‘hard intellectual task of discovering the conditions under which national interests could be harmonized was rarely undertaken’.166 Fox maintained that another unexamined assumption of the interwar internationalists was that ‘everything international was better than anything national’. This assumption, he contended, ‘biased the selection of research topics’ such that disarmament, collective security and peaceful change were ‘overstudied,’ while the question of the ‘national interests which the new international institutions were expected to protect and the ways by which these values should be protected’ was neglected.167 Fox claimed that from the time of ‘the invasion of Manchuria to the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement,’ students of international relations with their faith in the Geneva institutions ‘often found themselves emotionally and intellectually unprepared for the event.’168 Fox’s claim that interwar international relationists simply assumed an underlying harmony of interests is undermined by the fact that the debates in the 1930s concerning collective security and peaceful change arose precisely because it was well understood that a harmony of interests did not exist and that there existed dissatisfied or unruly states. It should also be noted that whereas Fox appeared to have grouped together advocates of disarmament, collective security and peaceful change, it was far from being the case that the all the advocates of these three causes were of the same outlook. First, it should be noted that collective security advocacy arose because of the belief in some quarters that disarmament was too dangerous an undertaking in the absence of security guarantees.

165 William T. R. Fox, ‘Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,’ World Politics 2, no. 1 (1949): 67–79, 77. 166 Ibid., 76. 167 Ibid., 71, 74–75. James T. Shotwell and Stanley Hartnoll Bailey were cited by William T. R. Fox as two examples of scholars whose focus rested on Geneva. On this point see also Edgar S. Furniss Jr., ‘Theory and Practice in the Teaching of International Relations in the United States,’ in Goodwin ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 95. 168 Fox, ‘Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,’ 67.

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This belief was based on a hard-boiled assessment of the power political situation in light of the Japanese advance into Manchuria and German demands for equality of status. Second, it should be clear that the advocates of peaceful change fell into two distinct and opposed camps. On the one hand, there were those who were willing to give ground on the question of changes to the status quo but only in a context in which the states demanding change renounced violence and in which mutual aid was guaranteed. On the other hand, there were those who were willing to countenance the idea of treaty revision or other changes to the status quo as an alternative to preparations for collective defence in the face of the threat of war-like change and irrespective of the legitimacy of the demands for change being made. A sharp cleavage arose between those who conceived of peaceful change as supplement to the collective security system and those who saw it as an alternative to that system and the fact of this cleavage shows that Fox was wrong to represent the policies of collective security and peaceful change as part of the one and same internationalist package. Indeed, it should be noted that some of those mouthing the words peaceful change in the 1930s were not especially internationalist in their outlook but were simply individuals who wanted to avoid a clash with Germany and who believed, rather naively, that the tiger could be tamed. The third point to make in responding to Fox’s characterisation of the interwar situation, is that the concern about how to protect national interests in a context in which international institutions seemed ill-equipped for the task, was precisely the driving force behind the advocacy of collective security in the interwar period, a point which explains why those advocating in favour of the organisation of collective security simultaneously supported or came to support British rearmament and multi-lateral security measures. Manning addressed the cleavage between those who advocated first and foremost in favour of collective security and certain of the advocates of peaceful change in a 1942 essay entitled ‘The “Failure” of the League of Nations’. He commenced this essay in noting that according to one of Roosevelt’s envoys, namely, Benjamin Sumner Welles, the League had failed because of its inelasticity in regard to peaceful adjustments of the status quo. Manning then proceeded to attempt to demolish this line of argument, clearly viewing the question of peaceful change, at least in relation to such unruly states as Japan and Italy, as a complete

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red herring. Citing an observation made by Rappard, Manning asked the following: by what ‘conceivable process of institutionalised evolution Manchuria would ever have been detached from China or an end put to the Abyssinian State?’169 Manning concluded that the putative failure of the League was a result of a lack of will to cooperate on the sanctions front due to a lack of diplomatic vision: an inability to see that there was a common interest in establishing a precedent in regard to the use of sanctions. Manning observed that the failure to effectively cooperate in order to defend the Geneva system was precisely what the ‘felon’ counted on in hatching his ‘nefarious little plans.’ As Manning explained, ‘[b]efore the instrument could be “elastic” it must first have been strong.’ It was not strong because even before the ‘“have-not” powers even seriously began to smite upon the planks above, the “haves”, whether Allied or merely Associated, had too effect loosed the props below.’170 It should be clear that the view that the real failure in respect to international affairs in the 1930s was the failure to effectively cooperate to defend the Geneva system was a view that was common to many of those associated with the ISC and those involved in overlapping organisations such as the New Commonwealth Society during that period. However, the aim of Fox’s paper was not to accurately depict interwar discussions. Its aim was to further a trend commenced by American political scientists such as Earle, Harold Sprout and Nicholas Spykman, this last having in the 1920s had been associated with Zimmern’s Geneva School of International Studies: of viewing international relations through the prism of national security and the national interest. Another author of this trend was Arnold Wolfers. A member of faculty at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik before it was nazified, Wolfers had been among those present at the conference in Berlin which lead to the foundation of the CISSIR. Wolfers had served as the ISC’s general rapporteur, which was an international position, during the period of its first study cycle and it was thus Wolfers who prepared the record of proceedings of the ISC’s conferences in Milan in May 1932 and in London in June 1933, soon after the latter of which he went into exile

169 Manning, 170 Ibid.,

‘The “Failure” of the League of Nations,’ 105. 106.

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in the United States.171 Fox’s inclination was to reduce international relations to international politics and it was this inclination that caused him to insist, albeit without discounting the possibility that international relations had ‘“arrived” as a separate social science discipline,’ that political scientists had an important contribution to make to international relations analysis and to ensuring that the study of international relations be ‘taken seriously in the 1950s’.172

A Social or a Political Science? Manning was well aware of the dismissals of interwar international studies as ‘just a line in League of Nations propaganda’ or as a plea for disarmament or peace in general.173 Yet Manning thought that international studies had made great strides in the direction of becoming a social science since the time when the first chairs in international relations were endowed in the immediate aftermath of the First World War by certain ‘public-spirited’ individuals with a view to furthering the cause of peace.174 Indeed, invoking Vernant, he maintained in the context of the Windsor meeting that he assumed, as the ISC ‘never hesitated to assume,’ that international relations is a ‘subject whose existence it is “really not possible to deny.”’175

171 Fox, ‘Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,’ 78–79. Harold Sprout noted the following: ‘Before 1914, the teaching of international subjects seems to have been oriented chiefly towards the general cultural development of the student. As a result of World War I, the orientation shifted radically towards a search for ways and means of consolidating peace. That motivation has persisted down to the present. Since 1945 it has taken on a strong “national security” coloration.’ Harold Sprout, quoted in C. A. W. Manning, The University Teaching of Social Sciences: International Relations (Paris: UNESCO, 1954), 53. The University Teaching of Social Sciences: International Relations was a report prepared by Manning on behalf of the ISC. In The University Teaching of Social Sciences, Manning noted that his report drew almost wholly on ‘eight national contributions from the following national rapporteurs: M. A. Yehia (Egypt), J. J. Chevallier (France), A. Appadorai (India), G. Casanova (Mexico), K. E. Birnham (Sweden), G. L. Goodwin (United Kingdom), H. Sprout (United States of America), and J. Djordjević (Yugoslavia)’ (ibid., 9). 172 Fox,

‘Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,’ 67, 79. ‘Out to Grass—And a Lingering Look Behind,’ 357. 174 Manning, The University Teaching of Social Sciences: International Relations, 51–2. 175 Manning, ‘International Relations: An Academic Discipline,’ 14. 173 Manning,

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As to the subject matter of this discipline, Manning assumed, as had generally been assumed by members of the ISC from the time of its inception, that it concerned what was referred to as ‘international society’. As Vernant explained at the Windsor meeting, this expression did not refer to some ‘ideal state of society,’ but rather designated a world in which the relations ‘between governments and between peoples are more numerous and closer than ever and in which…national frontiers are not insuperable.’176 Using more abstract language and borrowing from Jean-Jacques Chevallier, Manning described international society as a ‘universal manifold of more or less intricately interwoven relationships,’ a manifold which Chevallier styled as ‘le complexe relationnel international’.177 In the view of Manning and in the view of Vernant, the study of international relations was above all a sociological enterprise because the subject matter of international relations concerned a social milieu, albeit a social milieu more comprehensive in scope than that studied by ‘orthodox’ sociology: the sociology of international relations ‘out-distanced’ conventional sociology. This was an important consideration from Manning’s point of view as it was this that justified the status of international relations as a distinct academic discipline.178 In the view of Manning and Vernant, it is because of its variegated nature that the international social milieu must be examined from a great variety of angles: from the angle not just of diplomatic history, international law and politics, but from the angle of geography, demography, economics, psychology, religion, sociology along with other fields.179 176 Vernant,

‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 56. The University Teaching of Social Sciences: International Relations, 10, and Jean-Jacques Chevallier, n.d. quoted ibid. As recorded by Manning, Chevallier stated that the concern of international relations lay ‘with a tangled intertwining of relationships arising in all sorts of fields, among the various States [and between States and international organisations] within that special sort of “relational” milieu which is generally referred to as “international society”’ (ibid.). 178 C. A. W. Manning, ‘Report of the General Rapporteur,’ in Goodwin ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 73. See also Hidemi Sugnami, ‘C. A. W. Manning and the Study of International Relations,’ Review of International Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 91–107, 99, and Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 57. 179 Manning, The University Teaching of Social Sciences: International Relations, 10. See also Sugnami, ‘C. A. W. Manning and the Study of International Relations,’ 99, and Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’ 57. 177 Manning,

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For both Manning and Vernant, the ultimate aim of a sociological study of international relations is not to obtain a series of snap-shots but to obtain, as Vernant expressed it, a kind of ‘synthesis…a complete and objective picture of international society.’180 It is clear that by 1950 both Manning and Vernant were struggling to assert their sociological conception of international relations and its status as an independent discipline against the claims that the subject was really a subset of political science. Such claims were being issued by American scholars in particular, often accompanied by an emphasis on the role of national power at the expense of the social milieu.181 That the view of international relations as a branch of political science was gaining ground at UNESCO is evidenced by an observation made by Walter R. Sharp, an American political scientist in the employ of UNESCO’s Department of Social Science. Sharp, who had also been in attendance at the Fourteenth Session of the ISC as an observer on behalf of UNESCO, maintained at the Windsor meeting that there was a ‘certain danger’ in according sociology too prominent in the study of international relations. Sociology, he warned, as a well-organised and powerful discipline, might feel encouraged to ‘take over the whole thing,’ the result being ‘unfortunate reactions from Political Science, Law and other aspects of the total field.’182 While Manning’s reaction to this claim was that he did not think that this was a ‘very serious danger,’ he well may have been worried that Sharp’s observation related to an agenda that posed a serious danger to the ISC.183 Sharp advised the same meeting not to overstate the synthetic nature of ‘International Relations’: not all the specialities relevant to it, he pointed out, occupied the same plane. The subject of

180 Vernant,

‘International Relations: The Work of the International Studies Conference,’

57. 181 Manning, ‘Report of the General Rapporteur,’ 72–73, 75. Manning criticised Sprout for shifting his focus away from the role of international society to that of national power. Vernant attended the Windsor meeting as secretary general of the ISC. The chair of the meeting in Windsor was Walter Russell Crocker, a professor of international relations at the Australian National University. 182 Walter R. Sharp, 1950, quoted in Manning, ‘Report of the General Rapporteur,’ 73. See also International Social Science Bulletin 1, nos. 3–4 (1949), 93. 183 Manning, ‘Report of the General Rapporteur,’ 73.

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international relations, he insisted, had a ‘core’ and this core consisted of political science or policy science.184 It should be noted here that Sharp had chaired a Preparatory Committee that had been established by UNESCO in order to oversee the foundation of IPSA.185 The background to the foundation of IPSA concerns UNESCO’s 1947 General Conference which took place in Mexico from November 6 to December 3. In Mexico, the conference had determined that the ‘study of the subject-matter and problems treated by political scientists’ should be promoted.186 It was deemed a matter of priority that political science should be equipped with the means to study the ‘political realm that was held responsible for the collapse of the world order…[and]…both to study and to reform the defective institutions.’187 Reflecting its policy in relation to academic disciplines in general, UNESCO decided at its 1948 General Conference to lend its support— both moral and financial—to the formation of an international association of political scientists. It was thus under the auspices of UNESCO that IPSA’s founding conference was held in Paris between September 12 and 16, 1949, with representatives of sixteen countries in attendance.188 All those in attendance at the conference agreed that IPSA’s headquarters should be based in Europe in order that the discipline might be advanced in that region. The conference, having considered Brussels and Geneva as possible locations, settled on Paris as the location for the association’s headquarters and, in light of this, IPSA was subsequently ‘constituted as a “foreign association” under French law’.189 As noted above, because of what was bound to be an obvious overlap between the ISC and the soon to be born IPSA, Torres Bodet had 184 Ibid.,

60.

185 Boncourt,

‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ 5. ‘Records of the General Conference of UNESCO, Second Session, Mexico, 1947,’ quoted ibid., 4. 187 Boncourt, ‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ 4. 188 Yves Déloye, ‘Retour sur une naissance: 1949 ou l’histoire de l’AFSP au prisme de celle de l’AISP-IPSA,’ Participation 33, no. 1 (2009): 20. A meeting of researchers involved in the ‘methods in political science’ project which took place in Paris on September 16, 1948, had already decided that the project necessitated the establishment of a ‘dialogue between political scientists from different countries and disciplines.’ See Boncourt, ‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ 5–6. 189 Boncourt, ‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ 7. 186 UNESCO,

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recommended at the September 1949 meeting of the ISC that the ISC and IPSA should collaborate in some manner. Indeed, there was for a time a limited form of collaboration between the two organisations. For example, between 1951 and 1953 the ISC and IPSA collaborated on the preparation of three volumes called International Political Science Abstracts all of which were published by UNESCO.190 Yet it is clear that key figures at UNESCO saw the new rather than old organisation as being more central to UNESCO’s aims and ambitions. In opening the first IPSA conference, Torres Bodet put the following questions: ‘What can be more essential or urgent for the future of mankind than a scientific study of government? Is there anything that touches more nearly the whole essence of Unesco’s effort to establish peace in the minds of men and prepare a life worthy of mankind?’ He then stated that it was the ‘great object’ of political science to ‘realize more satisfactory human relations in face of the dangers of war and totalitarianism which our generation has experienced. The conditions which have led to these experiences are world-wide, so the science of politics must be world-wide.’191 In responding to Torres Bodet, Maurice Duverger, on behalf of the Association française de science politique, an association which was established on July 14, 1949, tellingly stated: ‘While all sciences are to some extent international, political science is much more so than the other sciences.’192 These observations were recalled and reiterated by

190 International Political Science Abstracts: Documentation Politique Internationale, vols. 1 (Paris: UNESCO, Paris, 1951); International Political Science Abstracts: Documentation Politique Internationale, vols. 2 and 3 (Paris: UNESCO, 1952); and International Political Science Abstracts: Documentation Politique Internationale, vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Paris: UNESCO, 1953). The International Studies Conference also published on behalf of UNESCO a preliminary version of a ‘World List of International Relations Periodicals’ in 1951. See Liste mondiale des périodiques spécialisés dans les Sciences Sociales: World List of Social Science Periodicals (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), 5n. 191 Jaime

Torres Bodet, 1949, quoted in Quincy Wright, ‘The Significance of the International Political Science Association,’ International Social Sciences Bulletin 3, no. 2 (1951): 275–80, 275. 192 Maurice Duverger, 1949, quoted in Wright, ‘The Significance of the International Political Science Association,’ 275. The formation of the Association française de Science Politique must be viewed in connection with the UNESCO political science project. See Déloye, ‘Retour sur une naissance: 1949 ou l’histoire de l’AFSP au prisme de celle de l’AISP-IPSA,’ 20.

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Quincy Wright, the first president of IPSA, in his opening address at IPSA’s conference of 1950. Wright charged political science with the task of combating ‘inhuman tyranny and total war’ through bringing to bear on political problems ‘the universal application of scientific method’. He stated that the study of ‘world society’ or ‘world community’ fell within the scope of political science and noted that throughout the conference’s programme ‘special reference’ would be made to international affairs.193 Nonetheless, Wright, who as we have seen had been a participant in the 1937 session of ISC study conference, did not discount the idea that international relations might form a distinct discipline and, indeed, maintained that the subject was not restricted to political science because it also dealt with economic and social questions.194 Unfortunately for the future of the ISC however, Wright’s successor as president of IPSA, William A. Robson, was of the view that international relations was an ‘indivisible part’ of political science. Robson raised this issue at a meeting which took place on September 12, 1952 in the midst of an IPSA congress that was held at The Hague. The meeting was convened in order to discuss the detailed inquiry into the teaching of political science that was being directed by Robson on behalf of IPSA.195 This inquiry had been initiated by UNESCO as a result of a General Conference resolution in 1950, concerning the following: Enquiry into the Teaching of the Social Sciences.196 At the meeting at The Hague, Robson, a professor of government at the LSE, complained of that fact that in many countries there was resistance to the idea of the ‘unity of political science’: he complained that its ‘various branches were scattered among different disciplines.’197 Unsurprisingly given the its contested status, leaders in the field of political science had a strong interest in seeing its boundaries consolidated. With this end in view, Robson turned his attention to the

193 Wright,

‘The Significance of the International Political Science Association,’ 275, 279. Meynaud, ‘The Teaching of Political Science,’ International Social Science Bulletin 5, no. 1 (1953): 104–12, 109. 195 Ibid., 104–05. 196 ‘The Enquiry into the Teaching of the Social Sciences: General Report submitted to UNESCO’s General Conference, 1952,’ International Social Sciences Bulletin 5, no. 1 (1953): 151–57, 151. 197 Meynaud, ‘The Teaching of Political Science,’ 105. 194 Jean

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relationship between political science and international relations, noting the fact that UNESCO had initiated a specific inquiry into the teaching of the latter even though it had been determined, as expressed in IPSA’s 1949 constitution, that international relations was one of the four key areas addressed by political science. Robson, concerned about the tendency in some universities to separate international relations from political science, insisted that the former could not form a distinct field study as the fundamental concepts of political science—these being, according to Robson, sovereignty and power—were also the building blocks of international relations. Robson added that it was absurd to ‘divide State politics into two separate subjects, according to whether they concerned international questions or relations with foreign countries’: political science and international relations both had as their focus the state.198 Geoffrey L. Goodwin, a lecturer in the department of international relations at the LSE who had edited the proceedings of the ISC’s Windsor meeting, challenged Robson’s position. Goodwin stated at the IPSA meeting that in his view, international relations should be constituted as a separate discipline (a position to which Wright leant some support), Goodwin’s argument in this regard being that international relations had a ‘definite purpose’: the study of the ‘community of States’.199 The inquiry into the teaching of international relations about which Robson had complained, was under the direction of Manning was assisted in his direction of it by Goodwin among others. The report resulting from this inquiry, which was the second volume in a series called the University Teaching of Social Sciences to be published by UNESCO, appeared in February 1954, by which time the ISC had been liquidated.200 The immediate cause of the ISC’s demise was the decision of UNESCO’s General Conference on the recommendation of the UNESCO’s Executive Board not to renew its agreement with the organisation at its General Conference in November–December 1952.201 198 Ibid.,

105–06. 109. 200 International Social Sciences Bulletin 5, no. 1 (1953), 152. See also Unesco, preface to Manning, The University Teaching of Social Sciences: International Relations. On the winding up of the ISC see David Long, ‘Who Killed the International Studies Conference,’ Review of International Studies 32, no. 4 (2006): 603–22, 607. 201 ‘Resolutions,’ in UNESCO, ‘Records of the General Conference: Seventh Session, Paris, 1952,’ Proceedings, 33.3, 101, UA. 199 Ibid.,

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Some years after its liquidation, Manning recalled that with the end of the funding arrangements with UNESCO (and with no money forthcoming from private organisations), there was no other choice but to wind up the conference, adding that at the meeting in London at which this occurred, it was decided that ‘some of the activities should in some form be resumed, should conditions eventually make this once more possible.’ This, however, was not to be.202

The Demise of the ISC In explaining the demise of the ISC, Manning noted that certain individuals appeared to have given UNESCO the impression that the ISC wanted to ‘wind itself up’; however, according to Manning, at a meeting in Rome of the ISC’s executive committee in early 1952, no such desire had been expressed. Indeed, Manning stated that ‘[o]n the contrary, the feeling was that the organisation should continue.’203 Based on his research into its demise, David Long maintains that the certain individuals in question were two of Manning’s LSE colleagues, namely, Robson and T. H. Marshall, the latter being a member of the LSE’s Sociology Department and, in 1952, the chair of the Working Party on Social Sciences of UNESCO’s Programme Commission.204 In that year, UNESCO’s various working parties were charged with making recommendations regarding the revision of UNESCO’s programmes on the assumption of a 7.88 per cent reduction in the budgetary cots originally estimated for each section, the result being the deletion of some activities and the postponement of others.205 Marshall’s Working Party recommended that the funding for the ISC that year be reduced from a proposed $3500 to $1750. The General Conference accepted this recommendation and thus the ISC was awarded a subvention that was the lowest awarded that year to any of the other non-governmental international organisation supported by

202 Manning,

‘Out to Grass—And a Lingering Look Behind,’ 355. 355. See also Long, ‘Who Killed the International Studies Conference,’ 610. 204 Long, ‘Who Killed the International Studies Conference,’ 610, and UNESCO, ‘Records of the General Conference: Seventh Session, Paris, 1952,’ 14, UA. 205 UNESCO, ‘Records of the General Conference: Seventh Session, Paris, 1952,’ 14–15, UA. 203 Ibid.,

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UNESCO. It was also considerably less than it had received in previous years: in 1948, 1949, 1950 and 1951, the ISC had received from UNESCO subventions of $10,000, $10,000, $8000 and $5000 respectively.206 In any case, that the General Conference found the recommendation of Marshall’s Working Party persuasive, may have been helped by the fact that at a meeting of the General Conference’s Programme Commission, Marshall stated that the Working Party had ‘doubts about the financial stability and future prospects’ of the ISC. He also claimed that the ‘question of…[the ISC’s]..dissolution had been mooted, but had been left in abeyance pending the execution of certain reorganization plans. Little was known at the moment,’ he added, ‘about the success of those endeavours. That was why the Working Party had not proposed that the grant be entirely withheld.’207 Cassin, who was at the meeting in question, argued in response that it was ‘indefensible’ to cite the fact that an organisation was ‘temporarily in difficult circumstances’ as justification for further weakening its financial position, adding that there was no precedent for this at UNESCO. On behalf of the French delegation, which included Vernant, now the ISC’s secretary general, Cassin, after having noted the ISC’s ‘fine record,’ urged the commission consider the possibility of restoring the ISC’s funding should the ‘necessary funds ultimately be available.’208 Voicing strong support for Cassin’s position was an Italian delegate, namely, Francisco Vito, the economist who had contributed a paper to the ISC’s first study conference, that is, its session in Milan in 1932 on the subject of ‘The State and Economic Life’. Before the war, Vito had

206 ‘Resolutions,’ in UNESCO, ‘Records of the General Conference: Seventh Session, Paris, 1952,’ 48. See also UNESCO, ‘Conseil exécutif’ XXII (1953), 33-34 Sessions, 34 EX/15–5, Annexe III, UA. UNESCO’s executive board had originally planned to award the ISC $4500 for 1953/54. For the sums received between 1947 and 1951, see UNESCO, ‘Conseil exécutif,’ XIV, 1950, 20-21-22 Sessions, 20 EX/2 (SS)-10-13, March 21, 1950, UA, and UNESCO, ‘Conseil exécutif’ XVII (1952), 26-27-28 Sessions, 28 EX/17–15, Annexe IX, October 23, 1951, UA. 207 ‘Programme Commission,’ in UNESCO, ‘Records of the General Conference: Seventh Session, Paris, 1952,’ 426–27. See also Long, ‘Who Killed the International Studies Conference,’ 610. 208 ‘Programme Commission,’ in UNESCO, ‘Records of the General Conference: Seventh Session, Paris, 1952,’ 426–27.

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been a member of the board of the GRC. Vito underlined the fact that in terms of its ‘composition and work,’ the ISC differed from IPSA. He also pointed out that its work was ‘in many aspects closely related to UNESCO’s programme.’209 Despite Cassin’s impassioned defence of the ISC and the support it received from Vito, his proposal was rejected by sixteen votes to ten with four abstentions.210 Prior to the UNESCO’s 1952 General Conference, an article written by Hans J. Morgenthau was published in the International Social Science Bulletin. In his article, Morgenthau decried the ‘vagueness and eclecticism’ that characterised much of the teaching and research in the field of international relations. Morgenthau attributed this alleged lack of disciplinary coherence to the field’s indiscriminate concern ‘with everything that is “international”, that is, with everything that transcends the limits of a particular nation’ and the equally unfocussed multidisciplinary approach to which this gave rise.211 Although he did not mention it by name, Morgenthau clearly saw the work of the ISC as exemplary in this regard. He observed that on reading the ‘voluminous proceedings’ of the IIIC, which, he claimed, ‘dedicated much of its work to the discussion of international relations as an academic discipline’ in the interwar years, one cannot not help but be ‘struck by the amorphousness of the discussion and the vagueness of the results.’212 Obviously, Morgenthau confused the ISC with the institution which housed its secretariat.213 This confusion might be explained by the fact that in attempting to illustrate the vague and eclectic nature of interwar international studies, Morgenthau drew on a record of a discussion of the university teaching of international relations which took place in tandem with the ISC’s study meeting on collective security in London in 1935, and on a short memorandum on the same subject submitted to the ISC’s session in Madrid in 1936

209 Ibid.,

427.

210 Ibid. 211 Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘Area Studies and the Study of International Relations,’ International Social Science Bulletin 4, no. 4 (1952): 647–55, 649, 653. 212 Ibid., 648. 213 Ibid., 648.

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both of which were published in the IIIC’s monthly bulletin, namely, Coopération Intellectuelle.214 In regard to Morgenthau’s charges of amorphousness and vagueness, it is certainly true that members of the ISC tended to view international relations as being much richer in content, both in terms of the actors involved and the issues at stake, than Morgenthau would have thought advisable for the sake of intellectual unity. Yet it would be unfair to dismiss the ISC’s approach as mere eclecticism: that it saw anything which somehow transcended national boundaries as coming within its field of vision. Certainly some made extravagant claims on behalf of the subject’s reach. Zimmern, for example, could be quite promiscuous in this regard. However, we must also recall the social matrix prism through which many members of the ISC viewed their subject matter. Morgenthau’s disdainful attitude towards the ISC was also apparent in an observation he made in relation to Mantoux’s contribution to the ISC’s discussion of university teaching of international relations in 1935: it was ‘typical in its bias in favour of international law’.215 To reiterate, members of the ISC well appreciated the centrality of the struggle for power. However, they also thought that struggle should and could be subordinated to the rule of law. This for many of them was the lesson of the First World War, a lesson reinforced by the political crises of the 1930s as the conferences on Collective Security and Peaceful Change well demonstrate. For Morgenthau, however, the experience of the 1930s held out a different lesson. Morgenthau opposed to the ISC’s tendency to conceive of international relations in terms of a milieu intersocial or, at least, an international society, a conception of international relations which insisted on ‘primacy of politics over all other interests,’ with politics being conceived as a ‘struggle for power among individuals and groups’. In Morgenthau’s view at this point in time, international relations should be studied before all else as international politics,

214 Ibid., 648–49. Hans J. Morgenthau cited the following publications, albeit without providing their full details, in order to illustrate the vague and eclectic nature of interwar international studies: ‘L’Enseignement universitaire des relations internationales: Réunion tenue à Londres le 7 juin 1935,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 57–58 (1935): 483–503, and Antoni Deryng, ‘L’Enseignement universitaire des relations internationales,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 68–69 (1936): 28–34. 215 Morgenthau, ‘Area Studies and the Study of International Relations,’ 648–49.

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whether within the framework of a department of international politics or within that of a department of political science.216 Morgenthau’s dismissal of the work of the ISC would not have helped its cause in the context of a struggle concerning the ownership of the study of international relation, especially when its opponent in this struggle, namely IPSA, was a larger and more well-connected body within the framework of UNESCO. It would have mattered to those deciding the fate of the ISC that IPSA was a creature of UNESCO and the ISC was not. This last point aside, Morgenthau’s depiction of the work ISC as amorphous and eclectic would have been particularly unhelpful in regard to the ISC’s relationship with UNESCO because the kind of organisations with which UNESCO preferred to collaborate were organisations based in a particular specialisation. Arvid explained in a report published in the International Social Science Bulletin on the occasion of UNESCO’s tenth anniversary, that support had been given initially to the ISC in order that it might reconstruct itself and collaborate with UNESCO in areas of common concern. However, he added, it soon became clear that an organisation comprising a ‘rather loosely co-ordinated task-force’ whose members came from ‘variety of disciplines according to the requirements of current projects’ was not a suitable partner for such collaboration. The kind of ­ organisations with which UNESCO preferred to collaborate were ‘single-discipline bodies’: ‘separate international associations for each professional specialization,’ be it economics, political science or sociology.217 Although Morgenthau himself appeared agnostic on the issue, his charges in relation to the ISC could only have reinforced the view entertained by certain figures at UNESCO that for intellectual reasons, and not just for reasons of better professional coordination, international relations should come within the scope of political science. With obvious disdain, Manning reported that a UNESCO rapporteur had declared that ‘[a] study of International Relations which is not based on a solid foundation of political science can scarcely be said to have a firm basis of any kind’ and had concluded, therefore, that the teaching international

216 Ibid.,

655. Brodersen, ‘Unesco’s Tenth Anniversary: A Retrospective International Social Science Bulletin 8, no. 3 (1957): 403–09, 405. 217 Arvid

Sketch,’

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relations ‘within departments of political science’ is the ‘correct solution’.218 According to Long, another possible reason why the reputation of the ISC foundered was that it was tainted by the ‘elitist approach inherent in League-era intellectual co-operation,’ as reflected, in Long’s view, in the exchanges between the ‘great and good’ in the context of the ‘Conversations’ and ‘Open Letters’ sponsored by the ICIC’s Permanent Committee of Letters and Arts.219 We have seen that a similar charge had been raised in relation to the ISC by some of those actually participating in it in the pre-World War II years: too many formal speeches, too many big names and too much stifling protocol. In relation to this, it is worth noting that just before the 1935 session of the ISC in London, the IIIC’s Chalmers Wright asked Margaret Elisabeth Cleeve, the librarian and chief administrator at Chatham House, editor of the RIIA’s periodical International Affairs and secretary of the BCCIS, whether he should wear a top hat at the conference’s inaugural meeting. Cleeve’s response was that this was ‘not in the least necessary,’ that it was ‘most unlikely that a single British “topper” would appear at the proceedings,’ and that the advice of the secretary of the BCCIS was to wear ‘ordinary things’. Nonetheless, the fact that Chalmers Wright thought fit to make his inquiry is itself telling.220 Following the much-criticised 1937 session of the ISC in Paris and under the careful watch of Condliffe, the ISC was subject to substantial reform. It was due to its reform, and not only to the sombre political situation, that its last study meeting before the war, that is, its session in Bergen in 1939, was a rather austere affair. At the study meeting Bergen, as with the study meeting in Prague in the previous year, members remained focussed on the subject at hand; the windy speeches that often book-ended previous sessions and even intruded on the meetings supposedly dedicated to serious discussion were not in evidence. Nonetheless, the reputation of the ISC as a forum charactersed by too much oratory and too little discussion, obviously lingered. As evidence

218 ‘C. A. W. Manning, ‘“Naughty Animal”—A Discipline Chats Back,’ International Relations 1, no. 4 (1955): 128–36, 134. 219 Long, ‘Who Killed the International Studies Conference,’ 606–7n. 220 Margaret E. Cleeve to Fergus Chalmers Wright, May 17, 1935, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, 16 mai–30 juin 1935, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.s, UA.

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of this, one might cite Holland’s advice to Mayoux in June 1946 that the ISC should cast off its quasi-diplomatic pretensions and statements made by Mayoux himself later that year to the effect that the ISC should be reformed in conformity with the more radically democratic age that had dawned. In its early years of the ISC, its predominantly European make-up was a cause of concern, particularly for those of its participants who were active in the IPR. In light of this, the IIIC devoted a considerable amount of effort to extending the geographic reach of the conference and in this it achieved remarkable results. Originating as a result of collaboration between certain individuals in London, Paris and Berlin, during its life the reach of the ISC extended across the Atlantic to the Americas, northwards to Scandinavia, eastwards to Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey, and southwards to the Asia-Pacific region. By the time of the Second World War, more than thirty national groups were associated with the ISC.221 While the number of national groups involved in the ISC decreased to twenty-five in 1947, as of March 1950 it was claiming a membership of thirty-two national groups and five international institutions.222

Some Final Reflections Despite its rather undignified exit from the field of international intellectual endeavours, the ISC’s efforts should not be disregarded. Its intellectual lessons remain relevant and instructive and the study of its history adds another significant layer to our understanding of the political and

221 Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 14. See also League of Nations, International Studies Conference XIth Session, Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace—A record of meetings held in Prague on May 25 and 26, 1938, ii-v, AG IICI K-X1-23, UA, and International Studies Conference, Verbatim Report of the XIIIth Administrative Session, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris, IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, i, iv. 222 Although Malcolm W. Davis resigned from the position of general rapporteur at the session of the ISC held in September 1949, he participated in the 1950 ISC study meeting on teaching. He was the only American national to do so. For his resignation as the chair of the ISC’s executive committee, see ‘The Fourteenth Session of the International Studies Conference,’ 93. For the ISC’s membership for 1947 and 1950 see UNESCO, ‘Conseil exécutif,’ XIV (1950), 20-21-22 Sessions, 20 EX/2 (SS)-11, March 21, 1950, UA.

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intellectual history of the interwar period. From the time that it decided on becoming a study conference, the ISC called upon leading intellectuals to participate in organised research and discussion of pressing problems of the day with a view to public enlightenment. In this regard, the conception of its intended role was similar to that envisaged for the ‘Conversations’ and Open Letters,’ except that the approach adopted towards the subject at hand in the context of these two series was largely cultural and psychological whereas the ISC’s approach to its subject matter was based in economics, law and, above all, sociology.223 As Zimmern had maintained in setting the tone for ISC’s discussions on the teaching of international relations in Madrid in 1936 and in invoking ‘the Greek Age,’ what needed to be stressed is the ‘altogetherness of public affairs,’ an altogetherness that implied among other things that the boundaries of the discipline of international relations should not be tightly policed. Interpreted generously, the sociological approach embraced by certain partisans of the discipline of international relations in the interwar period suggested that what should be examined is not simply the multiple relations of states, but also the various relations amongst peoples. It is for this reason that Paul Boyer in L’Enseignement universitaire in 1939 stated that although he did not like neologisms, he would ‘say willingly “interhuman relations” in place of international relations.’224 Such an approach insisted on the importance to the study of international relations of examining social life within states, be it in relation to a state’s economic situation, its culture and traditions, its prevailing ideology and so on. This, of course, may conduce to the very vagueness of which Morgenthau complained, however, at the same time it is an approach that circumvents a potentially sterile concentration on states and their power. The irony here is that ISC, with its conceptions of international relations in terms of a complex relational milieu, was more open to investigating questions relating to the culture, identity and welfare of peoples that so many at UNESCO wished to explore than the more statist and

223 Kolasa,

International Intellectual Cooperation, 108. Alfred Zimmern, ‘Introductory Report to the Discussions in 1935,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 11, and Paul Boyer, L’Enseignement universitaire, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationaux: Publications (préparations) imprimeurs jusqu’au 1e juin, 1939, AG 1-IICI-K-II-8.a, UA. 224 Sir

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power-political interpretation of international relations which was gaining ground at the time of the ISC’s demise. In many ways, what some of those associated with ISC sought to do was to theoretically entrench the League and its evolving activities.225 This point holds not only in relation to the League’s activities in the political, legal and economic spheres, but also, given the sociological orientation of the ISC, in relation to the League’s work in general: protection of minorities; the governance of mandated territories; traffic in women and children; refugees; demographic questions; opium and dangerous drugs; health and hygiene; nutrition and standards of living; transit and communication and, of course, intellectual cooperation. Yet, despite the broader social purposes that lay behind its efforts, the ISC was also keen to affirm its scientific character. Under the direction of Condliffe such affirmations were translated into a precise formula: a report of the ISC’s work submitted to the Twenty First Plenary Session of the ICIC in 1939, the last session of its kind, stated that it proceeded ‘by the study of reality, by the verification of facts and of their underlying significance.’226 That said, the ISC’s frequent and solemn affirmations of its scientific attitude throughout most of its life are probably best seen as reflections of a felt-need to assert the intellectual respectability of what was being undertaken in the conference’s name. In this regard, it can be contrasted with the IPR, which, under the influence of Condliffe, sought from the outset to develop a ‘scientific method in international relations,’ through integrating the ‘methods of the natural sciences’ in regard to research with the ‘psychological processes of discussion.’227 The affirmations of the ISC’s scientific character are also telling of the ISC’s connection with Intellectual Cooperation at the LON: the vaunted apolitical status of the LON’s intellectual cooperation organisation

225 Kolasa,

International Intellectual Cooperation, 109. Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, Report of the Twenty First Plenary Session, 1939, quoted in Kolasa, International Intellectual Cooperation, 109. 227 ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Bruno Lasker and William L. Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific 1931: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Hangchow and Shanghai, China, October 21 to November 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 530–32. This handbook was prepared by Condliffe. 226 International

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certainly informed the functioning of the ISC, this status neatly intersecting with the ISC’s posture of scientific impartiality. This helps explain why the ISC, like Intellectual Cooperation, tolerated in is midst individuals representing states which scorned the Geneva system and trampled on the principles which underpinned it. I say helps, because such toleration was also a function of the hope entertained by some ISC members, that the ISC could serve as an instrument of pacification, most especially in relation to Hitler’s Germany. This hope explains Toynbee’s determined efforts to renew collaboration between German scholars and the ISC following Germany’s withdrawal from the LON in 1933 and the liquidation of the German unit of the ISC as a consequence of that withdrawal. As a result of those efforts, Berber participated in the ISC’s 1935 study meeting on collective security in 1935 and its study meetings on peaceful change in 1936 and 1937. At the same time, the fact that Berber was present at those study meetings and that he was in contact with the ISC, whether in the form of Toynbee, its secretariat in Paris or its rapporteurs, over a period of more than five years, would indicate that Berber and his patron, namely, Ribbentrop, saw the ISC as a useful tool for the purpose of promoting what they saw as German interests.228 Unfortunately for those members of the ISC who entertained the ambition of developing a theoretical or scientific framework for the peaceful resolution of international problems, controversies such as those it addressed at its study meetings on peaceful change could not be resolved on the intellectual plane. This would seem to have been well

228 Vagts points out that Berber was ‘probably the last person to be employed by the Reich in connection with international institutions’ and notes that ‘he slipped across the border into Switzerland late in the war to become the German representative to the International Red Cross.’ He adds that although Berber’s ‘role in Switzerland is subject to various interpretations,…it is clear he was involved in last minute maneuvers of leading Nazis to try to soften their fall in exchange for better treatment of Hitler’s victims.’ Vagts, ‘International Law in the Third Reich,’ 675. Based on the reflections of historians of the Hamburg Institute for Foreign Policy and an actual encounter with an elderly Berber in Cambridge, MA in 1990, Vagts offers the following assessment of Berber: He was ‘an almost picaresque character, skipping from post to post in a troubled time and doing what the powers wanted, without taking them wholly seriously….He never plunged into the anti-Semitism that shamed [Carl] Schmitt; nor did he betray old friends as Schmitt did. Indeed, he seems to have indulged in various protective kindnesses along the way’ (ibid., 685).

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understood within the context of the ISC by the time its study meeting in Paris in 1937 reached its dispirited conclusion. Yet even while the international system was collapsing around it, the ISC persisted in its efforts to throw light on international problems and find ways of organising international peace. At its study meetings in Prague and Bergen in 1938 and 1939 respectively, the ISC discussed why it was imperative to create mechanisms that would ensure that the masses enjoyed a better and more gracious way of living in the future, thereby anticipating a paramount feature of the discussions concerning post-war reconstruction that were soon to burst forth. True to its origins within the framework of Intellectual Cooperation and reflecting an awareness that at some point all must begin again, the ISC’s report on its work to the ICIC’s twentyfirst plenary session in 1939 concluded with the following crisp pronouncement: ‘in view of the complexity of modern life, the need to place the power of thought at the service of world relations, its capacity for discovery and foresight is daily more clearly evident.’229

229 International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, Report of Its Twenty-First Plenary Session, 1939, quoted in Kolasa, International Intellectual Cooperation, 109.

Index

A Abbot, Grace, 294 Acerbo, Giacomo, 297 Acheson, Dean, 368 Ackroyd, Wallace Ruddell, 293 Adams, Vyvyan, 176 Akami, Tomoko, 67–70, 376 Almeida, Miguel Ozório de, 353, 355, 371, 431 Aloisi, Pompeo, 15 Alvarez, Àlejandro, 262, 263 Amery, Leopold S., 146, 147, 167 Anatola, Esko, 348, 349 André, Charles, 269 Angell, Norman, 87, 232–234, 329 Angus, Henry Forbes, 70–72, 142, 316 Antonescu, Ion, 264 Antonescu, Mihai A., 264–266 Antonescu, Victor, 302, 303 Appadorai, Arjun, 480 Archibald, Gail, 413 Arita, Hachirō, 321, 326, 327 Armstrong, E. F., 414

Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, 202 Arnold, Sydney, 217, 219, 227 Arnold-Forster, William, 233 Astor, Nancy, 36 Astor, Waldorf, 379 Astor, Waldorf, 2nd Viscount Astor, 36, 295, 298, 299, 334, 442 Atatürk, Mustapha Kemal, 344 Atonescu, Victor, 303 Attlee, Clement, 408 Avenol, Joseph, 51, 112, 269, 310, 312, 313, 355, 448 Awad, Mahomed Bey, 463 Aykroyd, Wallace Ruddell, 291–293 Ayske, Kabayama, 423 B Bailey, Stanley Hartnoll, 51, 258, 259, 341, 477 Baldoni, Claudio, 142, 143 Baldwin, Stanley, 21, 36, 39, 176, 273 Balfour, Arthur, 446 Baranowski, Shelley, 148, 173

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part Three, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31827-7

499

500  Index Barcia Trelles, Augusto, 47 Barth, Volker, 110 Bartlett, Vernon, 210, 212 Baudin, Louis, 280–282 Bauer, H. W., 166 Beckmann, Max, 123 Belshaw, Horace, 389 Beneš, Edvard, 257, 335 Berber, Fritz (Friedrich), 28–31, 35, 38, 39, 43–45, 53–55, 129, 169, 180–191, 196, 197, 207, 247, 248, 251, 252, 271–275, 342, 343, 357, 359, 360, 362, 363, 496 Bergson, Henri, 2, 3, 6, 206, 207, 417 Bernard, Léon, 290 Beveridge, William, 270 Bevin, Ernest, 91 Bidault, Georges, 428–430 Birchall, Frederick T., 15–17 Birn, Donald S., 90, 91, 334, 336 Birnham, K. E., 480 Blakeslee, George H., 165 Blum, Léon, 94–96, 105, 109, 112, 228, 410 Boháč, Antonin, 257 Boncourt, Thibaud, 414 Bonnard, Pierre, 98 Bonnet, Henri, 29–31, 40, 41, 47, 57, 59, 60, 63, 93, 125, 129, 130, 181–183, 240, 241, 243, 247, 252, 254–256, 261, 262, 270, 271, 273, 284, 351, 355–361, 371, 407, 410, 424, 425, 427, 433, 441, 443, 447 Bouglé, Célestin, 243, 248, 258, 259 Boulter, Veronica M., 37 Bourdelle, Antoine, 96, 103, 104 Bourgeois, Léon, 429 Bourquin, Maurice, 35, 40, 41, 52, 53, 127, 129, 130, 137–139, 194, 245, 252, 264, 310, 446

Boyd Orr, John, 292, 293 Boyer, Paul, 494 Braque, Georges, 98 Brewin, Christopher, 339 Briand, Aristide, 61, 62, 104, 105, 114, 145 Brinkmann, Carl, 153, 247, 271 Broderson, Arvid, 463 Bruce, Stanley Melbourne, 292, 295, 296, 298, 300, 302–313 Bruns, Viktor, 358, 359 Bryan, William Jennings, 62 Buell, Raymond Leslie, 127, 128 Bulwer-Lytton, Victor, 2nd Earl of Lytton, 63, 81, 82, 129, 139, 165, 190, 191, 196, 197, 220, 403 Bunche, Ralph J., 396 Buñuel, Luis, 109 Burnet, Étienne, 291 Butler, Harold, 310 Butler, Richard Austen (Rab), 22, 405 C Cachin, Marcel, 92 Cain, Julien, 432 Calder, Alexander, 110 Carr, Edward Hallett, 329, 330, 337– 339, 341, 342, 344, 345, 476 Carter, Edward C., 49, 67, 68, 70, 316, 318–320, 372, 373, 397, 398, 449, 450, 455 Carter, William Horsfall, 151 Casanova, G., 480 Cassin, René, 403, 406, 411, 427, 464, 465, 488, 489 Cassou, Jean, 96 Catastini, Vito, 130, 142, 143 Cecil, David, 193, 225 Cecil, Robert, 82, 87, 91, 92, 112, 346, 402

Index

Chalmers Wright, Fergus, 19, 40–42, 135–138, 158, 170, 171, 180, 361, 459, 492 Chalupný, Emanuel, 260 Chamberlain, Austen, 145, 152, 298, 331 Chamberlain, Joseph P., 61–63 Chamberlain, Neville, 155, 227, 228, 230, 274, 335, 336, 339–343, 347 Chandler, Arthur, 103, 104 Chapsal, Fernand, 95, 110, 111 Charléty, Sébastien, 139, 165 Chautemps, Camille, 228 Chauvel, Jean, 430 Chevallier, Jean-Jacques, 480, 481 Christophersen, Halfdan Olaus, 30, 42, 131, 182–184, 442, 445 Churchill, Winston, 90, 91, 195–197, 229, 230, 232, 233, 298, 313, 334, 336, 379, 381, 382, 385, 386, 398 Ciano, Galeazzo, 269 Claudel, Paul, 104 Cleeve, Margaret E., 43, 442, 459, 492 Cobden, Richard, 280 Cogniat, Raymond, 99 Cohen, William B., 109 Condliffe, John Bell, 49, 64, 66, 130, 243–250, 267, 268, 276–279, 282, 300, 316, 357, 360, 450, 492, 495 Conklin, Alice L., 102 Cooper, Barry, 252, 254 Coppola, Francesco, 207, 332 Corbett, Percy E., 392, 393 Cot, Pierre, 87, 94, 112 Cowell, F. R., 406, 408, 415–417 Crane, R. T., 461 Cripps, Stafford, 381, 386 Cromie, Leonard J., 131

  501

Crossley, Anthony, 218 Crozier, Andrew, 32, 33, 35, 39 Crozier, William Percival, 212 Cruttwell, C. R. M. F., 209 Cullum, Jerry, 97, 98 D Dagen, Philippe, 96, 97 Daladier, Ḗdouard, 347 Dalton, Hugh, 91 Dantas, Júlio, 431 Davies, David, 90, 112, 330 Davis, Malcolm W., 54, 125, 127, 131, 183, 232, 235–237, 245, 248, 253, 358, 363, 372, 432, 441–443, 445, 448–450, 452, 461, 466, 472, 493 Davis, McPherson Paschall, 36 Davis, Norman H., 36 Dean, Vera Micheles, 242 DeBenedetti, Charles, 287 De Blonay, André, 452, 462, 463, 467 De Gaulle, Charles, 361, 380 Delaunay, Robert, 100 Delaunay, Sonia, 100 Delbos, Yvon, 228 De Michelis, Giuseppe, 297 Dennery, Étienne, 63–66, 129, 130, 243, 245, 316, 407, 444 Desnos, Robert, 102, 105 Dieckhoff, Hans, 39 Dietrich, Bruno, 131, 254, 256 Dix, Otto, 123 Djordjević, J., 480 Dorival, Bernard, 96 Douglas-Hamilton, James, 273 Drummond, Eric, 50, 130, 300 Dubin, Martin D., 310, 313 Duff Cooper, Alfred, 429, 430 Dufour-Feronce, Albert, 40 Dufy, Raoul, 98, 101

502  Index Duguit, Léon, 264 Duhamel, Georges, 120, 121 Dulles, Allen W., 12, 208, 237, 332, 456 Dulles, John Foster, 202–209, 239, 240, 285 Dunn, Frederick Sherwood, 143, 202 Durozol, Gérard, 98, 99 Duverger, Maurice, 484 E Eagleton, Clyde, 285 Earle, Edward Mead, 443, 479 Eden, Anthony, 20, 21, 36, 39, 175, 176, 192 Eggleston, F. W., 72, 73 Eichelberger, Clark, 285 Einstein, Albert, 261 Elzinga, Aant, 422 Emanuel III, King Vittorio, 142 Emeny, Brooks, 267 Epp, Franz Ritter von, 149, 178, 195 Escholier, Raymond B., 98 Escudero, Julio, 262, 263 F Fakhry Pacha, Mahmoud Hussein, 352 Fassbender, Bardo, 181, 187 Fassbender, Bruno, 182, 187, 271 Febvre, Lucien, 439, 440 Fenwick, Charles G., 285 Ferenczi, Imre, 142 Fleckner, Uwe, 123 Fosdick, Raymond, 373 Fox, William T. R., 476–480 Franco, Francisco, 110 François-Ponçet, André, 177, 179 Freud, Sigmund, 261

Freytagh-Loringhoven, Axel von, 157, 194 Frisch, Hartvig, 269 G Garcia Calderon, Francisco, 355, 431 Gascón y Marín, José, 45–47 Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert (Viscount Cranborne), 176 Gathorne-Hardy, G. M., 16 Gay, Peter, 149, 150 Geouffre de La Pradelle, Albert de, 131 Gerig, Benjamin, 125, 126 Gillet, Louis, 97 Gilson, Étienne, 438 Giuliano, Balbino, 118–120, 269 Gleditsch, Ellen, 431 Goebbels, Joseph, 29, 122, 141, 157, 189, 195, 226 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 117, 120, 161 Goodwin, Geoffrey L., 480, 486 Gordon, Alexander, 150 Göring, Hermann, 174 Greene, Katherine R. G., 472 Grey, Egerton, 290 Grimm, Hans, 149 Gross, Leo, 40–42, 46, 127, 131, 135–137, 183, 246, 247, 251, 252, 254–256, 282, 361 Grosz, George, 123 Guedella, Philip, 35 Gupta, Shanti, 454 Gusti, Dimitrie, 54, 136 H Hailey, Malcolm, 383, 384 Halifax, 1st Earl of, 227–229 Hambro, Carl J., 310 Harbeler, Gottfried, 253

Index

Harmsworth, Harold, 1st Viscount Rothermere, 18 Hata, Shunroku, 327 Haynes, Rebecca, 303 Heilperin, Michael A., 279–281 Henderson, Arthur, 22 Henderson, Neville, 177, 179 Herriot, Ḗdouard, 15, 87, 112, 115, 116, 118, 201, 352, 429, 432 Hirst, Arthur, 151 Hitler, Adolf, 34, 36–39, 43, 90, 123, 152, 153, 155, 157, 171, 172, 178, 179, 182, 185, 192, 204, 212, 213, 215–217, 219, 224, 226–228, 235, 271, 274, 313, 317, 336, 339, 340, 342, 345, 396, 423, 434, 461, 496 Hoare, Samuel, 7–9, 12–21, 23, 144, 158, 179, 192, 223 Hodeir, Catherine, 108 Hodža, Milan, 256, 335 Holcombe, Arthur N., 255 Holland, William L., 57, 64, 67, 69, 84, 85, 315–317, 320, 325, 326, 328, 373–375, 390, 396–398, 449–451, 457, 493 House, Edward M., 161–163, 315 Hrozny, Bedrich, 431 Hugenberg, Alfred, 154 Huizinga, Johan, 119, 353, 355, 431, 433, 434 Hull, Cordell, 306, 309, 327 Hunke, Heinrich, 280 Hurst, Cecil, 198 Hu Shih, 408 Hussein, Taha, 431 Huxley, Julian, 408, 412–416, 418, 420, 421, 452, 462 J Jackson, Oliver, 41, 137, 361

  503

Jessup, Philip C., 11, 202, 285, 315, 316, 318, 319, 332 Johnson, Richard A., 406, 414 Jones, Thomas, 35, 36 Josepson, Harold, 288 Jouhoux, Léon, 87, 94 Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 37, 43 Joxe, Louis, 407 Junyk, Ihor, 107 K Kandinsky, Vasily, 98, 122 Kan, Joseph van, 49, 50, 58 Keenleyside, Hugh L., 397 Kellogg, Frank B., 62, 211, 288 Kelsen, Hans, 131, 264, 361, 455 Kenworthy, Joseph, 10th Baron Strabolgi, 194 Kerr, Philip. See Lothian, 11th Marquess of Keyserling, Hermann, 433, 434 Kinzer, Stephen, 206, 208, 209 Kirk, Grayson, 454, 458, 476 Kittredge, Tracey B., 127, 242–244, 246–248, 251–256 Kiyusawa, Retsu K., 266, 267 Klee, Paul, 123 Kofmans, Jan, 265 Kohn, Hans, 330, 342, 343, 345 Kolasa, Jan, 422 Konoe, Fumimaro Prince, 163, 164, 321, 327 Kopelmanas, Lazare, 460 Krauel, Wolfgang, 359, 360 Kroft, Kamil, 257 Kuhn, Ferdinand, 18, 19 L Labbé, Edmond, 111 Labouret, Henri, 191, 199

504  Index Ladoué, Pierre, 96 Lajti, Étienne, 362 Lange, Christian L., 129, 139, 243 Lasker, Bruno, 64, 67, 70 Laurent, Jean, 65 Laval, Pierre, 7, 8, 15, 16 Layton, Eleanor, 36 Layton, Walter, 36 Lebrun, Albert, 102 Léger, Fernand, 98 Leith, Charles K., 241 Lemberger, Ernest (Ernst), 456, 457 Lemoine, Bertrand, 100, 106–108 Léon, Paul, 118 Leopold III, King, 308 Lester, Séan, 311, 448 Lévy, Roger, 63, 65, 66, 451, 454, 455 Lippmann, Walter, 162, 202, 328 Li Yu-ying (Li Shizeng), 89, 90, 362, 363, 423, 425, 431 Lloyd George, David, 112 Locker-Lampson, Godfrey, 145 Long, David, 487, 492 Lorwin, Lewis L., 125, 130 Lothian, 11th Marquess of, 36 Loveday, Alexander, 130, 299–301, 311–314, 365, 390 Luchaire, Julien, 418 Lugard, Frederick, 157, 192–194, 196, 197, 211, 215 Luther, Martin, 161 Lyttelton, Edward, 335 M Macadam, Ivison S., 6, 35, 42, 129, 357, 442 Macleish, Archibald, 408 Madariaga, Salvador de, 92, 121, 122, 330, 331 Madgearu, Virgil, 456 Maillol, Aristide, 98

Mair, Lucy P., 134 Mandel, George, 102 Manning, Charles Anthony Woodward, 26, 50–52, 132–134, 138, 153, 213, 442, 459, 469–472, 475, 476, 478–482, 486, 487, 491 Mann, Thomas, 419 Mantoux, Paul, 131, 243, 455, 490 Markwell, D. J., 417 Maroger, Gilbert, 144, 148, 149, 152, 156, 157, 169, 179, 180 Marshall, T. H., 487, 488 Martinez de Velasco, José, 45, 46 Masaharu, Anezsaki, 121 Masaryk, Jan, 403 Matisse, Henri, 98 Matsuoka, Yōsuke, 327 Maud, John, 415 Max, Alfred R., 41, 137 May, Herbert L., 125, 130 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 411, 419, 421, 427–431, 434–438, 440–446, 448, 449, 451–453, 457–459, 461–464, 468, 493 Mazuy, Rachel, 87, 92 McDougall, Frank Lidgett, 292, 293, 295, 297, 298, 301, 302, 306, 357, 364, 367–369 McNeill, William H., 5, 6, 34, 37, 39, 338, 339 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Albrecht, 28 Menghin, Oswald, 252 Meston, James Scorgie, 213 Milhaud, Darius, 104, 105 Milhaud, Madeleine, 105 Millot, Jacques, 102 Miró, Joan, 110 Mises, Ludwig von, 131, 455 Mistral, Gabriela, 353–355, 440 Mitchell, Kate L., 57, 67–69, 72, 84, 85, 325–328 Mitrany, David, 201, 442, 472

Index

Mitter, Brojendra al, 275 Moderow, Walter, 448 Monnet, Georges, 105 Monnet, Henri, 105 Montague, Frederick, 48, 218 Montenach, Jean-Daniel de, 130 Moore, Harriet, 57 Moresco, Emanuel, 195, 197, 199, 232, 283, 284 Morgan, Laura Puffer, 125, 130 Morgenthau, Hans J., 489–491, 494 Morley, Felix, 83, 125, 130, 373 Moutet, Marius, 212, 216 Mukhina, Vera, 103, 104 Murray, Gilbert, 6, 10, 117–119, 210–212, 239, 334–336, 355, 402, 404, 408, 421, 431, 438, 439 Mussolini, Benito, 7, 16, 142, 143, 189, 204, 269, 313, 396, 425 N Nash, Walter, 377 Nečas, Jaromir, 256 Needham, Joseph, 412, 413, 418, 421 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 398 Neurath, Konstantin von, 39, 177, 179 Nicholson, Harold, 213–215, 217–219, 221, 225, 226 Noailles, Charles de, 105 Noel-Baker, Philip, 87, 446, 447 Noel-Buxton, Noel Edward, 193, 210, 212, 218, 227 O O’Brien, John B., 292 Ocampo, Victoria, 431 Ojetti, Ugo, 120 Oprescu, George, 122 Ory, Pascal, 96, 98, 106

  505

P Painlevé, Paul, 59 Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi, 398 Papen, Franz von, 154 Parker, Robert John, 343 Paterson, Ada, 294 Paul-Boncour, Joseph, 15, 94 Pavolini, Alessandro, 120, 121 Perham, Margery, 220–227, 382, 383 Pernot, Maurice, 454, 460, 461, 469 Peukert, Dettev J.K., 150 Piatier, André, 444 Picasso, Pablo, 97, 98, 105, 109, 110 Pickersgill, J. W., 78 Pilotti, Massimo, 118 Poincaré, Raymond, 65 Politis, Nikolaos, 265 Portevin, Jeanne-Marie, 122, 124 Potter, Pitman B., 126, 284, 285, 356–360, 441, 442, 449, 453 Predöhl, Andreas, 271 Price, George Ward, 143, 155 Primanis, Martin, 431 Pugh, Michael, 91 Pyke, Richard, 57 Q Qadir, Abdul, 431 R Rajchmann, Ludwik, 292, 293 Rappard, Alfred, 442 Rappard, William E., 127, 129, 131, 280, 356, 461, 479 Ratzel, Friedrich, 149 Remarque, Erich Maria, 150 Remer, Carl F., 261, 284 Renoliet, Jean-Jacques, 117, 352, 353, 363, 372, 406, 428, 429 Renvers, Dorothea von, 180, 181, 183, 184

506  Index Reynold, Gonzague de, 431 Reynolds, Paul A., 471, 472 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 28, 30, 38, 39, 43–45, 179, 180, 182, 272–274, 362 Richardson, Henry L., 200 Rist, Charles, 124, 310 Rivet, Paul, 94 Rivoirard, Philippe, 94, 113, 114 Rixon, Alec T., 270 Robbins, Lionel, 281 Robertson, Malcolm, 217, 219, 405 Robson, William A., 485–487 Rocco, Alfredo, 118 Rogge, Heinrich, 156, 172 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 368 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 306, 353, 366, 368, 369, 379, 391, 478 Rosenberg, Alfred, 153, 216 Roszkowski, Wojciech, 265 Russell, Claud, 217 Russell, Frank M., 331 S Saiki, Tadasu, 289 Saladraigas Zayas, Carlos, 370 Salter, James Arthur, 26, 27, 279 Samuel, Herbert, 9 Sarraut, Albert, 59, 65, 70, 73, 102, 138, 139, 196, 197 Satō, Junzo, 56 Satō, Naotako, 142 Scelle, Georges, 357, 447, 460, 463–465 Schacht, Hjalmar, 109, 145, 149, 158–168, 171–180, 208 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 106 Schlunk, Martin, 196 Schmitt, Carl, 187 Schnee, Heinrich, 146, 147, 155 Schrieke, Bertram J. O., 198–200

Schumann, Frederick L., 346–349 Schwitters, Kurt, 123 Scroggs, William O., 240, 241 Seabury, Paul, 43 Sedoux, Roger, 452 Seni Pramoj, Mom Rajawongse, 374 Sert, Josep Lluis, 109 Sewell, James P., 418, 421 Seydoux, Roger, 466 Sharp, Walter R., 482, 483 Shidehara, Kijūrō, 82 Shiels, Thomas Drummond, 199–201, 219–221 Shotwell, James T., 54, 59–63, 126, 183, 241, 258, 285–288, 372, 431, 477 Simon, John, 231 Simopoulos, Charalambos, 403 Sinclair, Archibald, 231 Smith, Woodruff D., 149 Soby, James Thrall, 110 Sofronie, George, 136, 264–266 Solo, Dominique, 56 Soong, T. V. (Song Ziwen), 19, 377, 378 Speer, Albert, 103, 104 Spengler, Oswald, 1 Sprout, Harold, 479, 480 Spykman, Nicholas, 479 Staley, Eugene, 190, 198, 199, 285 Steed, Wickham, 150, 151, 219, 335 Steinig, Leon, 261, 262 Stewart, Frederick, 294 Stiebling, Hazel, 292 Stimson, Henry L., 80, 82, 85, 205 Stoppani, Pietro, 130 Stresseman, Gustave, 145, 148 Suárez, Francisco, 47 Sumner Welles, Benjamin, 478 Sweetser, Arthur, 130, 310 Sze, Alfred Sao-ke, 377, 378

Index

T Tachi, Sakutarō, 56 Tagore, Rabindranath, 438, 439 Takagi, Yasaka, 317 Tanaka, Kōtarō, 56 Tarr, Edgar J., 318 Tasca, Henry J., 282 Teleki, Pál, 243, 431 Tennant, Ernest, 273, 274 Titulescu, Nicolae, 431 Tojo, Hideki, 327 Tollardo, Elisabetta, 118 Torres Bodet, Jaime, 408, 474, 475, 483, 484 Touzet, André, 65, 148 Toye, John, 416 Toye, Richard, 416 Toynbee, Arnold J., 1–11, 24–40, 42, 58, 133, 134, 153, 211–213, 224, 234, 243, 329, 338, 339, 442, 445, 496 Troll, Carl, 169, 170 Tudela, Francisco, 310 V Vagts, Detlev F., 358, 359, 496 Valéry, Paul, 107, 116, 118, 371, 419 Vandenberg, Arthur, 328 Van Zeeland, Paul, 21–23, 306, 308 Vayo, Alvarez del, 93 Verdross, Alfred von, 131, 252 Vernant, Jacques, 452, 467–469, 472, 474, 480–482, 488 Verzijl, J. H. W., 131 Vito, Francisco, 356, 357, 488, 489 Vitray, Laura, 451 Vittoria, Francisco de, 47, 56 Vlădescu-Răcoasa, Gheorge (Georges Vladesco-Rocoassa), 47, 53, 54 Voegelin, Eric, 243, 251–256 Vranek, Jiri F., 41, 247, 361, 442, 445, 449–452, 462

  507

Vranek, Lillian F., 41 Vulcan, Constantin, 455, 456 W Waelder, Robert, 260–262 Walker Linares, Francisco, 370, 371 Walker, Sydnor H., 132, 239, 240, 242, 243 Wallace, Henry Agard, 368 Walters, Frank P., 300, 307–310, 313, 364, 365 Ware, Edith E., 258, 259 Watt, Donald Cameron, 338 Way, Wendy, 22, 302, 306, 367 Webster, Charles K., 11, 34, 35, 55, 56, 58, 132, 134, 234, 243, 349, 459, 465, 466 Wedgewood, Josiah, 23, 24 Weinberg, Gerhard L., 172, 176, 178 Welles, Benjamin Sumner, 368 Westermann, Diedrich, 169 Whitton, John Boardman, 125, 127– 130, 144, 183, 247, 253, 261 Wilkie, Wendell, 382, 383 Wilkinson, Ellen, 413–415 Willits, John H., 364 Wilson, Howard E., 452, 463 Wilson, Peter, 329 Wilson, Woodrow, 161–163, 186, 214, 315 Winant, John G., 310, 365 Winter, Jay, 109 Wolfers, Arnold, 479 Wood, Bryce Marian, 160, 171, 172, 176, 191, 209, 216, 229 Woodham, Jonathan M., 104, 108 Woolf, Leonard, 341, 342 Wright, Carl Major, 131 Wright, Quincy, 79–81, 83–85, 131, 186–188, 198, 199, 285, 340, 485, 486 Wu Zhihui (Wu Shi-Fee), 89, 431

508  Index Y Yanguas Messía, José de, 49, 50 Yehia, M. A., 480 Yonai, Mitsumasa, 325–327 Yoshida, Zengo, 327 Yoshizaka, Shunzo, 141 Young, Carl Walter, 165 Z Zaleski, August, 403 Zay, Jean, 102, 135

Zimmern, Alfred E., 10, 48, 51, 56, 57, 140, 234, 243, 249, 251, 257, 329, 341, 343–345, 349, 357, 408, 415–418, 428, 430, 442, 452, 454, 462, 479, 490, 494 Zimmern, Lucie, 415, 416