The British people and the League of Nations

Democracy, citizenship and internationalism, c .1918–45

Helen McCarthy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847798015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

In the decades following Europe's first total war, millions of British men and women looked to the League of Nations as the symbol and guardian of a new world order based on international co-operation. Founded in 1919 to preserve peace between its member-states, the League inspired a rich, participatory culture of political protest, popular education and civic ritual which found expression through the establishment of voluntary societies in dozens of countries across Europe and beyond. Embodied in the hugely popular League of Nations Union, this pro-League movement touched Britain in profound ways. Foremost amongst the League societies, the Union became one of Britain's largest voluntary associations and a powerful advocate of democratic accountability and popular engagement in the making of foreign policy. Based on extensive archival research, The British people and the League of Nations offers a vivid account of this popular League consciousness and in so doing reveals the vibrant character of associational life between the wars.

1
The League of Nations, public opinion and the New Diplomacy

The Democratic Spirit may be relied upon if the democratic mind is sufficiently informed. (Lord Robert Cecil, 1920)¹

In short, the Union believes that the problem of maintaining world peace is mainly a problem of education. (Report on the Work of the LNU, 1921)²

In the official history rushed out by the LNU in summer 1935, its author justified the Peace Ballot as a unique exercise which had, for the first time, made knowable the will of the people on vital questions of foreign policy. ‘If our democracy is a true democracy,’ the book observed, ‘John Smith and Mary Brown, and the sum of their opinions, are the things that matter. They are the rock upon which the fabric of our Government is based. Upon their response all advance ultimately depends.’³ By invoking public opinion in this manner, the LNU pressed into service a technique much used – and, arguably, abused – by politicians, reformers and social critics since the late eighteenth century.⁴ To claim that one spoke for the people seemed a fast-track route to legitimacy, yet it naturally invited dissent and debate. Who exactly constituted ‘public opinion’, how its content and direction were to be gauged, and what proper place it should occupy within the processes of representative government, were questions which punctuated debates about franchise reform, the influence of the press and the role of extra-parliamentary movements in Britain throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵ As universal education and extensions of the franchise enlarged the body of citizens who could be said to comprise the ‘public’, so did public opinion become ever more urgent a factor in electoral politics and apparently ever more unknowable. Even with the advent of ‘scientific’ opinion polling from the late 1930s, understandings of public opinion remained highly contested, as an entity with no stable referent but upon which, under conditions of democracy, the fortunes of parties, governments, states and even empires turned.

There were few areas of policy in the twentieth century where the verdict of public opinion was more anxiously anticipated, nervously second-guessed and fiercely contested than foreign affairs. Decisions made in this sphere of government potentially entailed committing the nation to war, arguably the ultimate expression of a state’s coercive powers over its citizens. Although popular sentiment had factored in decision-making from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, it was only in the later nineteenth century, with the rise of the daily press and its exploitation by radical pressure groups, that public opinion found substantial scope for vocalisation on international issues.⁶ The years 1914 to 1918 marked another turning point, when success appeared to rest for the first time upon the mobilisation of whole populations, and upon the skilful deployment by the state of the new art of ‘propaganda’.⁷ Early blueprints for the League reflected the growing conviction that the experience of total war, together with the toppling of autocratic regimes in its wake, would transform the conduct of foreign policy; as the Philimore Committee – established by Cecil at the Foreign Office to consider schemes for international government – put it in July 1918:

At a moment when the forms and spirit of popular government are acquiring a noticeable accretion of strength in every direction, and when the vast majority of those who have to fight are not only voters but civilians by profession and inclination, it is becoming an article of faith widely and sincerely professed in most countries that there is no quarrel between nations for which an equitable settlement could not be found without recourse to war, provided the voice of the people could make itself heard, and the necessary machinery were called into existence.⁸

The LNU shared this view that the advent of universal suffrage offered the potential for a far-reaching democratisation of foreign policy in Britain as elsewhere. The pressure exerted by an informed and mobilised ‘League opinion’, its members believed, would eventually prove irresistible even to the most recalcitrant of governments, and international co-operation would become the keynote of British foreign policy.

This model of influence through an educated public opinion, as this chapter explores, met with considerable success in the 1920s, but the movement’s faith in voters’ readiness to absorb complex ideas, alongside its belief in the power of public opinion to dictate to government, became harder to sustain over the course of the 1930s. This stemmed in part from the repeated failings of the League itself, in part from the collapse of democratic government across large parts of continental Europe, and in part from increasing pessimism about the effects of the ‘mass society’ upon the quality of public debate. These tensions reached a climax during the Peace Ballot; this event became a battleground upon which supporters vigorously defended their optimistic vision of public opinion from critics who viewed the LNU’s experiment in deliberative democracy as a reckless intervention in a highly sensitive area of government. The extraordinary levels of participation appeared to prove the detractors wrong. Yet the fact that many League supporters shared their objections, together with subsequent fluctuations in the public response to Mussolini’s incursion into Abyssinia in late 1935, revealed just how contested the category of ‘public opinion’ remained within democratic discourse and what limited progress the movement had made in establishing it as the new motor of British foreign policy.

The League and the New Diplomacy

In focusing on the power of public opinion, the LNU took its cue from the institution to which it owed its very existence. Despite the absences – forced and unforced – of Germany, Russia and the USA, LNU supporters held fast to the belief that the League of Nations offered the potential for a wholly new kind of diplomacy rooted in openness and trust.⁹ Cecil remarked upon the contrast he sensed between the upbeat mood of the first League Assembly and the strained torpor of the Paris Conference in a letter to Jan Smuts, the South African premier. At the latter, he wrote, ‘one felt a pervading atmosphere of contest... The exact reverse was true at Geneva. The general tendency was towards co-operation for a common object, and it was only by way of exception that national interests became dominant.’¹⁰ Murray drew a similar lesson at the Assembly the following year: ‘You did get an expression of the common feeling of 48 nations; you got them sometimes talking round a table in Committee and really co-operating in serious work. You got an atmosphere of openness and friendliness … It would have been totally impossible for anyone to stand up in that Assembly and make a jingo speech.’¹¹

For both men, the magic ingredient was publicity. In its ideal form, the League method rejected the secrecy and horse-trading bedevilling diplomacy before the War and substituted in their place structures which allowed for rigorous public scrutiny and for the pressures of opinion outside Geneva to be felt by elites within. As Cecil explained to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, in 1926: ‘One of the chief principles on which the success of the League depends is that the general public opinion of the world is in favour of peace, and that in international difficulties an appeal shall be made to this opinion.’¹² This spirit of transparency, famously enunciated in the first of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, was written into the League’s constitution through Article 18 of the Covenant, which insisted on the registration and publication of all international treaties entered into by member states.¹³ It was also built into the League’s institutional design, which invited pressmen into the galleries at Assembly meetings, and welcomed feminist campaigners, social reformers, intellectuals and ‘experts’ on to the various commissions and conferences sitting at Geneva throughout the year.¹⁴ These groups were further aided by access to reports of League activities and the minutes of its various sessions through a well-resourced Information Section.¹⁵

These non-state actors, LNU leaders believed, were the real lifeblood of the League, ensuring Geneva’s place as ‘a rallying-point for the forces of peace’ rather than a mere playground for political elites.¹⁶ ‘Kings and emperors, statesmen and diplomats, victorious generals and admirals who formerly made the great political changes are now almost powerless to secure the world against war,’ remarked an editorial in Headway in 1930. Today, that task fell to ‘ordinary people who are convinced that it needs doing, and who combine to create a sentiment of world loyalty and a clear understanding that the interest of any one nation can only be served by serving at the same time the interests of the whole international community’.¹⁷ The LNU counted itself, and kindred League Societies elsewhere, as providing a crucial link between the League and those ‘ordinary people’, in whom they saw the raw materials of an active international public opinion. An anonymous ‘Covenanter’ outlined the purpose of the League Societies in an early LNU publication:

They will serve both as the interpreter of the League outwards to the peoples, and of the peoples inwards to the League. They must explain the purposes of the League on the one hand, and the desires of the people on the other. They will form the great channel of communication both ways, the connecting link between an organised international society and the various bodies of opinion which go to make up that society.¹⁸

Murray, addressing the LNU’s General Council in 1932, argued the same line: ‘Everything now for the future of the world depends upon public opinion,’ he told the delegates, ‘and it is on the voluntary societies existing in all the nations of Europe, like the League of Nations Union in this country, that public opinion really rests and is built up.’¹⁹

This model of a League assured of success through the agency of public opinion contained a further assumption, namely that in democracies governments ignored the expressed will of the people at their peril. Again, the War offered a ready explanation for this shift in the balance of power between government and the governed. It became commonplace for LNU speakers to assert the undemocratic nature of the system which had dragged men, as Murray put it, ‘into a quarrel which they neither made, nor desired, nor understood’, and subjected them to ‘the very extremity of human suffering, while those at whose will they fight for the most part contemplate the battles from a distance or else sit at home in glory’.²⁰ War by diktat from above was impossible now that the peoples had woken up both to the horrors of modern warfare and the protections offered by parli...