The Story of International Relations, Part Two

Cold-Blooded Idealists

Jo-Anne Pemberton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030218232
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030218249
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is the second volume in a trilogy that traces the development of the academic subject of International Relations, or what was often referred to in the interwar years as International Studies. In this volume, the author begins with the 1932 Mission to China and conference in Milan, examines the International Studies Conference, reviews the Hoover Plan, the MacDonald Plan, the fate of the World Disarmament Conference, and the League of Nations' role in the discipline. This one of a kind project takes on the task of reviewing the development of IR, aptly published in celebration of the discipline's centenary. ?

© The Author(s) 2019

J.-A. PembertonThe Story of International Relations, Part TwoPalgrave Studies in International Relationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21824-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. 1932: Material and Moral Disarmament, a Mission to China and a Conference in Milan

Jo-Anne Pemberton¹

(1)

School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Jo-Anne Pemberton

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Sanctions Before Disarmament: The French Position and Its Critics

In the view of French policy-makers, the defiance of the Covenant of the League of Nations (LON) in the form of the occupation of Manchuria by Japanese forces during the last quarter of 1931 and thereby on the very eve of the LON’s Conference for the Limitation and Reduction of Armaments (Disarmament Conference), only served to reinforce the ‘well-known French thesis’ that there can be no disarmament unless means are found to replace national forces.¹ The French insistence on this thesis meant that France was singled out for much criticism before and during the Disarmament Conference. For example, in an address at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London in October 1931, V. A. G. R. Bulwer-Lytton the 2nd Earl of Lytton stated that while ‘year after year’ Germany had been the ‘great protagonist of disarmament,’ the French had increasingly adopted an ‘obstructive and immovable attitude’ towards it. A delegate of Great Britain at the Twelfth Assembly of the LON in September 1931, Lytton observed that whereas alongside other nations Britain had stood for disarmament, the French had ‘stood for security.’ He noted in relation to this that a German delegate at the Twelfth Assembly had remarked in contemptuous tones following a speech by the French foreign minister Aristide Briand that one only had to ‘pinch the French bird and he…utters “Security”.’²

Lytton told his audience that the behaviour of the French delegates at the assembly that year was ‘in many ways deplorable,’ however, he warned that there was a ‘great danger’ in the British tendency to dismiss the French as ‘perfectly impossible’ and urged that an effort should be made to understand their point of view.³ Lytton suggested that a means of overcoming the impasse between the French demands for security and the push by other states for disarmament might be found in a proposal put by the Spanish delegate Salvador de Madariaga at the Twelfth Assembly. As an alternative to the International Police Force (IPF) that France had advocated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and of which Joseph Paul-Boncour had on occasion spoken in favour as a French delegate to the LON, Madariaga proposed that should an outbreak of violence occur, states would combine forces to put an end to the fight.⁴ He contended that while mutual protection was as necessary to states as it was to individuals, its practice in the international arena had been greatly hindered by the policy of ‘neutrality towards war.’⁵ Madariaga argued that given that the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy (Pact of Paris) of 1928 had declared that the use of force is no longer an acceptable means of imposing one state’s will on another and denied that war is a right of states, it was incumbent upon those states which had signed this pact to put an end to any outbreaks of violence: in his view, the pact entailed that there can be no such thing as the ‘rights of neutrals.’⁶

In relation to Madariaga’s proposal, Lytton stated that it did not involve states agreeing, as the French had proposed they should, on a definition of the aggressor, such that states would be obliged to enter a dispute on the side of one state or another. Rather, Madariaga’s proposal, which Lytton emphasised did not involve any derogation from the ‘full sovereign rights and powers and…full discretion’ of states, simply stipulated that those engaged in violent quarrels should be pulled apart: the rights and wrongs of the matter could be resolved once the violence had been curtailed. Lytton expressed the hope that should any situation arise, states would meet and ‘decide in conference what each was prepared to do to maintain the peace of the world.’ Lytton suggested that such an approach might satisfy states such as Britain which were wary of entering into obligations in advance and those states demanding security guarantees.⁷

The French position in relation to the nexus between security and disarmament was a central feature of an address by Otto Hoetzsch at the RIIA on 17 November. Hoetzsch was a noted expert in Russian history at the University of Berlin where he lectured in foreign policy and Russian and Eastern European history and a member of faculty at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (German Political Academy or German Academy of Political Science) in Berlin where he taught courses in international politics. He chaired and was a founding member of the German coordinating committee for international studies, that is, the Committee for Foreign Affairs (Ausschuss für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten). The Committee for Foreign Affairs would become the German unit of the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations (CISSIR), an association which was established following an international meeting of experts interested in the study of international relations. This meeting was held at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (DHP) in March 1928 and was attended by Hoetzsch along with other members of the Committee for Foreign Affairs. As the RIIA was the host organisation of the CISSIR’s British unit, that is, the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies (BCCIS), the institutional link between Hoetzsch and the RIIA should be clear. Hoetzsch’s address had been arranged in light of the adoption by the CISSIR, which was soon to be renamed the International Studies Conference (ISC), of a proposal issued by Arnold J. Toynbee, director of studies at the RIIA, for an exchange of speakers on disarmament in the period just prior to the opening of the Disarmament Conference. At a conference in Copenhagen in June 1931, Toynbee had told members of the CISSIR that he thought such an exchange would help facilitate comprehension of the different national points of view on the question of disarmament. For this reason, Toynbee probably would have been pleased to see that Hoetzsch’s address garnered some publicity. For example, a version of it was later published in the Spectator under the heading of ‘Germany and Disarmament.’⁸

In his address, Hoetzsch expressed support for the LON and for the Pact of Paris or what Hoetzsch preferred to refer to as the Kellogg Pact after one of its two principal sponsors: the former American secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg. The probable reason why Hoetzsch preferred to label the pact in this way, a practice common among American commentators, was because he ascribed its creation to the United States alone. In his address at the RIIA, he declared that the pact was ‘the work of the first Great Power in the world’ and that it fulfilled the ‘demand of the movement for outlawry of war’ without denying to states the ‘right of self-help and the right of self-defence.’ Having thus lauded the Pact of Paris, Hoetzsch noted that its practical application was being sorely tested by the Sino-Japanese dispute.⁹

Hoetzsch observed that states ‘represent a society of moral personalities’ and that therefore their relations must be ‘governed according to the laws of justice and morality.’ Such a requirement, he added, in no measure diminished the ‘independence and the sovereignty’ of states. To the contrary he stated, drawing on Georg Hegel’s notion that states receive their ultimate legitimation through reciprocal recognition, it is only on the basis of participating in a society of moral personalities that the ‘real essence’ of the state, that is, its ‘moral spirit,’ can become an ‘organic reality.’¹⁰ Turning to the German demands in relation to the question of disarmament, Hoetzsch stated that the German view was that a ‘just solution’ based on the principle of ‘equality of right’ required that disarmament must be undertaken ‘by all states on the same basis and by the same methods.’¹¹ He claimed that the French and German positions on the question were ‘irreconcilable’: the staggered French approach to disarmament, that is, the French demand for security first, arbitration second and disarmament third, could not be reconciled with the German insistence that ‘these three be taken as a whole because of their closely connected relationship.’¹² Hoetzsch then echoed a key theme of the lectures he had given on Germany’s domestic and foreign policies at the eighth session of the Institute of Politics at Williamstown in the United States in 1928:

The only way to abolish war is to find means for a peaceful consideration of the conflicts which cause war, and through their settlement through arbitration. This thought must underlie all discussions concerning the attainment of peace. To approach the subject from the principle of war and of military sanctions is an impossible method. War is not averted by preparing for war against war, but by removing the fundamental causes. A system of sanctions would be practical if a settlement of the problem of armaments is reached. Unless this takes place, there will never be League action against a strongly armed State, but only League action by armed States against weaker States.¹³

Essentially, Hoetzsch was arguing that the key to disarmament lay with treaty revision: the League system had to be fl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. 1932: Material and Moral Disarmament, a Mission to China and a Conference in Milan
• 2. The International Studies Conference
• 3. The Hoover Plan, Reparations and the French Constructive Plan
• 4. The MacDonald Plan
• 5. The Fate of the Disarmament Conference
• 6. Collective Security, Air Police and Defining the Aggressor
• 7. The League of Nations and Collective Security
• Back Matter