Instead of leaving it to the hypocritical phrase-mongers to deceive the people by phrases and promises concerning the possibility of a democratic peace, socialists must explain to the masses the impossibility of anything resembling a democratic peace, unless there are a series of revolutions and unless a revolutionary struggle is waged in every country against the
respective government.
~ Vladimir Lenin,
The Question of Peace
There is a historical debate to be had as to whether the World Disarmament Conference ever had any practical chance of success however few would deny it was an admirable endeavour.
Notions of world peace can be traced back to the Bible and even further, however the concerns of the conference were practical. The three primary concerns were to identify which weapons were hazardous to world peace, how stocks of these weapons could be limited or eliminated altogether and, most importantly, how the powers involved could be ensured of their security without such weapons. It was on this basis the conference went forward and one can credit Lloyd George’s second ministry with a heartfelt attempt in finding an outcome to these issues.
The British delegation was led by Anthony Eden, the Conservative turned Action Foreign Secretary who took to the challenges of the conference with a vigour his new party purported to espouse. Eden had witnessed first hand the horrors of the trenches in the First World War and was determined not to see that nightmare repeat itself. Alongside his junior LIberal counterpart at the foreign office, Herbert Samuel, the case was made for an approach of ‘principle and realism’. This would include the United States joining the League of Nations and with that a more standardised League approach to conflict resolution which would be the arbiter of disputes in a demilitarised world. The recent cases of League arbitration in regards to the German Civil War and the Austro-Italian war were presented as examples of what this model could look like.
Although these incidents were meant to be the precedents for this new international framework they were not objectively seen as good outcomes. Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister alleged that Italy had been previously mistreated in simply trying to administer their responsibility as a regional power to curb Communist aggression and was wary that such bias would continue on any collective forum which contained “Marxist” voices. In effect he was calling for the German and Soviet delegations to be excluded before any work could be done, effectively making the conference one of determining anti-Socialist collective security.
The French delegation led by Louis Barthou were not unsympathetic to the Italian view. They argued that Germany had been rewarded for aggression and as such any form of collective security which prevented a powerful French military could be exploited by the Germans in the future. The leader of the German delegation, Hermann Muller, attempted to reason with Barthou by pointing out that Germany needed international arbitration to solve its problems and that cooperative attitudes should not be seen as threatening. Eden’s agreement with Muller in this regard seemed to only further aggravate the French delegation who aired suspicions of being colluded against. Ciano was happy to join in with these accusations.
The conference was thus already at an impasse due to these issues, even before concrete news began to arrive of the events in North-Eastern China. What had previously been dismissed as increased bandit activity in the area now transpired to be large numbers of Japanese and Soviet military personnel occupying the Manchurian region to the south and north respectively. Despite the protests of the Chinese delegation and the attempts of Eden and Samuel to use the crisis as an opportunity to apply the new framework they had been proposing, they met a brick wall in the form of the Japanese and Soviet delegations. Both denied any knowledge of what was happening, then denied any evidence to the contrary and eventually blamed each other.
The Japanese delegation now pulled out of the conference, principally in opposition to what they saw as Soviet aggression but also because the crisis had caused their own government to fall. The leader of the delegation, Count Uchida Kosai, had to be informed he was no longer the Foreign Minister whilst still in Geneva.
Attempts were made to encourage the Soviets to desist, or at least to continue the dialogue but the Soviet delegation, led by Alexandra Kollontai, had also had enough. Departing without ceremony she would later give a statement declaring that whilst the international working class wished for nothing more than world peace it was clear that the conference had become about the means of maintaining imperialism.
Whilst Kollontai could be described to be as fanatical as Adolf Hitler, her statement underlined the theme of the developing global conflict within Comintern circles. There could be no peace whilst capitalist states existed, other than that of the grave.
With the exit of the Japanese and Soviet delegations the conference was no longer able to deal with the sort of crisis it was meant to provide an answer to. The Chinese delegation, led by Dr. H. H. Kung, had to sit by with the realisation those responsible for the crisis were now no longer committed to any sort of solution. Whilst Chinese troops were forced to retreat from their own territory in the face of foreign aggression, the incident had made a mockery of the continuing dialogue. The final blow would come with the exit of the American delegation led by Henry Stimson. Like his Japanese counterpart it had become clear Stimson would soon no longer be Secretary of State.
With the defeat of President Hoover in the 1932 Presidential election the conference had lost one of its most enthusiastic supporters. Although the President-elect, Franklin Roosevelt had made it clear he was sympathetic to the conference’s aims he had stressed that his urgent domestic agenda meant that the United States could not consider joining the League of Nations to be a priority. The Conference had wound up before his inauguration in March 1933, by which time Germany also had a new Chancellor.
The failure of the British delegation was denounced back home as a damning of the government’s foreign policy by the Tory opposition. It provoked another attempt at the removal of the government by a vote of no confidence. Similar to the debacle over the Land Value Tax, the Action-Liberal government would survive but their vision of a better world had indeed fallen by the wayside.
By 1936 the government would be propelled into electoral success amidst the King’s Election where, having established their link to the people ,they undertook rearmament with an energy that called for a younger man. Lloyd George would retire in favour of such a fellow before the Second World War had broken out.
Perhaps by the beginning of 1933 it was clear already that the failure of the conference marked the failure of the liberal internationalism and pacifism that had arisen out of the horrors of the First World War. In its place lay the road ahead for the final collision of the classes.
It would not be long before Lenin’s Global Civil War triumphed over Lloyd George’s dreams of international harmony.
~ Prof. James Brown,
British Papers on the Second World War
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The painting is
Impossible Love by Marc Brunet
