Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The last counter circle was that against Czechoslovakia. Hungary on the Czechoslovak southern frontier and Germany on its northwestern frontier were both opposed to Czechoslovakia as an “artificial” creation of the Versailles Conference. The German annexation of Austria in March 1938 closed the gap in the anti-Czech circle on the west, while the aggressive designs of Poland after 1932 completed the circle everywhere except on the insignificant Romanian frontier in the extreme east. Although the Czechs offered the Poles a treaty and even a military alliance on three occasions, in 1932-1933, they were ignored, and the Polish-German agreement of January 1934 opened a campaign of vilification of Czechoslovakia by Poland which continued, parallel to the similar German campaign, until the Polish invasion of Czechoslovakia in October 1938.

Of these three countercircles to Barthou’s efforts to encircle Germany, the most significant by far was the encirclement of France which alone made the other two possible. In this encirclement of France the most important factor, without which it could never have been achieved, was the encouragement of Britain. Accordingly, we must say a word about the motivations of Britain and the reactions of France.

Any analysis of the motivations of Britain in 1938-1939 is bound to be difficult because different people had different motives, motives changed in the course of time, the motives of the government were clearly not the same as the motives of the people, and in no country has secrecy and anonymity been carried so far or been so well preserved as in Britain. In general, motives become vaguer and less secret as we move our attention from the innermost circles of the government outward. As if we were looking at the layers of an onion, we may discern four points of view: (1) the anti-Bolsheviks at the center, (2) the “three-bloc-world” supporters close to the center, (3) the supporters of “appeasement,” and (4) the “peace at any price” group in a peripheral position. The “anti-Bolsheviks,” who were also anti-French, were extremely important from 1919 to 1926, but then decreased to little more than a lunatic fringe, rising again in numbers and influence after 1934 to dominate the real policy of the government in 1939. In the earlier period the chief figures in this group were Lord Curzon, Lord D’Abernon, and General Smuts. They did what they could to destroy reparations, permit German rearmament, and tear down what they called “French militarism.”

This point of view was supported by the second group, which was known in those days as the Round Table Group, and came later to be called, somewhat inaccurately, the Cliveden Set, after the country estate of Lord and Lady Astor. It included Lord Milner, Leopold Amery, and Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), as well as Lord Lothian, Smuts, Lord Astor, Lord Brand (brother-in-law of Lady Astor and managing director of Lazard Brothers, the international bankers), Lionel Curtis, Geoffrey Dawson (editor of The Times), and their associates. This group wielded great influence because it controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London, The Observer, the influential and highly anonymous quarterly review known as The Round Table (founded in 1910 with money supplied by Sir Abe Bailey and the Rhodes Trust, and with Lothian as editor), and it dominated the Royal Institute of International Affairs, called “Chatham House” (of which Sir Abe Bailey and the Astors were the chief financial supporters, while Lionel Curtis was the actual founder), the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and All Souls College, Oxford. This Round Table Group formed the core of the three-bloc-world supporters, and differed from the anti-Bolsheviks like D’Abernon in that they sought to contain the Soviet Union between a German-dominated Europe and an English-speaking bloc rather than to destroy it as the anti-Bolsheviks wanted. Relationships between the two groups were very close and friendly, and some people, like Smuts, were in both.

The anti-Bolsheviks, including D’Abernon, Smuts, Sir John Simon, and H. A. L. Fisher (Warden of All Souls College), were willing to go to any extreme to tear down France and build up Germany. Their point of view can be found in many places, and most emphatically in a letter of August 11, 1920, from D’Abernon to Sir Maurice (later Lord) Hankey, a protégé of Lord Esher who wielded great influence in the interwar period as secretary to the Cabinet and secretary to almost every international conference on reparations from Genoa (1922) to Lausanne (1932). D’Abernon advocated a secret alliance of Britain “with the German military leaders in cooperating against the Soviet.” As ambassador of Great Britain in Berlin in 1920-1926, D’Abernon carried on this policy and blocked all efforts by the Disarmament Commission to disarm, or even inspect, Germany (according to Brigadier J. H. Morgan of the commission).

The point of view of this group was presented by General Smuts in a speech of October 23, 1923 (made after luncheon with H. A. L. Fisher). From these two groups came the Dawes Plan and the Locarno pacts. It was Smuts, according to Stresemann, who first suggested the Locarno policy, and it was D’Abernon who became its chief supporter. H. A. L. Fisher and John Simon in the House of Commons, and Lothian, Dawson, and their friends on The Round Table and on The Times prepared the ground among the British governing class for both the Dawes Plan and Locarno as early as 1923 (The Round Table for March 1923; the speeches of Fisher and Simon in the House of Commons on February 19, 1923, Fisher’s speech of March 6th and Simon’s speech of March 13th in the same place, The Round Table for June 1923; and Smuts’s speech of October 23rd).

The more moderate Round Table group, including Lionel Curtis, Leopold Amery (who was the shadow of Lord Milner), Lord Lothian, Lord Brand, and Lord Astor, sought to weaken the League of Nations and destroy all possibility of collective security in order to strengthen Germany in respect to both France and the Soviet Union, and above all to free Britain from Europe in order to build up an “Atlantic bloc” of Great Britain, the British Dominions, and the United States. They prepared the way for this “Union” through the Rhodes Scholarship organization (of which Lord Milner was the head in 1905-1925 and Lord Lothian was secretary in 1925-1940), through the Round Table groups (which had been set up in the United States, India, and the British Dominions in 1910-1917), through the Chatham House organization, which set up Royal Institutes of International Affairs in all the dominions and a Council on Foreign Relations in New York, as well as through “Unofficial Commonwealth Relations Conferences” held irregularly, and the Institutes of Pacific Relations set up in various countries as autonomous branches of the Royal Institutes of International Affairs. This influential group sought to change the League of Nations from an instrument of collective security to an international conference center for “non-political” matters like drug control or international postal services, to rebuild Germany as a buffer against the Soviet Union and a counterpoise to France, and to build up an Atlantic bloc of Britain, the Dominions, the United States, and, if possible, the Scandinavian countries.

One of the effusions of this group was the project called Union Now, and later Union Now with Great Britain, propagated in the United States in 1938-1945 by Clarence Streit on behalf of Lord Lothian and the Rhodes Trust. Ultimately, the inner circle of this group arrived at the idea of the “three-bloc world.” It was believed that this system could force Germany to keep the peace (after it absorbed Europe) because it would be squeezed between the Atlantic bloc and the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union could be forced to keep the peace because it would be squeezed between Japan and Germany. This plan would work only if Germany and the Soviet Union could be brought into contact with each other by abandoning to Germany Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Polish Corridor. This became the aim of both the anti-Bolsheviks and the three-bloc people from the early part of 1937 to the end of 1939 (or even early 1940). These two cooperated and dominated the government in that period. They split in the period 1939-1940, with the “three-bloc” people, like Amery, Lord Halifax, and Lord Lothian, becoming increasingly anti-German, while the anti-Bolshevik crowd, like Chamberlain, Horace Wilson, and John Simon, tried to adopt a policy based on a declared but unfought war against Germany combined with an undeclared fighting war against the Soviet Union. The split between these two groups appeared openly in public and led to Chamberlain’s fall from office when Amery cried to Chamberlain, across the floor of the House of Commons, on May 10, 1940, “In the name of God, go!”