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

The Locarno Pacts and the admission of Germany into the League also alarmed the Soviet Union. This country from 1917 had had a feeling of insecurity and isolation which at times assumed the dimensions of mania. For this, there was some justification. Subject to the attacks of propaganda, diplomatic, economic, and even military action, the Soviet Union had struggled for survival for years. By the end of 1921, most of the invading armies had withdrawn (except the Japanese), but Russia continued in isolation and in fear of a worldwide anti-Bolshevik alliance. Germany, at the time, was in similar isolation. The two outcast Powers drifted together and sealed their friendship by a treaty signed at Rapallo in April 1922. This agreement caused great alarm in western Europe, since a union of German technology and organizing ability with Soviet manpower and raw materials would make it impossible to enforce the Treaty of Versailles and might expose much of Europe or even the world to the triumph of Bolshevism. Such a union of Germany and Soviet Russia remained the chief nightmare of much of western Europe from 1919 to 1939. On this last date it was brought into existence by the actions of these same western Powers.

In order to assuage Russia’s alarm at Locarno, Stresemann signed a commercial treaty with Russia, promised to obtain a special position for Germany within the League so that it could block any passage of troops as sanctions of the League against Russia, and signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union (April 1926). The Soviet Union, in its turn, as a result of Locarno signed a treaty of friendship and neutrality with Turkey in which the latter country was practically barred from entering the League.

The “Locarno spirit,” as it came to be called, gave rise to a feeling of optimism, at least in the western countries. In this favorable atmosphere, on the tenth anniversary of America’s entry into the World War, Briand, the foreign minister of France, suggested that the United States and France renounce the use of war between the two countries. This was extended by Frank B. Kellogg, the American secretary of state, into a multilateral agreement by which all countries could “renounce the use of war as an instrument of national policy.” France agreed to this extension only after a reservation that the rights of self-defense and of prior obligations were not weakened. The British government reserved certain areas, notably in the Middle East, where it wished to be able to wage wars which could not be termed self-defense in a strict sense. The United States also made a reservation preserving its right to make war under the Monroe Doctrine. None of these reservations was included in the text of the Kellogg-Briand Pact itself, and the British reservation was rejected by Canada, Ireland, Russia, Egypt, and Persia. The net result was that only aggressive war was renounced.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) was a weak and rather hypocritical document and advanced further toward the destruction of international law as it had existed in 1900. We have seen that the First World War did much to destroy the legal distinctions between belligerents and neutrals and between combatants and noncombatants. The Kellogg-Briand Pact took one of the first steps toward destroying the legal distinction between war and peace, since the Powers, having renounced the use of war, began to wage wars without declaring them, as was done by Japan in China in 1937, by Italy in Spain in 1936-1939, and by everyone in Korea in 1950.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed by fifteen nations which were invited to do so, while forty-eight nations were invited to adhere to its terms. Ultimately, sixty-four nations (all those invited except Argentina and Brazil) signed the pact. The Soviet Union was not invited to sign but only to adhere. It was, however, so enthusiastic about the pact that it was the first country of either group to ratify and, when several months passed with no ratifications by the original signers, it attempted to put the terms of the pact into effect in eastern Europe by a separate agreement. Known as the Litvinoff Protocol after the Soviet foreign minister, this agreement was signed by nine countries (Russia, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Lithuania, Turkey, Danzig, and Persia, but not by Finland, which refused), although Poland had no diplomatic relations with Lithuania and the Soviet Union had none with Romania.

The Litvinoff Protocol was one of the first concrete evidences of a shift in Soviet foreign policy which occurred about 1927-1928. Previously, Russia had refused to cooperate with any system of collective security or disarmament on the grounds that these were just “capitalistic tricks.” It had regarded foreign relations as a kind of jungle competition and had directed its own foreign policy toward efforts to foment domestic disturbances and revolution in other countries of the world. This was based on the belief that these other Powers were constantly conspiring among themselves to attack the Soviet Union. To the Russians, internal revolution within these countries seemed a kind of self-defense, while the animosity of these countries seemed to them to be a defense against the Soviet plans for world revolution, In 1927 there came a shift in Soviet policy: “world revolution” was replaced by a policy of “Communism in a single country” and a growing support for collective security. This new policy continued for more than a decade and was based on the belief that Communism in a single country could best be secured within a system of collective security. Emphasis on this last point increased after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and reached its peak in the so-called “Popular Front” movement of 1935-1937.

The Kellogg Pact gave rise to a proliferation of efforts to establish peaceful methods for settling international disputes. A “General Act for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes” was accepted by twenty-three states and came into force in August 1929. About a hundred bilateral agreements for the same purpose were signed in the five years 1924-1929, compared to a dozen or so in the five years 1919-1924. A codification of international law was begun in 1927 and continued for several years, but no portions of it ever came into force because of insufficient ratifications.

The outlawry of war and the establishment of peaceful procedures for settling disputes were relatively meaningless unless some sanctions could be established to compel the use of peaceful methods. Efforts in this direction were nullified by the reluctance of Britain to commit itself to the use of force against some unspecified country at some indefinite date or to allow the establishment of an international police force for this purpose. Even a modest step in this direction in the form of an international agreement providing financial assistance for any state which was a victim of aggression, a suggestion first made by Finland, was destroyed by a British amendment that it was not to go into effect until the achievement of a general disarmament agreement. This reluctance to use sanctions against aggression came to the forefront in the fall of 1931 at the time of the Japanese attack on Manchuria. As a result the “peace structure” based on Versailles, which had been extended by so many well-intended, if usually misdirected, efforts for twelve years, began a process of disintegration which destroyed it completely in eight years (1931-1939).

Disarmament, 1919-1935

The failure to achieve a workable system of collective security in the period 1919-1931 prevented the achievement of any system of general disarmament in the same period. Obviously, countries which feel insecure are not going to disarm. This point, however obvious, was lost on the English-speaking countries, and the disarmament efforts of the whole period 1919-1935 were weakened by the failure of these countries to see this point and their insistence that disarmament must precede security rather than follow it. Thus disarmament efforts, while continuous in this period (in accordance with the promise made to the Germans in 1919), were stultified by disagreements between the “pacifists” and the “realists” on procedural matters. The “pacifists,” including the English-speaking nations, argued that armaments cause wars and insecurity and that the proper way to disarm is simply to disarm. They advocated a “direct” or “technical” approach to the problem, and believed that armaments could be measured and reduced by direct international agreement. The “realists,” on the other hand, including most of the countries in Europe, led by France and the Little Entente, argued that armaments are caused by war and the fear of war and that the proper way to disarm is to make nations secure. They advocated an “indirect” or “political” approach to the problem, and believed that once security had been achieved disarmament would present no problem.