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

As a result of the failure of the Permanent Advisory Commission, the Assembly of the League set up a Temporary Mixed Commission on which only six of twenty-eight members were officers of the armed services. This body attacked the problem of disarmament by the indirect method, seeking to achieve security before asking anyone to disarm. The Draft Treaty of Mutual Guarantee (1922) and the Geneva Protocol (1924) emerged from this commission. Both of these were, as we have said, vetoed by Britain, so that the disarmament portions of the negotiations were never reached. The achievement of the Locarno Pacts, however, provided, in the minds of many, the necessary security to allow a return to the direct method. Accordingly, a Preparatory Commission to the World Disarmament Conference was set up in 1926 to make a draft agreement which was to be completed at a World Disarmament Conference meeting at Geneva in 1932.

The Preparatory Commission had delegates from all the important countries of the world, including the defeated Powers and the chief nonmembers of the League. It held six sessions over three years and drew up three drafts. In general, it encountered the same difficulties as the Permanent Advisory Committee. This latter group, acting as a subcommittee of the Preparatory Commission, used up 3,750,000 sheets of paper in less than six months but still was not able to find answers to the same questions which had baffled it earlier. The chief problems arose from political disputes, chiefly between Britain and France. These two countries produced separate drafts which diverged on almost every point. The French wanted war potential counted but wanted trained reserves of men excluded from limitation; the British wanted war potential excluded but wanted to count trained reserves; the French wanted supervision by a permanent commission to enforce fulfillment of any agreement, while the Anglo-Americans refused all supervision. Eventually a draft was prepared by including all divergences in parallel columns.

The Preparatory Commission lost more than one full session in denouncing the disarmament suggestions of Litvinoff, the Soviet representative. His first draft, providing for immediate and complete disarmament of every country, was denounced by all. A substitute draft, providing that the most heavily armed states would disarm by 50 percent, the less heavily armed by 33 percent, the lightly armed by 25 percent, and the “disarmed” by o percent, with all tanks, airplanes, gas, and heavy artillery completely prohibited, was also rejected without discussion, and Litvinoff was beseeched by the chairman of the commission to show a more “constructive spirit” in the future. After an impressive display of such constructive spirit by other countries, a Draft Convention was drawn up and accepted by a vote which found only Germany and the Soviet Union in the negative (December 1930).

The World Disarmament Conference which considered this draft was in preparation for six years (1926-1932) and was in session for three years (February 1932 to April 1935), yet it achieved nothing notable in the way of disarmament. It was supported by a tremendous wave of public opinion, but the attitudes of the various governments were becoming steadily less favorable. The Japanese were already attacking China; the French and Germans were deadlocked in a violent controversy, the former insisting on security and the latter on arms equality; and the world depression was growing steadily worse, with several governments coming to believe that only a policy of government spending (including spending on arms) could provide the purchasing power needed for economic revival. Once again, the French desire for an international police force was rebuffed, although supported by seventeen states; the British desire to outlaw certain “aggressive” armaments (like gas, submarines, and bombing planes) was rejected by the French, although accepted by thirty states (including the Soviet Union and Italy).

Discussion of these issues was made increasingly difficult by the growing demands of the Germans. When Hitler came to office in January 1933, he demanded immediate equality with France, at least in “defensive” arms. This was refused, and Germany left the conference.

Although Britain tried, for a time, to act as an intermediary between Germany and the Disarmament Conference, nothing came of this, and the conference eventually dispersed. France would make no concessions in regard to armaments unless she obtained increased security, and this was shown to be impossible when Britain, on February 3, 1933 (just four days after Hitler came to office), publicly refused to make any commitments to France beyond membership in the League and the Locarno Pacts. In view of the verbal ambiguities of these documents and the fact that Germany withdrew from both the League and the Disarmament Conference in October 1933, these offered little security to France. The German budget, released in March 1934, showed an appropriation of 210 million marks for the air force (which was forbidden entirely by Versailles) and an increase from 345 million to 574 million marks in the appropriation for the army. A majority of the delegates wished to shift the attention of the Disarmament Conference from disarmament to questions of security, but this was blocked by a group of seven states led by Britain. Disarmament ceased to be a practical issue after 1934, and attention should have been shifted to questions of security. Unfortunately, public opinion, especially in the democratic countries, remained favorable to disarmament and even to pacifism, in Britain until 1938 at least and in the United States until 1940. This gave the aggressor countries, like Japan, Italy, and Germany, an advantage out of all proportion to their real strength. The rearmament efforts of Italy and Germany were by no means great, and the successful aggressions of these countries after 1934 were a result of the lack of will rather than of the lack of strength of the democratic states.

The total failure of the disarmament efforts of 1919-1935 and the Anglo-American feeling that these efforts handicapped them later in their conflicts with Hitler and Japan have combined to make most people impatient with the history of disarmament. It seems a remote and mistaken topic. That it may well be; nevertheless, it has profound lessons today, especially on the relationships among the military, economic, political, and psychological aspects of our lives. It is perfectly clear today that the French and their allies (especially Czechoslovakia) were correct in their insistence that security must precede disarmament and that disarmament agreements must be enforced by inspection rather than by “good faith.” That France was correct in these matters as well as in its insistence that the forces of aggression were still alive in Germany, although lying low, is now admitted by all and is supported by all the evidence. Moreover, the Anglo-Americans adopted French emphasis on the priority of security and the need for inspection in their own disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union in the early 1960’s. The French idea that political questions (including military) are more fundamental than economic considerations is now also accepted, even in the United States, which opposed it most vigorously in the 1920’s and early i93o’s. The fact that the secure states could have made errors such as these in that earlier period reveals much about the nature of human thinking, especially its proclivity to regard necessities as unimportant when they are present (like oxygen, food, or security), but to think of nothing else when they are lacking.

Closely related to all this, and another example of the blindness of experts (even in their own areas), is the disastrous influence which economic, and especially financial, considerations played in security, especially rearmament, in the Long Armistice of 1919-1939. This had a double aspect. On the one hand, balanced budgets were given priority over armaments; on the other hand, once it was recognized that security was in acute danger, financial considerations were ruthlessly subordinated to rearmament, giving rise to an economic boom which showed clearly what might have been achieved earlier if financial consideration had been subordinated to the world’s economic and social needs earlier; such action would have provided prosperity and rising standards of living which might have made rearming unnecessary.