The Story Of International Relations, Part One: Cold-Blooded Idealists [1st Edition] 3030143317, 9783030143312, 3030143317, 9783030143312

Table of contents :
1. Chapter 1: The League of Nations and the Study of International Relations --
2. Chapter 2: The League of Nations and Origins of the International Studies Conference --
3. Chapter 3: The Paris Peace Conference, Racial Equality and the Shandong Question --
4. Chapter 4: The Quest for a Machinery of Cooperation in the Pacific: The Covenant Rejected, the Washington Conference and the 1924 Exclusion Laws --
5. Chapter 5: The Institute of Pacific Relations 1927-1929 and the Evolution of the International Studies Conference 1928-1930 --
6. Chapter 6: International Studies in 1931: From Copenhagen to Shanghai --
7. Chapter 7: The Lessons of Manchuria.

Citation preview

PSIR · PALGRAVE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The Story of International Relations, Part One Cold-Blooded Idealists

Jo-Anne Pemberton

Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series Editors Mai’a K. Davis Cross Northeastern University Boston, MA, USA Benjamin de Carvalho Norwegian Institute of International Affairs Oslo, Norway Shahar Hameiri University of Queensland St. Lucia, QLD, Australia Knud Erik Jørgensen University of Aarhus Aarhus, Denmark Ole Jacob Sending Norwegian Institute of International Affairs Oslo, Norway Ayşe Zarakol University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Palgrave Studies in International Relations (the EISA book series), published in association with European International Studies Association, provides scholars with the best theoretically-informed scholarship on the global issues of our time. The series includes cutting-edge monographs and edited collections which bridge schools of thought and cross the boundaries of conventional fields of study. EISA members can access a 50% discount to PSIR, the EISA book series, here http://www.eisa-net.org/sitecore/content/be-bruga/mci-­ registrations/eisa/login/landing.aspx. Mai’a K. Davis Cross is the Edward W. Brooke Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. Benjamin de Carvalho is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway. Shahar Hameiri is Associate Professor of International Politics and Associate Director of the Graduate Centre in Governance and International Affairs, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia. Knud Erik Jørgensen is Professor of International Relations at Aarhus University, Denmark, and at Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey. Ole Jacob Sending is the Research Director at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway. Ayşe Zarakol is Reader in International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College, UK. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14619

Jo-Anne Pemberton

The Story of International Relations, Part One Cold-­Blooded Idealists

Jo-Anne Pemberton School of Social Sciences University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia

Palgrave Studies in International Relations ISBN 978-3-030-14330-5    ISBN 978-3-030-14331-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I am considerably indebted to a number of people who have supported me in preparing this manuscript. I thank members of my family: Mark, Sally, Gail and Gregory Pemberton. I also thank Helen Pringle for her support. Many thanks to Peter Carman and Jean-Michel Ageron-Blanc, president and chef d’enterprise respectively, of the Paris American Academy, for their generous assistance during my stays in Paris. I am especially grateful to the following archivists: Jens Bol, Mahmoud Ghander and Steve Nyong. Their help and expertise made it possible for me to access archival records and other materials of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s held in the UNESCO Archives in Paris.

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Contents

1 The League of Nations and the Study of International Relations  1 2 The League of Nations and Origins of the International Studies Conference 71 3 The Paris Peace Conference, Racial Equality and the Shandong Question157 4 The Quest for a Machinery of Cooperation in the Pacific: The Covenant Rejected, the Washington Conference and the 1924 Exclusion Laws241 5 The Institute of Pacific Relations 1927–1929 and the Evolution of the International Studies Conference 1928– 1930315

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Contents

6 International Studies in 1931: From Copenhagen to Shanghai397 7 The Lessons of Manchuria467 Index579

Abbreviations

BCCIS BIIA CFR CISSIR CLON DNVP FPA GIIR GRC IAP ICIC IICI IIIC ILO IPR ISC ISIPR JCIPR LNU LON LSE NSDAP OIC OJ PID RIIA

British Coordinating Committee for International Studies British Institute of International Affairs Council on Foreign Relations Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations Commission of the League of Nations Deutschnationale Volkspartei Foreign Policy Association Geneva Institute of International Relations Geneva Research Center Institut für Auswärtige Politik International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation International Labour Organization Institute of Pacific Relations International Studies Conference International Secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations Japanese Council of the IPR League of Nations Union League of Nations London School of Economics and Political Science National Socialist German Workers’ Party Organisation of Intellectual Cooperation Official Journal (of the League of Nations) Political Intelligence Department Royal Institute of International Affairs ix

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ABBREVIATIONS

SDN UA UIA

Société des Nations UNESCO Archives Union of International Associations

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at the side of the Palais Royal in Paris 2 Fig. 2.1 The signing of the Kellogg Pact by the German Gustav Stresemann. 1928. Place: Paris 71 Fig. 2.2 Kellogg-Briand Pact, with signatures of Gustav Stresemann, Paul Kellogg, Paul Hymans, Aristide Briand, Lord Cushendun, William Lyon Mackenzie King, John McLachlan, Sir Christopher James Parr, Jacobus Stephanus Smit, William Thomas Cosgrave, Count Gaetano Manzoni, Count Uchida, A.  Zaleski, Eduard Benes72 Fig. 3.1 Council of Four at the WWI Paris Peace Conference, May 27, 1919 (candid photo) (L–R): Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Great Britain), Premier Vittorio Orlando (Italy), French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and US President Woodrow Wilson158 Fig. 3.2 Japanese peace delegates in 1919 with Makino Nobuaki 159 Fig. 4.1 The Conference on Limitations of Armaments, Washington 242 Fig. 4.2 The Punahou School in Honolulu where the first conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations took place in 1925 243 Fig. 5.1 Old engraving of the building of the School of Politics (Schinkelsche Bauakademie) 316 Fig. 5.2 International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (League of Nations). Plenary Session in the Palais Wilson, between 1924 and 1927 317

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1

The Chinese delegation addresses the Council of the League of Nations following the Mukden Incident Portrait of the attendees of the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations Lytton Commission in Shanghai, 1932

397 398 468

CHAPTER 1

The League of Nations and the Study of International Relations

International Studies in the Interwar Years This study traces the development of the academic subject of international relations, or what was often referred to in the interwar years as international studies, within the framework of the Organisation of Intellectual Cooperation (OIC) of the League of Nations (LON). In this regard, its focus rests on an institution which came to be known as the International Studies Conference (ISC) and which commenced life at a meeting in Berlin in 1928. The determination to avert another European war and the zeal for international organisation engendered by the creation of the LON were key factors behind the formation of the ISC. Its founders hoped that through furthering the institutional development of the study of international relations, they would help foster mutual comprehension among peoples and help entrench the LON system. Indeed, the aforementioned Berlin meeting was itself intended to serve as an instrument of international rapprochement and as a means of reinforcing the LON. The choice of Berlin as the location for the meeting, which was initiated and organised by the OIC’s Paris-based executive arm, namely, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), must be viewed in light of Germany’s entry into the LON in September 1926 and, more particularly, the desire to further harmonise Franco-German relations. The organisers of the Berlin meeting were acutely aware that in the absence of © The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part One, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2_1

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Fig. 1.1  International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at the side of the Palais Royal in Paris. Source: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication/ Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine

­ ranco-­German rapprochement there could be no assurance of peace and F security in Europe. This study does not claim that the year 1919 marks the birth of international relations as an academic discipline. Courses in the field of international law and diplomatic history had long been offered in academic institutions in Europe and North America. Furthermore, generalist courses on international affairs under such rubrics as Contemporary Politics had been introduced into the curricula of American universities as early as 1900. Yet what needs to be underlined is the fact that almost all of those

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involved in promoting the study of international relations in the interwar years believed that they were engaged in a new intellectual enterprise. This partly explains why this study traces the development of international studies in the period after the end of the Great War or what later became known as the First World War. The other main factor explaining my temporal starting point is the birth of the LON. For the purposes of this study, this organisation is significant in two mutually informing respects. First, the LON was deeply involved in the development of the study of international relations, above all, through its intellectual organs. Second, a prime motivation behind the promotion of such study was the desire to see a hardening of the norms enshrined in the LON Covenant. In this way, the development of the discipline of international relations can be seen as a component of a larger enterprise: it was a feature of the new world order which was proclaimed and which began to be instituted at the end of the First World War. Indeed, the cultivation of the study of international relations was viewed exactly in this light by many of its partisans. It should be emphasised that the ISC was not the first attempt at organising the study of international relations on an international basis. That honour must go to the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a body that resulted from a meeting of representatives of nations bordering the Pacific in mid-1925 in Honolulu and whose membership soon came to include non-Pacific powers with imperial interests in the region. It is important to note that in the official literature produced by the IPR’s international secretariat (ISIPR) in the IPR’s early years, the IPR was far from being represented as a strictly regional organisation. To the contrary, the IPR’s secretariat stressed the point that the Pacific was a crucial arena of world politics and that the IPR was a body engaged in international relations research. In this connection, it is also noteworthy that from 1927 down to 1945, observers from the LON and the International Labour Organization (ILO) attended IPR conferences. This study discusses the IPR at length. A key reason for this concerns the fact that as an international organisation engaged in collaborative research on international problems, the IPR was the principal model for the ISC. Further to this, the IPR served as a yardstick against which the ISC would be measured on various occasions throughout its life. That these two bodies had overlapping memberships and that the IPR was a constant fixture at ISC conferences from 1929 to 1949 are of relevance in this context.

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To the extent that the IPR might be viewed as a largely regional organisation, it cannot be seen as different in kind from the ISC: the members of the latter body were predominantly European, and their eyes were trained mainly on European affairs. In fact, American and Canadian members occasionally criticised the ISC because of its bias towards Europe. To its credit, the ISC sought to rectify this situation. For example, repeated approaches were made by the ISC’s secretariat to Chinese and Japanese institutions in the hope that they would join the conference. These approaches met with a degree of success. Another reason for dwelling on the IPR is that its activities show that concentrated scholarly thinking about international relations both in abstract and in concrete terms was not confined to countries such as France, Great Britain and the United States in the years after 1918. It is true that the institutional development of the study of international relations was most advanced in these three countries at the time, above all, in the United States. Yet insights into the nature and conduct of international relations developed in the interwar period by individuals and groups located outside these centres of power and influence should not be overlooked. Such insights certainly were not overlooked at the time, as evidenced by the very positive international reputation enjoyed by the IPR and the ISC’s ongoing attempts to establish a membership that represented the greater part of the globe. Both the IPR and the ISC served as forums in which the major political controversies of the interwar period were rehearsed. In the case of the IPR, this point largely relates to its conference discussions concerning Chinese efforts to re-establish China’s autonomy and unfolding events in Manchuria. In the case of the ISC, this point largely relates to debates taking place in the years between 1934 and 1937 on the topics of collective security and peaceful change. These debates well demonstrate that the defence of the League system by interwar students of international affairs in the face of the challenges confronting it was generally based on hard-­ headed political calculations. Indeed, partisans of the LON often discussed the conditions giving rise to the political crises of the interwar years in terms ‘as frank as those of any blood-and-iron historian,’ to borrow Frank M. Russell’s description of the analysis of the disarmament question issued by Salvador de Madariaga who headed the Disarmament Section of the LON Secretariat between 1922 and 1928.1 1  Frank M. Russell, Theories of International Relations (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 441–2. Madariaga joined the secretariat in 1921.

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The ISC’s discussions of the topics of collective security and peaceful change are of historical interest because they overlap with the debate concerning appeasement and provide us with further insights into the conceptual environment in which that increasingly polarised debate occurred. What we also obtain from examining these discussions are instructive illustrations of the rhetorical manoeuvres performed on behalf of the Hitler regime with a view to manipulating foreign opinion in its favour. A good example of the above was on display at the 1937 conference of the ISC where a senior Nazi propagandist gave vent to the German grievance about the fact that Germany had been stripped of its colonial possessions under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In the forum of the 1937 conference of the ISC, the same propagandist mounted a detailed argument to the effect that the retrocession of the German colonies was a matter of law and justice, an argument accompanied by a vague hint that should Germany’s former colonies not be returned to Germany, there might be trouble ahead. Of further historical interest in regard to the 1937 conference was the discussion within its framework of what was referred to as the  colonial problem, a discussion which served to further prise open the colonial question in a way favourable to a policy of decolonisation.

The Origins of Intellectual Cooperation My account of the development of the study of international affairs in the years between the First and Second World Wars and in the early post-war period is mostly chronological. Before embarking on this account, I want to elaborate on the origins, institutionalisation and guiding philosophy of the OIC because it was this organisation that provided the institutional and, importantly, the cultural setting in which much of what is discussed in this study takes place. The OIC can be seen as the culminating point of the profusion of activity taking place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in regard to international intellectual cooperation. An inspirational figure in this regard was Léon Bourgeois, an adherent of France’s Radical Party (Parti radical) who emerged as a leading statesman. The degree of ­influence exercised by Bourgeois over many years caused Julien Luchaire, the first director of the IIIC, to describe him as that ‘remarquable pontife de la Troisième République.’2 Of more significance in this context is another 2  Julien Luchaire, Confessions d’un Français moyen, vol. 2, 1914–1950 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1965), 81–2. See also Danielle Wünsch, ‘Einstein et la Commission i­ nternationale

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description that Bourgeois earned: ‘apostle’ of international intellectual cooperation.3 Speaking in his capacity as minister for public instruction in 1891 at a congress of savants, Bourgeois called for the institution of arrangements that would ensure that new discoveries in all those fields into which scientific method had penetrated were ‘systematically dovetailed into the existing body of knowledge.’4 In this context, Bourgeois’s motive was not solely pedagogical: he saw in the systematic integration of scientific knowledge a template for integration in the wider social arena. In a study called Solidarité (1896), Bourgeois sought to ‘establish on the scientific doctrines of natural solidarity a practical doctrine of moral and social solidarity,’ involving ‘a rule specifying the duties and rights of each in the interdependent action of all.’5 Bourgeois gave expression to such a doctrine as the premier French delegate at the Conferences of the Peace at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, where he enunciated the ‘principle of international solidarity,’ the actual and growing ‘solidarity of nations’ and the existence of a ‘véritable Société des nations.’6 Accordingly, the preambles to The Hague Declaration (1899) and The Hague Convention (1907) on the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes affirmed ‘the solidarity which unites the members of the society of civilised nations.’7 Bourgeois, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920, elaborated on the thinking behind and implications of these pronouncements in a work appearing in 1910 entitled Pour la Société des Nations, stating therein that ideas are also facts, or, as people say, forces. We speak of a politique réaliste: it is an incomplete, blind réalisme that does not hold account of ideas in the de coopération intellectuelle,’ Revue d’histoire des sciences 57, no. 2 (2004): 509–20, 510. 3  Charles André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle (Rennes: Imprimerie Provinciale de l’Ouest, 1938), 41. 4  F. C. S. Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations: Its Conceptual Basis and lessons for the present (PhD diss., University of London, 1953), 243. F. C. S. Northedge cites a speech given by Bourgeois at the general session of the Congrès de Sociétés Savantes in Paris, May 27, 1891. See also Léon Bourgeois, Solidarité (Paris: Armand Colin et Cie, 1896), 13–4, classiques.uqac.ca/Cclassiques/bourgeois_leon/solidarite/solidarite.html. 5  Bourgeois, Solidarité, 30. 6  Léon Bourgeois, Pour la Société des Nations (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1910), 106, 167, 259. Emphasis added. See also Wünsch, ‘Einstein et la Commission internationale de coopération intellectuelle,’ 510–1. 7  Bourgeois, Pour la Société des Nations, 48.

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estimation of the apparent facts and in the calculations of the active forces … [P]ublic opinion acts each day more powerfully on the direction of general affairs and this opinion is more and more directed itself by two growing forces: one of the moral order, the increasing respect for the life of the human person; the other of the material order, the ever tightening economic solidarity of nations. These two forces tend to the same end: respect for the law and the maintenance of peace.8

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an increasing number of international congresses of an intellectual character.9 A very important institution in this regard was the Union of International Associations (UIA), which was established in 1910 at what the UIA later described as the ‘First World Congress’ and in which 132 non-­governmental international organisations participated. The key figures behind this congress were two Belgians, namely, Henri La Fontaine and Paul Otlet, both of whom had spent the previous two decades seeking to organise knowledge along the lines suggested by Bourgeois.10 Obtaining a membership comprised of 230 unofficial international associations by 1914 and in receipt of the support of the Belgian government and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the stated purpose of the UIA consisted in ‘the elaboration of a world organization, founded on law, scientific progress and technique, and on the free representation of out the common interests of humanity.’11 It is thus not surprising that after the war the UIA emerged, as stated by Sir Eric Drummond, the LON’s first secretary-­general, as one of the staunchest supporters of the LON, a draft covenant for which the UIA had prepared before the war’s end.12 Indeed,

 Ibid., 23–4. Emphasis added.  Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 241–2. 10  Union des Associations Internationales, Publication no. 98, August 1921, quoted ibid., 248. On role of La Fontaine and Otlet, see Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 244. 11  Mémoire de Secrétaire Général de la Société des Nations sur l’activité educative et l’organisation du travail intellectuel accomplies par l’Union des Associations internationals, 1921, quoted in Pham Thi-Tu, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations (Paris: Librairie Minard, 1962), 13. On the support given by the Belgian government and the Carnegie Endowment for the UIA, see Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée: La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 13. 12  Jan Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation: The League Experience and the Beginnings of UNESCO (Wroclaw: Zaclad Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1962), 18. 8 9

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the UIA was described by contemporary students of the LON as ‘one of the chief pioneers of the idea of a League of Nations.’13 On February 5, 1919, the UIA presented a petition to the Peace Conference in Paris which called for the covenant of the proposed LON to include a charter for ‘Intellectual and Moral interests.’14 Although this petition had little impact, the Belgian government submitted to the Peace Conference on March 24, 1919, an amendment to the covenant to the effect that it would provide for an international committee on intellectual relations in order to promote the ‘development of moral, scientific and artistic international relations among diverse peoples and promote, by every means, the formation of an international spirit.’15 As this proposal also failed to elicit much enthusiasm, it was withdrawn by the Belgian delegate, namely, Paul Hymans, in the conference’s commission on the LON ‘without discussion.’16 There are a number of explanations for the lack of interest in such proposals. For example, H. R. G. Greaves, in his 1931 study of the committees of the LON, pointed to a desire on the part of certain delegates to the peace conference to not complicate the covenant with ‘unnecessary matter.’ As the conference proceeded, a view emerged in some circles, especially in American and British circles, that the nascent LON was already overburdened in an organisational sense.17 In relation to this last point, Henri Bonnet, a former member of LON’s secretariat who went on to replace Luchaire as director of the IIIC, noted that  as a result  of the war, the international community found itself facing major tasks in the fields of economic and social reconstruction and that in view of this, the conference endowed the LON with multiple technical organisations. As Bonnet further noted, although the war had severely disrupted intellectual life, the problems in that area were in 13  H. R. G. Greaves, The League Committees and World Order (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 112 and André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 29–30. 14  Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 113. 15  David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 2 (New York: G. B. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 522. See also Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 17–8; Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 114; and F. R. Cowell ‘Planning The Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1966): 210–36, 219. 16  Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 113. See also Pham, La Coopération Intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 18; Cowell ‘Planning The Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946,’ 219. 17  Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 113. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 19.

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some ways less visible than or were simply ‘overshadowed’ by the enormous problems in the economic and social areas.18 Finally in this context, we might note the observation of Nitobe Inazō, one of the LON’s first undersecretaries-general, that ‘a certain number of members—considered that the League of Nations was first and foremost a political organisation which should not dissipate its efforts to too great an extent.’19 Madariaga later stated that on this point the British were ‘adamant’: the British view was that the ‘League was to be a League, not a Society; it was to deal with peace and war, not with humdrum facts and relations between nations.’20 Irrespective of the attitude described by Nitobe and Madariaga, non-­ government organisations continued to pressure the LON to act in the field of intellectual cooperation. At the Third Conference of the Associations for the League of Nations in December 1919, representatives of the UIA won support for a resolution which demanded that the LON ‘encourage and direct initiatives in the domain of the sciences and of education.’21 Subsequently, the Paris-based European Council of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sent to the LON Secretariat a resolution adopted at the council’s meeting of February 15, 1920, which asked that the assembly fund chairs in international relations. It also recommended that the LON should play a leading role in the creation of an ‘international organisation for the promulgation of reliable and independent information with a view to preventing international conflicts.’22 On July 8, 1920, Paul Appell, rector of the University of Paris, communicated to Drummond the contents of a resolution passed by the French Association of the League of Nations at a meeting of its executive committee (of which Appell was president), on June 21.23 The resolution demanded that the LON establish as soon as possible an international office of intellectual and educational relations: ‘a permanent organisation 18  Henri Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization (Washington: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), 4. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 19. 19  Minutes of the Intellectual Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, 1923, quoted in Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 334. 20  Salvador de Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ in Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee eds., Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 194–5. 21  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 13. 22  Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 274. 23  André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 31.

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of intellectual work, analogous to the one which existed for manual work,’ that is, the ILO.24 This resolution was accompanied by a draft convention which had been prepared by Luchaire (then chef de cabinet of the French minister of education), which outlined a detailed plan for what Luchaire referred to as a Permanent Organisation for the Promotion of International Understanding and Collaboration in Educational Questions and in Science, Literature and Art.25 Brussels and Paris were not the only sources of pressure: propositions regarding the creation of an organisation addressing intellectual cooperation emanated from associations and institutions based in Cracow, Geneva, London, New York, Oxford and Vienna.26 The first official steps in the direction of intellectual cooperation within the framework of the LON occurred when at the eighth session of a meeting held at Saint-­ Sébastien between July 30 and August 5, 1920, the Council of LON considered a plan submitted to it by the UIA.27 The UIA asked the council to support its plan for what it termed an International University: its plan for the convening of summer schools in Brussels with the purpose of fostering ‘an elite of some thousands of minds’ who would cooperate in the promotion of ‘international understanding and in the work of the League of Nations.’28 The UIA also requested a subvention to assist it in the publication of a Code des voeux et résolutions des congrès internationaux: a 24  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 20 and S.  H. Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 5n. For a somewhat different account of the form of this resolution, see André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 31. 25  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 20. For further discussion of Luchaire’s role, see Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 274–5 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 13. Jean-Jacques Renoliet notes that at its congress in Brussels in September 1920, the UIA called for an international conference to be held in order to draft the statutes of an international organisation for intellectual work. This idea was also taken up at the fourth conference of the League of Nations Associations in Milan in October 1920. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 31. André points out that Luchaire was charged with this task at Milan. 26  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 18. 27  André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 34, 37. 28  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 13. See also Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 18 and Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 7n. Stanley Hartnoll Bailey points out that a so-called International University functioned between September 5 and 20, 1920, in Brussels. In attendance were forty-seven professors and one hundred students. The main focus of its syllabus was on (1) international questions of a legal, economic and technical character; (2) comparative studies of history and contemporary international

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­ ublication involving the ‘coordination of the principal desiderata in all p the domains of international life.’29 The discussion of these proposals at the council took place following a presentation of a report prepared by Bourgeois in the course of which he praised the UIA’s achievements and the service it had rendered to private international associations and acknowledged the utility of the proposed international university and its planned programme of studies. However, Bourgeois then stated that as this university had yet to be established, it would be ‘premature’ to accord to it League ‘patronage.’30 Rather, he suggested that the council should send to the UIA an ‘expression of all its sympathy’ for its new undertaking, wish it every success and authorise the secretariat to assist the UIA ‘in the measure possible, in the realization of … [this] … work of international interest.’31 Deferring to the opinions expressed by its ‘eminent rapporteur,’ the council decided to accord ‘moral encouragement’ rather than financial support to the planned international university. Nonetheless, the council agreed to allocate the funds requested by the UIA for the publication of the proposed Code des voeux et résolutions des congrès internationaux as it considered that such a publication would be of great value to the LON Secretariat and to the manifold private international organisations.32 On December 13, 1920, during the First Assembly of the LON and following a successful attempt by France’s Gabriel Hanotaux to ward off a proposed resolution authored by La Fontaine favourable to the teaching of Esperanto, discussion of the question of intellectual cooperation ­commenced.33 On that same day, a motion was put forward by delegates representing Belgium, Italy and Romania, suggesting that the assembly invite the council to pay close attention to the work currently being undertaken in the field of international intellectual cooperation, to possibly accord to this work its patronage and ‘to present to the assembly, during institutions; and (3) the League of Nations. For the history of the UIA’s proposal, see André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 34–6. 29  André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 34–6 and Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 18. 30  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 18–9 and Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation, 261. 31  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 19. 32  Ibid. 33  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 14. Renoliet observes that Gabriel Hanotaux’s action was in order to defend the French language.

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its next session, a detailed report on the educational influence which they are called upon to exercise on the formation of a liberal spirit of understanding and world-wide co-operation.’34 Importantly also, the motion called upon the council to investigate the utility of establishing a technical organisation dedicated to the organisation of intellectual work.35 As this motion concerned the creation of a new technical organisation, it was sent to the assembly’s Second Committee, the mandate of which concerned technical organisations, for its consideration.36 The committee endorsed the resolution without hesitation and assigned the Belgian delegate, namely, La Fontaine, who remained secretary-general of the UIA, the task of reporting on the committee’s view to the assembly.37 The report that La Fontaine presented was entitled Report on the Organization of Intellectual Labour, and therein La Fontaine recalled the advances that had been made in the field of intellectual cooperation in the preceding decades and insisted on the need to ‘give more force and more power to human thought.’38 Most importantly, La Fontaine stated in his report that ‘there should be placed, at the crown’ of the LON’s technical organisations in the fields of labour, hygiene, economics, communications and transit, a technical organisation ‘devoted to the world’s intellect.’39 34  Actes de la Première Assemblée, Séance plenière, December 1920, quoted in Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 21. See also Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 278. 35  Actes de la Première Assemblée, Séance plenière, December 1920, quoted in Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 21. 36  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 21n, 24. Following a general discussion of the activities of the council, the LON Assembly at each session would distribute the questions that required examination among six committees. The First Committee addressed constitutional and juridical questions; the Third Committee addressed disarmament; the Fourth Committee addressed budgetary and administrative questions; the Fifth Committee addressed social questions and the Sixth Committee addressed political questions. Questions concerning Intellectual Cooperation were addressed by the Fifth Committee in 1921 and 1923, by the Second Committee in 1922 and from 1924 to 1927, by the Sixth Committee in 1928, by the Second Committee from 1929 to 1930 and then by the Sixth Committee from 1931 to the outbreak of the war. 37  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 19–21. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 39. 38  Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 115. 39  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 20. See also Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 21; Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 279; and André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 38.

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La Fontaine’s proposal met with lively resistance from George Nicoll Barnes, a delegate of Great Britain, who advised against encouraging intellectuals to come to the LON ‘demanding alms’ rather than seeking funds for their activities in their own countries.40 Barnes complained that creating an intellectual equivalent of the ILO, aside from being unnecessary given the ILO’s capabilities, would serve to reinforce the distinction between intellectual and manual work, a distinction which in a democratic age was otherwise ‘tending to disappear.’41 Despite these objections, the assembly adopted the report, passing a unanimous resolution in which it expressed its wholehearted approval of the ‘moral and material support’ that the council had accorded the UIA.  It requested that the council should continue to ‘participate in a large measure in the efforts tending to realise the international organisation of intellectual work’ and that it should present to the next assembly a report in the form specified in the motion put forward by the Belgian, Italian and Romanian delegates on December 13.42 The council addressed the assembly’s resolution of December 18 on March 1, 1921, at its twelfth session. It examined two options in this context: whether the UIA should be transformed into a technical organisation of the LON or whether an entirely new organisation should be created. In the report adopted by the council which had been prepared by the Spanish delegate José María Quiñones de León, it was noted that before deciding on either of these options, it was necessary to know whether the LON’s members ‘were ready for an enterprise similar to the institution’ of the ILO and, assuming a response in the affirmative, whether the LON ‘disposed of sufficient financial means in order to support such an organization.’43 Based on views expressed at the First Assembly concerning LON expenses, the report concluded that ‘in the current situation of the world, 40  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 22. See also Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 279. 41  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 22 and Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 279. See also Hsu Fu Teh, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1929), 33. 42  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 19–22. See also Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 278–9 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 15. 43  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations 22–3.

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what can best favour intellectual co-operation is private effort … [and] … that the League can, for the moment, render a greater service to this cause in helping these initiatives, than in trying to organise intellectual work.’44 Such a conclusion would appear to have favoured the UIA option. It is thus noteworthy that at the council session of March 1, Bourgeois recalled Luchaire’s proposal for an office of education which would be charged with promoting the idea of international cooperation and which had been adopted by the Fourth International Conference of the League of Nations Associations in October 1920.45 This proposal, which was inserted in the report of Quiñones de León, was also adopted by the council, although financial concerns and a disinclination to expand the role of the LON suggested that it was unlikely that the plan for a new organisation would find favour in the end.46 At its thirteenth session on June 27, the council charged the secretary-­ general with preparing a report on these various options for the benefit of the Second Assembly. The resultant report comprised two detailed memoranda. The first of these memoranda elaborated on the activities of the UIA, noting its desire to collaborate with the LON and to even find a permanent place within that organisation.47 The second of the two memoranda ‘underlined the importance of international intellectual and educational collaboration, notably in what concerns the intellectual and moral development of national collectivities, scientific activity, and even in order to favour the development of the League of Nations.’48 In connection with this second memorandum, it should be noted that in his report to the council, the secretary-general insisted that the LON could not ‘pursue any of its aims, either the general aims of co-operation as laid down in the covenant, or even its more precise aims such as the campaign against the use of dangerous drugs and against the traffic in women and children, without, at every moment, encountering educational problems, and without being obliged to ask for active help from those engaged in education 44  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 15 and Ministres des Affaires étrangères. 1921, quoted in Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 16. 45  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 16. 46  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 22 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 16. 47  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 23. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 40–1 and Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 35. 48  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 23.

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in all countries.’49 At the same time, however, the secretary-general also determined that it would be ‘premature’ at this point to establish a new technical organisation. In order to ensure against an unnecessary duplication of work being undertaken by existing organisations, he suggested that a study of the terrain be conducted and that for this purpose a provisional consultative committee be established under the auspices of the council.50 Jean-Jacques Renoliet, the author of a comprehensive history of the OIC, points out that Drummond’s caution in this matter was a result of advice given to him by Jean Monnet, the under-secretary-general in charge of internal administration. Monnet suggested to Drummond that for reasons of cost and reasons of a non-fiscal nature, a proposal for a permanent organisation would ‘encounter the opposition of the assembly and particularly of the British Dominions.’51 Renoliet notes that such caution was deplored by Bourgeois, a feeling that was reflected in a report that Bourgeois submitted to the council entitled The Organization of Intellectual Labour.52 Therein, Bourgeois contended that it was in fact international intellectual cooperation that had given birth to the LON, stating that ‘if an international intellectual life had not been long existent, our League would never have been formed.’53 Continuing in this vein, Bourgeois declared that ‘[n]o association of nations can hope to exist without the spirit of reciprocal intellectual activity among its members,’ and he called on the LON ‘to take steps to show how closely the political idea which it represents is connected with all aspects of the intellectual life which unites nations.’ Indeed, Bourgeois stated that the LON had ‘no task more urgent than that of examining … [those] … great factors of international opinion—the systems and methods of education, and scientific and philosophical research.’54 Nonetheless, Bourgeois took care in his report to ‘disarm the critics by deprecating ambitiousness’ and by restricting his recommendations to what was ‘immediately feasible’ in light of the 49  League of Nations [hereafter LON], Official Journal [hereafter  OJ], no. 12. (1921), 1111. For the secretary-general’s statement in full, see Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 27. 50  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 23. See also Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 280–1. 51  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 18. 52  Ibid. 53  LON, OJ, no. 12. (1921), 1105. 54  Ibid. See also Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 6 and Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 21.

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‘climate of feeling’ in the assembly at the time.55 Thus, irrespective of the title of his report, Bourgeois acknowledged that the situation of intellectual workers ‘fell more directly within the competence of the ILO.’56 The council adopted the reports of Drummond and Bourgeois at its meeting of September 2, 1921, and charged the latter with presenting to the Second Assembly a resolution he had drafted for adoption by that body.57 The text of this resolution invited the council to appoint a committee comprised of not more than twelve members, which would serve as a consultative organ of the council in regard to ‘the study of questions of international intellectual cooperation and of education.’58 It recommended that this committee would submit a report to the next assembly ‘on the measures that the League could take in view of facilitating intellectual exchange among peoples, notably in what concerns the communication of scientific information and methods of education’ and that it would undertake a study of the French plan for an international office of education as mentioned in the council’s report of March 1.59 The resolution was sent to the assembly’s Fifth Committee, which devoted itself to questions of a social nature, and was discussed by it between September 8 and 10, the discussion being based on the two memoranda prepared by Drummond and the report of Bourgeois. As a result of this discussion, the text of the resolution was modified in two ways. First, in order to forestall the misunderstanding that the LON was attempting to involve itself in the domestic affairs of states in the field of  Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 284.  Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 284. Hsu Fu Teh pointed out that a consultative commission charged with addressing ‘questions concerning the social and economic conditions of intellectual workers’ was established within the framework of the ILO in March 1927. Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 76. 57  André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 40–1 and Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 23–4. 58  LON, OJ, no. 12. (1921), 1105. Northedge notes that the services of the members of the Committee were to be ‘unpaid, apart from travelling expenses.’ Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 287. See also Malcolm W.  Davis, ‘Experiences of the Committee for International Cooperation,’ Journal of Educational Sociology 20 no. 1 (1946): 49–51. Siegfried Grundmann observes that the concept of ‘intellectual co-operation’ was first mentioned in the Bourgeois report. Siegfried Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers: Science and Politics—Einstein’s Berlin Period, trans. Ann M.  Hentschel (Berlin: Springer, 2004), 176. 59  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 24. The number was raised to 14 in 1924, to 15 in 1926, to 17 in 1930 and to 19 in 1937. 55 56

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education, the Fifth Committee eliminated the words et d’éducation from the formula, ‘questions internationales de coopération intellectuelle et d’éducation,’ a move which, however, did not prevent education becoming one of the ‘most fruitful branches’ of the OIC activities.60 Second and on the urging of Norway’s Kristine Bonnevie, it was decided that women should be included in the committee, thereby ensuring that in principle its composition would be in harmony with LON policy concerning equality of opportunity for men and women.61 Thus modified, the proposal was presented to the Second Assembly by Gilbert Murray, the Australian-born Murray serving on the occasion of that assembly as a delegate of South Africa and as the Fifth Committee’s rapporteur. On September 21, the Second Assembly unanimously adopted the proposal, and thus, the legal foundation for the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) was established.62 The assembly’s decision was ratified by the council on January 14, 1922, with the council allocating to the ICIC a modest sum transferred from the budget of the international bureaux section of the secretariat in order to cover the travel and other related costs of the members of the prospective committee.63 This allocation of funds was the result of a desperate compromise, the occasion for which was the registration by an Australian delegate of a vote opposing any funds being allocated to the ICIC on the pretext that intellectual cooperation was not mentioned in the Treaty of Versailles.64 In regard to its work, while the council envis60  Ibid., 24–5 and Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 18n, 285. Northedge records that Murray told him, Northedge, that Catholic influences were more important than political objections in regard to Intellectual Cooperation’s involvement in class-room activities. Bonnet simply notes that there were objections on political grounds and on grounds of religious freedom. Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 5. 61  On Kristine  Bonnevie’s role, see Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 19. On LON practice in regard to female representation, see Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 286. Article 7 of the covenant declared the following: ‘All positions under or in connection with the League, including the Secretariat, shall be open equally to men and women.’ André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 43n. 62  In his report of the Fifth Committee’s deliberations, Murray echoed Bourgeois in stating that the future of the LON depended on the ‘formation of a universal conscience.’ Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 24–5, 27. See also Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 6–7. 63  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 176–7. 64  Ibid., 177.

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aged that the committee would focus at the outset on such matters as organising conferences, establishing relations between universities, compiling bibliographies and organising exchanges of publications, it nonetheless ‘granted the greatest liberty’ in regard to the ICIC’s programme.65 That the ICIC was created was thanks to the efforts of a number of member states, among the foremost of them being Belgium which had hoped to see the Brussels-based UIA become a technical organisation of the LON partly with a view to elevating Belgium’s status internationally.66 Obviously, France too played a major role in the ICIC’s creation, although it should be noted that elements at the Quai d’Orsay, the home of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had initially resisted the idea of endowing the LON with an organisation of intellectual cooperation. Renoliet observes that such resistance stemmed in part from the concern on the part of certain French officials that such an organisation would attempt to interfere in national education policy in the name of internationalism, a concern shared by officials in other countries. The other reason for the initial French resistance, according to Renoliet, is that French officials feared that the creation of an international intellectual organisation might undermine French intellectual influence internationally. He notes that it was only during the approach of the Second Assembly that the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, was persuaded of the worth of undertaking ‘a new diplomacy aiming at the growth of French cultural influence through the device of an international institution.’67 Belgium and France were by no means the only continental European states to strongly support  a programme of intellectual cooperation in the Second Assembly: the Austrian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Greek, Romanian and Swiss delegations also voiced their support.68 One of the reasons for the support lent to the project by other European states, in particular the new states of Central and Eastern Europe, concerned the hope that an intellectual cooperation programme might provide an opportunity for the receipt of financial assistance and permit them to ‘get their voice heard on the international scene’ in a way they could not in other international forums.69 In turn, the European delegations favouring the project of intellectual cooperation,  Report by the German Consulate, 1922, quoted ibid.  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 21. 67  Ibid., 21, 24. 68  Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 5. 69  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 21. 65 66

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as Bonnet later pointed out, received the strong and decisive support of ‘almost all states which were chiefly interested in problems of a universal and general character’ and which ‘did not want to see the League confined exclusively to European concerns.’70 Prominent within this category of states were the republics of South America. Bonnet attributed the support of these republics for the cause of intellectual cooperation to their extensive history of intellectual and cultural exchange with Western Europe. Importantly, these republics exercised considerable influence in the assembly.71 Yet historic intellectual ties to Europe was not the sole motivating factor in this context: the republics of South America saw the institutionalisation of intellectual cooperation as a means of ‘cultural defence in the face of l’anglais.’72 China and India were keen supporters, doubtless because they too wished to have a greater opportunity to have their voices heard with the framework of the LON, thereby gaining for themselves greater international recognition and respect.73 In relation to China, it is worth noting the points made by Hsu Fu Teh in a doctoral thesis entitled L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel which was submitted to the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris in 1929 and which was dedicated to the Chinese vice-minister for foreign affairs. Hsu, a former member of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pointed to the age-old character of China’ s involvement in international intellectual relations, noting that China had entered into such relations with les Indes during the second half of the Han dynasty and that these relations had further developed during subsequent dynasties. He further noted that under the Sui dynasty and at the beginning of the Tang dynasty, Japan had sent a large number of students to undertake studies in China. In addition, Hsu pointed out that intellectual relations between China and Europe had a long pedigree, observing that ‘some very precise forms of intellectual cooperation, especially in the university domain, were already noted in Middle Ages’ and that this cooperation had further developed during the Renaissance through frequent exchanges of ideas or persons.74 In regard to India, it is worth noting Bonnet’s observation that that country had never manifested any of the ‘reticence and even hostility’  Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 5–6.  Henri Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ Journal of World History 10 no. 1 (1966): 198–209, 201 and Davis, ‘Experiences of the Committee for International Cooperation,’ 49. 72  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 21. 73  Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 6. 74  Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 10–1. 70 71

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towards the Intellectual Cooperation that was manifested by the other members of the British Empire in the assembly.75 Bonnet further observed in relation to the Indian stance that while ‘one cannot say that the delegation of this great country had total freedom of decision’ at the time of the opening of the ‘world Parliament,’ one can say that ‘on the need for rapprochement and mutual comprehension between the old cultures of the West and Asia, she never made any concession.’76 Other members of the British Empire routinely objected to the LON’s involvement in Intellectual Cooperation on the grounds of cost and utility, although these may not have been the only reasons for the Anglo-­ Saxon mistrust of Intellectual Cooperation: Renoliet suggests that the Anglo-Saxon members of the LON did not want to supply France with a vehicle for promoting its cultural interests.77 F.  R. Cowell, a one-time member of the British Foreign Office who participated in the creation of UNESCO, offers a somewhat contrasting view, suggesting that the notion that the ‘whole thing [Intellectual Cooperation] was just another cunning French cultural propaganda device’ was in fact a pretext which Britain concocted in order to ‘cover its apparent meanness.’78 Be that as it may, a ‘fear of too much French influence’ was certainly a prominent feature of the forceful Australian objections to the French government’s offer to found and finance an institute to be based in Paris that would serve, ­alongside a section of the LON Secretariat, as the ICIC OIC’s executive arm: the  IIIC.79 In any case, what one can say is that the Anglo-Saxon members of the LON were consistent in opposing and deriding intellectual cooperation, a stance which caused Lord Arthur Balfour to observe that the Anglo-Saxon delegations ‘never voted together except to oppose intellectual co-operation.’80 75  Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ 200. At the assembly in 1922, the French delegation moved to reverse a cut to the ICIC’s annual budget made by the Fourth Committee, and the French motion was ‘supported in an admirable speech by the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar,’ a delegate of India. The French motion, which was, in the event, successful, was opposed during the vote by Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and South Africa. See H. Wilson Harris, Geneva 1922: Being an Account of the Third Assembly of the League of Nations (London: League of Nations Union, 1923), 53. 76  Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ 200. 77  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 21. 78  Cowell ‘Planning The Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 219. 79  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 31.  See also  Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 9. 80  Cowell ‘Planning The Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 219.

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The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation On May 15, 1922, the council appointed eleven of the proposed twelve members of the ICIC, a twelfth appointment (that of an American) being made a few days later.81 Those appointed were Devendra Nath Bannerjea, professor of political economy at the University of Calcutta; Henri Bergson, honorary professor at the Collège de France, member of the French Academy and member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences; Kristine Bonnevie, professor of zoology at the University of Christiana and delegate of Norway to the LON; Aloysio de Castro, director of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Rio de Janeiro; Marie Curie-Sklodowska, professor of physics at the University of Paris, honorary professor at the University of Warsaw, member of the Academy of Medicine of Paris, member of the Scientific Society of Warsaw and member of the Polish Academy; Jules Destrée, former Belgian minister of science and arts and member of the Belgian Academy of French Language and Literature; Albert Einstein, professor of physics at the Universities of Leyden and Berlin, member of the Royal Academy of Amsterdam, member of the Royal Society in London and member of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin; George E. Hale, director of Mount Wilson Observatory, member of the executive committee of the International Council of Research, honorary president of the National Research Council of the United States, foreign associate of the Institute of France and foreign member of the Royal Society in London; Gilbert Murray, professor of Greek philology at the University of Oxford and member of the Council of the British Academy; Gonzague de Reynold, professor of French literature at the University of Bern; Francesco Ruffini, professor of ecclesiastical law at the University of Turin, former minister of public education, president of the International Union of Associations for the League and vice-­ president of the Royal Academy of Turin; and Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, director of the Electro-Mechanical Laboratory at Madrid, member of the Real Academia de Ciencias, member of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios, member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and inspector general of the Engineering Corps of Roads and Bridges.82 81  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 25. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 21 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 26. 82  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 25–6. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 21, 168. Robert A. Millikan, director of the Norman

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According to Frank P.  Walters, an advisor to Drummond who later became his chef de cabinet, Drummond had ‘from the very first … made up his mind to form his Secretariat as a strictly international body.’83 This point is noteworthy because it was on the urging of the secretariat that it was the council rather than member states that nominated members of the ICIC and that those appointed were selected on the basis of their high intellectual stature and irrespective of their citizenship. Both the method of and the basis for the appointments to the ICIC reflected the secretariat’s view that the members of the ICIC should represent their respective fields of learning and not the states of which they were citizens.84 Importantly, the secretariat’s approach as adopted by the council allowed for the appointment of intellectuals to the ICIC who were nationals of countries that were not members of the LON, thus imparting to it a semblance of universalism. The same approach was also intended to ensure that the ICIC would be genuinely internationalist in outlook, such that it would not be ‘paralysed by political divisions.’85 Yet the selection process was not without its biases, given that ‘almost all the nationalities composing the Council [were] represented.’86 Japan was the only permanent member of the council not represented on the ICIC at the moment of its creation. However, Nitobe quickly found himself appointed to the newly created role of director of the Intellectual Cooperation Section, a position in the secretariat which he combined his role as under-secretary-general.87 It was because of Nitobe’s new role that Japan did not at first press for Japanese representation on the ICIC.88 The special case of Japan aside, the overwhelmingly European Bridge Laboratory for Physics at the California Institute of Technology, vice-president of the National Research Council of the United States and an exchange professor in Belgium, was appointed as a substitute for George E. Hale as the latter could not attend all the meetings. 83  F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 75. On Frank P.  Walters’s role, see Peter van den Dungen, ‘Sir Eric Drummond: the First International Civil Servant,’ United Nations Library (Geneva), League of Nations Archives, The League of Nations 1929–1946: Organization and Accomplishments; a retrospective of the first organization for the establishment of world peace (New York: United Nations, 1996), 31. 84  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 25–6 and Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 177. 85  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 25. 86  Ibid., 26. 87  Felix Morley, The Society of Nations (New York: Brookings Institution, 1931), 278n. 88  The issue of representation was raised by the Romanian, Serbo-Croat and Czech group and the Spanish-speaking American group at the assembly in 1923. At the same assembly, Chu Chao-Hsin, speaking on behalf of the Asiatic group, lamented the fact that ‘the intel-

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character of the committee very quickly gave rise to demands, aired both within the assembly and the council, for the ICIC to be enlarged so as to accommodate more representatives of intellectual life in Latin America and Asia as well as representatives of intellectual life in those smaller European nations who were not represented among the initial twelve appointments.89 In June 1924, in the course of the council meeting which saw a place created anew for Einstein as discussed below, a representative of Uruguay demanded that a seat be attributed to Spanish-speaking American peoples. In response to this, the ICIC was enlarged to include an Argentinian: Léopoldo Lugones.90 In 1926, on the retirement of Nitobe from the secretariat, the council acceded to the Japanese government’s request that it appoint the physicist Tanakadate Aikitsu to the ICIC, which, as a result, now numbered fifteen.91 In 1930, following the appointment of Wu Zhihui (Wu Shi-Fee), officially described by the ICIC as a member of the Faculty of Beiyang (Peiyang) University and of Nanyang College, Shanghai, and Nicolae Titulescu, the Romanian minister of foreign affairs and a professor of law at the University of Bucharest, the number of ICIC members reached seventeen.92 lectual movement of the Far East was not adequately represented.’ As a consequence of the demands of these groups as well as by other countries, the assembly resolved that membership of the Committee should immediately be increased to sixteen. Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 310. Julien Luchaire stated that he had ‘only ever received from … [Nitobe, Inazō] … encouragement.’ Luchaire added he ‘could not say as much’ of Drummond nor of Drummond’s deputy Joseph Avenol, suggesting that the latter was even less encouraging than the former. Luchaire, Confessions d’un Français moyen, 85. 89  Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 48n, 310–3. 90  Pham, La Coopération Intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 78. This demand was made at the council meeting of June 16, 1923. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 167. Lugones was the director of the Library of Professors and a former inspector-general of education. 91  Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 310. For Tanakadate Aikitsu, see Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 167–8. 92  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 168. For a more accurate and detailed description of the background of Wu Zhihui, see Françoise Kreissler, ‘China-Europe: Transcontinental “Intellectual Cooperation” during the Interwar Period,’ in Peng Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Meditation (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 17–8. On the Japanese government’s request, see Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 310.

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Finally in regard to the make-up of the ICIC, the strength of French influence needs to be underlined, France being the only country to have two nationals (namely, Bergson and the Franco-Polish Curie-Sklodowska) on the committee. Elements in the French government also counted on receiving the support when it came to the promotion of French interests (such as assisting in the French campaign to prevent Esperanto from becoming an official language of the LON), from those members of the committee who, according to Renoliet, had French ‘sympathies,’ notably the Swiss national Reynold.93 France’s influence raises the question as to why appointing a German member was even considered, especially given that at the time, as Siegfried Grundmann points out, German ‘science was being systematically boycotted by international organizations under the guiding influence of France.’94 The simple explanation is that those involved in establishing the ICIC wanted to revive ‘fruitful cooperation among scholars from all countries,’ and this meant bringing to an end the boycott of German science: despite the formal position that the members of the committee acted only in their individual capacity, many partisans of intellectual cooperation wanted a ‘representative of Germany and German Science’ to sit on the c­ommittee.95 Given the hostility that many in France still harboured towards Germany, the appointment of a German was likely to prove extremely difficult and this is precisely why Einstein was selected: his extraordinary scientific achievements and his well-known pacifism meant that even the French government, it having earlier sought to exclude nationals of the defeated countries from the ICIC, could not resist his appointment.96 Einstein was first alerted to his possible appointment to the committee when visiting France in March and April 1922 on the invitation of his friend and fellow physicist, Paul Langevin, on behalf of the Collège de  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 26–7.  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 178. Katharina Rietzler notes that Germany’s involvement in international scholarly collaboration was ‘effectively curtailed between 1919 and 1926 through an organized boycott of Germany by the national scientific academies of the former Allied and neutral countries.’ Katharina Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics: Rockefeller and Carnegie Support for the Study of International Relations in Weimar Germany,’ supplement, GHI Bulletin, no. 5 (2008): 61–79, 65. 95  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 178–9. 96  Ibid., 178; Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 25–6 and Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), 58–9. 93 94

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France. The visit was seen as significant in terms of improving Franco-­ German relations in general and German and French scholars in particular. Although initially reluctant, Einstein in the end accepted the invitation at the urging of his friend Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister.97 On April 6, a week and a half after arriving at the French border where he was met by Langevin, Einstein participated in a debate with Bergson at the Société de Philosophie in Paris concerning philosophical and physical interpretations of time, a debate which many observers deemed Einstein to have won.98 Bergson, who would be elected president of the committee on August 5 that year, highly esteemed Einstein’s intellect, and he was not going to let slip the opportunity of encouraging Einstein to join the ICIC, especially given the positive public response in France to Einstein’s tour.99 The secretary-general promptly issued an invitation to Einstein to join the ICIC, an invitation to which Einstein acceded on May 30. On July 4, however, Einstein, who had been badly shaken by the assassination of Rathenau on June 24, abruptly reneged on his acceptance. In a note accompanying a letter sent to Pierre Comert, the head of the Information Section of the secretariat, the ICIC’s secretary until the autumn of that year and someone with whom Einstein was acquainted, he offered the following explanation: The situation here is such that a Jew would do well to exercise restraint as regards his participation in political affairs. In addition, I must say that I have no desire to represent people who certainly would not choose me as their representative, and with whom I find myself in disagreement on the questions to be dealt with.100

97  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 130. See also Jimena Canales, ‘Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations’ MLN. 120, no. 5 (2005): 1168–91, 1175. 98  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 130. Einstein concluded the debate with the following statement: ‘There is thus not a time of the philosophers; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.’ See ‘Discussion avec Einstein,’ in Henri Bergson, Mélanges (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972), 1340–437. 99  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 179. 100  Pierre Comert, 1922, quoted in Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 59. See also Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 180; Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 2; and David E.  Rowe and Robert J.  Schulmann, Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 189, 192.

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Einstein’s retraction of his acceptance greatly disappointed those who had campaigned on his behalf. Bergson, Curie-Sklodowska, Nitobe and Murray all made efforts to ensure that Einstein reversed his decision. Such was the importance attached to Einstein’s membership by LON officials that Comert was sent to Berlin in the hope of persuading Einstein to reconsider.101 On July 29, after having discussed the matter at length with Comert over the previous two days, Einstein wrote to the secretary-­ general, stating that although he would not be able to attend the first meeting of the ICIC, which was scheduled to take place in Geneva between August 1 and 5, as there were pressing matters to which he had to attend before his forthcoming scientific mission to Japan, upon his return his participation in the committee would be ‘more zealous.’102 According to a report submitted by the German consul in Geneva to the German Foreign Office which was based on a discussion with the Polish historian Oskar de Halecki, a member of the secretariat who had been elected the ICIC’s new secretary at the Geneva meeting, the members of the ICIC had expressed doubts about the reason Einstein had given for this absence.103 They had asked themselves whether the real ­reason for his non-attendance concerned the anti-League sentiment current in Germany or whether the pronounced anti-Semitic feeling there had caused Einstein to feel that ‘as a Jew he had to be particularly careful and therefore could not appear as a representative of German science.’ The German consul noted in his report that Einstein’s colleagues were especially dismayed by his absence because they felt that his ‘presence would have most brilliantly revealed the international character of the event.’104

101  Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (London: Hodder and Staunton, 1996), 340 and Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 59. 102  Albert Einstein, 1922, quoted in Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, 341. Clark is quoting from a letter that Comert subsequently wrote to Einstein which concludes with an account of Einstein’s letter to the secretary-general retracting his resignation. 103  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 182. See also Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (London: Hodder and Staunton, 1996), 341. Einstein did not in fact sail to Japan until October. See further ‘Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1352–54. In addition to the members of the ICIC and Halecki, the first meeting of the ICIC was attended by Nitobe, Luchaire (who accompanied Bergson) and William Martin, an American who served as technical advisor at the ILO. 104  German Consulate in Geneva, 1922, quoted in Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 182–3.

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Einstein would cause his ICIC colleagues further dismay upon his return from Japan. On March 21, 1923, he resigned from the ICIC once more after having been ‘swept up … in the German outrage over the arbitrary exercise of foreign power’ in the form of the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr on January 11 of that year.105 The French and Belgian action reinforced Einstein’s view that the LON, as he wrote to Curie-Sklodowska, despite its ‘thin veneer of objectivity’ served as a ‘willing instrument of power politics.’106 Einstein expressed much the same view of the LON in the letter of resignation that he sent to Comert, stating that as a committed pacifist he did not ‘consider it right’ to be associated with such an institution.107 It is true that Einstein had serious misgivings about the LON which he had come to view as a ‘hypocritical’ enterprise despite its ‘fine name.’108 However, Grundmann suggests that Einstein’s ‘most immediate, although unexpressed reason’ for his resignation was neither the Ruhr occupation nor his disillusionment with the LON.109 According to Grundmann, what was most likely at the forefront of Einstein’s mind concerned the sentiment he had expressed in his note to Comert in the previous year: he had no wish to represent people who most certainly have not chosen him to be their representative and with whose views he largely disagreed.110 On this occasion Einstein’s behaviour dismayed and infuriated many of those associated with the ICIC, an important reason being that some had hoped that through Einstein’s membership the ICIC could serve as a means to counter the boycott of German science.111 In fact, Murray complained to Einstein that ‘his decision weakened the committee and destroyed the possibility of issuing a collective statement by the committee members against the French policy.’112 As Grundmann points out, 105  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 183–4. See also Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 61. 106  Rowe and Schulmann, Einstein on Politics, 194. See also Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 62. 107  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 183. 108  Albert Einstein quoted ibid., 184. 109  Albert Einstein to Pierre Comert, 4 July 1922, quoted in Grundmann The Einstein Dossiers, 184. 110  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 184. 111  Grundmann writes that Comert felt ‘rebuffed and offended’ and that Marie  CurieSklodowska, Murray and many others ‘felt at least as snubbed.’ Ibid., 184. 112  Ibid. Jimena Canales quotes Murray as advising Einstein in July 1922 that ‘this Committee, like all the organizations of the League of Nations, is in danger of having the

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Murray’s complaint shows that the ICIC was not an ‘obedient instrument of French cultural imperialism’ despite French interests being overrepresented on it.113 Within the framework of the ICIC, the question of intellectual relations with Germany was a particular source of tension between France and Britain in the respective shapes of Bergson and Murray, the latter then being the committee’s vice-president. Bergson resisted the normalisation of such relations, considering that it was his obligation as a Frenchman, to pay heed to French opinion. Nor did Bergson think it was in the interest of the ICIC to ignore such opinion.114 The tension produced by Bergson’s attitude surfaced when he nominated the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz as a replacement for Einstein on April 23, 1923.115 In a telegram sent to Nitobe, Bergson excitedly reported that the new appointment was a ‘world celebrity like Einstein,’ a status Bergson considered essential to the ‘prestige and future’ of the ICIC.116 Murray, however, was not so enthused, seeing the appointment as a reflection of the ‘hidden a­ nti-­German spirit’ present among certain members of the ICIC and as evidence that this body was in some degree attempting to boycott Germany.117 On March 5 of the following year, against the background of British calls for Germany to be reintegrated into the community of nations and at a time when France was diplomatically isolated and weakened due to its currency crisis, The Times published an extremely harsh letter penned by Murray in which he reproached the ICIC for not including a German among its members.118 Murray’s letter was noteworthy for bearing the address of 15 Grosvenor Crescent, S.  W. 1: the address of the British League of Nations Union (LNU). More importantly, it was notable for lamenting the absence of German representation on the committee rather Latin element overrepresented.’ Canales, ‘Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment that Failed,’ 1180. 113  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 184. 114  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 41. See also Daniel Laqua, ‘Transnational intellectual cooperation, the League of Nations, and the problem of order,’ Journal of Global History 6, no. 2 (2011): 223–47, 235. 115  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 185. 116  Henri Bergson, 1923, quoted ibid., 185. 117  Rose Marie Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955), 123. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 38–9. 118  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 41–3 and Gilbert Murray, letter to the editor, The Times, March 5, 1924.

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than simply the absence of Einstein.119 In this regard, Murray argued as follows: The League of Nations Committee of Intellectual Cooperation has issued an appeal for funds for the relief of the intellectual classes in various countries in Europe, and I see from the Press that very serious criticism has been aroused by the fact that there is still no German member on the committee, and that Germany is not included among the countries reported upon or those to which it is proposed to give relief …. [A]s a member of the Committee of Intellectual Cooperation, I feel bound to repeat what I have said more than once both on the committee and at meetings of the Assembly—that I consider the complete failure of the committee to enter into relations with the intellectual classes in Germany, to whatever cause it may be due, not only severely injures the committee’s usefulness and prejudices its reputation and good faith, but makes a great part of its work positively harmful. The … [ICIC] … was intended to perform a great work of healing in Europe by ‘appealing to those feelings of solidarity which should unite intellectual workers all over the world.’ It started with a most distinguished chairman and personnel and with magnificent prospects. But as things have turned out, its action has tended to embitterment rather than to healing. However excellent the intentions which animate individual members of the committee, the actual result of their labours is to build up throughout the rest of Europe while the German universities are down and out, a closely knit intellectual association from which German science, literature, and thought are rigidly excluded. And this is emphatically not the object with which the … [ICIC] … was formed. If it is still impossible for Frenchmen, Belgians, and Germans to work together, even in the dispassionate realm of the intellect this means that ‘intellectual cooperation’ is not a present possible. The ‘feelings of solidarity among intellectual workers’ does not exist. That being so, I think the Council of the League might well consider the desirability of suspending the operations of the … [ICIC] … until times change. As things now are, the … [ICIC] … tends to prevent European cooperation, not to promote it.120

119  Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur, 123. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 38–9. In 1957, Murray recalled the following: ‘I was naturally eager to get Doctor Einstein made a member of the Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, partly because he would, in a sense, count as a German, and partly for his eminence.’ See Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 58. 120  Murray, letter to the editor, The Times, March 5, 1924.

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Unsurprisingly, Murray’s harsh critique raised the ire of Bergson, who initially wished to respond vigorously to the accusations brought against the commission but who, it would appear, was persuaded by certain of his colleagues not to so respond ‘for fear of creating a dangerous tension in the Commission’ and for exacerbating the ill-feeling caused by the perception that it was as an instrument of French cultural politics.121 Members of the secretariat, Drummond among them, were also disapproving of Murray’s action; however, there was also a concern at that level that continuing anti-German sentiment might see the Anglo-Saxons, namely, the British and the Americans, desert the ICIC. People well understood that without Anglo-Saxon involvement, the ICIC would be a less representative and less prestigious body, thereby making it a less attractive proposition to potential donors.122 Even in French official circles there was a growing feeling that the restoration of relations with Germany was inevitable and that it would be politic, as Luchaire urged, for the ICIC to demonstrate that it was ‘capable of good will in the face of Germany.’123 Thus, Renoliet observes, ‘the policy of conciliation carried out by [Ḗdouard] Herriot from the summer of 1924 … [was] … already at work in the domain of intellectual cooperation.’124 In a confidential letter addressed to Einstein and dated May 16, Murray began by pointing to the criticisms that he and others had sometimes made of the ICIC ‘on the grounds of its one-sidedness,’ adding that ‘matters had now reached the point,’ where if Einstein were to alter his stance in relation to the committee, ‘they would unanimously welcome your presence.’ Having noted that Einstein had resigned following the occupation of the Ruhr and the consequent deterioration in Franco-German relations, Murray stated that his return to the committee would be the ‘beginning of that rapprochement’ between France and Germany ‘to which we all look forward.’125 Murray finished the letter by stating that if Einstein could assure him that he would accept an invitation from the council to  Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur, 123–4 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 41–2.  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 41. See also Laqua, ‘Transnational intellectual cooperation, the League of Nations, and the problem of order,’ 235–6. Daniel Laqua records that while certain elements in the secretariat were critical of Murray’s public intervention, they were also critical of Bergson’s role. 123  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 42. 124  Ibid., 43. 125  Murray to Einstein, 16 May 1924, in Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 65–6. 121 122

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return to the committee, he was certain that such an invitation would be issued.126 On May 30, Einstein responded to Murray’s entreaty, declaring in his letter of response that he would be ‘grateful’ to accept a seat on the committee. Despite the LON’s many failures, Einstein felt that it provided the best avenue for achieving international rapprochement and that he should do his utmost to ensure that the ‘spirit of European unity, so strongly manifest in the French people, be allowed to bear fruit.’127 In a letter dated June 6, after having noted the pleasure elicited in him by Einstein’s response, Murray told Einstein that all the information to which he was privy seemed to indicate that there was going to be a ‘real and decided change in the direction of French policy, especially in matters connected with League.’128 On June 16, at the fourth meeting of its twenty-ninth session, the British representative Lord Parmoor informed the council of Einstein’s letter to Murray, following which Bourgeois called for it to be read out.129 Bourgeois then told the council he had discussed the question of Einstein’s return to the ICIC with Bergson and that Bergson had stated that ‘he could see nothing but advantage’ in Einstein resuming his seat.130 At this point of the proceedings, the council decided to invite Einstein to ‘sit on the committee as representative of German science,’ an invitation accepted by Einstein on June 25.131 Einstein thus attended the fourth meeting of the ICIC which took place between July 25 and 29. During its opening session, Bergson declared that the ICIC was ‘pleased and proud’ to have among its members a person of such world-wide renown as Einstein, declaring that Einstein’s work was the fruit of ‘one of the most powerful efforts that man has ever made to extend the limits of human thought’ and adding that he hoped that Einstein’s presence on the ICIC would attract those interested  Ibid., 66.  Einstein to Murray, 30 May 1924, in Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 66–7. Einstein is reported to have said that the appointment of his friend Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, a man ‘he so honored and whose motives and impulses he knew to be of the purest and the highest, [had] resolved any doubts that he might have had as to the Committee.’ See Waldo G. Leland, ‘Some Aspects of Intellectual Co-operation Since the World War,’ Advocate of Peace Through Justice 92 no. 2 (1930):112–23, 114. 128  Murray to Einstein. 6 June 1924, in Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 67. 129  LON, OJ, no. 7 (1924), 914. 130  Ibid. 131  Ibid. 126 127

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in his ‘transcendental speculations’ to the ideal of the LON.132 Despite this promising beginning, Einstein soon found the work involved in being a member of the ICIC frustrating. He complained that it was a drain on his other activities, most particularly his scientific research. In light of this, on March 5, 1927, Einstein nominated a proxy for himself on the ICIC: Hugo Andres Krüss, the managing director of the Prussian State Library.133 Krüss was more than willing to assist in a role that other members of German academic institutions had shunned either because of patriotic sentiment or because of their sensitivity to German public opinion regarding the LON.134 However, with the German Foreign Office manoeuvring to gain entry to the LON in 1925 and then with Germany actually entering it on September 10, 1926, the public hostility in Germany towards the LON had begun to dissipate. Krüss’s willingness to participate in the ICIC, Grundmann suggests, reflected an emerging sense that with Germany’s entry into the LON, a new chapter in German history had commenced.135 Grundmann also observes that like the German Foreign Office, Krüss was ‘much more flexible and far-sighted than academic ­institutions’ in regard to what posture to adopt in relation to the LON and its various institutions. In addition, he points out that Krüss, who had already served as Einstein’s proxy on the ICIC’s Bibliographic SubCommittee in 1926, had in fact coveted Einstein’s position on the ICIC for some years.136 In June 1924, a date which coincided with Einstein’s readmission to the ICIC, Krüss travelled to Geneva, where, with the assistance of the German consulate, he was able to speak with Nitobe and the Romanian George Oprescu, the latter being the secretary of the ICIC at the time. Krüss’s visit was ostensibly in order to explore the LON’s activities in the cultural and academic fields. It was also ostensibly, as the consulate emphasised to Nitobe and Oprescu, of a private nature. Nonetheless, Krüss, then an employee of the Ministry of Culture, had the full support of the Foreign Office in undertaking this mission. In fact, just before his 132  ‘Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle,’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1455. 133  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 192, 194–5. Krüss was not Einstein’s first choice as proxy on the ICIC.  See also Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 93. Between 1926 and 1930, Einstein attended only three meetings of the committee. 134  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 42. 135  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 195. 136  Ibid.

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departure, Krüss was asked by one of its officials to seek to ‘uncover “underground ties”’ between the ICIC and the Brussels-based International Research Council, the latter being an organisation involved in the boycott of German science.137 Aside from his ongoing cultivation of key figures associated with the ICIC, the most telling evidence of Krüss’s ambition is the fact that on February 6, 1925, while he was still serving at the Ministry of Culture, Krüss stated  the following  at a meeting at the Foreign Office: that Einstein ‘who himself constantly emphasizes his supranationality, could not be a ‘valid representative’ of Germany at the ICIC of the LON.’ At the same meeting, Krüss stressed the importance of finding suitable persons for such positions, warning that ‘[a]bstention on this issue would be worse, because the other side would never have difficulty finding willing outsiders as representatives of Germany, who would then lack the crucial characteristics they ought to have in guarding the interests of German science.’138 There was unintended irony in Krüss’s observations. Leaving aside his breathtaking fame, it was because of Einstein’s status as an outsider in Germany, a status which in part derived from his supranationalism and pacifism, that he had been ­acceptable to the other side. Indeed, Bergson informed Nitobe at the time of Einstein’s initial appointment that he was ‘the only German whom the French could possibly accept.’139

Henri Bergson and Intellectual Cooperation Bergson was a committed French patriot, and his patriotism was forcefully on display in a presidential speech delivered at the annual public meeting on December 12, 1914, in which he sought to explain the ‘inner meaning’ of the war (la signification de la guerre).140 Essentially, what Bergson 137  Ibid., 182, 196–7. The private nature of the meeting was stressed in order to ‘prevent that the presence of Mr. Krüss be correlated with the readmission’ of Einstein to the ICIC and ‘be taken as a sign of an official rapprochement.’ On the International Research Council and the boycott on German science, see Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 42. 138  Minutes of the meeting at the Foreign Office, 1925, quoted in Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 198. 139  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 178. 140  Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ The Hibbert Journal 13, no. 3 (1915): 465–75, 465 and Henri Bergson, ‘Discours en séance publique de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques,’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1107–8.

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undertook to do in this speech was to frame the war in terms of his theory of évolution créatrice, according to which there is an ‘implacable law [that] declares that spirit must encounter the resistance of matter, that life cannot advance without bruising that which lives, and that great moral results are purchased by much blood and many tears.’141 Life, Bergson tells us, is impelled by l’élan vital—‘the impulsion which comes from the deep’—and it is the élan vital which lies at the origin of and which animates all living creatures.142 Impelled to advance ceaselessly, life seeks to traverse the numerous obstacles it encounters in its path, and it is in the course of seeking to overcome obstacles that the process of creative evolution arises, its cumulative effect being an ‘immense efflorescence of unforeseeable novelty.’143 The characterisation of nature as a scene of open-ended creativity is crucial to Bergson’s understanding of human freedom. Bergson was fond of stating that the future lies in our hands: conscious of our origins in the life principle and thereby of our creative powers, we come to realise that the world of tomorrow will be what we make it.144 Above all for Bergson, as morally conscious beings we should seek to propel the world towards unity. Indeed, Bergson suggests that the life principle itself inclines us in the direction of unity, an inclination that has its evolutionary basis in our shared origins in the élan vital.145 As the American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry wrote in his own study of the philosophical significance of the war, ‘there is in Bergson … a sense of solidarity of all lives, as parts of

 Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ 475.  Henri Bergson, ‘La conscience et la vie,’ in Henri Bergson, L’énergie spirituelle: essais et conférences, 74th ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), 25. This lecture was first delivered in English in the context of the Huxley Memorial Lectures at the University of Birmingham, May 29, 1911, and was published as ‘Life and Consciousness’ in The Hibbert Journal in October of the same year. 143  Bergson, ‘La conscience et la vie,’ 24. 144  ‘What will France be tomorrow? She will be … what we want her to be; because the future depends on us, it [the future] is what free human wills make.’ Henri Bergson, ‘Allocution avant une conférence sur la guerre et la littérature de demain,’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1151–6. Based on his reading of Bergson, Arnold J.  Toynbee identified a Promethean élan with ‘progressive mastery of the environment and progressive self-determination.’ Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 118–9, 124–6. 145  Bergson, ‘La Conscience et la Vie,’ 25–6. 141 142

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one great forward movement, springing from a common source and serving a common cause.’146 As intimated above, it is ‘unity in diversity’ that Bergson favours: unity as he conceives it signifies a ‘richer and more harmonious diversity’ and certainly not uniformity.147 Bergson stated in relation to the evolution of human societies: In battle with themselves and in war with others, they visibly try, through friction and shock, to round off angles, to wear away antagonisms, to eliminate contradictions, to cause individual wills to insert themselves without deforming themselves in the social will and the diverse societies to enter in their turn, without losing their originality nor their independence, into a society more vast: a spectacle disquieting and reassuring, that we cannot contemplate without saying to ourselves that here again, traversing obstacles without number, life works to integrate in order to obtain the most grand quantity, the most rich variety, the most advanced qualities of invention and effort.148

In his aforementioned speech concerning the inner meaning of the war, Bergson observed that uniformity is the mark of society that has lost touch with the life principle and has fallen as a consequence into a state of spiritual decay: in place of the ‘spiritualization of matter,’ which leads in the direction of liberty, justice and fraternity, society succumbs to the ‘mechanization of spirit.’ The way is thus open for ‘inferior and infernal powers’ to fill the ‘soulless void in the body politic’ through exciting in the masses a passionate hatred for and desire to destroy the other.149 According to Bergson, the mechanisation of spirit had been the direction taken by Germany since the time of Bismarck: the German devotion ‘to poetry, to art, to metaphysic[s]’ had been overcome, he insisted, by the ‘continuous clang of militarism and industrialism, of machinery and mechanism, of debased moral materialism’ which had as its culminating

146  Ralph Barton Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals: a study of the philosophical background of the world war (New York: Longmans, Green, 1918), 353. Northedge notes the appeal of Bergson’s philosophy given the ‘post-war climate of moral and spiritual disintegration.’ Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 13. 147  Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ 473. 148  Bergson, ‘La conscience et la vie,’ 25–6. 149  Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict, with an introduction by H. Wildon Carr (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915), 36.

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point ‘scientific barbarism.’150 Yet despite Germany’s material power, Bergson pronounced, Britain and France ultimately would triumph in a war in which there was ‘[o]n one side, mechanism … [and] … on the other, life, the power of creation which makes and remakes itself as every instant.’151 Bergson’s quasi-philosophical, patriotic speech of December 1914 was reproduced in a number of French publications in the wake of its delivery. It also reached audiences beyond France. An authorised translation of the opening portion of the speech was published in the British religious periodical the  Hibbert Journal in April 1915, under the heading of ‘Life and Matter at War’ and alongside the reflections of a number of other noted thinkers concerning the war’s significance, Murray being among them.152 In light of his desire to see an end to the boycott of German science, it is worth noting that in his contribution, Murray insisted that although Germany’s ‘whole spirit of “blood and iron” ambition’ was to be abhorred, one ‘must not hate’ the German people, adding that when the conflict was settled, there must be ‘no revenge, no deliberate humiliation of any enemy, no picking and stealing.’153 Bergson’s speech was reproduced in full for the benefit of British audiences and with the permission of the author in June 1915 in a brochure entitled The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict. Included in this brochure was an introduction by a leading exponent of Bergson’s thought in England, namely, H.  Wildon Carr, and a short article by Bergson entitled ‘The Force which Wastes and the Force which does not Waste’ (La force qui s’use et celle qui ne s’use pas), which had first appeared in the Bulletin des armées de la République on November 4, 1914, and which concerned the same theme as his discourse on the inner meaning of the war. As Bergson had hoped, The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict proved somewhat popular in Britain: a second impression of it

150  Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ 472–3. Bergson would reiterate this view after the commencement of the Second World War, stating that ‘Hitlerism’ was not ‘an accident of history’ as was generally thought, but was rather identical with the Germany of Bismarck: an expression of a ‘brutal and unscrupulous materialism.’ H. Bergson to J. Chastenet, December 1939, in Bergson, Mélanges, 1597. 151  Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ 475. 152  Ibid., 465. See also Gilbert Murray, ‘Thoughts on the War,’ The Hibbert Journal 13, no. 3 (1915): 68–81. 153  Murray, ‘Thoughts on the War,’ 71, 73, 77.

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was published in July 1915 and a third in the following month.154 However, what was perhaps most important in terms of the Allied war effort was the fact that ‘Life and Matter at War’ was republished by the American journal The Living Age.155 Bergson’s patriotic acts in the years 1914–1918 went beyond the delivery of morale-inducing speeches: Bergson undertook three diplomatic missions on behalf of France during the war, visiting Spain in 1916 and the United States in 1917 and again in 1918.156 In Bergson’s view, the most significant of these missions was the mission which saw him visit the United States from February to May 1917, a mission which he undertook at the urging of Briand, the then French prime minister. During his visit, Bergson sought to rally American support in the form of moral encouragement for the Allied side. At a meeting of the France-America Society in New York, he declared that France had understood from the outset the ‘great task that was devolved on her, the duty of saving, not only herself, but the whole of human civilization’ from German imperialism and its ‘anti-democratic and anti-human dogma of might superior to right.’157 Yet the purpose of Bergson’s mission was more pointed than this: what the French government hoped was that Bergson, then France’s most renowned philosopher and as such one who enjoyed great fame in the United States, could assist in persuading President Wilson’s entourage, or perhaps even Wilson himself, of the wisdom of the United States entering the war. In Bergson’s estimation, his meetings in Washington with the president and his advisors, especially those with presidential advisor Colonel Edward M. House during which the question of the LON was addressed, were a great success.158 This view was shared in official circles in France: Bergson’s diplomatic mission was viewed in that context as having influenced in some measure Wilson’s decision to seek from Congress 154  H. Wildon Carr, introduction to Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict, 9. See also J.  Alexander Gunn, Bergson and his Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1920), 12–3, 161–2. 155  Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ The Living Age, July 31, 1915, 25,964. 156  In regard to the Spanish mission, Bergson stated that he was sent by the French government to confer with ‘influential persons’ in order to ‘lead them to a more correct view’ of what France stood for in the war. Henri Bergson, ‘Mes missions (1917–1918),’ in Mélanges, 1555. 157  Henri Bergson, ‘Discours au banquet de la Société France-Amérique à New York, 12 mars 1927,’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1246. See also Bergson, ‘Mes missions (1917–1918),’ in Mélanges, 1555. 158  Bergson, ‘Mes missions (1917–918),’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1555–7, 1560.

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a declaration that the United States was in a state of war with Germany. Writing as a member of the Académie française in Le Figaro in June 1917, Hanotaux stated the following: It is no secret that M. Bergson has been received several times by President Wilson himself. Without doubt, the authority of the philosopher, the firm conception that he has of the human ideal, the refined suppleness of his intelligence, all that makes the character of his doctrine and his personality, has retained the attention of the high intellectual that is President Wilson. The two men were born in order to comprehend each other. M. Bergson found himself being ambassador of French thought to American thought.159

Bergson’s patriotic convictions and the fact that he was, as F.  C. S. Northedge writes, ‘plainly jealous for the good name of his country in European culture’ meant that his election as president of the ICIC was highly welcome from the perspective of France.160 Yet to view Bergson’s election solely through the lens of the French political or cultural interests would be to miss much else that is of significance. Bergson enjoyed a matchless international reputation, and many of those occupying the upper echelons of the academy and across a broad range of disciplines were well acquainted with the key elements of his thought.161 In Northedge’s view, that the chairman of ‘an international organisation which, if not political in itself, was at least the … dependency of a political association’ was the ‘most outstanding philosopher of his day’ is a mark of the ‘bold and experimental mental climate’ which surrounded the LON in its early years.162 It should be noted that such a mental climate arose precisely because of the desire to create the world anew amidst the ruins of the old order. In his introduction to a 1920 study of Bergson’s philosophy, Alexander Mair noted that ‘men everywhere are seeking for a sign, a glimpse of a scheme of life, a view of reality, a hint of human destiny and the true outcome of

159  ‘Communication à l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 9 juin, 1917 (Gabriel Hanotaux, L’Amérique à l’Académie, leader du journal Le Figaro, 10 juin 1917, col.1–2),’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1253. 160  Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 10. 161  Ibid., 9–10, 12. 162  Ibid., 9.

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human effort to be an inspiration and a guide to them in their pathetic struggle out of the morass in which they … are plunged.’163 Bergson’s philosophy was an expression of confidence in the human effort to create for itself, as Murray would have put it, a cosmos. While acknowledging that evolution is ‘full of unprogressive culs-de-sac, blind alleys, marking time, deviations, and retrogression,’ Bergson, as noted by one of his former students, provided an assurance that this effort would not be in vain.164 In a speech inaugurating the second session of the ICIC in July 1923, Bergson declared that one could be ‘certain that the chimera of today might become the reality of tomorrow.’165 It was precisely because of the faith he expressed in human effort that certain Bergsonian motifs were adopted by movements dedicated to social change in the early twentieth century. For example, in his book on Bergson’s philosophy published in 1920, J. Alexander Gunn noted that articles had been written on Bergson’s ‘message to Feminism.’166 Taking the foregoing points into account, Bergson’s position at the apex of an international committee forming part of an organisation which was an expression of social change and which had as its larger purpose the promotion of a society of nations may seem less remarkable than it otherwise appears. As Jean-Jacques Mayoux, the last director of the IIIC, observed in a valedictory essay on the work of the OIC appearing in 1946, given the felt-need to act on the world by thought and to create the basis for common thought at the time, it was not ‘by accident that the first patron’ of intellectual cooperation ‘was the great French philosopher Henry Bergson.’167 Bergson’s philosophy was not universally applauded. Giving expression to a view of Bergson’s philosophy current in Anglo-Saxon circles, Murray described Bergson’s notion of creative evolution as ‘loose and mystical.’168 This assessment seems to have informed Murray’s view of the whole  Alexander Mair, introduction to Gunn, Bergson and his Philosophy, xi.  J. Alexander Gunn, ‘The Status of Mind,’ Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 23rd Meeting (1936): 246–54, 248. 165   Henri Bergson, ‘Discours d’Ouverture de M.  Bergson, Président, Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle (26 juillet 1923),’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1398. 166  Gunn, Bergson and his Philosophy, 119, 174. 167  Jean-Jacques Mayoux, ‘UNESCO,’ La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, no. 1 (1946): 1–23, 3. 168  Gilbert Murray, The Ordeal of this Generation: The War, the League and the Future (London: Allen and Unwin, 1929) 183. 163 164

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­ roject of Intellectual Cooperation at first. On October 8, 1921, immedip ately after the ICIC was established, Murray observed in a letter to the South African statesman Jan Smuts that it was ‘a hazy and obscure subject, on which nobody but a few cranks seemed to have any clear views.’169 However, unlike some of his fellow Anglo-Saxons, Murray soon came to appreciate the thinking behind the creation of the ICIC, which had been, he stated in a broadcast transmitted on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, ‘Bergson’s idea: a committee of thinkers to “represent the deeper spirit of the League.”’170 In a study appearing several years before this broadcast, Murray pointed out that in calling for the creation of an ‘organ for increasing … [the] … artistic, scientific, imaginative link between the nations for which we [the Anglophones] have no single word but which the French call spirituel or intellectuel,’ Bergson had stated that he wanted to ‘give the League a soul.’ In the same context, Murray recalled that it was Bergson who converted Bourgeois and then the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour to his idea of a committee of thinkers, Lord Balfour being the person who proposed the appointment of an initially reluctant Murray to the ICIC.171 Bergson’s conception of  the project of  intellectual cooperation was consistent with aspects of his philosophy.172 In the course of a Huxley Memorial Lecture that he gave at the University of Birmingham on May 29, 1911, the philosopher spoke appreciatively of those individuals whose striking moral heroism lights new paths to virtue. Such individuals,  Gilbert Murray, 1921, quoted in Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ 189.  Jean Smith, ‘The Committee for Intellectual Co-operation in Gilbert Murray’s Papers,’ in Smith and Toynbee eds., Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography, 198. Murray’s broadcast was entitled Unfinished Business and was transmitted by the BBC in January 1956. 171  Gilbert Murray, From the League to U.N. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 4, 201 Murray noted that it was on the joint proposal of Great Britain and France that the assembly in 1921 created the ICIC with a view to encouraging and facilitating international movements in the direction of intellectual cooperation. On Balfour’s proposal in respect to Murray’s appointment, see Smith, ‘The Committee for Intellectual Co-operation in Gilbert Murray’s Papers,’ 198. 172  As Northedge rightly notes, ‘much in Bergson’s philosophy is consistent’ with the approach adopted by the ICIC. He also notes that Bergsonianism was misused by ‘totalitarian apologists’ in their attacks on the LON. Northedge does not name these apologists but a likely candidate would be those Italian Fascists, Mussolini among them, who maintained that Bergsonianism informed Fascist doctrine. Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 11. 169 170

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Bergson observed, however much they stand at the culminating point of evolution, are closest to its origins due to their intuition of the élan vital.173 It is this intuition that gives rise to penetrating moral insights and it is characteristic of individuals possessed of such insights that they are ‘capable of intensifying … the action of other men.’174 Bergson believed that social advance depends, firstly, on the presence of a creative minority in a position to display their god-like qualities and, secondly, on the imitation of this minority by the majority. Discussing Bergson’s philosophy of creative evolution, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee observed that this imitation comes about either because the mystical attraction of the minority is such that it ‘induces … imitation, and even a spiritual union’ or by means of ‘drill (dressage),’ the latter having its basis in the ‘faculty of sheer mimesis—one of the less exalted faculties of Human Nature which has more in it of drill than of inspiration.’175 Bergson’s contention that life advances in the direction of a richer and more harmonious diversity was evident at the first meeting of the ICIC which was held from August 1 to 5, 1922. There he put forward the view that while ideas are distinct from one another, there is also interplay among them. Bergson affirmed that the paramount purpose of the ICIC was to build upon this interplay and realise ‘the grand ideal of fraternity, of solidarity and of agreement amongst men.’ Although Bergson thought this ideal would be more readily appreciated by intellectuals, he believed that the ICIC could do much to encourage its gradual absorption by whole nations.176 The ICIC in its early days was conscious of the distance between intellectual elites and the masses and considered this to be a ‘true danger’; it was thus absolutely necessary to institute multiple and meaningful lines of communication between elites and the wider public.177 Nonetheless, and despite his desire that the ICIC establish a moral ascendancy in world affairs, Bergson well understood the limits of committee’s persuasive pow Bergson, ‘La conscience et la vie,’ 25.  Ibid. 175  Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 245. 176  Henri Bergson, ‘Discours de clôture du président, Août 1922,’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1349–52. Speaking as its vice-president, Murray told the Third Assembly that the ICIC would seek to ensure ‘that the great intellectual currents of the world shall at some time once again flow in harmony.’ Harris, Geneva 1922, 52. 177  ‘Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle,’ 13 Septembre 1922,’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1360. 173 174

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ers. He was aware of the need to be sensitive to the existence of varying shades of opinion and mindful of the view entertained in some quarters that intellectual cooperation was a needless extravagance.178 Bergson stated at the second session of the ICIC that he considered it wise that the ICIC had avoided the temptation to act like a ‘supra-national’ intelligence. He insisted that what was of the essence was to inspire confidence among professional thinkers and whole nations alike. Bergson argued that the ICIC was far more likely to inspire such confidence if, rather than issuing grand pronouncements or pursuing reforms which could be ‘qualified as chimerical,’ it continued to ‘work towards some practical ends in the interest of international science.’179 In the context of the ICIC, the term science covered not only work in the fields of the exact and natural sciences but also work undertaken in the fields of history, geography, law and letters. Indeed, that the ICIC was seen as placing an emphasis at the outset on the human sciences at the expense of the exact and natural sciences relates partly to the fact that the latter were considered ‘better organised internationally’ than other branches of knowledge. A report issued by the ICIC in 1922 noted that the exact and natural sciences are ‘universal by their essence’ and ‘international by their practice.’ Although the same report observed that although the human sciences were clearly universal by their essence, it found that by contrast international cooperation in this domain was relatively primitive. Indeed, one of the major concerns of the ICIC was the nationalist orientation of some aspects of the human sciences.180 This early emphasis on the role of the human sciences is further explicable if we recall that the end of intellectual cooperation in the context of the LON was moral rapprochement. Reform of instruction in the fields of history and to a lesser extent geography, as well improved understanding across cultures in general, was seen as key to achieving this end. Bergson  Ibid.  Bergson, ‘Discours d’ouverture de M.  Bergson, président,’ 1398. Northedge writes that in addition to wanting to build a ‘moral consensus between nations in general,’ Bergson had a professional concern for the ‘technical problems’ that intellectuals faced in their daily lives ‘such as the duplication of research through inadequate international information, the lack of efficient bibliographical agencies and the insufficient cross-fertilisation between research workers in the same field in different countries.’ Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations: Its Conceptual Basis and lessons for the present, 11. 180  ‘Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle (13 septembre 1922),’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1358. 178 179

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touched on this issue in observing that while the LON had ‘pursued a scientific end above all’ in establishing an organisation of international intellectual cooperation, it had also pursued a ‘moral end’ which was identical with the overall purpose of the LON itself: the ‘realisation of the grand ideal of fraternity, solidarity and accord amongst men.’181 Bergson reiterated this point before the assembly’s Fourth (Financial) Committee on September 26, 1923, in the course of making a plea for a supplementary credit in order to fund an office of university information. It was a plea that moved all those present except, ‘true to popular stereotype,’ the British delegate.182 In the same context Bergson challenged the view that in establishing the ICIC the LON had indulged itself with a ‘luxury,’ asking committee members whether or not they thought the LON’s endeavours on the political terrain would be ‘complete, profound, durable’ and ‘real’ if there were no ‘rapprochement between the souls, the minds, between the hearts.’183

Towards a Society of Minds Bergson would depart the ICIC in August 1925 on the grounds of ill-­ health, although he would continue to interest himself in its work long after his departure. Despite the brevity of his tenure, there is no doubt that his conception of international intellectual cooperation had a lasting influence. This conception was distilled in a message he addressed to the Swedish Academy in November 1928 following his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927. Bergson stated in this speech that it was misguided to believe that the applications of steam and electricity in diminishing distances, would lead by themselves to a moral rapprochement among peoples; we know today that … the antagonisms, far from disappearing, risk becoming more 181  ‘Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle (5 août 1922),’ in Bergson, Mélanges 1351. 182   Henri Bergson, ‘Proposition de crédit supplémentaire pour la Commission de Coopération Intellectuelle (26 Septembre 1923),’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1422. Northedge states that it ‘required two personal appearances’ before the Fourth Committee to obtain the supplementary credit. Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 304, 334. 183  Bergson, ‘Proposition de Crédit Supplémentaire Pour la Commission de Coopération Intellectuelle (26 septembre 1923),’ 1420–1.

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a­ ggravated unless spiritual progress and greater efforts in the direction of fraternity are not accomplished. To unite thus the souls necessarily requires a foundation of an international character and idealistic inspiration, which implies that the whole civilised world is envisaged, from a point of view purely intellectual, as constituting a single and same république des esprits.184

In the context of the OIC, the persistence of Bergson’s influence was demonstrated by the continuing reaffirmations of the notion of unity in diversity and efforts to translate this notion into reality in the shape of a veritable république des esprits. A crucial figure in relation to this last was Bergson’s friend, the poet Paul Valéry, who served as a member of the ICIC’s Sub-Committee on Arts and Letters from the mid-1920s. Jackson Mathews notes that Valéry’s ‘presence in Geneva, his electrifying intelligence and wit soon made him a leading figure’ in the field of intellectual cooperation, adding that his views on this field of activity predominated in the Sub-Committee on Arts and Letters and its 1931 successor: the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters.185 Particularly influential was Valéry’s notion, which he stated had occurred to him from the very beginning, that a ‘Société des Esprits is the condition of a Société des Nations and that the one and the other can have only opinion as their unique and identical foundation.’186 The expression société des esprits quickly became the leitmotiv of the OIC following Valéry’s invocation of it in a report to a plenary meeting of the ICIC in 1930. Like Bergson, Valéry contended that all the accords and conventions signed by nations would remain fragile and ephemeral unless they were ‘animated by a profound spirit of agreement, of sincere agreement, not by any written pact, but by an accord on certain fundamental points of human thought.’187 It is a contention that should be considered in light of Valéry’s identification of a crisis of the mind in 1919  Henri Bergson, ‘Au Président du Comité Nobel,’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1488–90.  Jackson Mathews, ‘Valéry’s Role in the League of Nations: Forenote,’ in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Mathews, vol. 10, History and Politics, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) 531. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Cooperation, 23. All the ICIC’s subcommittees were abolished in 1930 and replaced by permanent committees of experts. By the end of 1939, there were 14 such committees. 186  Paul Valéry, ‘Société des Nations et Société des Esprits,’ L’Europe Nouvelle, September 20, 1930, 1349 and L’avenir de la culture, Entretiens de Madrid, May 3–7, 1933 (Paris: IICI, 1933), 284, IICI/2/2, UA. 187  L’avenir de la culture, Entretiens de Madrid, May 3–7, 1933, 284. 184 185

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and his concern, expressed some years later, that disorder of the mind, which he maintained was ‘the very essence of modernity, made it very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to represent the ‘world on a single plan and a single scale.’188 It was with a view to promoting agreement on certain fundamental points of human thought that the Permanent Arts and Letters Committee organised and published correspondence between noted thinkers of the day. The most famous of these exchanges, formally entitled an International Series of Open Letters, was an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud under the rubric of Why War? (1933), this being the second volume in the series. However, it is the correspondence between Valéry and Madariaga which featured in the series’s first volume (alongside letters penned by Henri Focillon, Gilbert Murray, Miguel Ozorio de Almeida, Alfonso Reys and Cai Yuanpei [Tsai Yuan Pei]) that I wish to discuss here. Telling of the influence of Valéry, the title of this volume was Pour une société des esprits (1933), which was rendered in English in the less expressive form of A League of Minds.189 Madariaga made it clear in his reply to Valéry that, like the latter, he believed in the pre-eminent role to be played by intellectual cooperation in the international arena. He congratulated Valéry for being, along with Madariaga himself, among the first to understand that the ‘role of the mind in the modern world’ constituted the foundation of what was known in the ‘jargon of Geneva’ as intellectual cooperation. Madariaga declared that he saw intellectual cooperation as ‘the very soul of the Covenant,’ adding that ‘in two or three centuries, historians will possibly consider as the most fertile of … [the ideas] … which the first World Charter erected into universal laws.’190 The belief of Valéry and Madariaga in the pivotal importance of intellectual cooperation is reflected in Madariaga’s observations on the work 188  Paul Valéry, ‘Politics of the Minds,’ in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed., Mathews, vol. 10, History and Politics, 93. ‘The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and by its nature, assuming the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation) … this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase.’ Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind,’ in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed., Mathews, vol. 10, History and Politics, 5. 189  Mathews, ‘Valéry’s Role in the League of Nations: Forenote,’ 532. 190  Salvador de Madariaga, ‘To Mr. Paul Valéry,’ in A League of Minds: Letters of Henri Focillon, Salvador de Madariaga, Gilbert Murray, Miguel Ozorio de Almeida, Alfonso Reyes, Tsai Yuan Pei, Paul Valéry (Paris: IIIC, 1933), 89–90, IICI/3/1, UA. See also Mathews, ‘Valéry’s Role in the League of Nations: Forenote,’ 531–2.

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of the Permanent Committee of Arts and Letters in his introduction to a volume dedicated to Valéry’s writings on history and politics. Therein Madariaga recalled that the committee had ‘decided to spread among the various elites of the world a better understanding of the intellectual harmony that would be necessary if the League of Nations was to develop into something more permanent and efficient’ than was indicated by ‘its English name’: Madariaga agreed with Murray and others that LON was ‘better called by its French name, La Société des Nations [SDN].’191 Madariaga elaborated on this latter point as follows: ‘We did not want a League; we wanted a Society. But for a society of nations actually to come to life, a society of minds had first to be fostered.’192 Or as Valéry repeatedly insisted, ‘la Société des Nations suppose une Société des Esprits.’193 There are two points to underline in relation to Valéry’s and Madariaga’s conception of a society of minds. First, it encompasses the notion, discussed above in relation to Bergson, that the advance of civilisation concerns, above all, those ‘privileged souls’ who, instead of ‘­ remaining within the limits of the group and confining themselves to the solidarity that has been established by Nature,’ address ‘themselves to Humanity in general in an élan of love.’194 Second, their conception of a society of minds reflects a belief that intellectual cooperation, as was also espoused by Bergson, Murray and other figures associated with the OIC, should be fédéraliste: that it should seek ‘to realise in international intellectual life union and not unity,’ this last term signifying uniformity in this context.195 Valéry observed that it was not the LON’s intention to impose a ‘unified (possibly monotonous) accord between the thoughts of men’; that would be undesirable, he insisted, as ‘[v]ariety is even a necessary and natural condition of vitality.’ Nonetheless, and in a very Bergsonian manner, Valéry qualified this point, stating that ‘those precious fine shades of 191  Salvador de Madariaga, introduction to The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Mathews, vol. 10, History and Politics, xxxv and Murray, From the League to U.N., 199. 192  Madariaga, introduction to The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Mathews, vol. 10, History and Politics, xxxv. 193  League of Nations [hereafter LON], International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation [hereafter IIC], International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1932 (Paris: IICI, 1933), 3. IICI/01. 194  Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1948), 58th ed., 51, https://doi.org/10.1522/cla.beh.deu. 195  Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 68–9.

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thought should not materialize as obstacles, should not harden in isolation, should not become impervious to change.’196 It should be noted that although some circles viewed the cause of fostering a society of minds as something light and frivolous, its basis lay in a clear-eyed understanding that the attempt through the LON to ‘substitute the rule of reason for selfish scheming and disorderly passions’ on the political terrain was ‘doomed’ to failure unless that system established for itself solid psychological roots.197 It is also important to point out that for the partisans of a society of minds, such a society was not a ‘fiction’ yet to be translated into fact; rather, their view was that it had always been a fact, even if its ‘vitality’ varied across time.198 Yet in 1932, the year in which Valéry and his colleagues penned their contributions to Pour une société des esprits, these same partisans were acutely aware that the tide of this vitality, which had risen during the LON’s golden years which spanned the midto the late 1920s, was rapidly receding. It was with this in mind that Valéry declared in his letter to Madariaga that he regarded the ‘political necessity of exploiting all that is basest in man in the psychical order as the greatest danger of the present time.’199 That the LON would only prove effective if it were grounded in a fundamental agreement among minds was precisely the point that Bourgeois had sought to establish in insisting at the council, that pre-war intellectual life in a sense had parentage of LON and that the LON could not sustain itself in the absence of mutual understanding. Bonnet later stated that the significance of this point was not well understood at the time, especially by those member states who considered that any attempt to translate the ideas of mutual comprehension and spiritual rapprochement into  Paul Valéry and Henri Focillon, introduction to A League of Minds, 13–5.  Paul Valéry and Henri Focillon, ‘Towards a Correspondence,’ in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed., Mathews, vol. 10, History and Politics, 349. André Thérive noted the fact that the ‘public does not understand correctly this formula [intellectual cooperation], so noble and so vague.’ André Thérive, ‘Chronique Internationale: La vraie coopération intellectuelle,’ L’Opinion, 5 décembre 1931, 14–6. See also Aloïs Derso et Emery Kelen, ‘Une séance à la cooperation intellectuelle,’ in Le Testament de Genève: selon Derso et Kelen, Le Rire éd. (Paris: Achevé d’imprimer sur les presses de Georges Lang, 1931). The celebrated caricaturists Aloïs Derso and Emery Kelen depicted a typical meeting of the ICIC as a gathering of mystics and scribes studying unfurled scrolls. 198  Paul Valéry and Henri Focillon, ‘Towards a Correspondence,’ in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed., Mathews, vol. 10, History and Politics, 349. See also Murray, From the League to U.N., 4. 199  Paul Valéry, ‘To Mr. Salvador de Madariaga,’ in League of Minds, 126. 196 197

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a­ dministrative form was ‘utopian … or a waste of time.’200 As Bourgeois had stated earlier, this was even though concern for ‘moral and intellectual unity’ had dominated the discussions of President Wilson and his colleagues at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris during the Peace Conference and was the essential end of the covenant.201

The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation There is one last institution that requires sustained discussion in this context: the IIIC. It was within the framework of this institution that what emerged as the ISC was conceived and developed, notably under the guidance of another British classicist, namely, Alfred E. Zimmern, who in 1925 was appointed as chief of one of the IIIC’s six sections in 1925: the Section of General Affairs. Like many of his colleagues in the field of intellectual cooperation, Zimmern was of the view that the LON would have to live in people’s minds if it were to live at all.202 The origins of the IIIC concern the dire financial position in which the ICIC quickly found itself after its inauguration. It could barely undertake the work with which it was charged on a meagre annual budget of the equivalent of 5000 British pounds.203 Bonnet observed that it was ‘pathetic’ to see Bergson, ‘frail, modest and persuasive, come himself to plead in vain before the Assembly,’ which remained ‘deaf to his tone, the cause of this poor relative, la Société des Esprits.’204 Fearing for its very survival, the ICIC asked the council to allow it to accept funds from states or private organisations. In view of this request,  Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 4–5.  Léon Bourgeois, L’oeuvre de la Société des Nations (1920–1923) (Paris: Payot, 1923), 17. See also Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 4–5. Robert Cecil touched on this point in a letter to Wilson: ‘But in itself the Covenant is no more than a bare skeleton. We have next to clothe it with flesh and muscle. Even so it will be a dead body unless a spirit can be infused into it. For that we must look under God to the peoples of the World & especially to those of America & England. May they be rightly inspired!’ Robert Cecil to Woodrow Wilson, May 4, 1919, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, eds., Arthur S. Link et al., vol. 58 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 423. 202   Société des Nations [hereafter SDN], L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle (Paris: L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1926), 13, 18–9, IICI/19, UA. The six sections were University Relations, Scientific Relations, Legal Service, General Affairs, Literary and Artistic Relations, and Information and Reference. 203  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 30–1. 204  Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ 201. 200 201

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on July 24, 1924, the French minister of education and fine arts, François Albert, addressed a letter to Bergson in which he made the following declaration: ‘In the name of the French government, and certain of being in this the interpreter of the whole of French public opinion, I would like to offer to the Commission of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations material means to transform its plans into a solid and beautiful reality.’ Clarifying the nature of the offer, Albert noted that in 1905, the Italian government had ‘offered to the Nations to create in Rome the International Institute of Agriculture’ in order to address the problem of agricultural development and production, adding that this institute had functioned ‘since then under the authority of the delegates of the Nations.’ Albert then stated that in an analogous gesture, the French government ‘offers to Nations to create in Paris the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation’: the French government offered ‘through the intermediary of the League … the money and accommodation necessary for the foundation and functioning of the future Institute’ in order to facilitate the ‘rapprochement des esprits’ and as a demonstration of the French government’s ‘ardent desire to contribute’ with the LON ‘and through … [the LON] … to the peace of the world.’205 The letter concluded with the pronouncement that the proposed Institute would ‘respond to the essential needs of the cause’ that ICIC upheld, that it would be the ICIC’s ‘executive instrument’ and that it would be the right of the ICIC to determine all its activities.206 On July 26, the ICIC considered the French offer whereupon some of its members, conscious of the ICIC’s precarious financial situation, proposed that the offer be accepted ‘by acclamation.’ Other members, however, expressed the fear that as the offer would involve ‘the transfer of a part of the activity of the League of Nations from Geneva to Paris,’ it would lend support to the ‘critiques of those who were inclined to attribute to the action of the ICIC some political designs.’207 Following cer205  ‘Annexe I: Lettre de M. François Albert, ministre de l’instruction publique et des beaux arts de France au président de la CICI, 8 December 1924’, in L’Institut International de  Coopération Intellectuelle [hereafter  IICI], L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel: 1925–1946 (Paris: L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1946), 102–4, IICI 944/50, UA. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 31 and Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le intellectuel, 53. 206  ‘Annexe I: Lettre de M. François Albert,’ in IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 104. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 31. 207  Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 54–5. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 95.

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tain clarifications given by Bergson and Luchaire (the latter having been co-opted to one of the ICIC’s subcommittees in view of his role as inspector-­general of education in France), the ICIC unanimously resolved to convey to the French government their ‘gratitude’ for its generous offer and to send to the council a report in order to facilitate its examination of the proposition.208 In that report, which was dated July 29, the ICIC suggested ‘bases on which such an institute could be established and function,’ emphasised that such an institute could render an invaluable service to the ICIC and stressed that the ICIC had reached a stage where it could not progress in its work unless greater means were put at its disposal.209 The report acknowledged that the ‘political and juridical aspect’ of the French proposal was outside the competence of the ICIC, it being but a consultative committee of the council: it was for the council and assembly to decide what was ‘most in conformity with the interests of the League of Nations.’210 On September 9, the council, reunited in Geneva for its thirtieth session, turned its attention to the French government’s offer, examining in that context a report presented by the French representative Henry de Jouvenel. Having read his report and a proposed resolution on the subject, Jouvenel reminded his colleagues of Bourgeois’s observation that ‘if there were no intellectual co-operation there could be no League of Nations,’ adding that with these words Bourgeois had crystallised the doctrine of the French government. Jouvenel also reminded delegates that although a vast field of labour had opened up to the ICIC, its financial means remained meagre. What a ‘sad thing’ it had been, he observed, to see Bergson come to the assembly in the previous year to claim before the Fourth Committee a supplementary credit of 14,000 francs in order to establish the International University Information Office.211 Aware of 208  André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 95. See also Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 55. On Luchaire’s status see Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 32. 209  André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 95–6. See also Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 55. The text of the report was inserted in the record of the proceedings of the fourth session of the ICIC. 210  Procès-verbal de la Quatrième Session de la Commission, 1924, quoted in Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 55. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 96. 211  LON, OJ. no. 10 (1924), 1296, 1549–50. See also Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 56; André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 97 and ‘Annexe II: Lettre du gouvernement français au Président du Conseil

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lingering fears on the part of certain members of the council, Jouvenel then made two declarations in regard to the intentions of the French government. First, he declared that the planned institute must in no case impair the autonomy of already established international institutions of an intellectual character, adding that it was rather ‘a question of creating an organ of liaison between the … [ICIC] … and the different existing associations.’ Second, he declared that the ‘Institute should be an entirely an international office’ and must be directed solely by the ICIC.212 Having heard these declarations and having approved the report of the ICIC, the council adopted the resolution proposed by Jouvenel, thereby accepting in principle ‘the generous French offer’ and, in light of this, submitting it to the assembly for consideration of the following points: the functions of the new institute, the administrative and juridical conditions governing its work and its relations with existing international intellectual institutes.213 Despite the council’s in-principle endorsement of the proposal, when the question of the new institute came before the Second Committee, it gave rise to a very vigorous debate.214 Toynbee, who was then Murray’s son-in-law, maintained that there was a ‘certain feeling’ that were the new institute to be established in Paris, its ‘international character’ might prove difficult to maintain.215 Addressing the Second Committee on September 15, Bergson acknowledged the existence of this feeling before hastening to remind his audience that the new institute would be entirely under the control of the ICIC which would continue to sit in Geneva. Following Bergson’s address, Murray submitted a draft resolution which he had de la   Société des Nations [hereafter  SDN], 8 December 1924,’ in IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel: 1925–1946, 104–6. 212  LON, OJ. no. 10 (1924), 1297. See also Hsu L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 56, and André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 97. 213  LON, OJ. no. 10 (1924), 1550. The resolution cited as examples of such institutes the following Brussels-based bodies: the UIA, the International Office of Biography, the International Council of Research, the International Academic Union. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 97 and L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel, ‘Annexe II: Lettre du Gouvernement français au Président du Conseil de la SDN,’ in IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel: 1925–1946, 104–6. 214  Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 58. 215  Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation, 1926,’ Royal Institute of International Affairs, London (Mr. Toynbee), 1925–1935, AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA.

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­ repared and which was favourable to the French offer, the question of p which, Murray told the committee, was ‘one of life or death’ for the ICIC.216 At the same time, Murray told the committee that he treated very seriously the danger of the institute ‘losing its international character and becoming too predominantly French,’ explaining that under his proposal, the ‘danger of its falling under the exclusive influence’ of the French members of the ICIC who would ‘always be on the spot’ in Paris would be avoided as he had prescribed that the institute be managed by the secretariat in Geneva.217 Opposition to the location of the institute in Paris was most forcefully expressed by the Australian delegate Matthew Charlton. At a meeting of the Second Committee on September 16, Charlton, while expressing appreciation of the ‘liberal offer’ of the French government, urged the committee to reconsider the condition on which the offer was based, insisting that the institute ‘should be directed by the League of Nations at its seat of government and nowhere else.’218 He told the Second Committee that ‘the same reason which brought the League to the neutral town of Geneva militated in favour of establishing a centre for intellectual co-­ operation there also,’ adding that it was ‘[m]oreover uneconomic to disperse the staff of the League to different places.’219 On September 18, Murray presented to the committee the unanimous proposals of a subcommittee appointed the previous day to prepare a new text for the draft resolution on the French offer. Consistent with Murray’s draft, the preamble of the rewritten resolution emphasised the desire to maintain the international character of the institute and specified that its powers and duties were to be defined by the ICIC. However, under the new resolution, the administration of the institute was to be placed, not in the hands of the secretariat, but in the hands of a board of management 216  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 25 (1924), 18–9. See also i ‘Annex 3 a: Intellectual Co-operation, Creation of an International Institute: Offer of the French Government, Resolution proposed by Professor Gilbert Murray (British Empire)’ (ibid., 51). 217  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 25 (1924), 19. 218  Ibid., 21. See also Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 58–9; LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 23 (1924), 135; Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation, 1926,’ AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA; and Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 31. 219  Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 58–9 and LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 23 (1924), 135. See also Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation, 1926,’ AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA.

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appointed by the ICIC which would report annually to the council and the assembly. Following Murray’s presentation, Charlton once again urged the committee to reconsider the decision to accept the French ‘gift.’220 The minutes of the meeting record that Murray thanked Charlton for his frankness, appealed to him to not persist with his opposition and then stated the following: At a time when the whole work of the Committee on Intellectual Co-operation had been hampered by a lack of means the Assembly had made an appeal on its behalf for money. Not a single country except France had responded. While he recognised the dangers which Mr. Charlton feared, he felt that the French Government had earned the position of influence which they would doubtless acquire under the present scheme. In so far as this preponderance was undesirable, from the point of view of the League, the blame must rest with the other countries which had made no contribution.221

At this point Charlton declared that he intended to vote against the resolution and that he wished the fact to be recorded in the minutes, following which the committee adopted the resolution, by twenty-five votes to one: the rule of unanimity prescribed in Article 5 of the covenant in respect to the decisions taken by the council and the assembly did not apply itself to the decisions taken by the six committees of the assembly.222 At a plenary meeting of the assembly on September 23, Murray noted that of all the resolutions on intellectual cooperation adopted by the Second Committee in the course of its work, the only one on which there had been any serious difference of opinion was its recommendation concerning the French offer, adding that the delegation which had taken the strongest view on the matter had kindly assured him that they would not be pressing the matter any further.223 The withdrawal of the Australian delegation’s opposition did not prevent Charlton from declaring at the assembly that the ‘only way in which  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 25 (1924), 27.  Ibid. See also Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 59, and Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation, 1926,’ AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA. 222  LON, OJ, special supplement no. 25 (1924) 27. See also Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 61. 223   LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 23 (1924), 132 and Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation, 1926,’ AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA. 220 221

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the work [of intellectual cooperation] can be accomplished is by keeping it within the territory of the League,’ a contention which, as one observer pointed out, seemed inconsistent with the ICIC’s policy of enlarging and diversifying ‘throughout the entire world the organisms of Intellectual Cooperation, in giving a role more active and a larger place to the national committees.’224 Charlton’s protest at the assembly was echoed by the New Zealand delegate Sir James Allen, who declared that should the Australian delegation make an adverse vote on the question of the French gift, he would vote with him, although he acknowledged that to vote against a report of the Second Committee would be ‘rather a serious thing to do.’225 Speaking after the close of the discussion, the head of the Australian delegation and Australia’s attorney-general, Sir Littleton Groom, explained that in making his protest his colleague had not intended to ‘injure the feelings of our French friends’ but had merely wished to emphasise the principle that the agencies of the League should be concentrated in its administrative centre as far as possible. Although declaring that Charlton was right to make his protest, Groom stated he could not in his capacity as chief delegate exercise his vote to prevent a proposal being carried out which aimed at the creation of an ‘international sentiment,’ adding that as far as that aspect of the proposal was concerned, it had Australia’s sympathy.226 Groom’s speech, unlike those of Charlton and Allen, was greeted with applause, following which the president of the assembly, Switzerland’s Giuseppe Motta, stated that as Australia was no longer opposed and that thereby the opposition of New Zealand had been removed, there was now no longer any opposition to the resolution. This did not prevent Charlton from observing following its adoption that Motta’s statement did not apply to him ‘personally’ as he remained just as strongly opposed to the proposal as when he spoke, adding that ‘unfortunately’ he had no vote.227

224  Sir James Allen told the assembly: ‘I believe that the international character of organizations of this genre can be long maintained only if they are under the absolute control of the League and if they find themselves placed at the seat of the League in Geneva.’ LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 23 (1924), 135. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 98. 225  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 23 (1924), 141. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 98. 226  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 23 (1924), 142. 227  Ibid. 143.

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Charles André later  observed  that the Australian opposition, as with that of New Zealand, was motivated by jealousy: Australia and New Zealand as loyal members of the British Empire were jealous of the ‘preponderance and authority’ that France had acquired.228 Without excluding the possibility that imperial jealousy played a role, Renoliet suggests that the opposition of the two Dominions may have been in part tactical: intended to ensure on behalf of Great Britain, which had accepted the French offer albeit in a somewhat forced manner, that the rigorously international character of the institute was guaranteed.229 Renoliet further suggests that although underwhelmed by the French offer, London felt unable to dismiss it: in view of the sacrifices consented to by Herriot on the German problem and given the new international context symbolised by the Geneva Protocol presented at this same session …. [Hence], it appears that London was playing at being a ventriloquist in giving its voice to the delegates of the Dominions, charged in some way with summoning up the prejudices that nourished the Anglo-Saxon bloc in regard to an Institute which people suspect will serve forcefully French interests.230

On September 30, the council requested that the secretary-general prepare with the French government the agreements to be concluded between the latter and the council that were necessary, as stated in the assembly’s resolution of September 23, to ensure the establishment, continuity and proper working of the institute. On December 8, Herriot, as both prime minister and minister for foreign affairs, submitted a letter to the LON Council in which he confirmed that the French government, having taken into account the council’s acceptance in principle of the French offer on September 9 and the assembly’s resolution of September 23 which, Herriot noted, underlined the international character of the institute, ‘undertakes to found and maintain an International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, placed at the disposition of the League of Nations and of which the registered seat will be in Paris.’231 Herriot’s letter laid out in detail the terms of the French engagement, stressing, in conformity with  André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 98–9.  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 55. 230  Ibid. 231   ‘Annexe II: Lettre du gouvernement français au Président du Conseil de la SDN,’ in IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel: 1925–1946, 104. 228 229

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the assembly’s resolution, the independence and internationality of the new institution and promising that the French government would take all the steps necessary in order to establish the ‘International Institute as an autonomous foundation enjoying a legal personality.’232 Annexed to this letter and also signed by Herriot was a document entitled Statut organique de l’Institut international de la Coopération Intellectuelle which, with reference to the assembly’s stipulations regarding the IIIC’s administration, specified the general rules governing the functioning of the organisation. It too underlined the independence and internationality of the IIIC, as reflected in the following statement: ‘The International Institute is independent of the authorities of the country in which it is established. It corresponds directly with the governmental authorities and administrators charged, in the different countries, with the examination and the solution of the different questions connected to its object.’233 As stated in the Statut organique, the IIIC had as its principal object the ‘preparation of the deliberations of the Commission of Intellectual Cooperation, to pursue in every country the recommendations of this commission, and to work, under the direction of this Commission and by every means in its power, for the progress of the organization of intellectual work in the world through international collaboration.’234 On December 13, at a meeting held in Rome, the council examined the letter of Herriot and the Statut organique, deciding to regard the former as constituting the accord or accords between the French government and the LON envisaged by the assembly in its resolution of September 23 and instructing its president to convey to the French government its agreement  Ibid.  ‘Appendixe: Statut organique de l’Institut International de Coopération,’ in IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel: 1925–1946, 106–7. See also Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 60. Renoliet notes that a draft agreement (projet d’Arrangement) between the French government and the LON and a draft constitution (Statut organique) of the IIIC had been forwarded by Bergson to Drummond on November 12, 1924, following conversations between officials of the French Ministry of Education, the director of the secretariat’s legal service and a subcommittee of the ICIC of which Bergson, Destrée, Luchaire and Lorentz were the members. Renoliet adds that in addition to the assembly’s resolution of September 23, these drafts drew their inspiration from notes prepared by Luchaire in October. These drafts were largely incorporated into the Herriot’s letter and the Statut organique. 234  ‘Appendixe: Statut organique de l’Institut International de Coopération,’ in IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel: 1925–1946, 106. 232 233

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with the terms of the engagement.235 In light of the adoption by the council of the text of the Herriot letter along with that of the Statut organique, the French government submitted to the Chamber of Deputies and Senate a draft bill bearing on the founding of the IIIC. Following its adoption on July 10, the bill, which recognised the accord between the French government and the LON and which declared in its second article that the ‘International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation is an autonomous foundation invested with legal personality,’ was promulgated by President Gaston Doumergue on August 6, 1925.236 The IIIC was effectively subject to the LON by virtue of the fact that its governing body was the ICIC and, as such, the ICIC had sole oversight of its schedule of activities, budgetary allocations and the recruitment of its personnel.237 In regard to its personnel and in keeping with the IIIC’s international status, it should be noted that the ICIC in its capacity as the IIIC’s governing body decided to accord the more senior among these functionaries the same diplomatic privileges and immunities enjoyed by the representatives of member states and officials of the LON, a decision approved by the council during its thirty-sixth session.238 This decision had its basis in Article 11 of the Statut organique which stated that the ‘Governing Body, by a decision approved by the Council of the League of Nations, determines the categories of the personnel of the Institute that should benefit from the diplomatic privileges and immunities’ enjoyed by the representatives of member states and officials of the LON under Article 7 of the covenant.239 Thus, as Hsu pointed out a few years after its creation, ‘although founded by the French government,’ and although its ‘premises, the costs of [its] installation and its annual budget...[were]... dependent on the French government,’ the IIIC was not ‘a public establishment of the French State.’240 At the same time, the IIIC, although 235  Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 62. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 99–100; and Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 87. 236  Draft Bill bearing on the foundation of the IIIC, 1924, quoted in Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 64. For the dates of the law’s adoption and promulgation, see Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 69. 237  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 32–3. 238  Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 67. 239  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 32–3. On the question of the diplomatic status of its staff, see ‘Appendixe: ‘Statut organique de l’Institut International de Coopération,’ in IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel: 1925–1946, 107 and Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 66–7. 240  Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 64–5, 67. The Polish government offered it at the outset 100,000 French francs to undertake a study of

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placed at the disposition of the LON, was independent of that organisation in two crucial respects. First, throughout its life it remained financially independent of the LON: its ‘finances were derived from the annual contributions paid e.g. in 1937 by seventeen countries, members and non-­ members of the League of Nations; the greatest share, of course, was contributed by the French Government.’241 Second, its legal existence was not dependent on the covenant, which is why, unlike other technical organs of the LON, it did not come under the supervision of the secretary-­general: its personnel were not part of the personnel of the LON.242 Elaborating on the nature of autonomy of the IIIC, Pham Thi-Tu observes that the Institute is autonomous in regard to the … [LON] …. Placed at the disposition of the League, it was not, however, made by virtue of this act a party to the terms of the Covenant, but was functioning simply under its auspices. The two institutions were linked by close relations, but it is undeniable that the IIIC was able to subsist without the aid of the … [League] …, all in keeping with its international character. The … [LON] … was not a condition ‘sine qua non’ of its existence or of its proper working, because the League was exercising only a right of control of its management and work.243

Following a search for premises of sufficient grandeur to play host to an international institution, the IIIC, by virtue of a government decree, was installed in the wing of the Palais Royal which adjoins rue de Montpensier, its impressive entrance being located not far from the rear of the Théâtre de la Comédie Française.244 Although it opened its offices a few months earlier, the IIIC was not formally inaugurated until January 16 of the following year in the form of a ceremony that was broadcast on radio both within and outside France and which consisted of speeches and musical interludes which, ‘in order to mark well the international vocation and character of the IIIC, emanate from composers representing the great assistance to universities. On its annual budget, see SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 6. 241  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 33. 242  Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 9 and Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 89. 243  Pham Thi-Tu, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 88. 244  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 73; Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 63n; and SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 16.

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cultures of Europe (Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann).’245 The inaugural ceremony unfolded in the great hall of the IIIC located within what the acting president of the LON Council, Vittorio Scialoja, described in his speech as the ‘cadre magnifique’ of the Palais Royal. In addition to Scialoja, among the dignitaries present at this ceremony were President Doumergue; Édouard Daladier, Albert’s successor as minister for education and fine arts; Drummond; Lorentz, who had just been elected president of the ICIC in the wake of Bergson’s retirement; diverse members of the French government; and some ambassadors and diplomats accredited to Paris.246 Representing the LON in their different capacities, Scialoja, Drummond and Lorentz thanked the government of the French Republic for, in Drummond’s and Lorentz’s words, respectively, its ‘splendid generosity’ and ‘generous élan’ in providing the ICIC with an instrument for the realisation of its work. The French government, Scialoja declared, had favoured ‘the advent of the spirit of peace, the idea of the League of Nations.’247 All three of these speakers insisted on the internationality of the new institute, with Lorentz, for example, stating that those assembled at this ceremony well understood the importance he attached to the fact that the IIIC be ‘truly international’ and that the French government ‘expressly desired’ that it be of this character.248 Paul Painlevé, the French mathematician and former minister for war who had been appointed to the ICIC by the council following Bergson’s retirement on December 11, 1925, echoed Lorentz: in a speech given in his capacity as president of the IIIC’s board of directors, Painlevé declared that the institute was ‘very much international.’249 Luchaire, who had been appointed director of the IIIC and whom Bergson credited with being the key initiator of the French proposal to establish the IIIC, followed Painlevé in addressing the gathering. Luchaire thanked the French government for its ‘disinterested’ offer and underlined the ‘novelty’ of establishing an instrument of the LON in a location  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 73–4. See also SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 6. Renoliet notes that the institute was installed on October 26, 1925. However, the second  publication  cited in this  note  recorded  that the institute opened its offices in September. 246  Institut. International de la Coopération Intellectuelle [hereafter IICI], Travaux de l’Institut de Coopération Intellectuelle pendant la année 1926 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1927), 7, IICI/27, UA. 247  IICI, Travaux de l’Institut de Coopération Intellectuelle pendant la année 1926, 8–11. 248  Ibid., 10. 249  Ibid., 11–2. On Painlevé’s appointment to the ICIC, see Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 72. 245

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other than Geneva, thus both disassociating and associating the IIIC with France.250 Most interestingly, Luchaire concluded his speech in quoting advice issued in 1720 by François Fénelon, a French priest and ecrivain whom Luchaire described as a ‘great mystic at the same time as a refined intellectual,’ namely, that states ‘are under a necessity for the security of each, and the common interest of all, to maintain together a kind of society [société] and a kind of commonwealth [république générale].’251 Fénelon, a fierce critic of the wars of punishment and glory of Louis XIV, issued this advice in a famous piece entitled ‘Essay on the Balance of Europe’ wherein he added to it the following caution: that ‘unless they [states] unite together to preserve the balance,’ the most powerful would ‘at length prevail and overthrow the rest.’252 In his speech, Luchaire did not draw out the collective security implication of Fénelon’s cautionary words; rather, he cited Fénelon in order to pose the question as to whether ‘la République générale des Intelligences [will] one day be a reality?’253 Renoliet correctly observes that Luchaire’s expression, namely, la République générale des Intelligences, prefigured Valéry’s expression société des esprits.254 At the same time, it is worth noting that these or similar expressions would appear to have had currency in French intellectual and literary circles for some time. For example, towards the end of Victor Hugo’s novel Quatrevingt-treize (1874), the following line appears: ‘You dream of man as soldier, I dream of man as citizen. You want him terrifying, I want him thoughtful. You found a republic of swords … I would found a république d’esprits.’255 One should also recall that in his message to the Swedish Academy in 1928, Bergson had employed the expression

250  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 48, 73. Renoliet adds that the real originator of the project for an international intellectual centre was the Belgian Jules Destrée who proposed it in July 1922. 251  IICI, Travaux de l’Institut de Coopération Intellectuelle pendant la année 1926, 13 and François Fénelon, ‘Essay on the Balance of Europe,’ in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on the Most Interesting and Entertaining Subjects, 2nd ed. (London: Cadell, Davis, 1815), 766. 252  Fénelon, ‘Essay on the Balance of Europe,’ 766. 253  IICI, Travaux de l’Institut de Coopération Intellectuelle pendant la année 1926, 13. 254  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 74. 255  Victor Hugo, Quatrevingt-Treize. Reprint of the 1874 Paris edition, In Libro Veritas, 2006, 74, http://www.inlibroveritas.net/lire/oeuvre3594.html.

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république des esprits. He also had therein invoked, to use his words, ‘what the philosophers have called a société des esprits.’256 Despite the numerous homages paid to the spirit of internationalism at the inauguration ceremony, behind the scenes there had been and continued to be much manoeuvring in regard to the advancement of the interests of states in relation to the IIIC.  Here it should be noted that the ICIC, reunited in Geneva from July 27 to 30, 1925, and sitting as both the ICIC and the governing body of the IIIC, appointed Destrée, Lorentz, Murray, Reynold and Ruffini as the five members of the IIIC’s governing body to serve on the first board of directors of the IIIC.257 At the time of this meeting, those assembled envisaged that Bergson would preside over this board by virtue of the fact that he was the French member of the IIIC’s governing body: the ICIC had reached an ‘unwritten’ agreement at its fifth session, which commenced proceedings on May 11 and which was held in Paris, that the French member would head this board.258 This was how it came about that Painlevé presided over the IIIC’s governing board until his death in 1933, at which point Herriot assumed the role of president, a role that would only come to an end when the ICIC’s work was disrupted by the war.259 Painlevé was not the only person appointed to the ICIC by the council on December 11, 1925: the council also appointed to it the Italian minister of justice and culture, namely, Alfredo Rocco. Even though nationality was supposed to be irrelevant to such appointments, effectively, Rocco replaced his compatriot Ruffini, the latter being a ‘known opponent’ of the Duce.260 Rocco, a jurist, was an exponent of the theoretical basis of fascism. He boasted that it was he who, in his capacity as minister of justice, had created the legal basis for the Fascist state.261 Drawing a contrast between the fascist and the liberal state, Rocco proclaimed in 1927 that 256  Henri Bergson to the president of the Nobel Committee, in Bergson, in Mélanges, 1488. Note that the ICIC was described as a ‘League of Minds’ from the time of its inception. See Harris, Geneva 1922, 52. 257  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 32 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 71. 258  Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, 345.  On the May and July meetings of  the ICIC in 1925 and the agreements reached there, see  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 65,  72 See also Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 9. 259  Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 9. 260  Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 78–9. See also Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 72; and Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 92. 261  R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Dictatorship 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 226 and Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 453.

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the ‘Fascist State has its own morality, its own religion, its own political mission in the world, its own form of social justice, in sum its own economic arrangement,’ an outlook hardly in keeping with the universalist and humanist pretensions of the ICIC.262 Even more noteworthy in this context is his insistence, in the course of a speech delivered at Perugia on August 30, 1925, on the ‘necessity … of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, on behalf of society’ and his declaration in relation to this that here lies the ‘true explanation of war, eternal law of mankind, interpreted by liberal-democratic doctrines as a degenerate absurdity or as a maddened monstrosity.’263 According to Renoliet, the appointments of Rocco and Painlevé, irrespective of their intellectual credentials, would have been ruled out in 1922 given their ministerial roles. He observes in relation to these appointments and the nominations of the senior functionaries of the ­ Institute that there was in evidence at the level of the ICIC a ‘care to not wound any susceptibilities among all the great European powers.’264 This care was very much in evidence at a meeting of the IIIC’s governing body on January 16, a meeting that appointed Rocco to the IIIC’s board of directors, ‘under the pressure of the Italian government and with the support of France.’265 The same meeting also appointed Einstein to the board with a view to conciliating ‘the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian bloc’ which was ‘hostile’ (as was Einstein and Curie-Sklodowska) ‘to the candidature of a fascist dignitary,’ thereby bringing the number of members of the board to six, leaving aside Painlevé’s position as president.266 262  Marco Piraino and Stefano Fiorito, eds., Scritti e discorsi di Alfredo Rocco, 1925–1934, vol. 3, La formazione dello Stato (Lulu, 2013) 779, http://bibilotecafascista.org. 263  Alfredo Rocco, ‘The Political Doctrine of Fascism,’ International Conciliation, no. 223 (1926): 387–445: 402. 264  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 72. 265  Ibid. 266  Renoliet points out that at the meeting Murray had advanced the candidature of Norway’s Bonnevie who had ‘always supported the conception of an Institute the most international possible’ (ibid.). On the membership of the board, see SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 11. Jan Kolasa notes that Einstein and CurieSklodowska had earlier opposed Rocco’s appointment to the ICIC, adding, however, that the fear that Italy might withdraw from the LON in a fit of resentment caused them to compromise ‘with the fait accompli.’ Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 38. On this last point, see also Wünsch, ‘Einstein et la Commission internationale de coopération intellectuelle,’ 516 and Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 192. ‘Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden point out that Curie-Sklodowska opposed the appointment of Rocco ‘on the ground that members of the committee should be independent of their governments’ and that

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If Einstein initially responded positively to the idea of establishing an executive arm of the ICIC in Paris, he soon came to have doubts about it, suspecting that it would be dominated by the French. He thought this would be especially the case in light of the agreement that the president of its governing body would be the French member of the ICIC. Einstein was unable to attend the fifth session of the ICIC, which commenced proceedings in Paris on May 11, 1925, due to his presence in Rio de Janeiro. He thus attempted ‘to persuade Lorentz to protest in his name,’ although without success.267 Einstein was obviously not alone in having concerns about the potential for French dominance of the institute: the Anglo-Saxon countries harboured suspicions in this regard as did the neutral countries, a matter that did not go unnoticed by the German Foreign Office.268 In regard to Anglo-Saxon sentiment, it is worth noting that at the fifth session of the ICIC which commenced on May 11, 1925, Toynbee, standing in for Murray, ‘declared that if the English milieux are disposed to accept that the director of this Institute is French, given the origin of its creation and Parisian seat, they will, however, be very disappointed’ if one of the six chiefs of section positions ‘was not allocated to a German.’ Such an appointment, Toynbee suggested, was desirable on the grounds that it would ensure the representation of ‘Germanic culture’ and demonstrate that the ‘Institute is truly international.’269 Toynbee’s intervention in favour of German representation at the IIIC came a few months after a resolution was passed by the Fourth Congress of German Universities, which noted that France and Belgium were ‘still systematically attempting to keep German science and German scientists out of any form of international collaboration.’270 However, according to a paper Toynbee prepared in 1926, by the time the ICIC met as the IIIC’s governing body in July 1925, the international situation in respect to German science ‘had sensibly improved.’271 Indeed, at that very same Einstein’s ‘opposition was based on ideological reasons.’ Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 79 267  Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, 345. See also Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 163, 191. 268  Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 191. 269  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 67. 270  Le Temps, February 8, 1925. See also Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation, 1926,’ AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA. 271  Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation, 1926,’ AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA and ‘The League of Nations: Intellectual Cooperation,’ Time, 10 August 1925, http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,720679,00.html.

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time, Lorentz, speaking on behalf of Dutch, Danish and Swedish ­academic institutions at the July meeting of the International Council of Research, was calling for an end to all forms of exclusion of Germany from international intellectual collaboration.272 Against the background of the expression of such sentiments and on the nomination of Einstein, the July meeting, at which Murray presided due to the absence of Bergson who was unwell, named Gerhart von Schulze-Gaevernitz as chief of the Scientific Section of the IIIC.  Thus, Schulze-Gaevernitz, an economist from Freiburg University, became the first German national to occupy a position under the LON, his appointment serving as a further sign of the demise of the boycott of German science.273 Just under two weeks before this meeting, Bergson had addressed a note to Einstein wherein Bergson responded to Einstein’s claim that some feared that the French government’s offer of the institute to the ICIC was ‘inspired by national interest.’274 If this were the case, Bergson proposed, how then to explain the ‘coldness of the welcome’ that the project had received in France as exemplified by the fact that it had been held ‘in suspense’ for six months by the French Senate before finally receiving that body’s approval. Bergson pointed out that it had been determined first by the ICIC and then by the LON, that the institute would be ‘rigorously and completely international’ and this, he added, had in fact been ‘the intention of the French government in offering it.’275 Evidently, Einstein remained unconvinced as in a dinner speech he gave at the official inauguration of the IIIC, he was forthright in expressing the concern that perceptions of French dominance in the context of the IIIC would impair confidence in the internationalism of the ICIC. Elaborating on this concern, Einstein stated: This year leading politicians of Europe have for the first time drawn the consequences of the realization that our part of the Earth can only flourish again if the latent battles among traditional organized states stop …. This great goal cannot be reached solely on the basis of treaties. Intellectual preparations are also of primary importance …. In consideration of this the League of Nations called into existence the ‘Commission de coopération  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 67.  Time, August 10, 1925, and SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 14. See also Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 77. 274  H. Bergson to A. Einstein, 15 July 1925, in Henri Bergson, Correspondences, ed., André Robinet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), 1161–2. 275  Ibid., 1162. 272 273

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intellectuelle.’ This committee is supposed to be an absolutely international agency detached from all politics, aimed at establishing a link in all areas of intellectual life between national cultural communities isolated by the war …. This committee has convened twice a year. In order make its work more effective, the French government decided to create and maintain a permanently operative Institute for Intellectual Cooperation which is now being inaugurated …. It is an easy and gratifying business to cheer and applaud and to remain silent about what one regrets or does not approve of …. So I will not shy away from adding some criticism to this birthday greeting: Every day I have occasion to notice that the greatest obstacle to the work of our committee is a lack of trust in its political objectivity. Everything must be done to strengthen this trust; and everything must be avoided that could damage this trust. When the French government establishes and maintains as a permanent organ of the committee an institute in Paris on state funds and with a French citizen as its director, this must necessarily lend the impression to outsiders that French influence must predominate in the committee. This is intensified by the fact that the president of the committee itself has hitherto been a Frenchman. Although the men in question are highly esteemed and appreciated by everyone everywhere—the impression still remains.276

Renoliet writes that even if imperialist ambitions coloured France’s role in establishing the IIIC, and this is something he does not doubt, its creation nonetheless contributed to the consolidation of the ‘détente’ which had begun to emerge in Europe and added to the ‘credibility’ of the LON.277 This perhaps helps explain why the council and assembly, in July and September 1926, respectively, approved the recognition of Intellectual Cooperation as a technical organ of the LON with the same status as its other organs. It was thus that the OIC came into existence.278 In according Intellectual Cooperation the status of a technical organ, the assembly resolved that it considered that this organisation now provided ‘a mechanism capable of strengthening the intellectual relations 276  Albert Einstein, quoted in Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 191. See also Wünsch, ‘Einstein et la Commission internationale de coopération intellectuelle,’ 515–6 and Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 77–8. 277  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 76. 278  Ibid., 65. See also LON, IIIC, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1932, 7; Bonnet, ‘Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization,’ 7 and Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 5. The status of the OIC became definitive as a result of an assembly resolution in 1931.

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among nations and improving the conditions of intellectual work in the world’ and recognised that, as such, the OIC comprised four parts.279 First, there was the ICIC which, as the OIC’s directive body, met once or twice a year in order to recommend the undertaking of certain projects and to study the results of projects that had been concluded. The ICIC also delegated certain questions to subcommittees in which certain of its members participated and which were sometimes assisted by ‘extraordinary committees of experts.’280 Second, there was the IIIC, which was ‘rigorously specialised in the study and execution of the measures of organisation of intellectual work’ and which assigned the task of ‘coordinating existing organisations’ or promoting the development of new organisations and ‘assuring among all of them a sort of common rhythm.’281 Third, there were the National Committees of Intellectual Cooperation which were supposed to represent the ‘principal intellectual forces in each nation.’282 Such committees had arisen in a spontaneous manner in Central and Eastern Europe in the winter of 1922 and in the spring of 1923. In the summer of 1923, the ICIC resolved to foster the growth of the national committees as part of its policy of federalism or decentralisation. It was the role of the IIIC from its inception to liaise with these committees.283 The fourth and final division of the OIC concerned the system of delegates of state (délégués d’état): governments were permitted to appoint delegates to represent them at the IIIC, with these delegates having access to materials relating to the IIIC’s work and being able, in the name of their governments, to propose questions that the

279  SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 19–20. The resolution noted with satisfaction the assurance of the governing body of the IIIC that this institute ‘is so conducted as to ensure perfect equality of treatment between the nations.’ 280  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 77. 281  Ibid. 282  Ibid. 283  Bonnet, ‘Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization,’ 7, 25. Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 32. See also Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 49–50. Eleven of the national committees had appeared by July 1923: Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. The ICIC invited the council to call on member state to give moral and financial support to such committees. There were thirty-three such committees by 1929. On the policy of decentralisation, see Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 68.

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IIIC might undertake to study.284 The institution of the delegates of state subsequently became an important feature of the OIC because it enabled this organisation to become more genuinely universal: less dominated by Europeans.285

Practical Projects or Theoretical Reflections: The Conflict Between Luchaire and Zimmern Luchaire very soon became the target of criticism because of his policy of expanding the range and scope of projects undertaken by the IIIC with a view to extending its influence and acquiring for it prestige.286 As he later expressed it, there were two main accusations to which the management of the IIIC was subject: firstly, that it had ‘created an excessive “bureaucracy”’ and, secondly, that it had ‘shown too much independence in regard to the authorities in Geneva,’ thus seemingly challenging the primacy of the ICIC.287 In addition, in seeking to expand the role and elevate the importance of the IIIC, Luchaire was seen acting in a way that profited France, thereby breaching the commitment to the principle of universality.288 Criticism was directed at Luchaire in Paris by Zimmern, who had been promoted to the position of deputy director of the IIIC in July 1926.289 Zimmern conveyed his criticisms of Luchaire to Albert Dufour-Feronce, a 284  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 33. On the role of the delegates of state, see also Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 68–9. 285  Renoliet writes that although Europeans were largely in the majority on the committee (often for the practical reasons of distance and cost of travel), and among the staff of the institute, through the system of the delegates of states in particular, the OIC in the late 1930s ‘revealed the progressive effacement of Europe and announced the veritable universality of Unesco after the Second World War.’ Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 332. By 1936, there were forty-five delegates of state attached to the institute. Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 33. 286  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 78–9. 287  Luchaire, Confessions d’un Français moyen, 181. See also Wünsch, ‘Einstein et la Commission internationale de cooperation intellectuelle,’ 518. See also Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 77. 288  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 81–2. 289  Wilhelm Haas, ‘Auslandsarbeit,’ in Ernst Jäckh, ed., Politik als Wissenschaft: Zehn Jahre Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (Berlin: Verlag Hermann Beckendorf, 1931), 261, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA.  In announcing Zimmern’s appointment, this pamphlet noted that ‘[s]everal other changes have also taken place in the Institute staff since July 1926.’ See ‘Work of the Sections,’ in SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 18–9.

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former member of the German Foreign Office, who, following Germany’s entry into the LON, joined Giacomo Paulucci di Calboli, a personal assistant of Mussolini, and Sugimura Yō tarō , a Japanese diplomat, as one of three under-secretaries-general at the secretariat. Dufour-Feronce’s role as under-secretary-general (and the fact that a third post of this kind had been created), was a consequence of Germany’s newly acquired status as a permanent member of the council, and it was in that role that Dufour-­ Feronce replaced Nitobe as director of the secretariat’s Intellectual Cooperation Section.290 It is worth pausing here to note that the appointment of Paulucci in 1927 was one of the main reasons that Madariaga left the secretariat in the following year, an institution which he had so prized on the basis that it was, due to the efforts of Drummond and Monnet, ‘an international body instead of a conglomerate of national offices.’291 However, according to Madariaga, when, following a visit to Rome, Drummond ‘allowed the Duce to force him to accept [Paulucci] as successor to [Bernardo] Attolico, the very essence of the secretariat was compromised.’292 Elaborating on this observation, Madariaga, who had met and had taken an immediate dislike to the Duce, stated: Here began the downfall of the Secretariat. The Fascist under-secretary’s room became a kind of Italian Embassy at the League (Save that the Ambassador’s salary was paid by the League), linked directly with Mussolini and openly accepting orders and instructions from him. Paulucci in himself an attractive and friendly person, was nevertheless zealous enough to go

 Morley, Society of Nations, 274, 278n.  Salvador de Madariaga, Morning Without Noon: Memoirs (London: Saxon House, 1974), 101. 292  Ibid. René Wadlow notes that the LON had ‘accepted to fire’ Bernardo Attolico as under-secretary-general ‘and replace him by … Paulucci. There were always persons from the Great Powers in influential League posts, but they were usually intellectuals who believed in the values of the League and not national civil servants. De Madariaga had met Mussolini twice in Rome during disarmament talks. It was De Madariaga’s habit of making quick instinctive judgements of people, and he did not like Mussolini from the start. De Madariaga became a “premature” anti-Fascist. The fact that the League would place a Fascist civil servant in a key position was for De Madariaga a step backward for a real world civil service.’ René Wadlow, ‘Salvador Madariaga: Conscience of the League of Nations,’ The Federalist Debate 22, no. 1 (2009): 1–3. http://www.federalistdebate.org/index.php/component/ k2/itemlist/category/16-year-xxii-number-1-march-2009. 290 291

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about even during official League gatherings sporting the Fascist badge on his lapel.293

Although Madariaga would once more serve the LON, joining its Permanent Arts and Letters Committee after it was established in 1930 and continued to regard the secretariat as an ‘admirable institution,’ the appointment of a fascist to an important post in what was meant to be a world civil service made him feel that there was ‘no future in the League, none beyond a certain utility’ as a diplomatic forum.294 In a note dated September 1927, Zimmern informed Dufour-Feronce that the Institute ‘should not be conceived essentially as an office changed with realising some practical projects,’ a conception which Luchaire tended towards, ‘but as a centre of intellectual life and a stimulus, where eminent personalities in the fields of learning and art will be certain of being welcomed.’295 Continuing in this vein, Zimmern told Dufour-­ Feronce that he thought the IIIC should not seek to englobe a vast array of intellectual activities by means of coordination, but should be a kind of ‘salon devoted to theoretical discussions and denuded of a means of practical action.’ Under this form, Zimmern insisted, the IIIC could be considerably relieved of many of its functionaries.296 Zimmern’s minimalist and highly elitist conception of the IIIC would have well-suited the agendas of those who were keen to limit the funds dedicated to the OIC or who did not want to see ‘drain towards Paris the essence of the activities of the OIC.’297 Among those who shared the latter view was Murray, who became president of the ICIC in July 1928, following the death of Lorentz. In that role, Murray sought to reorganise the OIC in a way that greatly diminished the functions of the IIIC. The justification for such a radical reorganisation was the view that Zimmern expressed: that the IIIC should confine itself to being a ‘centre for reflection on great intellectual problems.’298 The attack on the IIIC continued over a period of two years. However, due to the efforts of Painlevé and André François-Poncet, the latter being 293  Salvador de Madariaga, quoted in Wadlow, ‘Salvador Madariaga: Conscience of the League of Nations,’ 2. 294  Madariaga, Morning Without Noon: Memoirs, 101. 295  Confidential Note on the IIIC, 1927, quoted in Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 79–80. 296  Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 80. 297  Ibid. 298  Ibid., 86.

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a delegate of France at the assembly and who, in that capacity, defended ‘the work, the integrity, the autonomy and the central role’ of the IIIC, its status was maintained. However, Luchaire’s position as director had to be sacrificed.299 Despite the moves to reduce the influence of Paris, Luchaire (who would later join the Permanent Committee of Arts and Letters), was succeeded by another French national: the highly administratively adept Henri Bonnet assumed the role of director on January 1, 1931, after having served as Joseph Avenol’s chef de cabinet, Avenol being Monnet’s successor as the deputy secretary-general.300 While the various forms of technical cooperation that had characterised much of its early efforts continued to preoccupy the IIIC, the idea that Zimmern sought to realise during his tenure at the IIIC did not lie dormant: that the IIIC should serve as a stimulus to and a forum for reflections on great intellectual problems.301 Valéry touched on this idea in his 1930 report to the ICIC, declaring therein that ‘if one agrees that a growth of conscience and knowledge is the necessary condition of accomplishment of the ends of the [LON], the cooperation of esprits particularly consacrés à l’esprit … is, among all the forms of international cooperation, the most important to favour.’302 Zimmern himself had already taken concrete steps in this direction, through organising a conference of savants interested in the study of international affairs, a conference which he conceived of ‘as a kind of scientific section of the general “League of Minds.”’303  Ibid., 114–5.  Ibid. Bonnet was appointed to the position even though the statute of the IIIC stipulated that ‘it is desirable’ that the successor of a director who is deceased, who has retired or who is not reappointed, should not belong to the same nationality as the preceding director. Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 66. 301  SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 6–8. The institute’s early efforts covered the following fields: the international organisation of bibliography and scientific information; the extension of international exchange of publications; the unification of scientific nomenclature; international measures to facilitate the circulation of books and printed matter; the adoption of a general scheme for the exchange of professors and students, and for equivalence of degrees and credentials, the possibility of creating rights of scientific property; the extension of laws and regulations protecting works of art and the rights of artists in their production; development of instruction on international questions; regulation by international agreement of archaeological research, and the protection of historic buildings; international cooperation amongst museums and international exhibitions; international cooperation amongst libraries; international measures for the development and improvement of the cinematograph. 302  Paul Valéry, 1930, quoted in Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 116. Renoliet notes that the words in italics are in the original text. 303  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 110. 299 300

CHAPTER 2

The League of Nations and Origins of the International Studies Conference

Fig. 2.1  The signing of the Kellogg Pact by the German Gustav Stresemann. 1928. Place: Paris. Source: GaHetNa (Nationaal Archief NL)

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Fig. 2.2  Kellogg-Briand Pact, with signatures of Gustav Stresemann, Paul Kellogg, Paul Hymans, Aristide Briand, Lord Cushendun, William Lyon Mackenzie King, John McLachlan, Sir Christopher James Parr, Jacobus Stephanus Smit, William Thomas Cosgrave, Count Gaetano Manzoni, Count Uchida, A. Zaleski, Eduard Benes. Source: GaHetNa (Nationaal Archief NL)

Pre-war Tendencies According to an IPR report in 1933, the growing presence of the study of international relations in the interwar years was a result of the development of the social sciences in the early decades of the twentieth century under the impact of the Great War and its aftermath.1 However, one cannot overlook the fact that its growing presence was also the cumulative effect of forces that had been at work throughout much of the nineteenth century. Prominent among these forces being the peace movements which flowered in Britain, Europe and the United States from the early nineteenth onwards and the related and growing push in that century to codify 1  ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR, 14–26 August 1933,’ prepared by the ISIPR, Honolulu, 1933, Reports on activities from the Institute of Pacific Relations,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.

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international law. The latter development led to the formation of such bodies as the Institute of International Law (Institut de Droit International), which was established at Ghent on September 8, 1873, and which was intended by its founder, the Belgian publicist Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns, to be a ‘permanent scientific body’ that would undertake ‘the mission of paying particular attention to the progress of international law, of defining the principles thereof, and of assuring the practical efficacy thereof.’2 Peace societies assisted in the efforts to reform international law, hardly surprising given that one of the chief goals of those legal publicists calling for its codification was the establishment of positive laws to govern the conduct of war and given that many viewed the development of laws of this nature as a stepping stone to the subjection of interstate conflict to international arbitration. In this context, it is worth noting the original motto of the institute: ‘Verité, Justice à tous, Indépendence des tous les peuples, Garantie des faibles contre les abus de la force.’3 We can thus trace a direct line between the formation of bodies such as the Congrès des amis de la paix, which held its first meeting in Brussels in 1848, and The Hague International Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 not only resulted in a formal set of rules regulating armed conflict but also saw an attempt, in the case of the second Hague Conference of 1907, to expressly constrain the state’s otherwise discretionary war-making powers through prohibiting ‘recourse to 2  James Brown Scott, ‘Public Opinion in Relation to War and Peace: The Work of Nonofficial Organizations,’ in The Problems of Peace: Lectures Delivered at the Geneva Institute of International Relations at the Palais des Nations (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 320. Originally published in 1927. See also Ernest Nys, ‘The Codification of International Law,’ American Journal of International Law 5, no. 4 (1911):871–900, 888–91; Louis Renault, Introduction à l’étude du droit international (Paris: L.  Larose, 1879), 52–3; and Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 1n. The membership of the Institute of International Law included such noted legal publicists as Pasquale Stanislao Mancini (its first president), Carlos Calvo, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, William Edward Hall and John Westlake. The push to codify international law was furthered also by the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Laws of Nations, which had its origin in a proposal submitted to the English Association for the Advancement of Science in 1866 to draft a code of international law. It was established in October 1873 and renamed the International Law Association in 1895. Early examples of these peace movements included the Peace Society, which was founded in 1815 (and which merged with other peace groups in 1828 to form the American Peace Society), and the London-based Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace, which had already commenced its propaganda work by 1817. 3  Devise de l’Institut de droit international, 1873, quoted in Sandi E. Cooper, introduction to Louis Bara, La science de la paix, C.  Potvin, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 10.

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armed force for the recovery of public contract debts, except in cases where the debtor State … [refused] to accept or to submit to arbitration.’4 Returning to the more immediate historical background, we might also note that in the very early years of the twentieth century, a small number of diplomatic historians were turning their attention to contemporary events. Yet other scholars were turning their attention to ‘international organization and the practice of the machinery of diplomacy,’ thereby helping to erode the ‘rigid frontier’ which separated law from politics. In light of its relation to the LON, both as a sort of precursor to and public supporter of it, it should be pointed out that the central office of the UIA in Brussels published a substantial number of studies concerned with these topics.5 In regard to teaching, the idea that certain established subjects at both the high school and university level might extend their coverage to include world affairs was discussed at the International Conference on World Economic Expansion (Congrès international d’expansion économique mondiale) that was held under the patronage of King Leopold of Belgium in 1905. Nonetheless, there were very few attempts to encourage the 4  C. John Colombos, ‘The Paris Pact, Otherwise Called the Kellogg Pact,’ Transactions of the Grotius Society 14 (1928): 87–101, 87. See also Nys, ‘The Codification of International Law,’ 891; Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 1n; and Rudolf Broda, ‘New International Agencies for Intellectual Cooperation,’ The Antiochian 9, no. 2 (1927). At the 1899 session of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a body founded in Paris in 1889, the council of the union was asked to draft a code concerning the rights and duties of states. At its 1906 session in London, it expressed support for the development and codification of the law of nations by an international committee as  had been  discussed at  the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. The Universal Peace Congress at Stockholm in August 1910 also played an important role in terms of the codification of the laws of war. The year 1910 saw the foundation of the World Peace Federation in America and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Among the less well-known organisations that emerged in the years immediately before 1914 was the International Institute for the Exchange of Social Experience which was established in 1909 by Rudolf Broda. It later became an autonomous part of the League for the Organisation of Progress which was founded in 1911. 5  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 1–2. Among the UIA publications devoted to the topic, Bailey mentions in particular the publications La vie internationale and L’Annuaire de la vie internationale. See also Alfred Zimmern ed., University Teaching of International Relations: A Record of the Eleventh Session of the International Studies Conference, Prague, 1938 (Paris: IIIC, 1939), 214–5. Zimmern expressed his consternation that in the twelfth volume of the Cambridge Modern History which appeared in 1910 and which was entitled The Latest Age, not a single chapter was devoted to the subject of international relations. He also observed that political scientists, although preoccupied with the institution of the state, ignored the phenomena behind it.

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organised study of contemporary international affairs in higher education institutions before the Great War.6 The United States provided the most noted exceptions to this rule. For example, in 1900 the University of Wisconsin offered a course entitled Contemporary Politics.7 Dating from 1906 graduate students at Clark University, and from 1908 undergraduate students at the same university, were able to enrol in courses of lectures on contemporary history, the range of which was extended in later years.8 It is also noteworthy that the catalogues of the Universities of Iowa and Illinois for the academic years of 1913–1914 listed courses entitled World Politics. Despite their exceptional status, these early efforts did not greatly impress later exponents of the academic study of international relations. For example, in his 1947 survey of the teaching of international relations in American colleges and universities, Grayson Kirk, while acknowledging that such courses were pioneering in some respects, reached the overall conclusion that they were ‘little more than unsystematic and superficial attempts to discuss a wide variety of current problems’ or ‘segments of recent history, chronologically treated.’9 In an opening address at an ISC conference  held in Prague between May 23 and 27, 1938, which was centred on the topic of the university teaching of international relations, Zimmern posed the question as to why there had been such a long delay when it came to the study of the ‘underlying currents’ of world affairs. Why, he asked, given that the ‘great phenomenon of the economic interdependence of the whole world’ had been in existence for several generations, had scholars taken so long to study ‘the new facts’ that this phenomenon had generated and to  attempt to build a science based on these facts? Zimmern’s answer to this question was twofold: first, the ‘barriers that exist between nations,’ and second, the ‘barriers that exist between academic subjects.’10 A slightly different explanation was given by Stanley Hartnoll Bailey in  a survey entitled International Studies in Modern Education, a survey which was published in May 1938 to coincide with the ISC’s Prague conference.11 Bailey stated  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 2.  Grayson Kirk, The Study of International Relations in American Colleges and Universities (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1947), 2. 8  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 2n. 9  Kirk, The Study of International Relations in American Colleges and Universities, 3. 10  Zimmern, University Teaching of International Relations, 213. 11  Jiri F.  Vranek to Tracy B.  Kittredge and Stanley Hartnoll Bailey, 17 May 1938, Enseignement universitaire des relations internationales, 1 May to 1938 to October 1946, AG 1-IICI-K-I-14.c, UA. 6 7

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therein that the reason why so little was done before the war to encourage the systematic study of international affairs was because ‘in most countries the study of the social sciences was only in its infancy, and because the pressure of the external world on national life was consciously realized by only a small group of administrators and business men.’12

From the Great War to the Paris Peace Conference The Great War radically altered perceptions of the importance of international affairs in the public mind. Sir Samuel Hoare, then British foreign secretary, told the House of Commons in July 11, 1935, that ‘the War left the world with almost every one acutely interested in foreign politics,’ an interest that would be well on display on the part of the British public later that year to Hoare’s great dismay.13 According to John Bell Condliffe, the research secretary of the Honolulu-based International Secretariat of the IPR (ISIPR)  between 1927 and 1930, that international affairs had become a public thing was apparent even before the war ended, as evidenced by the ‘popular demand for a League of Peoples rather than a League of Nations.’ According to Condliffe, this demand sprang from the conviction that ‘what touches all must be approved by all.’14 Also demonstrating the growing public concern with international affairs was the wide reception of a series of popular works on the subject: Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (1910); Henry Noel Brailsford’s The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace (1914); J. A. Hobson’s Towards International Government (1915); and Leonard Woolf’s International Government (1916).15 Pamphlets and other materials for public consumption were produced by a body known as the Council for the Study of  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 2.  Ibid., 1. 14  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relation,’ in Bruno Lasker and William L. Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Hangchow and Shanghai, China, October 21 to November 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 528. A preliminary draft of this handbook was edited by John Bell Condliffe and was circulated before the Fourth Biennial Conference of the IPR. It was published in the proceedings of that conference with slight amendments. 15  Lucian Ashworth points out that all of these authors were ‘independent scholars and journalists’ and not members of the academy. He also points out that The Great Illusion first appeared as a pamphlet in 1909. Lucian M.  Ashworth, Creating International Studies: 12 13

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International Relations, which was established in 1915 under the presidency of James Bryce and which sought to encourage ‘the study of the national, social, economic and ethical problems raised by the War.’16 The name of this council is significant as it signals that the expression international relations had begun to be used, not only to refer to a set of empirical conditions prevailing among states but also to refer to a field of investigation. This trend was also evidenced by the appearance of courses in academic institutions with the formal title International Relations. For example, Kirk, in his aforementioned 1947 survey, pointed out that both Stanford and Indiana universities had established courses under this rubric in 1916, although he adds that the title World Politics ‘seems to have been more widely favoured’ than either International Relations or the alternative of International Politics, this last being the name of a course offered by the University of Washington in 1917.17 The post-war period saw a rapid increase in the number of private and ostensibly neutral organisations dedicated to the study and the dissemination of information relating to questions of international importance, a development which the Council for the Study of International Relations prefigured. Among the first such institutions to be created in this period was the British Institute of International Affairs, which was formally inaugurated on July 5, 1920, and which became known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) upon its receipt of a Royal Charter on May 31, 1926, at a ceremony attended by the Prince of Wales. On July 29 in the following year, its American counterpart was established in New York under the heading of the Council on  Foreign Relations (CFR).18 The Angell, Mitrany and the Liberal Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1999), 48. On Leonard Woolf’s study, see Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 3n. 16  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 3n–4n. 17  Kirk, The Study of International Relations in American Colleges and Universities, 3. 18  As laid down in the Royal Charter, the declared aims of the RIIA included that of advancing ‘the sciences of international politics, economics and jurisprudence and the study, classification and development of the literature of these subjects,’ promoting the study of international questions, serving as a source of information and enlightenment on such questions and encouraging an ‘understanding of the conditions and views of nations and peoples.’ A further aim was that of facilitating the establishment of similar institutes in the Dominions. Appendix C: Eighth International Studies Conference, RIIA, 1934–1935, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. On the British Institute of International Affairs formal inauguration, see F.  B. Bourdillon, ‘The Royal Institute of International Affairs,’ International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation [hereafter IIIC], Bulletin for University Relations 4, no. 1 (1928): 24–31, 28, IICI/033, UA. See also William McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 309.

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RIIA and the CFR were both creatures of the Paris Peace Conference, the idea for them germinating in the context of informal discussions taking place among British and American delegates to the conference, most notably, on the evening of May 30, 1919, at the Majestic Hotel where the British delegates were domiciled.19 Presided over by General Tasker H. Bliss of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, this meeting was a prelude to the appointment of a joint committee which was composed of three Americans and three Britons and which was charged with the task, as moved by Britain’s Lionel Curtis, of preparing a scheme for the establishment of an international institute of international affairs which was to have one branch in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. The role of the prospective institute was to keep ‘its members in touch with the international situation and encourage them to study the relation between national policies and the interests of society as a whole.’20 The initial meeting at the Majestic had been prompted by Curtis and Philip Kerr (the latter going on to become Lord Lothian in 1933), both of whom had been among what was known as ‘Lord Milner’s kindergarten’: the circle of ‘promising young Britons’ Alfred Milner had gathered around him in South Africa in the aftermath of the Boer War with a view to promoting amongst the South African public the notion that Britain’s four South African colonies should form a union.21 On their return to Britain in 1910 and with the financial support of the South African ­businessman and political figure Abraham B. Bailey, Curtis and Kerr established a journal: The Round Table: A Quarterly Journal Review of the Politics of the British Empire.22 The Round Table sought to provide ‘informed analysis of wider aspects of colonial and imperial affairs’ as well as of international affairs in general, its early editions featuring articles on such issues as Anglo-German rivalry, Japanese ambitions in East Asia, the 19  Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Selling Peace: The Origins, Promotion and Fate of the Anglo-American New Order during the Second World War,’ Diplomacy & Statecraft 7, no. 1(1996): 1–28, 7. 20  Edith Ware, The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 75–6. For Bliss’s role at the meeting, see Frederick Whyte, ‘The British Institute of International Affairs,’ The New Europe, July 1920, 308–9. For the joint committee, see M. L. Dockrill, ‘Historical Note: The Foreign Office and the “Proposed Institute of International Affairs 1919,”’ International Affairs 56, no. 4 (1980): 665–72, 667. 21  Cull, ‘Selling Peace,’ 4 and Deborah Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ in Bosco and Navari eds., Chatham House and British Foreign Policy 1919–1945, 62. 22  Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ 62.

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foreign policy of the United States and trends in contemporary Islam.23 According to Deborah Lavin, The Round Table, which was edited by Kerr, emerged as the only journal of substance concerned with imperial affairs, its approach to its subject matter being that of ‘keeping abreast of the facts, discussing the issues in private study groups and publicly communicating the results.’24 It was an approach which served as a template for investigations in a number of different institutional settings including that of the RIIA.25 William L. Holland, who occupied the positions of research assistant and then research secretary at the ISIPR between 1928 and 1943 before going on to become the IPR’s secretary-general in 1946, recalled in an interview concerning the history of the IPR that Curtis conceived of the British Empire as a ‘modern version of Augustine’s City of God,’ exclaiming that this was a ‘preposterous idea.’26 Holland’s recollection would seem to be borne out by a statement in an anonymous article penned by Curtis on the subject of the British Commonwealth which was published in The Round Table in 1927: A commonwealth is the sermon on the mount reduced to political terms, a society organized on the theory that the duty which each of its members owes to the rest is beyond measure. The sovereignty of the commonwealth is the necessary outcome of that principle, whether the commonwealth be city or nation. The conflict of sovereignties will never be solved until all men are organized in one society, as Jesus of Nazareth taught. By helping that commonwealth to come the will of God can be done, and thus only. In the river of time the British Commonwealth stands, a line of unfinished piers, yet to be crowned with arches whereby mankind shall cross to ‘that far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves’—and leave the bridge behind them.27

Toynbee later recorded that when crossing the Atlantic with Curtis in 1925, the latter, in putting the finishing touches to the text of a lecture he was to give in Michigan, asked Toynbee the following question: ‘If Christ  The Round Table: Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs; History, https:// www.commonwealthroundtable.co.uk/journal/history/. 24  Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ 62. 25  Ibid., 63. 26  ‘Appendix Two: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Paul F. Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations: The Memoirs of William L. Holland (Tokyo: Ryukei Shyosha, 1995), 208. 27  Lionel Curtis, ‘The Commonwealth,’ The Round Table 18, no. 69 (1927): 1–5. 23

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came back to earth, where in the present-day world, would he find that his precepts were best being practised?’28 Curtis then answered his own question: ‘the British Commonwealth.’29 In this connection it is also worth noting that in a letter concerning the future organisation of world affairs dated February 10, 1939, Murray bluntly told Curtis: There is one point where I possibly differ from you, and where I differ violently from Toynbee. He considers that the liberal principles of justice, co-­ operation, brotherhood of man, etc., are worthless unless they are combined with a belief in the divinity of Jesus, the Virgin birth, and Lord knows what other bizarre and speculative beliefs. This seems to me pernicious rubbish, leading straight to a revival of the wars of religion and the persecution of heretics.30

Referring to Curtis, Madariaga observed that this was harsh criticism of such a close and much-esteemed friend, especially of one who had declared that ‘[t]he Commonwealth is the Sermon on the Mount reduced to political terms.’31 Madariaga was quoting from Curtis’s aforementioned article from The Round Table, although in doing so he had slightly changed (no doubt accidentally) the wording: he quoted Curtis as stating the Commonwealth rather than a commonwealth. Nonetheless, his small error would suggest that he shared the belief that Curtis saw in the British Commonwealth the reflection of the City of God.32 Yet Curtis’s idealisation of the British Commonwealth did not render him insensitive to the structural transformation that  it was undergoing largely as a result of nationalist sentiment in the Dominions.33 Indeed, as Lavin points out, for Curtis, an ‘empire which existed to promote self-government rather than to perpetuate its rule should more truly recalled a Commonwealth, for its stability would lie not in alliances but in the acknowledged equality of its citizens’: only such an acknowledgement would foster among the members of a commonwealth ‘a sense of mutual duty’ to preserve it.34  Arnold Toynbee, Arnold Acquaintances (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 146.  Deborah Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Idea of Commonwealth,’ in Frederick Madden and D.  K. Fieldhouse, eds., Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth: Essays Presented to Sir Edgar Williams (London: Croon Helm, 1982), 101. 30  Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ 181. 31  Ibid. Emphasis added. 32  Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ 181. Emphasis added. 33  Inderjeet Parmar, ‘Chatham House and the Anglo-American Alliance,’ Diplomacy & Statecraft 3, no. 1 (1992): 23–47, 25. 34  Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Idea of Commonwealth,’ 101. 28 29

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Curtis early came to entertain a vision of the British Empire as a British Commonwealth of Nations: as ‘the first international organisation,’ the Commonwealth of Nations would serve as an exemplar of international cooperation while remaining an ‘influential world power in its own right.’35 Curtis could uphold the view that the British Empire was an international organisation precisely because he conceived of it as a commonwealth rather than an empire: as a commonwealth, this international organisation was ‘committed to increasing self-government and equality among its members.’ Such was the importance of this distinction between empire and commonwealth to the Round Table movement that the subtitle of its journal was changed in 1919: The Round Table was thereafter described as a quarterly review of the politics of the British Commonwealth.36 Curtis became a member of the LON section of the Paris Peace Conference on the invitation of Robert Cecil in light of the strength of an article that he had penned for The Round Table, albeit without naming himself as the author.37 In that article, which appeared in December 1918 and was entitled ‘Windows of Freedom,’ Curtis outlined what would become the preferred view of the LON amongst British officials, contending that the forthcoming Peace Conference could not hope to issue a ‘written constitution of the globe.’ However, what the Peace Conference could do, Curtis maintained in the same article, was establish a ‘permanent annual conference between foreign ministers themselves’ which, aided by a permanent secretariat, would serve as a forum in which they could settle their differences ‘if possible, by agreement.’38 He denied  that  such a conference could govern the globe, let alone those ‘portions of mankind who cannot as yet govern themselves,’ but insisted that it could serve as a ‘symbol and organ of the human conscience’ to which ‘real Governments of existing States can be made answerable for facts which concern the world at large.’ In particular, Curtis emphasised the point that ‘civilised States’ should be answerable to such 35  Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ 61. Donald Cameron Watt describes Curtis’s Round Table group ‘as an instrument for the modernisation and perpetuation of the British Empire as a group of self-governing but permanently allied nations, united by a common culture of Empire.’ Donald Cameron Watt, foreword to Bosco and Navari eds., Chatham House and British Foreign Policy 1919–1945, 62. 36   The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs: History, https://www.commonwealthroundtable.co.uk/journal/history/. 37  Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ 63. 38  Lionel Curtis, ‘Windows of Freedom,’ The Round Table 9, no. 33 (1918): 1–47, 35.

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an organ for their ‘tutelage’ of those regions in the South Pacific, in Africa and the Near East, which were now ‘severed from the German and Turkish Empires.’ On this depended, Curtis claimed, not only the ‘prospects for freedom’ of the peoples not yet able to govern themselves in those regions but also the ‘peace of the world.’39 Curtis urged that this burden of tutelage should not be confined to certain European powers, let alone an already overburdened British Commonwealth, but should be shared by the United States, the ‘future position’ of which in respect to world politics, he advised, being the ‘great issue’ hanging on the Peace Conference.40 Lavin rightly observes that the Paris Peace Conference was an unprecedented event, bringing together statesmen and high-ranking officials in numbers never before seen and from many parts of the globe. It was also unprecedented in terms of the number of expert advisers who attended, the interaction between these advisers and government figures impressing many of those present.41 F. B. Bourdillon, who attended the crucial meeting at the Majestic, later stated in his capacity as secretary of the RIIA that the need to bring to bear expert knowledge on the conduct of international affairs and for concentrated and ongoing research in this area was among the lessons which those attending the conference ‘could scarcely fail to draw.’42 A report drawn up for the aforementioned joint committee described the experience of the conference as follows: In January 1919, staffs with corps of specialists, strengthened by others released for the work from the navy, army, and air-force were assembled in Paris … Here were congregated under one roof trained diplomatists, soldiers, sailors, airmen, civil administrators, jurists, financial and economic experts, captains of industry and spokesmen of labour, members of cabinets and parliaments, journalists and publicists. Many of them came from the Dominions, India, Egypt and the Crown Colonies. At meals, and when off duty, there was no convention to forbid discussion of the business at hand. A unique opportunity was thus given to every specialist of grasping the rela Ibid., 35–6.  Ibid., 1, 36. 41  Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ 62. 42  Bourdillon, ‘The Royal Institute of International Affairs,’ 26 See also Michael Dockrill, ‘The Foreign Office and the Creation of Chatham House,’ in Bosco and Navari eds., Chatham House and British Foreign Policy 1919–1945, 84. Dockrill records that Bourdillon had been a member of the Admiralty Intelligence Department from 1916 to 1919, was part of the Foreign Office’s advisory attachment to the Political Section of the Paris Peace Conference and was secretary of the RIIA from 1926 to 1929. 39 40

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tion of his own particular question to all the others involved and of seeing its place in the vast problem of reconstruction before the Congress … In friendly informal intercourse they came to see how much they differed, and also to appreciate the sincerity of views which were not their own … In these delegations were included many whose business in life had been to originate thought or influence public opinion on international questions. Now for the first time they were put to the discipline of handling practical problems side by side with men who had only known what it meant to get things done. The mutual benefit of men of theory and men of practice was great. There were also coming to the delegations from time to time people fresh from some distant scene of action, from Russia, Prague, Armenia, Egypt or the remote frontiers of Central Asia. Whenever this happened there were gatherings of all those from either delegation whose business it was to deal with these special problems … Not seldom it happened that practical solutions afterwards embodied in the treaties were worked out in these informal discussions. The passions which embroil nations against each other … all have their roots in the ignorance born of isolation … More effective agencies for creating an opinion on international affairs, at once charitable, sane and well-informed have never been devised than these delegations so long as they existed.43

One corps of specialists participating in the conference was known as The Inquiry: a group of students of international affairs drawn from university faculties assembled in 1917 by Wilson’s ‘personal confidant,’ namely, Colonel House, a figure who, according to Robert Schulzinger, ‘had always had wanted to explain to the mighty what the world should look like.’44 The journalist Walter Lippmann, the American Geographical Society’s director Isaiah Bowman, the lawyer David Hunter Miller and the historian James T. Shotwell were among those researchers who quickly set about designing on behalf of the administration in Washington the ‘rational bases of lasting peace.’45 To this end, The Inquiry undertook a wide-­ ranging survey of international affairs, submitting to the American 43  Report of the Institute’s Provisional Committee, 1919, quoted in Bourdillon, ‘The Royal Institute of International Affairs,’ 26–7. See also Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ 62. Lavin points out that many officials in Paris regularly complained about the lack of information available to them. 44  Robert D. Schulzinger, Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council of Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 2. 45  Charles DeBenedetti, ‘James T.  Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ Political Science Quarterly 89, no. 2, 1974: 379–395, 385. See also James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 4–6.

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Commission to Negotiate Peace, which had been established by Wilson following the signing of the Armistice and which was headed by House,  extensive documentary materials in the form of ‘monographs, maps and memos, and draft treaty formulas.’46 Twenty-three Inquiry members were present at the Peace Conference where they  served as sources of expert advice and as participants in the Inter-Allied Commissions. In this way, they helped shape the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, and their role in this regard would inspire the founders of numerous non-­ government organisations in the years that followed.47 Shotwell, a University of Columbia professor who specialised in medieval history, was involved in ‘assisting American negotiators in the formation’ of the ILO and in this regard he worked alongside such figures as John Maynard Keynes and Jean Monnet. For Shotwell, a body such as the ILO was a specific expression of how domestic and international affairs should be governed: through ‘rational institution[s] which overcame conflict through empirical analysis and administrative action.’48 This valorisation of scientific expertise is evident in an observation Shotwell made in relation to the Peace Conference: that ‘never in the history of the political sciences had there been a greater opportunity for those students of those sciences to help mould instead of merely register events.’49 Members of The Inquiry and Round Table groups formed the nucleus of the thirty-three British and American delegates who met at the Majestic.50 Shotwell was among them and, along with his fellow Americans, namely, Archibald Clary Coolidge, professor of Eastern European history at Harvard University, and the lawyer James Brown Scott, was appointed to the joint committee charged with preparing the scheme for the establishment of an international institute of international affairs.51 Shotwell’s 46  DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 385. Tomoko Akami notes that The Inquiry group ‘drafted most of the Fourteen Points on territorial solutions.’ Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2002), 27. 47  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 26. See also DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 385. 48  DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 385. 49  James T.  Shotwell, ‘The Paris Peace Conference,’ in Charles E.  Andrews and Alfred E. Zimmern, eds., George Louis Beer: A Tribute to His Life and Work in the Making of History and the Molding of Public Opinion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), 83. 50  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 27. 51   Dockrill, ‘Historical Note: The Foreign Office and the “Proposed Institute of International Affairs 1919,”’ 667.

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ambition was to see established an ‘“a sort of international academy” of peace technicians who attached their highest loyalties to the dispassionate study of war and its substitutes,’ the expression peace technician neatly summing up that union of scientific research and pacific norms that Shotwell sought to forge.52 In a similar vein, Curtis, who accepted the role, alongside Whitney H.  Shepardson, of joint secretary  of the joint committee, urged at the meeting Majestic the following: Right public opinion was mainly produced by a small number of people in real contact with the facts who had thought out the issues involved … National policy ought to be shaped by a conception of the interests of society at large; for it was in the advancement of that universal interest that the particular interest of the several nations would alone be found. It was all important, therefore, to cultivate a public opinion in the various countries of the world which kept the general interest in view.53

Like the other American and British internationalists present in Paris, Curtis saw Britain and the United States as the linchpins of the new world order. At the same time, he was mindful of what he regarded as the ­inward-­looking tendency of the American and British peoples, and it was precisely this tendency that the proposed Anglo-American institute of international affairs was intended to counter.54 However, following the conclusion of the Peace Conference, it was decided that an Anglo-American institute was not a feasible option, largely due to American sensitivities concerning the involvement of the United States in European affairs. Hence, the American and British delegates con-

 DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 385.  Lionel Curtis, 1919, quoted in Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 28. See also Whyte, ‘The British Institute of International Affairs,’ 308. Curtis later stated in the report of the joint committee that the ‘tragedy of the situation was that this better understanding between thinkers and workers within the narrow circle of Paris availed so little to affect the main issues of the settlement.’ Report of the Institute’s Provisional Committee, quoted in Whyte, ‘The British Institute of International Affairs,’ 308. See also Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ 62. Lavin notes that this report was written by Curtis and records the full title of the joint committee as follows: ‘Provisional Committee appointed to prepare a Constitution, and select the original members of the British Branch of the Institute of International Affairs.’ 54  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 42 and Cull, ‘Selling Peace,’ 7. 52 53

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cerned with the matter jointly resolved to establish two completely independent organisations.55 As indicated, the CFR and RIIA were independent of government. Although enjoying official patronage, they relied on subscriptions or private philanthropy in order to sustain themselves. For example, the RIIA, or Chatham House as it also came to be known in light of the historic lodgings in St. James’s Square with which it was presented in 1924, was supported by donations from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as well as by figures from the world of commerce such as Abraham Bailey, Thomas W. Lamont and J. P. Morgan.56 Such was the renown quickly gained by these organisations, not least due to their vaunted reputation for impartiality, that support was not difficult to find. Their renown also saw them imitated. By the mid-1930s, around twenty countries were playing host to some form of institutes of international affairs. For example, Canada and Australia established institutes of international affairs in 1927 and 1929, respectively, immediately after which they proceeded to affiliate themselves with the RIIA. 55  Ware, The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934, 76. Akami points out that many in America, ‘including post-League internationalists, were reluctant to be involved with European organizations.’ For this reason, they ‘decided to form a similar, but independent organization, which soon merged with a group of bankers and lawyers initially organized by Elihu Root,’ the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: the CFR.  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 42–3. Robert D. Schulzinger records that Isaiah Bowman, James T. Shotwell and Whitney H. Shepardson, the first and third members  of this group also being involved in establishing the AngloAmerican institute, told Curtis in London in June 1921 ‘that American public opinion would not permit them to join with the British.’ Schulzinger, Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations, 5. 56  Parmar, ‘Chatham House and the Anglo-American Alliance,’ 24; McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 122; and Bourdillon, ‘The Royal Institute of International Affairs,’ 28–30. Bourdillon records that Chatham House was presented to the RIIA by Colonel and Mrs R. W. Leonard of St. Catherine’s Ontario, Canada. Deborah Lavin explains that the ‘single greatest gesture of support enabling the Institute to grow—the purchase of Chatham House—was if anything anti-American in motive, and came from Canada. The scheme had originated as an initiative by which the Institute would collaborate with the English-Speaking Union to found a library in memory of the American Ambassador Walter Page. When this fell through, the Institute’s prestigious headquarters at 10 St. James’s Square, the home of Chatham and Gladstone, was donated by Colonel Reuben Leonard, a Canadian magnate who had been converted by Curtis to the idea of Commonwealth and who hoped thereby to counteract the Institute’s declared Anglo-American emphasis.’ Lavin, ‘Lionel Curtis and the Founding of Chatham House,’ 66.

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The Institutionalisation of International Studies The post-war era saw the creation of chairs in international relations and even special departments or schools devoted to the subject. In 1919, the Liberal politician David Davies, who became Lord Davies in 1932, endowed the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth with a Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics in 1919. The trust deed of the chair specified that the duties of the Wilson professor were to give ‘lectures and instructions in International Politics,’ to travel to ‘foreign countries and study foreign political systems,’ to read ‘books and other publications relating to International Politics’ and to write ‘books, pamphlets or articles on the same subject.’ In that same year, a department of international politics was founded at the university, the staff of which comprised, in the 1932–1933 and 1934–1935 academic years, the Wilson professor and two assistant lecturers: Jiri F. Vranek and Lilian F. Vranek (née Friedlander). Although established as an independent department and in possession of its own library, in the context of the aforementioned academic years, it offered—aside from postgraduate supervision and the course of public lectures given by the Wilson professor—four undergraduate study courses: two in comparative politics and two in international politics.57 On August 1, 1924, the Sir Ernest Cassel Chair was established at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) with Philip Noel-Baker being appointed to the position for a period of five years. In the 1924/1925 academic year, Noel-Baker conducted a seminar for research students entitled International Relations and a lecture course entitled International Politics, both of which centred on the necessity of international organisation in light of growing interdependence.58 In 57  Appendix D: Eighth International Studies Conference, Department of International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1934–1935, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. Students were able to undertake a course in comparative politics and a course in international politics in the third year and also at Honours level. In order to complete a full programme, students were required to undertake courses offered by the Economics and History Departments of the university.  For  Lilian F.  Vranek’s maiden name, see Patricia Owens, ‘Women and the History of International Thought, International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2018): 467–81. 58  Zimmern had already prepared the way for Philip Noel-Baker in commencing a series of eight lectures at the LSE on November 12, 1923, entitled The League of Nations at Work. Zimmern stated that these lectures, ‘while dealing principally with the aims and achievements of the League, will treat also of the general international situation and of the position which the League can and should occupy in international politics.’ LSE: International Relations; Foundation and History of the International Relations Department, http://www2.lse. ac.uk/internationalrelations/aboutthedepartment/historyofdept.aspx.

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August 1927, a department of international studies was established at the LSE based on a consciousness on the part of the institution’s governing authorities of the ‘need for the organised teaching in international subjects in a British university,’ the subjects in question being as follows: international history, international relations, international law, economics, geography, political science, government, political and economic history ‘and the relations between peoples of different civilisations.’59 On October 1, 1930, the Montague Burton Professorship of International Relations was founded at the University of Oxford. Although the foundation of this chair did not see the creation of a separate department, it was established nonetheless with a view to ‘making International Relations a “special subject” for students aiming at the highest honours in Politics.’60 Zimmern was the first person to occupy this chair and in becoming its first occupant, he enjoyed the support of Murray, the Regius Professor of Greek at the same university.61 Meanwhile, the United States continued to lead the way in terms of the development of research and teaching in the field. At the annual American Political Science Association meeting in Washington in December 1924, a round table bearing the title of International Affairs held two sessions ‘devoted to research and instruction in International Politics and Law.’ At the conclusion of these sessions, a resolution was passed which declared that a ‘conference of teachers of international law and related subjects’ should be held in connection with the 1925 meeting of the American Society of International Law and which was then forwarded to the secretary of the American Society of International Law and the director of the Division of International Law of the Carnegie Endowment. It had been upon the invitation of the endowment that the society had held what was called the First Conference of Teachers of International Law in April 1914,

59  London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), Department of International Studies, Session 1934–35, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA.  See also LSE: International Relations; Foundation and History of the International Relations Department. The first reference to a department of international relations is in a professorial council minute of February 26, 1930, although the expression international studies continued to be used thereafter. 60  Appendix E: Eighth International Studies Conference; University of Oxford: Montague Burton Chair of International Relations 1934–1935, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 61   Paul Rich, ‘Reinventing Peace: David Davies, Alfred Zimmern and Liberal Internationalism in Interwar Britain,’ International Relations 16, no. 1 (2002): 117–133, 120.

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and this event was recalled by several of those participating in the international affairs round table in 1924.62 In consequence of the aforementioned resolution, Scott, the director of the Division of International Law as well as the Carnegie Endowment’s secretary-general, welcomed delegates to the ‘Second Conference of Teachers of International Law and Related Subjects’ in April 1925. At the final session of the conference, the delegates (among them being such noted figures in the field as Edwin M.  Borchard, Charles G.  Fenwick, James W. Garner, Manley O. Hudson, Ellery C. Stowell, Quincy Wright and Henry M.  Wriston), resolved to ‘perpetuate the Conference as an institution’ (which by 1929 was called the ‘Conference of Teachers of International Law and Relations’), which they did with the help of the endowment.63 In the summer of 1926, at the invitation of the Carnegie Endowment, a number of the members of this conference visited The Hague, Paris and Geneva for the purpose of intercourse with their European colleagues and ‘in order to see how the international mind operates when brought face to face with great difficulties.’64 In regard to the field of international relations specifically, it is useful to note that a bureau of international research, for which Harvard University and Radcliffe College shared responsibility, began research into international questions as early as 1924.65 Another example of gathering United States’ efforts in the area was the creation of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations, which was named in memory of the former 62  Ellery C. Stowell, ‘The Second Conference of Teachers of International Law and Related Subjects held in Washington, April 23–25, 1925,’ American Journal of International Law 19, no. 3 (1925): 542–6,542–3. While the Fourth Conference was originally scheduled for April 1930, it was moved forward in order to coincide with the meeting of the Institute of International Law at Briarcliff Manor on October 10–17, 1929, with a view to internationalising the conference. On the third of these conferences, see Edwin D.  Dickinson, ‘The Third Conference of Teachers of International Law,’ The American Journal of International Law 22, no. 3 (1928): 620–4. 63  Stowell, ‘The Second Conference of Teachers of International Law and Related Subjects held in Washington, April 23–25, 1925,’ 544–6. On the alternative name of the conference, see J. David Thompson to Zimmern, 30 April 1929 and Werner Picht to Isaiah Bowman, 24 May 1929, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Généralités, AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. 64  James Brown Scott, ‘Public Opinion in Relation to War and Peace: The Work of Nonofficial Organizations,’ in The Problems of Peace: Lectures Delivered at the Geneva Institute of International Relations at the Palais des Nations, August 1926, 323. 65  Thompson to Picht, 15 June 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-I-3. See also Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 18n.

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American ambassador to the United Kingdom: Walter Hines Page. First proposed in 1924, the school officially opened its doors in October 1930, under the directorship of John Van Antwerp MacMurray, who in 1933 would be succeeded in the post by Frederick Sherwood Dunn. The mandate of the Walter Hines Page School was to undertake research into foreign policy with an emphasis on the study of historical and legal and, ‘perhaps more particularly,’ the economic and psychological factors in connection with international relations.66 By the early 1930s, the multiplication of chairs and departments in universities devoted to international affairs and the creation of national and international institutions for the study, teaching and research of international problems was seen as pointing to the fact that a new and distinct intellectual discipline was emerging. Evidence for this contention can be found in a document giving an account of the organisation and activities of the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations (CISSIR), the name by which the ISC was first known, which was issued in January 1932. The document stated the following: Before the War of 1914–1918, international studies were generally pursued in the universities and centres of learning from the separate and uncoordinated angles of politics, economics, law, sociology, history and other departments of knowledge. Except in the field of law, not much effort was made either to integrate the various elements of inter-state relations into a homogenous group of studies or to lay any separate emphasis within each department upon the international aspects of its subject-matter. The position to-day is, in several countries, radically altered, and “international affairs” bids fair to become an autonomous intellectual discipline.67

According to the same document, institutional developments in this area were a reflection of the changed attitude towards interstate relations which had manifested itself in coordinated efforts in the direction of what was referred to as moral disarmament.68 The document further noted that 66  Thompson to Picht, 10 February 1931, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, publication (préparation): Répertoire international des centres de documentation politique, 1931–1939, AG 1-IICI-K-II-2.b, UA.  The director of the school commenced duties on February 15, 1930. 67  Moral disarmament and the International Co-ordination of the Study and Teaching of International Affairs: The Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations; its organisation and activities, 19 January 1932, Désarmement moral, 1931–1937, AG 1-IICI-B-V-9, UA. 68  The IIIC’s report on the work of the ISC for the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments stated that ‘the creation of this organ of co-ordination and study

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practical considerations had necessitated the development of international studies: firstly, the greater weight attached to the conduct of international relations had led to calls for the professionalisation of activity in this area— what was needed was a pool of young people with a ‘knowledge of the essential principles of international relations’ from whom could be selected foreign affairs recruits or international public servants; and secondly, after 1919, people felt there was an urgent need ‘to create an organ of study and objective documentation in the service of the men of state, of diplomats, of journalists and in a general fashion of all persons in contact with international life.’69

Private Philanthropy Private philanthropy was a crucial factor in furthering the development of the study of  international relations  in the interwar years. Particularly prominent in this regard were a number of American foundations: the Carnegie Endowment; the Rockefeller Foundation, which was established in 1913; and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, which was established in 1918. These institutions aided various national and international efforts to build up research and teaching as well as international intellectual cooperation among those participating in the field.70 Malcolm W. Davis, assistant director of the endowment’s European Centre of the Division of Intercourse and Education (Centre européan de la Division des relations internationals et de l’éducation) from 1935, claimed that the endowment had been engaged in the promotion of the ‘study of the teaching of international relations’ almost from its inception.71 was largely made possible in the first place by the changes which had taken place inside a number of countries. The numerous tasks of a practical order, which the Conference has already accomplished and the special programme of research which it is at present elaborating would seem to associate it intimately with the work of moral disarmament’ (ibid.). 69  International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation [hereafter IIIC], The International Studies Conference: Origins, Program and Organisation (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1937), 12, IICI/033, UA. See also IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 250. 70  The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial was merged with the Foundation in January 1929. The merger resulted in the Rockefeller Division of Social Sciences; the three fields of research with which it was to be concerned were ‘international relations, economic stabilization, and public administration.’ Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 61–3. 71  Zimmern ed., University Teaching of International Relations, 308.

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The expression international mind was coined by Nicholas Murray Butler,  president of the University of Columbia,  and was publicised by him over the course of many years in forums devoted to international affairs. One of his early invocations of the expression was in his opening address at the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration on May 15, 1912. In that context, Butler explained that the expression denoted a way of thinking and acting in regard to foreign relations, such that the ‘several nations of the civilized world’ were to be regarded not as antagonists but ‘as friendly and co-operating equals in aiding the progress of civilization, in developing commerce and industry, and in spreading enlightenment and culture throughout the world.’72 At this stage, Butler was director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Division of Intercourse and Education in New York and the role of this divisions was that of enlightening public opinion and imbuing minds with an ‘Esprit International’ based on the view that in the absence of an international mind there cannot be a ‘durable peace.’73 It is thus of no surprise that it was on Butler’s initiative that the Carnegie Endowment established a centre in the ‘old world’ which was dedicated, above all, to the promotion of the idea of an international mind.74 Indeed, its European centre, which was formally inaugurated in Paris on March 23, 1912, was charged with the specific task of promoting an international mind.75 From 1927, the centre would publish a trimestral review entitled L’Esprit International or International Mind, which the centre described as a review of international politics, emphasising that the review was not

72  Nicholas Murray Butler had previously touched on this idea in his opening address as chairman of the Lake Mohonk Conference on May 22, 1907. ‘One of the chief problems of our time is to bring the nations’ minds and the nations’ consciences to bear on the moral problems involved in international relations.’ Nicholas Murray Butler, The International Mind: An Argument for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes (New York: Charles, Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 5,102. See also Nicholas Murray Butler, ‘The International Mind: How to Develop It,’ Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York 7, no. 22 (1917): 16–20. 73  La Dotation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale, Le Centre européen de la Division des relations internationals et de l’éducation: foundation, administration, activité (Paris: Centre européen de la Dotation Carnegie, 1931), 15, 17. 74  Ibid., 34, 38. The establishment of such a centre was proposed by Butler on June 3, 1911. 75  La Dotation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale, Le Centre européen de la Division des relations internationals, 35.

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doctrinal as it did not dwell on the same social or moral themes in each issue.76 It should also be of no surprise that the expression international mind entered into the vocabulary of those involved in the OIC. For example, in his capacity as deputy director of the IIIC, Zimmern opened the proceedings of the Geneva Institute of International Relations in 1926 with an address entitled ‘Development of the International Mind.’77 Indeed, the expression international mind soon became a byword for the activities and ultimate aim of the OIC and, within that context, was closely associated with the expression société des esprits.78 The launch of the publication L’Esprit International was just one of many steps taken by the Carnegie Endowment in promoting an understanding of international politics in the 1920s and 1930s with a view to international rapprochement. It was with the support of the Carnegie Endowment that on July 14, 1923, The Hague Academy of International Law was established. The Hague  Academy was intended to be a ‘truly international’ centre for advanced studies in international law and related sciences and a place where, as the terms of its statute stated, ‘a profound and impartial examination’ of international juridical questions would be facilitated. In an inaugural address given on the occasion of its establishment, Scott announced that at The Hague Academy, ‘professors of different nationalities, in the absolute liberty of thought,’ would teach ‘the principles of international law to students of different nations, in order that, through their common action, the international mind’ would develop itself and in order that the law of nations would internationalise itself.79 Of a rather more populist hue than the project of establishing an academy devoted to advanced studies in international law, were two projects launched by the endowment in France in 1925 and 1926 respectively. The first of these projects saw the establishment in Paris of the first Carnegie Chair, a chair which would be occupied for more than a decade by André  Ibid., 54.  Alfred Zimmern, ‘The Development of the International Mind,’ Problems of Peace Lectures Delivered at the Geneva Institute of International Relations at the Palais des Nations, August 1926, 1. 78  W. G. L. C., ‘The International Mind,’ Nature, 132, no. 3335 (1933), 493–5. 79  My emphasis. Recueil des cours professés à l’académie du droit international de la Haye: Établie avec le concours de la Dotation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale (Paris: Librairie du Recueli Sirey, 1934), AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.m, UA. 76 77

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Tibal, a member of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Nancy. As a Carnegie professor, Tibal was required to give public lectures at the offices of the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment, which were located at 173 boulevard Saint-Germain, on the ‘present day relations between nations.’ As specified by the endowment’s educational programme, the purpose for which the Carnegie professorship was created was ‘to enable all persons, French and foreign, living in Paris and interested in the cause of Peace and Conciliation, to enrich, to clarify, or to revise their ideas regarding the different peoples of the world, and, in particular, those of the European continent’ and ‘to understand the moral and material solidarity which unites the peoples.’80 The second project launched by the Carnegie Endowment in France concerned collaboration between its European centre and the Institut des hautes études internationales which had been established in 1921 as an ‘integral part’ of the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris. While this institute’s raison d’être was that of delivering formal courses to students enrolled in the university’s law faculty, as of 1926 it also offered, at the request of the endowment and within the confines of the endowment’s European office, courses that were open to the public on subjects such as international law, contemporary diplomatic history, political science and political economy.81 Katharina Rietzler observes that of the two organisations, that is, the Carnegie Endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation,  it was  the latter that was more focussed on research, adding that the foundation’s interest in international relations stemmed from a desire to advance the social sciences in Europe and North America. Nonetheless, as Rietzler  rightly points out, the world view of the personnel of both organisations tended to be similar: their world view was of a liberal and internationalist cast.82 The preceding points concerning the research orientation of the Rockfeller Foundation  and the philosophical outlook  of  those associated with its work are well illustrated by a discourse delivered by Tracy Barrett Kittredge, assistant director of the Social Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, at the 1938 Prague conference on the teaching of international relations mentioned above. In that context, Kittredge stated that 80  André Tibal, ‘The Activity of the European Carnegie Endowment in the Field of the University Teaching of International Relations,’ in Zimmern ed., University Teaching of International Relations, 157–8. For Tibal’s background, see Dotation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale, Le Centre européan de la Division des relations internationales et de l’éducation, 46. 81  Tibal, ‘The Activity of the European Carnegie Endowment in the Field of the University Teaching of International Relations,’ 158–9. 82  Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 63.

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the foundation had ‘no political objectives’ and was only concerned with the ‘advance of knowledge’ and the ‘diffusion of the results of research.’83 Yet at the same meeting, Kittredge acknowledged his personal sympathy for the LON and that of the foundation’s trustees. He pointed out that the statutes of the foundation prevented it from making grants to the various League of Nations’ associations as these had a ‘predetermined’ political programme. However, he added that the foundation was not prevented by its statutes from aiding the LON’s technical organisations, such as the LON’s Health Section, its Economic and Financial Organisation and its intellectual cooperation organisation,  in respect to ‘the study of certain problems of an international character.’ In regard to the study of international relations, Kittredge noted that the foundation’s aid had been confined to national or international organisations of a ‘primarily scientific character’ in line with the foundation’s statutes. The organisations Kittredge cited in this context were as follows: the American-based Foreign Policy Association, the RIIA, the IPR, the Centre d’études de politique étrangère in Paris, the Institute of Economics and History in Copenhagen, the Committee for International Information in Stockholm, the Committee for the Study of International Questions in Norway and the Centre de hautes études internationales at the Institut Social Romain in Bucharest.84 It was also with Rockefeller assistance, as Paul Guggenheim reported to the same meeting, that the Graduate Institute of International Studies was established by the Canton of Geneva in 1927. While this institute had relations with the University of Geneva, it was not portrayed as ‘specifically a Swiss School’; rather, it was represented as an ‘absolutely new type of international school of politics,’ the organisation of which accentuated its ‘character as a research centre.’85 Given their shared outlook, it is not surprising that the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment jointly supported certain institutions. For example, both organisations  supported the Foreign Policy Association (FPA). In its first incarnation in 1918, the FPA was known as the Committee on American Policy. It would subsequently be renamed the League of Free Nations Association before settling on the name of FPA in 1921. In its first few years, the focus of the FPA was on public enlighten Zimmern ed., University Teaching of International Relations, 318.  Ibid., 318–9. 85  Paul Guggenheim, ‘The Study of International Relations in the Swiss Universities,’ in Zimmern, ed., University Teaching of International Relations, 144–5. 83 84

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ment in regard to international affairs by means of public talks, meetings and radio transmissions. However, in 1925, recognising the need to ‘provide reliable and impartial’ information for those with an interest, professional or otherwise, in the foreign relations of the United States, it established a research department. Indeed, the constitution it adopted that year specified that the FPA’s two aims were, first, that of undertaking research and, second, that of education. The first  director of the FPA’s research department was Edward M. Earle. Following his resignation on  grounds of ill-health in 1927,  Earle was  succeeded in the  by Raymond Leslie Buell. In December 1933, following the resignation of James G.  McDonald, who had chaired the association since 1919 but  who had been appointed by the Council of the LON in October 1933 to the position of High Commissioner for German Refugees (Jewish or otherwise), Buell assumed the newly created role of association president, a role which entailed both chairmanship and research directorship responsibilities.86 Another example of an institution consecrated to the study of international problems aided by both organisations is the Geneva Research Center (GRC). The  origins of the GRC can be traced to  the time of the First Assembly in 1920 when a formative version of the centre was initiated by a small group of Americans connected with an association which became known in 1929 as the American League of Nations Association. This association maintained offices or representatives  in Geneva  almost  from the outset of the LON’s existence in order to assist the many Americans pouring into Geneva in their understanding of the nature and workings of the League. The centre issued, ‘as occasion required,’ reports and studies concerning ‘outstanding events’ at the LON. In 1930, the GRC was established  as  a permanent  research centre  with a view to the preparation of publications  concerning the  activities of the LON  which were designed mainly for the benefit of readers in the United States but also for use by universities. During this second phase of its existence, the GRC depended at first on resources obtained through public subscriptions and then later on funds donated by the foundation, the endowment and the International 86  Ware, The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934, 30, 81, 347–8. On the German High Commissioner for Refugees, see Barbara H. M. Metzger, ‘The League of Nations and Refugees: The Humanitarian Legacy of Fridtjof Nansen,’ in United Nations Library (Geneva), League of Nations Archives, The League of Nations 1920–1946: Organization and Accomplishments, 79.

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Corporation Fund. It was during this period that it severed its link with the League of Nations Association and become an independent organisation. Additional funds were realised by the GRC  through the sale of the publications it began to issue on a regular basis from 1930 onwards. The GRC produced a monthly review called Geneva which conveyed news of ‘notable events’ at the LON. It also published brochures devoted to ‘outstanding questions of immediate interest,’ including both questions of high politics, such as the  Manchurian situation, disarmament, sanctions and collective security, and questions of a social nature, such as the suppression of slavery and the international implications of unemployment. These brochures were prepared by ‘qualified experts’ and published under the rubric of Geneva Special Studies. During the third period of its existence,  dating from July 1935 to August 1936, the GRC collaborated closely with the  FPA in New  York.  In the autumn of 1936,  the GRC entered its fourth and final phase when, with the support of the foundation and the endowment, it  was reconstituted  under Article 60 of  the Swiss Civil Code. As a result of its reconstitution, the GRC was no longer an American institution but was instead  a purely  international research centre, devoted to, as its constitution specified, advancing ‘the knowledge and ­ understanding of international relations … in a strictly scientific, impartial and objective spirit.’87

League of Nations’ Teaching and Reform of Scholarly Manuals In his aforementioned  1938 survey entitled International Studies in Modern Education, Bailey, a lecturer in international relations at the LSE, acknowledged the significance of nineteenth- and pre-war early-twentieth-­ century developments in regard to the growth of international studies. Nonetheless, Bailey concurred with Zimmern that international studies 87  Geneva Research Center: Study, 22 January 1937,  and  Geneva Research Center, Constitution, December 14, 1936, Geneva Research Center (Bureau d’études internationales,  Genève), 1935–1940, AG 1-IICI-K-V-3, UA and Ware, The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934, 426–7.  ‘The American Association for International Cooperation and the League of Nations Non-Patrisan Committee merged on January 10, 1923 to become the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association. This name was shortened in 1929 to become the League of Nations Association.’ League of Nations Association Collected Records, 1916, 1922–1945, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/.

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was ‘essentially a growth of the last twenty years.’ In this regard, he identified four ‘currents of influence’ that, in his view, had greatly contributed to this growth. All four of these currents of influence intersect and all four relate to the activities of the LON. At this point, I will focus on only two currents of influence: the moves to reform scholarly manuals and the push for educational institutions to instruct youth in the aims and ideals of the LON.88 As pointed out in the first chapter, there was no provision in the covenant for educational reform. Bailey maintained that this was due to the ‘atmosphere of national jealousy and suspicion’ that prevailed at the Peace Conference and the determination of states to retain control of their educational policy. Nonetheless, Bailey considered the failure of the authors of the covenant to include within it such a provision demonstrated a lack ‘both of retrospection and foresight’: retrospection was lacking in that the failure to include such a provision overlooked the ‘sinister power of nationalistic education policies’ in Germany and other countries in the years preceding the war, and foresight was lacking in that it ‘could hardly have been expected that after two decades the deterrent effects of the experience of the war would influence those who had not been born when it came to an end.’89 However, in the wake of the creation of the LON, private and official action began to be undertaken in regard to educational reform with a view to ensuring that public instruction was not conducted in a way likely to endanger the good relations among nations. In its resolution of June 21, 1920, calling for the creation of an international office of intellectual and educational relations, the executive committee of the French Association of the League of Nations proposed that measures be undertaken to ‘ensure that all tuition shall conform with the principles of the League of Nations and never be employed to excite mistrust and hatred between peoples’ and to ‘control and eliminate errors or offensive expressions concerning other countries from the handbooks and educational works of every nation.’ On September 27 of the same year, the Japanese Association of Members of the Teaching Profession, addressing themselves to the secretariat, similarly proposed that the LON should establish an international council of educa88  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 5, 10, 14–5. The other two currents of influence Bailey mentions concern moral disarmament and education for citizenship, both of which are addressed in part 2 of The Story of International Relations. 89  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 4.

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tion and charge it with undertaking ‘a critical examination of school text-­ books,’ a proposal that was put before the assembly in 1921 on the initiative of Japanese educational, pacifist and scientific bodies.90 At the assembly that year, Murray stated the following: In fact, we do find in most countries in the ordinary education given that there is traditionally … an inculcation into the minds of the young of a somewhat excessive sense of the military glories of that particular country, a somewhat excessive interest in their own wars and in their own differences from their neighbours. We find sometimes instilled into the mind the germs of contempt for other nations. That is pure poison, of course, from our point of view. It is not patriotism; it is something we must try with all our tact and caution in different countries—each in his own country—to eradicate.91

Individual members of the ICIC also brought pressure to bear in relation to this issue. Both its North and South American members insisted that history should be taught from an international or civilisational perspective, rather than a national perspective and suggested that the ICIC might compile an international history textbook for use by different countries.92 This pressure culminated in a decision on the part of the ICIC on July 29, 1925, to endorse the following proposition by  the lexographer Julio Casares, a Spanish member of the ICIC: that while it would be ‘premature’ to expect countries at this stage to teach history from an international perspective and ‘useless to try and to impose any particular text-­ book’ on countries, efforts could be made to ‘free national teaching from the false judgements and errors which have crept in … and which mask or disfigure the true aspect of others peoples by attributing to them charac-

90  IIIC, School Textbook Revision and International Understanding, 2nd ed. (Paris: IIIC, 1933), 10, IICI/12/2, UA. 91  Ibid., 11. 92  Robert Milliken, the Belgium-based American replacement for George E. Hale on the ICIC, raised the issue in a letter to Bergson dated November 2, 1922. It was also raised by the Argentinean Léopoldo Lugones at the ICIC in 1924. Lugones stated that the ‘purely narrative history of each country and individual continents should be transformed into the history of civilization.’ Lugones’s proposal was restated by the Uruguayan Juan Antonio Buero at a 1925 meeting of the ICIC during which he noted that considerable progress had been made in Latin American countries ‘in encouraging through School teaching the formation of an international conscience’ (ibid., 11–2).

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teristics which make them unrecognisable and even odious.’93 What became known as the Casares resolution was adopted in the following year by the assembly which called for measures by which the machinery of the national committees of intellectual cooperation could be used ‘for securing the deletion or amendment of passages in text-books relating only to questions of fact … “of a nature to convey to the young wrong impressions leading to an essential misunderstanding of other countries.”’94 An even more important influence concerning the stimulation of the study of international relations concerns the parallel push, led by the national League of Nations’ associations, to ‘encourage on a wide as scale as possible support for the ideals of the Covenant.’95 A proposal along these lines received formal acceptance at the LON in 1923 when the Fourth Assembly requested that governments take into account ‘the ends of the League of Nations and the terms of its Covenant’ in framing educational policy and that they ‘encourage contact’ among the youth of the world through assisting them to make voyages ‘by land and by sea.’96 The Fifth Assembly enlarged upon this resolution, reiterating the ‘fundamental importance’ of acquainting youth with the ‘principles and work’ of the LON, but also stressing the necessity of habituating younger generations to the idea that ‘international cooperation … [is] … the normal method of conducting the affairs of the world.’ To this end, it asked the secretariat to submit a report to the Sixth Assembly on the ‘means most appropriate to developing and coordinating efforts’ aimed at promoting relations

 Ibid., 12–3.  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 11. Reform of the teaching of history, especially the teaching of ‘war, battles and militarism,’ had been proposed by the American Peace Society in 1906 in the United States context. Raul d’Eça, ‘The Convention on the Teaching of History Signed at the Seventh Pan American Conference,’ World Affairs 97, no. 2 (1934): 109–113, 109. 95  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 5. Note that education in the ideals enshrined in the LON also formed part of the June 21, 1920, resolution of the executive committee of the French Association of the League of Nations. 96  Société des Nations [hereafter SDN], Comment faire connaître la Société des Nations et développer l’esprit de Coopération Internationale: Recommendations du Sous-Comité d’Experts de la Commission internationale de Coopération intellectuelle de la Société des Nations (Geneva: Société des Nations, 1927), 5, IICI/33, UA. See also Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 9. 93 94

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among children and youth of different nationalities and of instructing them in the ‘ideals of world peace and solidarity.’97 Noting with satisfaction the report of the secretary-general, the Sixth Assembly asked that the council, taking into account this report and proposals on the subject issued by the delegations of Poland, Chile, Haiti and Uruguay, request the ICIC to consider the possibility of establishing a subcommittee of experts to examine ways of coordinating official and private efforts in regard to the education of youth in the ideals of the League. The council duly communicated this wish to the ICIC and in 1926, under the auspices of the OCI, the Sub-Committee of Experts for the Instruction of Children and Youth in the Aims of the League was appointed, holding its first meeting in Geneva between August 3 and 6 of that year.98 Importantly, in its resolution of September 1926 concerning the recognition of the OIC as a technical organisation of the LON, the assembly laid special stress on the preliminary report submitted to it by this subcommittee, calling on governments and member states to give this report their ‘sympathetic consideration’ and ‘to take the measures necessary to give effect to all or to any of its recommendations.’99 After further meetings in Paris in March and July 1927, the subcommittee (which included experts from Denmark, Chile, Cuba, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Romania and Serbia among its members) issued its definitive recommendations.100 Notably, the subcommittee maintained that were its final report to be published, it should be published under the heading of How to make known the League of Nations and develop the spirit of international cooperation (Comment faire connaître la Société des Nations et développer l’esprit de Coopération Internationale) because it considered that the mission confided to it was wider in scope than the subcommittee’s formal title suggested.101 The themes suggested 97  SDN, Comment faire connaître la Société des Nations, 6. See also Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 9. 98  SDN, Comment faire connaître la Société des Nations, 6–9. See also Société des Nations, La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle (Genève: Secrétariat de la SDN, 1926), 28, ICIC/28, UA. 99  SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 19–20. On its status as a technical organisation, see Henri Bonnet, L’œuvre de l’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1938), 26, IICI/17, UA. It was only in 1931 through another resolution of the assembly that the OIC received a definitive constitution. 100  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 9. 101  SDN, Comment faire connaître la Société des Nations, 24. The subcommittee’s recommendations were adopted by the council and the assembly on July 26 and September 22,

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by this heading were the subject of a report prepared by Zimmern at the request of the subcommittee on which he sat as the IIIC’s representative. Entitled Learning and Leadership: A Study of the Needs and Possibilities of International Intellectual Cooperation, this report was first published by the LON in Geneva on July 5, 1927.102 This report was itself but an enlarged version of a report which Zimmern had authored in 1926 and which was published that year by the Presses universitaires de France on behalf of the IIIC under the heading of The Intellectual Foundations of International Cooperation. Zimmern’s earlier report, along with its enlarged version, proved persuasive among those in LON circles concerned with education in international affairs.103

1927, respectively. The Comité d’entente des grandes associations internationales was founded on December 10, 1925, in association with the IIIC to which it was attached in light of the 1924 assembly resolution on education. It comprised international non-government associations, especially those concerned with the instruction of youth. It also included associations specifically concerned with adult education and the education of women. In a declaration issued in May 1926, it expressed support for instruction at all levels that favoured the work of the League. The committee stated that there exists ‘… between the diverse peoples … a community of rights and duties,’ and noted the fact of ‘ever-growing’ interdependence. ‘The child’, it declared, ‘must learn that civilisation has been and remains the common work of all peoples.’ IICI, Le Comité d’entente des grandes associations internationales: dix années d’activité (Paris, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 1936), 16–7, 45–6, IICI/23, UA. 102  Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 9n and League of Nations [hereafter LON], How to make the League of Nations known and to develop the Spirit of International Co-operation: Recommendations of the Sub-Committee of Experts, International Committee of Intellectual Co-operation (Geneva: League of Nations, 1927), 9, IICI/24 UA.  See also Alfred E.  Zimmern, Learning and Leadership: A Study of the Needs and Possibilities of International Intellectual Cooperation (Geneva: League of Nations, 1927), IICI/32, UA. Zimmern’s report was republished in 1928 by Oxford University Press under the same heading. 103  Alfred Zimmern, The Intellectual Foundations of International Co-operation (Paris: League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, Presses universitaires de France, 1926). For the publication details of this report, see International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation [hereafter IIIC], Bulletin of the Section of Information and Reference, no. 13 (1927), 11, IICI/01, UA.

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Alfred E. Zimmern and the Development of International Studies Zimmern trained in classics, philosophy and history and was the author of the critically well-received and commercially successful study of fifth-­ century Athens entitled the Greek Commonwealth (1911).104 He confessed that he wrote this book in order to ‘make people think about the nature of the XXth century.’105 In the Greek Commonwealth, Zimmern sought to demonstrate that what he alleged to be the overly zealous pursuit of individualism by the ancient Greeks had in the end proved self-defeating. In his view, the individualism of the ancient Greeks which had been so celebrated by nineteenth-century savants was one of the main causes of  ancient  Greece’s downfall.106 However towering were the ancient Greeks’ artistic, philosophical and scientific achievements, Zimmern maintained, their individualism had made them incapable of rendering service: while there was ‘plenty in … [Greece] … to chatter about; there was nothing in it that men would die for.’107 Zimmern had long been interested in the pacification of international affairs, insisting in 1905 that the twentieth century ‘must witness the abolition of war.’108 His interest was apparent when after the outbreak of war in 1914 he published, along with R.W. Seton-Watson, J.  Dover Wilson and Arthur Greenwood, a ‘guide to the study of the causes and issues of the war’ called The War and Democracy. Registering their wholehearted support for the Allied war effort, the authors of this work declared that on the outcome of the war depended ‘all that is worth living’: the future of the ‘democratic ideal’ in Britain and its empire and the ‘deliverance’ of the people of Europe ‘from competing armaments and racial tyranny.’109 104  Alfred Zimmern, ‘International Law and Social Consciousness,’ Transactions of the Grotius Society 20 (1934): 25–44, 26. On the Greek Commonwealth, see D. J. Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited: Fifty Years On,’ Review of International Studies 12, no. 4 (1986): 279–92, 279 and Gordon Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ in Bosco and Navari eds., Chatham House and British Foreign Policy 1919–1945, 20. 105  Alfred Zimmern, 1910, quoted in Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 20. 106  Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 17. 107  Alfred Zimmern, 1905, quoted in Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 17. 108  Reginald Coupland, 1905, quoted in Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited,’ 287. 109  R. W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern and Arthur Greenwood, The War and Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1915), vii. See also Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 23. Gilbert Murray encouraged Zimmern in the preparation of the chapters he wrote for this book.

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Significantly in relation to the subsequent development of international studies, the preface of this work stated that it had ‘originated in the experience’ of its authors ‘at the Summer Schools for working class students held in connection with the Workers’ Educational Associations’ at the time of the outbreak of the war. It struck the authors, the preface stated, that the word ‘“citizen” had suddenly acquired a new depth and significance’ for the men and women of their generation and, further, that from the perspective of the individual citizen, ‘a large new field of study and discussion had been opened up on subject hitherto unfamiliar.’110 By the time the war broke out, Zimmern had been involved in working class education for some years, and upon being invited to join the Round Table committee in 1914, he assumed the task of impressing upon working class audiences, via the Workers’ Educational Association, the Round Table’s position on foreign policy questions as well as its brand of enlightened imperialism.111 In regard to the latter, Gordon Martel notes that Zimmern and other Round Table figures sought to immunise elements within the working class ‘against the xenophobia of reactionary imperialists.’112 Zimmern was sympathetic to the Round Table’s cause of transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of self-governing nations bound together by shared ideals. Indeed, as early as 1905, he had urged that an ‘empire, in the twentieth century sense of the term, is a union between self-governing political units of so intimate a character as to make war between them inconceivable.’ To the extent that the British Empire displayed these characteristics, Zimmern considered that it could serve as a model for the world.113 Zimmern conceived of empire, and beyond this a world polity, in terms of a harmonious blending of differences: differences should not be suppressed but neither should they be given full rein.114 In regard to this last point, it should be noted that Zimmern was critical of the nationality principle. Having observed in Nationality and Government with Other War-­ Time Essays (1918) that ‘many loose-thinking people think that it is one of  Seton-Watson, Dover Wilson, Zimmern and Greenwood, War and Democracy, viii.  Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 20, 22–4. See also Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited,’ 280. Zimmern had involved himself in working class education since 1907. In the years between 1912 and 1915 he served as an inspector for the Board of Education. 112  Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 20. 113  Alfred Zimmern, 1905, quoted in Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 18. 114  Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 18. 110 111

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the causes for which we are fighting,’ Zimmern stated that in his view the ‘theory that the nation-state is the normal and proper area of government … is one of the most formidable and sinister forces on the side of our enemies and one of the major obstacles to human progress at the present time.’115 He argued that to divide the world on the basis of nationality was to ground states in factors that were ‘partial, arbitrary and accidental’; states, he insisted, should be founded on a ‘universal principle such as justice, democracy or collective consent, or on anything moral or universally human.’116 In a lecture delivered in London in November 1917 which was entitled ‘The Passing of Nationality,’ Zimmern observed that ‘[t]he record of the typical national states—Germany, Italy, France of Napoleon III, and the Balkan states—does not compare favorably with the record of the “two great international states, the British and American Commonwealths.”’117 During the war, Zimmern spoke out on behalf of the proposed LON, advocating in July 1917 at the British League of Nations Society’s first annual meeting, ‘a treaty that made war a crime in any circumstances.’118 This indicates that Zimmern entertained a robust view of the LON, a view more in keeping with the views of Wilson than those of his compatriots who envisaged the LON as little more than a forum for conferencing.119 For Zimmern, ‘arrangements for regular conference’ were but one of the LON’s two principal features. The other principal feature concerned collective treaties aimed at ‘ensuring peace and restraining resort to violence.’ Such treaties would embody what he called, following Robert John Parker, that is, Baron Parker of Waddington, the ‘principle of the Hue and Cry’ and would ensure that the LON was not simply an ‘improved organisation of Power’ but was rather a ‘convergence of Power and Law, under the guardianship of the powers, great and small.’120 115  Alfred E.  Zimmern, Nationality and Government with Other War-Time Essays (New York: Robert Mc Bride, 1918), 46. 116  Ibid., 47. 117  Alfred Zimmern, lecture on ‘The Passing of Nationality,’ delivered at King’s Hall, London, November 23, 1917, paraphrased and quoted in Russell, Theories of International Relations, 382. 118  Henry R. Winkler, The League of Nations Movement in Great Britain 1914–1919 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1952), 65–6. 119  Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 29. 120  On March 18, 1918, a debate took place in the House of Lords on the LON. During that debate, Lord Parker invoked the British principle of the ‘hue and cry,’ explaining that at the base of every legal order lay the strong feeling that ‘an act of violence done to the person

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Martel points out that like other British liberals, Zimmern hoped that a ‘morally progressive United States could be used to prod a complacent Britain to adopt a new internationalist position’ in terms of supporting a LON conceived along such lines. He adds that Zimmern especially counted on Wilson, whose morally uncompromising approach to international affairs he greatly esteemed, to ensure that David Lloyd George did not ‘fall behind in the idealists’ race.’121 Touching on his criticism of the Athenian polis in its period of decline, giving expression to the ethical idealism he imbibed at Oxford and anticipating his later criticisms of those who resisted the obligations imposed by the covenant, Zimmern stated of Wilson the following: ‘No ruler has spoken thus since Marcus Aurelius. It is as complete a breach with individualism as with Prussianism. I despair of our pacifists ever learning that the duty of a citizen in a free state is not to weaken the sense of individual obligation to the Commonwealth but to make his State a real moral personality.’122 In the years 1918 to 1919, Zimmern held a position at the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department (PID) where ‘with memories doubtless of his own family history, became one of a circle of political thinkers who influenced policy towards the liberation of subject peoples and persecuted minorities.’123 However, Zimmern’s most notable contribution at the Foreign Office was a memorandum he prepared for the British government to consider in connection with the forthcoming peace settlement. What was referred to at the time as this ‘brief conspectus of League of Nations organisation’ in fact formed the basis of what became known among students of the LON Covenant as the ‘Cecil draft’: it is this draft that the British would take to Paris and show to President Wilson’s Legal Advisor on January 1, 1919.124 The impact of the Cecil draft was or property of one member of the community has been resented as a wrong to all its members. In such a case neutrality is impossible. It is a disgrace, a crime. The hand of every man is against the wrongdoer. He becomes an outlaw … Everyone must join in his arrest and punishment.’ Lord Parker, 1918, quoted in Alfred Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law (London: Macmillan, 1936), 174–6, 190–2. 121  Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 29. 122  Alfred Zimmern, 1917, quoted in Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 29. On the influence of the philosophy of ethical idealism on Zimmern, see Rich, ‘Reinventing Peace,’ 120. 123  ‘Zimmern, Sir Alfred Eckhard,’ in E. T. Williams and Helen M. Palmer, eds., Dictionary of National Biography 1951–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1096. 124  The memorandum is reproduced in Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 195–208.

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such that on arriving in Paris for the Peace Conference in February 1919, the director of the PID, James Headlam-Morley (who would also be present at the famed evening meeting at the Majestic), wrote the following: ‘The League of Nations scheme, which is now public, drives all the merit which is in it from our people, starting with Zimmern and [Lord Eustace] Percy, and carried on with all energy by Cecil.’125 Zimmern attended the Peace Conference on behalf of PID when his expertise required it, advocating in that forum that the blockade of Germany be lifted. Zimmern also strongly criticised ‘the reparations provisions of the peace’; nonetheless, he expressed satisfaction with the overall political outcome of the negotiations.126 H. G. Wells, who too was a member of the LNU, expressed ‘embarrassment and puzzlement’ that his colleagues Murray and Zimmern had not only accepted but had become ‘eager apologists’ for the ‘simulacrum’ and ‘sham’ which was the ­‘weaponless’ league which had issued from the ‘pseudo-settlement’ of 1919.127 Zimmern confessed that he was ‘a good deal less ambitious’ than some of his friends in regard to the idea of Geneva becoming a ‘centre of all policies.’128 He later stated that when he wrote his Foreign Office memorandum, he was partly in a mood to ‘bring the “League of Nations” down from the clouds.’129 As he had stated in 1914, he considered that humanity was ‘still far off from the World-State and the World-Law which formed the misty ideal of cosmopolitan thinkers.’130 Zimmern understood well that the level of international organisation that could be realised depended on, as he put it, prevailing ‘psychological conditions and political possibilities.’ Nonetheless, he continued to maintain that the world needed a much greater level of organisation than had been possible to achieve in Paris in 1919.131 As reflected in his observations concerning the principle of the hue and cry, he considered it impor125  Gordon Martel notes that Eustace Percy had collaborated ‘closely’ with Zimmern ‘in drafting British proposals for the Covenant of the League.’ Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 19. 126  Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited,’ 280. 127  H.  G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934), 715. 128  Zimmern, ‘The Development of the International Mind,’ 6. 129  Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 189–90. 130  Alfred Zimmern, ‘The War and Democracy,’ published in December 1914 and reprinted as ‘Nationality and Government: German Culture and the British Commonwealth,’ in Zimmern, Nationality and Government, 20. 131  Zimmern, ‘The Development of the International Mind,’ 6.

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tant to strengthen the commitment on the part of states to settle their disputes peacefully and to uphold the collective security dimension of the League system if the rule of law was to prevail. Based on these considerations, Zimmern welcomed the Washington Naval (or Five-Power) Treaty (1922), the Locarno Treaties (1925) and the Pact of Paris (1928): these were significant improvements upon an imperfect League system.132 Zimmern occupied the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Relations at the University of Aberystwyth in the years 1919–1921, and it was from that base that he assisted in the establishment of the British Institute of International Affairs. However, his tenure there was cut short due to the controversy created by his marriage to Lucie Hirsch-Flotron, the former wife of a colleague.133 Following their attendance at the Second Assembly, Zimmern and Mrs Zimmern departed for the United States, where Zimmern held a temporary teaching position at Cornell University in the years 1922–1923.134 Among his activities immediately on returning to the United Kingdom was a series of eight lectures given at the LSE commencing on November 12, 1923. In  his LSE  lectures, Zimmern treated of the ‘aims and achievements of the League … of the general international situation and of the position which the League can and should occupy in international politics,’ in this regard preparing the way for the courses given by Noel-Baker in his position as Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of International Relations.135 In October of the following year, Zimmern contested the general election on the Labour side, unsuccessfully running against the Liberal candidate, Lloyd George.136 As we saw, Zimmern was among those appointed to head a section of the IIIC, commencing work in the latter part of 1925 as chief of the Section of General Affairs. His colleague, the Polish historian Oskar de Halecki, who had been appointed chief of the Section of University 132  Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited: Fifty Years On,’ 285. The Pact of Paris or  General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy was also known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact after its two official authors: US Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and the French foreign minister Aristide Briand. In the United States and elsewhere, it was sometimes simply called the Kellogg Pact. 133  Paul Rich observes that as  the marriage could not be ‘tolerated’ by the university, Zimmern was thus compelled to resign. Rich, ‘Reinventing Peace,’ 121. See also Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited,’ 120. 134  Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited,’ 281 and Rich, ‘Reinventing Peace,’ 121. 135  LSE: International Relations: Foundation and History of the International Relations Department. 136  Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited,’ 281.

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Relations (although he would be replaced in this post in mid-1927 by a German national called Werner Picht), remarked in November 1925 that Zimmern was a man who was ‘deeply interested in all the questions connected with education,’ adding that Zimmern had ‘a very great experience in such problems.’137 It was no doubt due to Zimmern’s belief in the transformative potential of education and, more particularly, his interest in international civics that enabled the IIIC to report, in January 1926, that it had already been engaged in work on the ‘development of instruction on international questions.’138 Within months and by common agreement, Zimmern’s section began to collaborate with the secretariat’s Section of University Relations on plans for a ‘Federation of Institutions’ which, in diverse countries, would be dedicated to ‘instruction in matters indispensable to knowledge of the contemporary world and in international relations.’139 The background to this development concerns a request by the ICIC to the IIIC in May 1926 that it examine the possibility of creating an international university, the ICIC having received numerous petitions calling for the creation of a university that would in some fashion be attached to the  LON.140 In the hands of the IIIC, or rather in Zimmern’s hands, the proposal for an international university by the twenty-first of that month had been ‘transformed into a more modest project’: the plan of collaboration described above.141 This plan was first formally broached by Zimmern in The Intellectual Foundations of International Cooperation. This report was divided into 137  O. Halecki to G. W. Luckey, 10 November 1925, The International Education Research Council and World Bureau of Education. Document de G.  W. Luckey, 1925–1926, AG 1-IICI-B-VI-4, UA. On Picht’s appointment, see IIIC Bulletin of the Section of Information and Reference, no. 9 (1927), 2. 138  SDN, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 8. 139  IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 249. 140  Ibid. The plan for an international university ‘for the education of statesmen, diplomats, politicians, political writers, professors of political science and the like’ was first discussed by the ICIC at its Fifth Session of July 27–30, 1925. At that time, the committee ‘felt that the plan went beyond what is could then consider, though it aphorised that the matter be further studied.’ See Broda, ‘New International Agencies for Intellectual Cooperation,’ The Antiochian 9, no. 2 (1927). See also Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 76. 141  IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 249. Luchaire noted that ‘important institutions’ in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland had been approached in relation to forming a ‘consortium’ to this end. IICI, Travaux de L’Institut de Coopération Intellectuelle pendant l’année 1926, 17.

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two parts: the first part examined the environmental conditions which rendered intellectual cooperation a matter of urgency and the second part examined the methods by which international intellectual cooperation can be achieved. The first part opened with the argument that the mark of civilisation is ‘control over the environment’: according to Zimmern, whereas the civilised person ‘understands the world in which he is living and the forces by which it is moved … a savage is a plaything of arbitrary and capricious powers, acting beyond the limited range of his intelligence.’ Zimmern traced this understanding of civilisation to the ancient Greeks, pointing out that the European tradition had long accepted that control over the environment ‘is an indispensable condition of human happiness.’ It is perhaps this feature of the European tradition, he suggested, that non-European societies ‘have been most ready to accept.’142 Zimmern maintained that the war of 1914–1918 was the consequence of a loss of control over external forces: in 1914 statesmen had s­ urrendered control of the ‘fluid and tumultuous interaction of human wills and passion’ and,  despite the occasional deferential gesture towards the LON ideal, this control had not yet been regained.143 Zimmern further maintained that as the problems besetting the modern world were, at bottom, intellectual rather than political in character, the resumption of control over external forces could not be realised by statesmen alone. What was needed, Zimmern  declared, was a sustained intellectual effort aimed at understanding the forces at play in the world and the creation of mechanisms for their control.144 Zimmern urged the need to reconsider the question that the Greeks would daily address in the Agora: what is the ‘Common Thing,’ that is, what ‘is that which is common to us as civilised beings.’145 Zimmern thought it necessary to reconsider this question because public affairs for the present generation were very different from the public affairs of the previous generation in three major respects: in terms of scale, complexity and pace. According to Zimmern, the most obvious example of a change in the scale of things was the ‘World War’ which had just been fought: industrialisation and along with it the need for access to overseas resources conduced to ‘delocalised’ war. It was largely because of the belated realisa Zimmern, The Intellectual Foundations of International Cooperation, 3.  Ibid. 144  Ibid. 145  Ibid. 142 143

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tion that war could no longer be localised or even confined to a single continent, Zimmern  contended, that more than fifty states under the LON Covenant had pledged themselves to refrain from war in most circumstances and also ‘to go to war’ in certain circumstances.146 The advent of the covenant, Zimmern pointed out, involved the recognition that war had become a res publica, with the term publica in this context bearing the ‘significance worldwide or universal.’147 Yet Zimmern remained concerned that the governments who had signed the covenant and the peoples whom they represented continued to think in ‘miniature’ and ‘resist the enlargement of scale.’148 While they had embraced the LON because it symbolised ‘the possibility of human betterment,’ he stated, they had done so without fully appreciating the full implications of the covenant they had signed.149 That they did not grasp its full implications, Zimmern maintained, was because the intellectual foundations for the LON had not been laid.150 As indicated, Zimmern contended that in addition to an enlargement in the scale of public affairs, there had been an increase in its complexity. Due to the march of industrialisation, he noted, there had been a tendency in the material sphere towards greater uniformity. By contrast, he added, the social sphere had witnessed since the time of the French and American revolutions a ‘steady process of differentiation.’ Zimmern observed that this process manifested itself in the form of ‘self-assertion’ on the part of social groups, citing the suffragist movement as one example of  social group self-assertion. Self-assertion, Zimmern stated, also characterised the behaviour of nations, as exemplified by the movements for national self-determination which had sprung up in Europe and which had seen  an increase in the number of European states.151 Zimmern expected that the trend towards  heterogeneity  in the international field would only accelerate in the future as more and more nationalities awakened in other regions of the world: in Asia and in Africa. Striking a cautionary note, he  observed  that considerable subtlety and delicacy would be required of statesmen in addressing these developments. Certainly, he suggested, it would require policies characterised by much  Ibid., 5–6. Emphasis added.  Ibid., 5. 148  Ibid., 3. 149  Ibid., 4. 150  Ibid., 3–4. 151  Ibid., 6. 146 147

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greater ‘psychological insight’ than that which characterised the policies adopted by  the  European powers in relation to  China and the Nearer East.152 Placing a further burden on statesmanship, was what Zimmern considered to be the most ‘disconcerting’ feature of the post-war period: the rapid and accelerating pace at which contemporary events unfolded, a development which he contended required a preparation for public affairs very different from that which was afforded before 1914.153 In the second part of his report, Zimmern turned to the role of intellectual cooperation in ensuring effective statesmanship, defining it as the adjustment of ‘available resources of goodwill, expert knowledge and intellectual and moral leadership to the needs of the post-war world’ and setting them ‘to work together according to the rhythm of the age.’154 Zimmern then went on to discuss the role of public education in p ­ romoting an understanding of the wider world, being careful to stress at the outset that it should not be thought that this implied ‘any form of international control’; what was required in this field, he argued, was ‘cooperation of the existing authorities’ with a common end in view.155 Zimmern insisted that if there were any aspect of ‘civilised life’ in which ‘uniformity is death and diversity the law life,’ it is ‘that through which the younger generation is initiated into the social heritage of its community or nation’ and thereby integrated into them.156 This contention reflects Zimmern’s position on intellectual cooperation in general: that it should be a decentralised activity, although this position is itself a reflection of Zimmern’s view of what a true internationalism should entail. In order to understand what internationalism meant for Zimmern, one should begin by noting his disdain for those he referred to as the déraciné. Zimmern observed that while the advocates of international cooperation were often assumed to be rootless types, they were in fact the exact opposite. Citing Aristotle’s affirmation that ‘a man without a city is either a god or a beast,’ Zimmern argued that ‘no one can render true service in the cause of international co-operation unless he has not first thoroughly absorbed in his own mind and soul the meaning and value of nationality’ in the larger or political sense of that term.157 Zimmern  Ibid., 6–7.  Ibid., 7. 154  Ibid., 8. 155  Ibid., 9. 156  Ibid. 157  Ibid. 152 153

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argued that without the felt experience of attachment to a ‘home, its traditions and its institutions,’ an experience that Zimmern regarded as the most profound feature of political and social life, a person is ‘constitutionally incapable’ of rendering service in the public domain. Zimmern further argued that it is only through such experience, which, he insisted, cannot be gleaned from books but must be ‘lived,’ that one can develop an appreciation of the ‘great hidden movements’ unfolding below the surface of political life and a capacity for ‘judgement.’158 In light of these considerations, Zimmern maintained that education in international relations should take place only at the later stage of a student’s university career: in order to be ‘fit’ to contribute to the ‘larger society formed for ideal ends,’ one must first develop an identity as a citizen.159 In relation to education in international affairs, Zimmern ­recommended as a first step, attendance at ‘a school of international contacts’: attendance at summer schools that would bring together students from different countries who would then receive instruction from an international group of university teachers. This instruction would be, on Zimmern’s plan, in the fields of sociology, international law, international politics and international economic relations. In the course of such instruction, Zimmern maintained, students would learn the ‘best of nationality together with the best of internationalism.’ Zimmern suggested that these summer schools, ideally,  should be conducted in Geneva as this would allow for the participation of the many individuals there who had direct experience of international affairs.160 As a second step, Zimmern recommended enrolment in special educational facilities in the form of international schools where students from different countries would receive professional training in international affairs. Zimmern maintained that such training should not be undertaken in a ‘purely national atmosphere.’161 Zimmern pointed out that if such international schools were to establish a system of collaboration between them, then an international university would not be necessary. In a similar vein, he  argued that specialist research in the field of international rela Ibid.  Ibid., 13. 160  Ibid., 15. 161  Ibid., 17. On the notion of an international career, see also Alfred Zimmern, ‘The League of Nations and International Intellectual Co-operation,’ in The Problems of Peace: Lectures Delivered at the Geneva Institute of International Relations at the Palais des Nations, August 1926, 149. 158 159

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tions, this being essential precisely because the problems that beset the world and endanger peace are ‘predominantly’ intellectual in character, should be undertaken at separate national research institutes which would at the same time collaborate with each other. Anticipating the activities of the yet to be formed ISC, Zimmern suggested that these national research institutes might undertake joint studies of a particular problem or area of controversy. In this regard, Zimmern noted that the ‘whole agglomeration of difficulties, roughly and perhaps wrongly described by the western world as the race problem, might present a very different aspect if it formed the subject of reports issued simultaneously from London, Paris, Berlin, Rome Baltimore, Peking, Calcutta and Tokyo.’162 In respect to research on international affairs, Zimmern, as one would expect given his view of the role that IIIC should play, was ill-disposed to the idea of ‘single central institute’: Zimmern argued that it was very unlikely that such a centre, whether or not attached to the LON, would actually be viewed as ‘superinternational.’ Decentralised research was to be preferred, he insisted, in order to ensure that contributions to the study of international affairs emanated from ‘every continent, every race, every people’ and that researchers in this area remained in touch with local concerns. Here, Zimmern was touching on the view of intellectual cooperation that he would advance  in the following year in the context of his campaign against Luchaire: the role of intellectual cooperation is ‘not one of centralisation, but of stimulation and synthesis.’163 In advancing his particular conception of what form education in international affairs should take, Zimmern was promoting, as he himself indicated  elsewhere, the cause of the contact school he had established in 1925  in Geneva.164 The origins of Zimmern’s Geneva School of International Studies can be traced to a decision on the part of the annual Congress of the International Universities League of Nations’ Federation that it would cease being responsible for the courses that Zimmern, the federation’s honorary president, had initiated in Geneva at the time of the

 Zimmern, The Intellectual Foundations of International Cooperation, 19.  Ibid., 19. 164  Although Zimmern did not directly mention his contact school in his report, he nonetheless pointed out in his introduction to The New Germany that ‘fuller details of the aims and work’ of the school can be found in his Intellectual Foundations of Intellectual Co-operation. See Alfred Zimmern, introduction to Ernst Jäckh, The New Germany: Three Lectures (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 8. 162 163

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Fifth Assembly.165 Zimmern thereafter proceeded to reorganise and extend the scope of the enterprise he had initiated with a view to rendering it a more ‘systematic educational venture.’166 Although it would continue to collaborate with the federation, Zimmern’s school was established as a ‘completely independent educational organisation, free from any bonds with organisations which have political aims.’167 Certainly, Zimmern’s Geneva School became ‘attached’ to the IIIC in 1926, following Zimmern’s elevation to the role of deputy director of the  IIIC.  However, this posed no problem because of the IIIC’s ­autonomous status and apolitical character.168 That the Geneva venture was very dear to Zimmern’s heart is demonstrated by his insistence, on being offered an official position at the IIIC in 1925, that he would accept only on the condition that he was ‘left free to continue the work of the School during the summer months.’ As a result of this condition, Zimmern absented himself from Paris for long periods. While these absences did not assist his relationship with Luchaire, they doubtless helped ensure that his school was an immediate success.169 In 1925, its student body numbered 579 and it attracted students from over 30 countries and 115 universities.  Similar results  were  achieved in the following year. In terms of its staff, apart from Zimmern and his wife, the school relied on the cooperation of many ‘eminent scholars’ from many different countries and the collaboration of members of the secretariat and the ILO.170 165  Memorandum for the Geneva School of International Studies prepared by Nicholas J.  Spykman, Yale University, Geneva School of International Studies,  1927–1929,  AG 1-IICI-B-IV-19, UA. Zimmern stated that the federation had ‘generously consented to this extension of its scope and to the consequent change in the type of organization.’ Zimmern, introduction to Jäckh, The New Germany, 7. 166  Zimmern, introduction to Jäckh, The New Germany, 8. 167  Memorandum for the Geneva School of International Studies prepared by Nicholas J. Spykman, AG 1-IICI-B-IV-19, UA. 168   International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation [hereafter IIIC], Bulletin of the Section of Information and Documentation, no. 2 (1926), 5, IICI/01, UA. 169  Zimmern, introduction to Jäckh, The New Germany, 7. On Zimmern’s relationship with Luchaire, see Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation within the League of Nations, 365–366. Arnold Toynbee stated that Zimmern’s school in Geneva was his ‘chef d’œuvre in this special line of his, in which intellectual stimulus was humanized by a kindly touch.’ Toynbee, Acquaintances, 61. 170  The school also held public lectures while the assembly was in session, offering daily commentary on the assembly’s work. Delegates to the LON and ‘other eminent personalities’ were invited to give evening talks. Zimmern, introduction to Jäckh, The New Germany, 8.

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Based on a description given in a memorandum covering the school’s efforts in the years 1925 and 1926 written by the Dutch-American scholar Nicholas Spykman, it would appear that the school’s aims and activities paralleled in a number of ways the recommendations that Zimmern made in his 1926 report: The Intellectual Foundations of International Cooperation. The school’s  aims were firstly, to satisfy the need under ‘modern conditions’ for ‘leaders adequately trained to deal with problems of international relations’ (be they statesmen, diplomats or those pursuing a strictly international career), and secondly, to ‘cooperate with existing national and international organisations in stimulating the study of world problems with a view of contributing to the growth of an enlightened public opinion on international affairs.’171 The programme offered by the school was wide-ranging. For example, its planned 1927 summer schedule touched on such topics as international law and government; the history of the foreign policy of countries in Europe, Central and South America, Asia and the Balkans; security and disarmament; the ‘problem of Backward Peoples’ in colonies and mandates; public health; traffic in narcotics; developments in communications and transit; international labour issues and the minority problem. In addition to these topics, most of which mirrored the preoccupations of the LON and its various organs, the curriculum addressed factors influencing the international identity of nations: geographic and economic factors, historical factors (such as the experience of colonial domination), and sociological, ideological, racial and religious factors. In this way, the school’s offerings reflected an awareness of the need to understand the ‘culture and mentality of different countries.’172 The account of Zimmern’s Geneva School given in Spykman’s memorandum also mirrored Zimmern’s 1926 report in its careful insistence that it was not the intention of the school to ‘compete with national systems of education.’ Its courses were projected as ‘an addition to, not a substitute for, a national training’: the courses were designed to acquaint future foreign officers and future leaders in international affairs with the ‘national point of view held in other states’ and to ‘counterbalance’ their ‘exclusive national training.’ At the same time, the memorandum also emphasised that the school’s greatest strength lay in its ‘truly international character’

171  Memorandum for the Geneva School of International Studies prepared by Nicholas J. Spykman, AG 1-IICI-B-IV-19, UA. 172  Ibid.

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and the fact that it could offer training ‘of such a nature as can be offered only in Geneva.’173 While in Geneva during the summer of 1926, Zimmern attended a number of international congresses on behalf of the IIIC, among them being a week-long meeting organised by the Geneva Institute International Relations (GIIR)  which was held  in the second week of August in the Glass Room  on the first floor  of the secretariat building, that is, in  the Palais Wilson. Formerly the ballroom of the Hôtel National, the previous incarnation of the Palais Wilson, the Glass Room also served as the chamber of the LON Council until 1936 when it moved to its new headquarters: to the Palais des Nations, a structure resulting from an architectural competition  launched in April 1926 and which was  located in the parc de l’Ariana. The GIIR began life soon after the LON came into being and functioned at first as a summer school of the British LNU. However, subsequently, with the support of the LNU and a number of Americans led by  the international lawyer and  Harvard University  professor  Manley O. Hudson, it was converted into an institute. Thereafter, its programme was ‘widened so as to strike balance between those who wished to discuss international problems at large and those who were interested primarily in the structure and activities of the League,’ the latter topic having been the focus of the original summer school. Although among those giving lectures at GIIR’s 1926 meeting were Arnold Wolfers, director of the German Political Academy (Deutsche Hochshule für Politik) in Berlin, Madariaga, Paul Mantoux, the then director of the Political Section of the LON Secretariat and William E. Rappard, rector of the University of Geneva, member of the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission and co-­ founder of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in 1927, most of those in attendance were of British and American origin.174  Ibid. See also Zimmern, introduction to Jäckh, The New Germany, 7.  Introduction to The Problems of Peace: Lectures Delivered at the Geneva Institute of International Relations at the Palais des Nations, August 1926, v. One American group involved with the Geneva Institute for International Relations  was the American NonPartisan Association. See also John Eugene Harley, International Understanding: Agencies Educating for a New World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931), 245–6.  For the history and use of the Glass Room and the location of the secretariat, see Frank Moorehouse, Grand Days (Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 1993), 28;  Warren F.  Kuehl and Lynn K.  Dunn, Keeping the Covenant:  American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1919–1939 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997), 82; and Bailey Van Hook, Violet Oakley: An Artist’s Life (Lanham, Maryland: University of Delaware Press, 2016) 333. For the construction of the Palais des Nations, see Jean-Claude Pallas, ‘L’histoire du Palais des 173 174

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Zimmern’s lecture, which was entitled ‘The Development of the International Mind,’ was the first to be delivered, and in the course of that lecture he observed that a ‘common weakness’ of the British and Americans was their ‘condescension towards foreigners.’ This weakness revealed itself in particular, he stated, in relation to ‘those who are not of the white race.’ Noting that Nitobe (who had participated in the formal opening of the meeting and who had been collaborating with Zimmern as a Japanese representative on the subcommittee of experts mentioned above) was the only non-member of the ‘white-pink race of which are all so proud’ (a remark that was greeted with laughter), Zimmern went on to insist that no matter how hurtful or ‘disagreeable,’ the need to intellectually address the question of race was unavoidable. Unless the subject was faced ‘frankly in the intellectual arena,’ he added, there would be ‘war about it in the political.’175 Zimmern then reflected on an incident he had witnessed in the same room of the Palais Wilson two years earlier when ‘the so-called Japanese amendment’ to the Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes was under discussion: an amendment which concerned  domestic questions which threatened to disturb international peace, the most mentioned of these questions in the amendment being tariffs and immigration. Zimmern recalled entering the room and sensing a high-level tension, adding that he felt that among the members of the audience (as opposed to the delegates), and most especially among the Anglo-Saxon members, it was as if ‘[a]ll sorts of subconscious instincts had arisen from the bottom of … [their] … consciousness and were crowding to the top.’ He related how an American member of the audience had expressed her pleasure to him that the Americans and the British Empire were standing ‘together on this issue’ and how he responded to her by pointing out that ‘out of seven subjects of King George V only one has a white face.’ Zimmern reminded his Geneva audience that the British Empire is ‘not a white Empire’ and that the United States is not ‘wholly a white community.’ He then warned against the following: the tendency of the British and the Americans to function as a ‘kind of psychological block consisting of people with common affections and repulsions standing against the races of the world.’ Zimmern declared that such an approach Nations,’  in United Nations Library (Geneva), League of Nations Archives, The League of Nations 1920–1946: Organization and Accomplishments, 98–119. 175  Zimmern, ‘The Development of the International Mind,’ 12.

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would only lead to disaster and stated, to applause, that he could see that his audience was ‘forewarned and forearmed against [it] by the reception you have already given our dear Dr. Nitobé.’ The development of an international mind, Zimmern  advised  to renewed applause, involves the stretching of ‘the girdle of thought and sympathy round the entire world.’176 Zimmern’s report The Intellectual Foundations of International Cooperation proved influential in the context of both the subcommittee of experts of which he was a member and the ICIC. It was submitted to the ICIC in the form of an annex to a report prepared by Luchaire on the question of the project of an international university. It no doubt helped persuade the ICIC to reject that project in the course of a plenary meeting in late July 1926. Instead, the ICIC asked the IIIC to investigate the possibility of establishing coordination between those national and international organisations that were concerned with the teaching of international affairs.177 In 1927, the IIIC reported to the ICIC that Sébastien Charléty, the rector of the University of Paris, had taken steps in the first part of that year towards the coordination of Parisian institutions of higher international studies and that similar steps were being considered in a number of other countries.178 The result of these steps was the formation of the French Coordinating Committee of International Studies (Commission française de coordination des études internationales), which had Charléty as its honorary chair176  Ibid., 13. One part of the so-called Japanese amendment, which was intended to be the third and last paragraph of Article 5 of the Geneva Protocol, read as follows: ‘If the question is held by the Court [of arbitration] or by the Council to be a matter solely within the domestic jurisdiction of the State, this decision shall not prevent consideration of the situation by the Council or by the Assembly under Article 11 of the Covenant.’ For a discussion of this and the other part of the amendment, see David Hunter Miller, The Geneva Protocol (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 46–9, 64–7. 177  IIIC, International Studies Conference, 15. On the connection between Zimmern’s report and the report on the proposal for an international university, see IIIC, Bulletin of the Section of Information and Documentation, no. 2 (1926) 1. ‘There was equivocation on the earlier proposal to create an international school of higher political studies.’ Einstein supported this proposal, however, he ‘was told that some of the major universities already had a somewhat international character and that the committee should limit itself to emphasizing such existing opportunities.’ Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 82. 178  IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 252, and ‘L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle et les relations universitaires: Réunion des experts pour la coordination des hautes études internationales,’ Institut International de la Coopération  Intellectuelle [hereafter [IICI], Bulletin des relations universitaires, 4, no. 2 (1928), 72, IIIC/033, UA.

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man and Louis Eisenmann, a professor in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris, as its chairman.179 In The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934, Edith E. Ware pointed out that the French committee was a project of the American Social Science Research Council and that it had ‘originated as part of their programme for the better coordination of research.’ She noted that in 1927 the council had, ‘for the first time, recognized international relations as a distinct area of research.’ Indeed, in that same year the council established an ‘Advisory Committee on International Relations’ under the chairmanship of Shotwell, the first research grants of which were directed towards the IPR for purpose of producing studies on American ‘relations with the Orient.’180 In regard to the French international studies committee, Ware noted that it worked closely with the IIIC in Paris.181 At a  plenary meeting in July 1927, the ICIC adopted a resolution approving the Parisian undertaking, recommending that similar experiments be initiated in other cities and that encouragement should be given to private initiatives such as those vacation courses in international subjects being conducted in Geneva. The ICIC also authorised the IIIC to convene a meeting of a ‘Committee of Experts for the Coordination of Higher International Studies.’182 It is of relevance to the actual convening of such a meeting that on July 26, the ICIC unanimously adopted the subcommittee of experts’ final report in which was urged the study in universities and similar institutions of not only the LON but of ‘international relations in general.’183 179  Ware, The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934, 20, 429. See also ‘Experts pour la coordination des hautes études internationales: Réunion des 22–24 Mars 1928—Berlin,’ Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle [hereafter IICI], Bulletin de la Section d’Information et de Documentation, no. 19 (1928), 9, IICI/01, UA. 180  Ware, The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934, 20, 40, 168, 429. 181  Ibid., 429. 182  Alfred Zimmern, ‘L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle et les relations universitaires: Report to the Sub-Committee on University Relations on the Meeting of Representatives of Scientific Institutions for the Study of Politics,’ IIIC, Bulletin for University Relations 4, no. 3–4 (1928), 171. See also IIIC, International Studies Conference, 15 and IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 252. 183  League of Nations, How to make the League of Nations known and to develop the Spirit of International Co-operation, 14, 34–5. The Report was presented to the ICIC in the same month. It was adopted by the LON Assembly on September 22.

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As previously noted, in 1927 Zimmern produced an enlarged version of The Intellectual Foundations of International Cooperation for the benefit of the subcommittee of experts on League of Nations’ teaching. This document was called Learning and Leadership: A Study of the Needs and Possibilities of International Intellectual Co-operation and included two chapters additional to those contained in the earlier report. In the first of these additional chapters, Zimmern observed that due to the spectacular advance, modern science had seen the realm of knowledge (scientia) and,  which  had formerly been conceived of in terms of unity (the Universitas), had become marked by division. Modern science’s advance and the worship of, as a consequence of that advance, the scientific method of reducing experience to ‘measurable and ponderable units,’  Zimmern argued,  had seen a decline in the importance of and interest in those human studies that sought to comprehend life ‘in all the richness of its full reality.’184 The loss of prestige suffered by humanistic studies, Zimmern contended, had in turn affected the relationship between such studies and the conduct of public affairs.185 Zimmern argued that although science, by virtue of it being a manifestation of intellect, properly belonged to the ‘realm of spirit’ and therefore stood in opposition to the ‘powers of disorder,’ it had nonetheless found itself in the position of being an instrument of such powers. This ‘ghastly paradox,’ he declared, had come about because science, in its exaltation of technique, had so ‘carelessly’ abdicated the role that ‘Mind’ should occupy: that of controlling policy in the interest of the civitas maxima. With Mind having vacated the field of human conduct, Zimmern maintained, the way was open for the powers of disorder to reign, a reign facilitated by the techniques of modern science and which culminated in the “collective massacre” which was the Great War.186 In Learning and Leadership, Zimmern reiterated the point that people were mistaken to believe that the establishment of the LON had restored to mankind control of events: that Mind had found expression in the form of the LON. The LON, he stated, had not overcome the forces of chaos because it had not been allowed to undertake the tasks which were originally expected of it. That this was the case, he added, was due either to a lack of comprehension among its constituencies or  because these same  Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, 81–3.  Ibid., 82. 186  Ibid., 87–9. 184 185

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constituencies persisted in jealously guarding their ‘fancied interests.’187 It could thus be said, Zimmern concluded, that civilisation, in its ‘true spiritual sense,’ had ‘ceased to exist’ or at best had been ‘granted a reprieve until the next war—that war for which Science is preparing and which statesmen are powerless to arrest.’188 The pessimism Zimmern expressed in Learning and Leadership seems surprising given that it appeared at a time when others, such as his friend and colleague, Ernst Jäckh, the president of the German Political Academy, were writing paeans to the ‘spirit of Locarno,’ an expression signifying ‘good faith and good will’ and an expectation of agreement amongst different sides rather than fighting.189 The expression spirit of Locarno had gained currency in light of the Locarno Treaties which were named after the Swiss resort town on the banks of Lake Maggiore where they were negotiated between October 5 and 16, 1925. These negotiations resulted from a German Foreign Office memorandum of February 9, proposing a multilateral security pact in order to stabilise Germany’s western frontier. This proposal was a key element of the Foreign Office’s policy of rapprochement which it had adopted in view of Germany’s application to join the LON.190 Under the principal treaty of the Locarno Treaties, namely, the Rhineland Pact, the three Rhineland parties, that is, Belgium, France and Germany, entered a mutual undertaking that they would ‘in no case attack or invade each other or resort to war against each other.’ Should this undertaking be breached, the treaty stipulated, ‘all the other signatories,’ which, in addition to the Rhineland parties, included the non-­ Rhineland parties of Great Britain and Italy, were ‘severally bound each to “come immediately” to the help of the attacked party.’191

 Ibid., 90–1.  Ibid., 91–2. 189  Jäckh, The New Germany, 84–5. 190  Jacques Bariéty, ‘Germany’s Entry into the League of Nations,’ in United Nations Library (Geneva), League of Nations Archives, The League of Nations 1920–1946: organization and accomplishments 64; Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 364; and Detlev J.  K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 199. 191  Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 367. Neither Britain nor Italy received any security guarantees under the treaty. Italy did not take part in the negotiations, deciding only at the final moment to undertake a security guarantee. Detlev J. K. Peukert notes that under French pressure, Germany also signed treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, according to which the parties agreed to peacefully resolve their disputes. 187 188

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As suggested by the expression associated with them, the Locarno Treaties were believed to amount to much more than a security pact. The German foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, stated of the Rhineland Pact that it ‘is not only a legal construction of a political idea, but the basis of a new system of the European idea.’192 This sentiment was echoed by Stresemann’s French counterpart, namely, Briand, who asserted that in consequence of Locarno, ‘we become and are European. The sectionalism of our countries is from henceforth abolished and extinguished.’193 That Locarno symbolised the dawn of a new era in which ‘nationality and supernationality … [and] … nationalism and universalism’ were synthesised, was also reflected in the hope, as expressed by the assembly on the occasion of the Rhineland Pact’s conclusion, that the Locarno Treaties would not stand alone but instead would be multiplied such that the spirit of Locarno would extend across the globe.194 Just over a decade later and with the benefit of hindsight, Zimmern would confess that the period between 1924 and 1929 was ‘the most successful period—let us be bold and say the most normal period—which the League has yet passed through,’ as these years were ‘marked by a spirit of co-operation between the European Great Powers, particularly between France, Great Britain and Germany, cemented by a happy personal relationship between Sir Austen Chamberlain,’ the third key figure in the Locarno negotiations, and ‘M.  Briand and Herr Stresemann.’195 Yet, as demonstrated by  the pessimism Zimmern expressed in Learning and Leadership, it remains the case  that in 1927, Zimmern was deeply concerned  about the future of the LON: he thought  that there was little assurance that the LON would be able to ‘affirm its authority by checking the next outbreak of violence’ because the will to support it in checking violence  appeared to be lacking. Zimmern’s concern on this score was especially deep because of his expectation that the next war would be char-

However, Stresemann ‘firmly refused to agree to a recognition of the eastern frontier through a multilateral security treaty.’ Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 199. 192  Stresemann quoted in Jäckh, The New Germany, 84–5. 193  Jäckh, The New Germany, 85. 194  Georges Scelle and René Cassin, ‘French Public Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ in Maurice Bourquin ed., Collective Security: A Record of the Seventh and Eighth International Study Conferences, Paris 1934-London 1935 (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1936), 71. 195  Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 353.

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acterised by large-scale aerial attacks on both armies and population centres, possibly involving the use of poison gas.196 In 1924, the Fifth Assembly, in its longest sitting up to that point and under the leadership of Herriot and the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, had shaped the Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, the security provisions of which were an attempt to fill in the well-known gaps in Articles 10 and 16 of the covenant. The protocol provided a series of definitions of aggression and stipulated that when the council had determined that a particular action constituted aggression, all the protocol’s signatories were bound to ‘cooperate loyally and effectively … in the degree in which … [their] … geographical position and … [their] … particular situation as regards … armaments allow.’197 Zimmern later stated that no one who was at this assembly could fail to recall the French delegate, Joseph Paul-Boncour, thundering ‘against the crime of war’ and pointing ‘a long accusing finger at the “anonymous aggressor” who would expose himself to swift and certain punishment by the sword of Justice.’198 On October 2, 1924, when all forty-seven members of the assembly endorsed what Zimmern described as a ‘brave and consistent attempt to bring down to earth the ideal of Peace through Law,’ it seemed to Zimmern that the principle of the hue and cry had finally prevailed over the ‘forces of violence and disintegration.’199 However, not long after the conclusion of the Fifth Assembly, a general election in  Great  Britain saw the Labour government of MacDonald replaced by the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin. The latter government, following consultation with the Dominions, rather than suggesting amendments and thereby seeking to reconcile the British and Continental conceptions of the LON, decided on rejecting the protocol outright. At the council on March 12, 1925,  Austen  Chamberlain,  the foreign secretary, drawing on a memorandum written by Balfour, explained that the absence of the United States from the LON had so weakened it that it was ‘impossible for the British peoples, either at home or overseas,  Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, 90–2.  Zimmern stated that the effect of the definitions of aggression offered by the protocol was to deny individual members of the council ‘a large measure of discretion in judging an emergency situation as a whole.’ Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 342, 345–6. He also pointed out that in certain cases a verdict could be delivered by the council on the basis of a two-thirds majority. 198  Ibid., 350. 199  Ibid. 196 197

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to take the “strong” view of the Covenant and its obligations.’ Chamberlain observed that while it could stop minor conflicts based on misunderstanding, when it came to major clashes between large and powerful states springing from deep-seated hostilities, the LON was powerless, and thus it was pointless for it to even consider the question.200 Nonetheless and based on the recognition that political conditions in Europe were too important to ignore, the final part of the Balfour memorandum suggested as an alternative to the protocol and its ‘universalism,’ a ‘“regional” system of Mutual Assistance,’ a proposal for such a system being already in the hands of governments in London and Paris: what would become the principal Locarno Treaty.201 Yet even here, the British attitude to its undertakings appeared less than robust, at least in Zimmern’s view: the British did not view the security guarantees contained within the  principal  Locarno Treaty as being its centrepiece; rather, they were seen as a ‘mere incidental part’ of the broader goal of Franco-German rapprochement.202 As Zimmern explained: It was not for having pledged the word of Britain to intervene in a Franco-­ German conflict or for having pushed back the strategic frontier of his country from the cliffs of Dover to fifty kilometres East of the Rhine, that the British Foreign Secretary, on his return from Locarno was honoured by his sovereign and applauded by his fellow-citizens. It was because he seemed to have been successful in the delicate task of promoting a true and durable understanding between the French and German peoples—an understanding cemented by the Germany entry into the League of Nations with a permanent seat in the standing Conference of the powers.203

In relation to the promotion of Franco-German understanding, it should be noted that in the month before the aforementioned Locarno Treaty was signed, Anatole de Monzie, the French minister of education, paid an official visit to Berlin in order to ‘discuss the question of intellectual cooperation with special reference to the work of the new Institute’ in  Ibid., 356–8.  Zimmern records that the proposal put forward by German Foreign Office was originally intended to ‘prepare the way for a world convention to include all states along the lines of the Protocol drawn up by the League of Nations’ (ibid., 359–60, 365). 202  Ibid., 400. 203  Ibid. See also Jäckh, The New Germany, 84. Against the background of the Locarno negotiations, Briand referred to Germany’s ‘moral membership’ of the League. 200 201

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Paris with his German counterpart, namely, Carl Heinrich Becker, the director of the Prussian ministry of education from 1925 to 1930. In an account of this meeting, Toynbee noted that at its conclusion Monzie had declared that although ‘any allusion to politics had been studiously avoided … the warmth of his welcome proved that the Government of the Reich, looked upon his visit as an important step forward in the rapprochement between the two countries and that he himself carried away the most optimistic impressions of the possibilities for the future.’ Toynbee then observed that in view of the  meeting, the collaboration of Germany with the LON’s activities in the field of intellectual cooperation was now ‘assured.’ More specifically, he observed that due to this Franco-German meeting, significant progress had been made  in the direction of  restoring those ‘good relations’ between France and Germany in the intellectual sphere, the absence of which, Toynbee added, had been ‘specially deplored’ at the Fourth German Congress of Universities in February 1925.204

Arnold J. Toynbee: Civilisations, War and Nationality Toynbee early associated himself with the activity of intellectual cooperation due to his father-in-law’s election to the position of vice-president of the ICIC at its first meeting. Perhaps as part of his effort to obtain for Toynbee a post at the IIIC, it was arranged that Toynbee would serve as Murray’s proxy at a meeting of the ICIC which took place in Paris between May 11 and 15, 1925 and which was almost wholly devoted to the organisation of the soon to be established IIIC.205 This meeting appointed a subcommittee to prepare detailed regulations for the IIIC and, not long after this, Toynbee submitted a report to the same subcommittee in which he suggested various activities that the IIIC’s sections might undertake. For example, he suggested that the IIIC might foster and publicise studies concerning the ‘new problem of the education of the black races,’ confessing that he belonged to that ‘milieu of Englishmen who met from time to time in order to study this fundamental African question.’206 I mention this suggestion on Toynbee’s part because the fate of certain African peo Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation, 1926,’ AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA.  Renoliet, L’Unesco Oubliée, 65. 206  Toynbee, ‘Intellectual Cooperation,’ 8 and Arnold J.  Toynbee, ‘Note pour la souscommission chargée de préparer le règlement intérieur du future Institut: Note sur la organ204 205

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ples would later loom large as an issue for him within the framework of the ISC. Toynbee continued his close association with the OIC even after being awarded the Daniel  Stevenson Chair and becoming research director at Chatham House, serving once more as Murray’s proxy on January 28, 1927, at a meeting in Paris. In this instance, Toynbee substituted for Murray as a member of the IIIC’s board of directors: a bout of ill-health on the part of Toynbee’s mother-in-law had meant that Murray was unable to leave England. It was in his capacity as substitute member of the aforementioned board, that Toynbee lectured at Zimmern’s Geneva School of International Studies during its 1927 session which took place between July 11 and September 4.207 Toynbee also sought to promote the IIIC through the RIIA’s Annual Survey of International Affairs, preparing an article on its origins and activities for its 1928 edition.  In consequence of this, Toynbee was in regular contact throughout the rest of 1927 with Luchaire. Toynbee and Zimmern also communicated with each other in relation to  the preparation of  this article,  a draft of which was eventually submitted to the ICIC. Notably, Toynbee’s account of the meeting between Monzie and Becker  and his  observations concerning its wider ramifications featured prominently in it.208 Zimmern was also in contact with Toynbee in relation to another matter which, as we shall see, was not unrelated to the outcome of the meeting of Monzie and Becker: after the July meeting of the ICIC, Zimmern had begun to prepare the groundwork for a conference of experts on international studies. To this end, Zimmern wrote to Toynbee, reminding him that the ICIC had instructed the IIIC to ‘continue its efforts to co-­ ordinate the work of the various national institutions engaged in the study and teaching of international relations’ and suggesting that they meet in order to discuss the ‘possibilities of British cooperation in this matter.’209 isation de l’enquête dans les cadres des six sections de l’Institut et des publications,’ May 1925, AG 1-IICI-B-IV-18, UA. 207  Toynbee to Luchaire, 21 January and 16 September 1927 and Luchaire to Toynbee, 8 September 1927, AG 1-IICI-B-IV.18, UA.  See also Alfred Zimmern, ‘Geneva School of International Studies: Report on the Fourth Session, July 11 to September 4, 1927,’ IIIC, Bulletin for University Relations 4, no. 1 (1927): 39–43. 208  Luchaire to Toynbee, 18 January 1927, B.IV.18, UA. 209  Zimmern to Toynbee, 25 October 1927, ibid. Toynbee was ‘closely associated’ with the ISC since 1927. See Preliminary Analysis of Replies to Letters Concerning the Progress of the International Studies Conference, 28 September 1937, AG 1-IICI-K-I-4 UA.

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Toynbee’s association with Zimmern extended as far back as his years at Oxford where he had had the ‘good fortune,’ as Toynbee put it, of being Zimmern’s pupil.210 Toynbee felt that his own thinking had been immensely enriched by Zimmern’s lectures on Greek history, informing Zimmern on the occasion of the latter’s appointment to the Montague Burton Chair that his lectures had rendered Greek history as ‘something not less alive that the present.’211 Toynbee shared with Zimmern an appreciation of the ‘important historical role of intellectual communication between different civilisations and the impact of the West on other cultures.’212 He also conceived of civilisation in much the same way as Zimmern. In a series of lectures he delivered in 1919–1920 in his capacity as Koraes Professor at King’s College at the University of London, Toynbee defined the development of civilisation as a ‘process in which human individuals are less and less moulded by their environment … and adapt their environment more and more to their own will.’213 Importantly, Toynbee sought to demonstrate that the growth of civilisation and the development of human autonomy are closely linked: civilisation is the triumph over the ‘“mechanical laws” of the environment,’ included among these laws being the ‘mechanical laws of human society that allowed one class or group of human beings to oppress others.’214 As Toynbee’s biographer William McNeil observes in relation to these lectures, the ‘Bergsonian heritage’ is abundantly clear.215 The outlines of Toynbee’s conception of civilisation are discernible in a study published early in the war entitled Nationality & the War (1915). Toynbee had produced this study with the encouragement of Murray and A. D. Lindsay, the latter being a teacher to whom Toynbee was close at Oxford and the person who caused him to embrace Bergson’s  conception of evolution as a struggle between life and matter.216 At the outset of Nationality & the War, Toynbee noted that the outbreak of the war had plunged Europe into the condition of ‘complete uncertainty’ as to the  Arnold J. Toynbee, Nationality & the War (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1915), ix.  Arnold J. Toynbee, 1930, quoted in Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 21. 212  Rich, ‘Reinventing Peace,’ 123. 213  Arnold J. Toynbee, 1919–1920, quoted in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 96. 214  McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 96. 215  Ibid. 216  On Murray’s encouragement of Toynbee, see Martel, ‘From Round Table to New Europe,’ 23. On Lindsay’s influence on the young Toynbee, see McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 25–6, 267. See also Toynbee, Nationality & the War, ix. 210 211

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future.  He  maintained that  while such a condition was ‘commonplace’ among ‘uncivilised people,’ it was a shock to the twentieth-century European mind: Europeans were ‘accustomed to look ahead, to forecast accurately what lies before us, to choose a path and follow it steadily until its end,’ such activities being the mark of a civilised existence.217 Toynbee contended that while in political life such activities typically were aimed at advancing economic, moral and intellectual standards, in the current context, their overwhelming focus was on carrying the war to a successful conclusion. On such a conclusion depended, he continued, ‘our freedom to govern our own life after the war,’  adding that  it was only on the grounds that the war effort was directed towards the cause of freedom in this sense that the grave sacrifices involved could be justified.218 Toynbee further stated that for the war on the Allied side to be just, it must be fought for the sake of the ‘general peace of the world,’ insisting in addition that this general peace could only be secured through adhering to the principle of ‘giving free play to every manifestation of the spirit of Nationality’ in the form of self-government.219 As Toynbee pointed out, it was the struggle for national self-determination in the form of the ‘resistance of Southern Slav nationalism on the defensive to the aggression of Hungarian nationalism,’ that had ‘given occasion for the present catastrophe.’220 Thus, Toynbee declared, the map of Europe would have to be revised. The same applied, he added,  to the map  of the Nearer East.  He affirmed that the ‘self-consciousness and self-government by Arab and Turkish nationalities’ must be realised and thus cautioned against a settlement which carved the Nearer East into European ‘spheres of influence.’ Toynbee stated that such realisation221 is one of the most important foundation-stones of that ideal structure of European harmony and international peace to which Great Britain and her allies stand publicly pledged, and which we cannot betray without forfeiting the sympathy of neutrals in the present crisis, and destroying all confidence in our honour for the future. The Panislamist may assure himself that not even the most brilliant opportunity of immediate material gain would tempt us thus to falsify our whole position, while the fact that adherence to these  Toynbee, Nationality & the War, 1.  Ibid., 1–2. 219  Ibid., 411. 220  Ibid., 10. 221  Ibid., 11, 411–2. 217 218

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principles is the sole means of winning the Panislamist’s trust and good-will, affords a further proof to ourselves of the proposition … that our own true interest lies in a ‘disinterested’ effort to secure impartial justice to all our neighbours.222

It should be noted that despite his use of the expression free play, Toynbee insisted that the application of the nationality principle needed to be subject to a number of conditions: administrative, civilisational, economic and strategic. In fact, Toynbee maintained that the further Eastwards one travelled, the more it appeared that the ‘national atom’ was not capable of being adopted as the ‘political unit.’223 In addition, Toynbee was conscious of the fact that revising the map of Europe and the Nearer East would result in the creation of new minorities and that these would inevitably suffer as a result. For this reason, he urged that any revision of political boundaries should seek to ensure that the resultant minorities were ‘as small and that their suffering as mild as possible.’224 Toynbee insisted on the necessity of international guarantees of minority rights in regard to religion, education and local self-government while at the same time expressing regret that such guarantees were necessary: their necessity demonstrated how lacking the civilised virtues of forbearance and tolerance were.225 Such virtues would only shine forth, he advised, where nationality had been thoroughly purged of nationalism’s ‘evil element,’ that is, of ‘Chauvinism,’ ‘Jingoism’ and ‘Prussianism,’ through converting public opinion from ‘National Competition to National Co-operation.’ Qualifying this point, Toynbee observed that opinion would not be so converted as long as the current ‘system of injustice,’ whereby ‘one nation has less and another more than is due,’ remained in place.226 This last point relates to the principal reason why Nationality & the War is noteworthy for the purpose of the present study: it foreshadows arguments Toynbee would advance in the context of the debates concerning peaceful change in the 1930s and most especially in relation to Germany. Toynbee contended in Nationality & the War that if the aim was to prevent war in the future, then it was of the essence to ‘convince  Ibid., 412.  Ibid., 19, 60–1, 476 and McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 71. 224  Toynbee, Nationality & the War, 7. 225  Ibid., 20, 488–9. 226  Ibid., 10–1. 222 223

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Germany that war is not to her interest,’ adding that the only way to do this is to ‘beat her badly and then to treat her well.’227 Like his father-in-­ law in his Hibbert Journal essay of 1915, Toynbee insisted that the terms of peace should not serve as a means of advancing sectional political or economic interests and should  not  involve Germany’s humiliation as a settlement along these lines would only cause Germany to seek revenge.228 Toynbee wanted to see a settlement that recognised that the policy pursued by Germany that had culminated in war was based on Germany’s ‘oppressive sense that her development was being cramped by the action of her neighbours.’ Toynbee thus urged a peace settlement which took into account Germany’s ‘feeling of constriction,’ irrespective of whether this feeling had solid grounds or not. Toynbee argued that the vehemence of the German conviction that the nation was physically constricted meant that it would be ‘rash’ to maintain that if Germany were allowed to retain the colonies and concessions it had acquired, then this would permit ‘room for expansion ample enough to deprive her of excuse for her envy.’ At the same time, he warned that to seek to ‘give the lie’ to this national obsession by taking from Germany ‘even that which she hath’ would only deepen and perpetuate ‘her national bitterness.’229 It was with issues such as the German sense of physical constriction in mind that Toynbee called for the appointment by a future peace conference of an international committee equipped with executive powers and charged with administering and interpreting the guarantees resulting from such a conference. In relation to these guarantees, Toynbee insisted that they must be framed in a way that would render them ‘elastic’ and ‘malleable,’ adding that the problem with the guarantees of the old order was that they were rigid and hence ‘doomed to crack.’230 Included within the area of jurisdiction of Toynbee’s mooted international committee would be guarantees regarding the political independence and integrity of certain territorial units, these being ‘the three Scandinavian states, the Slovene Unit, the Greek Islands off Anatolia, Persia and the Sultanate of Oman.’ The  guarantee of Polish autonomy within the Russian Empire also came  under this head.  In addition to these guarantees, the committee would guarantee economic rights-of-way and ‘the rights of alien minori Ibid., 29.  Ibid., 30. 229  Ibid., 30–1. 230  Ibid., 486–8. 227 228

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ties within the national state.’231 Toynbee also put forward the idea that an  international committee should regulate ‘immigration from over-­ populated sovereign units’ to and capital flows into or even directly govern those ‘“no-man’s lands” where no sovereignty exists’: those territorial units that through a ‘want of population, wealth, spiritual energy, or all three together are unable to keep the spark of vitality aglow.’ Such ‘dead’ units, Toynbee observed, where left unregulated, posed a grave menace to world peace, because they enticed neighbouring ‘living units … to clash in conflict.’232 Curiously, in Nationality & the War Toynbee rejected the notion that international machinery can ‘aspire to the regulation of War.’ The reason he gave for this is that states  would  not tolerate any real or perceived encroachment on their ‘sovereign right of self-preservation’ or embrace the conciliation and arbitration processes of an international authority in instances where they felt threatened by annihilation. Nonetheless, Toynbee maintained that an international organ could assist in the prevention of war provided it had the authority to equilibrate the relations between states and was in a position to do so before those relations had reached a state of crisis.233 Toynbee later dismissed Nationality & the War as a piece of ‘juvenilia’ and would shift his ground on the question of the regulation of war as he would later embrace a  policy of collective security.234 Yet Nationality & the War, in calling for the creation of an international committee charged with adjusting the claims of states with a view to preventing conflict on the one hand, and in expressing scepticism in regard to the international regulation of war on the other, clearly anticipates Toynbee’s later advocacy of peaceful change as an alternative to war-like change. His observations concerning those no-man’s lands lacking in sovereignty and the need for outlets for the surplus population of sovereign units in Nationality & the War give an intimation of what form his advocacy would take. In the first years of the war, Toynbee undertook research for the British government in order to assist its propaganda effort in the course of which he assisted Bryce in the reporting of the Turkish massacres of the

 Ibid., 486–7.  Ibid., 493. 233  Ibid., 495–6. 234  McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 71. 231 232

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Armenians.235 In May 1917, Toynbee  commenced working alongside Zimmern and other scholars at the Foreign Office’s PID, a position from which he advocated the then radical view, as foreshadowed in Nationality & the War, that self-determination ‘could not be confined to European and Christian nations but would have to be applied in to Moslem peoples.’236 It was due to his position at PID that he attended the Paris Peace Conference where he tried, unsuccessfully, to influence the outcome of the settlement with Turkey. Toynbee  gloomily concluded that ‘[t]he outlook for relations between Europe and the East is very bleak … If the mandates turn out to be hypocrisy, we shall have a Moslem risorgimento (perhaps anarchic) with the British Empire for Austria-Hungary—a melancholy prospect.’237 Shortly after announcing his resignation in politically charged circumstances from the Greek-endowed Koraes Chair in early January 1924, Toynbee was engaged by Headlam-Morley, his former superior at PID, to write a detailed account of international affairs since the Peace Conference up until and including the year 1924. This task was to be undertaken under the auspices of the BIIA of which Headlam-­ Morley was one of the founders.238 A six-volume history of the Peace Conference had been edited on behalf of the BIIA by H.  W. V Temperley (with contributions from Shotwell, Toynbee and Charles K.  Webster), the last volume of which appeared in 1924.239 The BIIA’s council decided to further this exercise through authorising the production of an ‘unbiased record and interpretation of the more important events and movements in international affairs from year to year.’240 Toynbee, aided by staff at the BIIA, most notably Veronica Boulter, set to work on this record in February 1924. By  the middle of 1925, two lengthy volumes had made their appearance: Survey of International Affairs, 1920–1923 and The World after the Peace

 Ibid., 72–4.  Ibid., 75. 237  Toynbee, 1919, quoted in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 81. 238  McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 118, 120–2. 239  Publications on International Affairs (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1UA. 240  Picht to Otto Hoetzsch, 4 March 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-II-2.b, UA. This was how the surveys were later described. See also McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 121–2. 235 236

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Conference, being an Epilogue to the ‘History of the Peace Conference at Paris’ and a Prologue to the ‘Survey of International Affairs, 1920–1923.’ 241 At the time of the appearance of these volumes, Toynbee remained without permanent employment, a situation which caused Murray, on two occasions, to try to obtain for him a position at the IIIC in Paris. As no such position materialised, Toynbee travelled to Williamstown, Massachusetts, in order to participate in a conference, to which he had been invited, at the Institute of Politics which was aimed at educating professionals and business people in international affairs. It was there that he learnt that the Glaswegian political and business figure, Sir Daniel Stevenson, had agreed to fund for him a professorship in international history at the University of London (with a view to substituting the ‘spirit of international cooperation’ for the ‘spirit of antipathy, ill-wind and even hatred of other peoples’), and a position for him as director of studies at the BIIA. Although Toynbee gave the inaugural lecture as the Stevenson professor of international history, he never actually gave a course of ­lectures in that role, avoiding teaching in order to prepare the surveys of international affairs at Chatham House.242

Ernst Jäckh and the German Political Academy Another key figure in the organisation of the conference of experts on international relations that was to be held under the banner of the OIC was Ernst Jäckh. As explained by Zimmern, after having been educated in Germany and Geneva, Jäckh  commenced his career in public life.  This career began when he accepted the role of editor of the ‘oldest democratic paper’ in Southern Germany. Subsequently, Jäckh campaigned on behalf of Friedrich Naumann, the leader of the Christian Socialist Party, and, from 1902, became a prominent figure in German liberal circles. Jäckh would go on to serve on the executive of the German Democratic Party, later becoming a member of the National Economic Council (Reichswirtschaftsamt) under the Weimar Republic. During the war years, 241  McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 123–4. Veronica Boulter’s name would be attached to the Surveys, dating from the publication of Survey of International Affairs, 1925, pt. 2. 242  McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 120, 126–8, 131. The quotation given is from Sir Daniel Stevenson’s preamble to the indenture of endowment as quoted in Bourdillon, ‘The Royal Institute of International Affairs,’ 29–30. The terms regarding the chair were revised by the RIIA, London University and Stevenson in 1928 such that Toynbee became thereafter research professor in international history at the University of London.

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Jäckh undertook missions in Turkey and the Balkans on behalf of the German Foreign Office, having already established for himself a reputation as an authority on those regions.243 On October 24, 1920, Jäckh opened the doors of the German Political Academy of which he was the founder and president.244 The German Political Academy was born in defiance of war: as Jäckh explained at a meeting of the ISC in June 1933, he established it in memory of his only son Hans, who at the age eighteen, on September 16, 1918, was killed in action on the Chemin des Dames.245 Jäckh stated that he intended his academy to be a ‘memorial’ and ‘an act of service’ to his son’s ‘generation to help them to overcome the chaos of the world as it was by the creation of a new order.’246 Steven D.  Korenblat notes that it was as a ‘fixed reminder of the futility of war’ that a bust of Hans Jäckh was placed in the academy’s lobby. He further notes that the story of Jäckh’s tragic loss was drawn on by Jäckh in order to demonstrate his fidelity to the cause of international understanding.247 The German Political Academy was modelled on the École libre des sciences politiques which had been established in Paris in 1872 and which was regarded by some as leading the way in terms of the modernisation of France’s administrative apparatus following  France’s defeat by Germany in the Franco-German war.248 Although a non-partisan institution, the academy was from the beginning politically engaged, introducing ‘innovative programs in civic education and public service training designed to meet the educational needs of an emerging democracy.’249 It established connections in very high places: no less than the president of

243  Alfred Zimmern, preface to Jäckh, The New Germany, 13–4. On Jäckh’s activities on behalf of the Foreign Office, see Steven D.  Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic? Cosmopolitans and Their Enemies at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik,’ Central European History 39, no. 3 (2006): 394–430, 398–9. On Jäckh’s involvement with the development of the ISC, see Ernst Jäckh (address, Sixth CISSIR, London, 1 June 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 244  Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’ 394 and Jäckh, ed., Politik als Wissenschaft, v, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 245  Dedication in Jäckh, The New Germany and Jäckh (address, Sixth CISSIR, London, 1 June 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 246  Jäckh (address, Sixth CISSIR, London, 1 June 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 247  Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’ 402. 248  Ibid., 396. 249  Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’ 394–5.

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the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, officiated at its opening.250 Personal links were forged between members of the institution and  other senior political figures, among them Rathenau (German minister for reconstruction in 1921 and then foreign minister from 1922 up until the time of his assassination), Walter Simons (German foreign minister between June 1920 and May 1921 and president of the Reichsgericht from 1922 to 1929) and Becker.251 It is a mark of its high-placed connections and prestige that the tenth anniversary of the academy was celebrated in a hall of the Reichstag with around 1000 guests in attendance, among them being many state officials as well as representatives of such noted educational institutions as the University of Berlin and The Hague Academy of International Law. In a message delivered to the gathering on behalf of Becker, the connection between the development of the German Republic and the work of the German Political Academy was clearly specified.252 The academy also maintained links with Stresemann up until his death in October 1929. As we saw, it was Stresemann who led the Locarno negotiations on the German side, concluding these negotiations with what Jäckh described as the historical words: ‘War is crime!’253 It was also Stresemann, whose stature was by then considerable, who led the German delegation to a chorus of cheers into the assembly of the LON on September 10, 1926. In order to mark the occasion, Briand delivered a stirring speech in the course of which he proclaimed: ‘Away with rifles, machine guns and canons! Let us have conciliation, arbitration and peace!’254 Fittingly, Stresemann and Briand were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10 that year.255  Ibid., 396.  On official involvement in establishing and supporting the German Political Academy, see Deutsche Hochschule für Politik: Aufbau und Arbeit (Berlin, 1926), 2–5, and Jäckh, ed., Politik als Wissenschaft, vi, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. On the academy’s elite connections, see also Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’, 398–400 and Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 69. Among its board of trustees were Walter Simons, the industrialist Robert Bosch and the banker Hjalmar Schacht. 252  ‘Akademische Feier des zehnjährigen Bestehens der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik,’ in Berichte der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik, vol. 8, November 1930, 113–129, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 253  Jäckh, The New Germany, 88. On Stresemann’s association with the academy, see also Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 70. 254  Bariéty, ‘Germany’s Entry into the League of Nations,’ 61. 255  Ibid., 65. See also Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Great Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 208. Wright notes that Stresemann had several meetings with Richard Reidl in 1923. 250 251

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Here, we should note the contributions to Weimar-era foreign policy of the German Political Academy. To start with, it was at the academy that the principal Locarno Treaty was first drafted.256 According to Jäckh’s account, three days after the French occupation of the Ruhr, the academy formed a committee in order to examine the situation. On the committee were Simons (who was on the academy’s board of trustees), Hans Simons (the son of Walter Simons and director of the academy), Hugo Preuss (the main author of the Weimar constitution), Walther Schücking (a member of the Reichstag and one of the German negotiators at Versailles) and Richard Reidl (the Austrian ambassador in Berlin and an early proponent of the Rhineland Pact).257 This committee determined that the main ­problem in relation to the French action concerned ‘neither coal nor economic demands’: the French action, in essence, concerned a ‘politico-­ psychological question,’ namely, French feelings of insecurity. In light of this determination, the committee concluded that what was needed was a formal treaty: a ‘Treaty of Security’ as the members of the committee named it. Such a treaty, one which went further in its terms than did Locarno ultimately, was duly drafted and submitted to the German Foreign Office.258 It was because of such efforts that the academy attracted the interest of the Carnegie Endowment, which came to view it, as Korenblat states, as a ‘partner … in [its] efforts to promote European rapprochement.’259 We need to recall at this point the post-war boycott of collaboration with German scholars, a matter which was of major concern for the German Foreign Office.260 As we have seen, this boycott began to erode in the mid-1920s against a background of improved diplomatic relations, but it should be clear that even before then, efforts were being made at official and unofficial levels to end Germany’s intellectual isolation and reassert 256  On the academy’s role in relation to the Locarno Treaties, see Jäckh (address, Sixth CISSIR, London, 1 June 1933) and Ernst Jäckh, ‘Beiträge zum Locarno und KelloggVertrag,’ in Jäckh ed., Politik als Wissenschaft, 3–4, G 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. See also RIIA, ‘Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations,’ Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 8, no. 33 (1929): 185–202, 197. 257  Jäckh, The New Germany, 87. On Reidl’s advocacy of a Rhineland Pact, see Ernst Jäckh, ‘Beiträge zum Locarno und Kellogg-Vertrag,’ in Jäckh, ed., Politik als Wissenschaft, 3–4, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 258  Jäckh, The New Germany, 87. 259  Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’ 395. 260  Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 65.

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the universality of intellectual activity. I have noted, for example, the efforts made in the context of the OIC, but mention should also be made in this context of the efforts of the American philanthropic foundations. For example, the Carnegie Endowment invited German scholars to participate in its Economic and Social History of the World War.261 According to Charles DeBenedetti, this project ‘represented the most exhaustive attempt on the part of social scientists and wartime administrators,’ William H. Beveridge and Keynes among them, to utilise what the project’s general editor Shotwell referred to as the ‘the great laboratory of the World War’ in order to examine ‘the impact of modern total war upon industrial societies.’262 At the same time, it should be noted that the project had the additional purpose of furthering ‘mutual understanding’ as it was also planned as an exercise in international intellectual cooperation. Rietzler notes that the Carnegie Endowment organised editorial committees in each of the countries involved in the project, pointing out that a German editorial committee was established in 1922 under the directorship of Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy.263 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a research professor in foreign and international law at the University of Hamburg, was a founder and the first head of the Institut für Auswärtige Politik (IAP), a body comparable in nature to the BIIA and the first of its kind established in Germany.264 Although formally established in February 1921, the original idea for the Hamburg-­ based IAP was put forward on May 27, 1919, at Versailles by the authors of a document entitled the Memorandum of War Responsibility, Mendelssohn Bartholdy being among them. That Hamburg was chosen as the site for the IAP was because of the Hamburg connections of many of its proponents and because it was thought that the city’s tradition of international intercourse meant it was well suited to being a centre for the study of foreign relations. A further consideration was the fact that much ‘independent criticism of government policy had already emanated’ from  Ibid., 67.  DeBenedetti, ‘James T.  Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 386 and James T.  Shotwell, ‘A Mechanism for Peace in Europe,’ Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 17, no. 3 (1937): 15–24, 16. The 152-volume History took seventeen years to complete. Shotwell was appointed its general editor in 1920. 263  Ibid., 67. 264  Muriel K.  Grindrod, ‘The Institut für Auswärtige Politik, Poststrasse 19, Hamburg,’ International Affairs 1, no. 22 (1931): 223–9, 223 and Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 67. 261 262

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that city.265 It was the IAP’s links, in the form of Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s association with the BIIA and that other institutional product of Versailles, namely, the CFR, that helped gain it the support of the Carnegie Endowment and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. However, the main focus of attention of these philanthropic foundations in respect to German institutions consecrated to the study of international affairs would shift in the 1920s from the IAP to the Germany Political Academy (a sometime collaborator with the IAP), due to the academy’s larger scale and its location in the heart of Berlin.266 Butler, president of the University of Columbia and Elihu Root’s successor as president of the Carnegie Endowment in 1925, met with Jäckh during the latter’s visit to New  York in late 1924 and early 1925.267 In June 1926, Butler visited Berlin, where he attended a dinner at which were present many prominent figures from the world of politics, academia and commerce. As testimony to the quasi-diplomatic character of the event, it should be noted that Stresemann, with whom Butler had been in contact, and the ambassador of the United States were among the guests.268 In March 1927, the Carnegie Chair for international relations and history was formally established at the German Political Academy.269 The Carnegie Chair in Berlin was at first organised differently from its Parisian counterpart.  As  initially  organised, the  chair was  not held by a single person. Rather, the chair served as a platform from which distinguished university figures and representatives of official organisations from different countries could deliver public lectures on public affairs. Among the figures destined to give such public lectures in the years dating from 1927 to 1931 were the ILO’s Albert Thomas whose lecture was entitled ‘Germany Considered by a French Friend’; Rappard, who discussed 265  On Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s academic post, see Grindrod, ‘The Institut für Auswärtige Politik, Poststrasse 19, Hamburg,’ 223–4. The other authors of the memorandum were Professors Hans Delbrück and Max Weber and General Count Max Montgelas. The idea was also supported by the head of the German delegation at Versailles, namely, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, its secretary Walter Simons and Carl Melchior, the delegation’s Hamburg member. 266  Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 67–8. See also Grindrod, ‘The Institut für Auswärtige Politik: Poststrasse 19, Hamburg,’ 228. In collaboration with the IAP, the German Political Academy produced a series of volumes called Politische Wissenschaft. 267  Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 69. 268  Ibid., 69–70. 269  Ibid., 70.

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the principle of the colonial mandate and its practical application; Ernst Robert Curtius of the University of Heidelberg whose lecture was entitled ‘The Idea of French Culture and the Present Intellectual Situation’; the Sorbonne’s André Siegfried, who lectured on the French constitution; the University of London’s G.  P. Gooch whose lecture was  entitled  the ‘Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey’; the University of Uppsala’s Östen Undén whose  lecture was entitled  ‘War of Aggression as a Problem of International Law’; Butler, whose lecture was entitled ‘The Mission of the Chair Carnegie’; and Giovanni Gentile, the idealist philosopher and former Italian education minister who gave a lecture entitled ‘Education and Political Culture of the New Italy.’270 These lectures were a great success with the public. The lecture by Gooch, for example, attracted an audience numbering 800. As had been hoped, they generated considerable publicity.271 It was the very success of these lectures that gave rise to the reorganisation of the chair after the fashion of the Carnegie Chair in Paris: the new plan was that the chair would be held by a single person over several years.272 It was thus that the academy’s Hajo Holborn became Carnegie Endowment professor in 1931, a position from which he would seek to encourage instruction in international relations in a way that stressed the interdependence of states and the duties that they shared.273 That great significance was attached to the Berlin Chair by the Carnegie Endowment was well demonstrated by the fact that it was Shotwell who was called upon to deliver the inaugural Carnegie lecture. This lecture took place in March 1927 and was entitled ‘The Teaching of History and the Problem of Peace.’274 It should be noted that in addition to being general editor of the endowment’s Economic and Social History of the World War, 270  Dotation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale, Le Centre européan de la Division des relations internationals et de l’éducation, 47–9. 271  RIIA, ‘Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations,’ 199. On the media interest in these lectures, see Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’, 403. 272  Dotation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale, Le Centre européan de la Division des relations internationals et de l’éducation, 49. 273  On Holborn’s appointment, see Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’, 406–7. Rietzler notes that the reorganisation of the chair also stemmed from the concern expressed by the German Political Academy that the ‘existing set-up was not academic enough.’ Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 70. 274  La Dotation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale, Le Centre européan de la Division des relations internationals et de l’éducation, 48.

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Shotwell  was from 1924 the director of the endowment’s Division of Economics and History.275 Shotwell had voiced support for German scholarship  in undertaking both of these roles and it  can hardly be doubted that  the voicing of such support  influenced the decision to ask him to deliver the inaugural lecture.276 Yet there was much more involved in the selection of Shotwell than his status and sympathy for the plight of German scholars in the context of the boycott. As Jäckh observed in London in 1929 at a meeting of the CISSIR, Shotwell had been given the ‘opportunity’ of the Carnegie Chair in order that he could ‘outline … the first suggestion’ of what became the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy and then proceed to Paris in order to ‘get M.  Briand’s decisive interview.’277 As Jäckh was fond of reminding audiences, it was in this way that it was at the academy that the ‘first public European impulse’ was given to what became popularly known as the Pact of Paris almost one and half years before its formal appearance.278 The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy was signed by fifteen states in the Salle de l’Horloge of the French Foreign Office at the Quai d’Orsay on August 27, 1928. A brief examination of the history leading up to this event is warranted in this context, precisely because Shotwell figures so prominently in it.279 Shotwell considered war a complete ‘anachronism’ in light of the new forces at work world, and it was exactly this that he wanted the Economic and Social History of the World War to demonstrate.280 In addition to this, Shotwell was very keen to find a way of ensuring formal American collaboration with the LON and it was this concern, along with his concern to render obsolete the institution of war, that caused him to seek the decisive interview mentioned above.281 During this interview, which took place on  DeBenedetti, James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics, 381, 386.  Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 65. 277  RIIA, ‘Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations,’ 197–8. 278  On the German Political Academy’s role in the development of the Pact of Paris, see Jäckh (address, Sixth CISSIR, London, 1 June 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 279  James T. Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy and its Renunciation in the Pact of Paris (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), 3. 280  Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy and its Renunciation in the Pact of Paris, 7 and DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 386. 281  Russell, Theories of International Relations, 364. 275 276

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March 22, Shotwell suggested to a ‘receptive’ Briand that the latter should use of the occasion of the impending tenth anniversary of the entry of the United States into the war to launch the European movement for the outlawry of war.282 In an address commemorating  this  anniversary on April 6, 1927, Briand, who had been inspired by Shotwell, declared to the people of the United States that France ‘would be willing to subscribe publicly with the United States to any mutual engagement to outlaw war … as between these two countries,’ adding that ‘the renunciation of war as an instrument of policy … is a conception already familiar to the signatories of the covenant of the LON and of the Locarno treaties.’283 Condliffe, an Australian-born New Zealander, was  appointed to the position of research secretary at the ISIPR in 1927, this being the same year that Shotwell became chairman of the IPR’s International Research Committee. Discussing Shotwell’s campaign on behalf of a treaty for the renunciation of war in an address to a meeting of the CISSIR in 1930, Condliffe explained that when Briand first ‘threw out’ the idea of a pact, it did not receive the attention in the United States that it warranted: it did not feature in newspaper headlines or editorials, a major reason for this being the fact that American journalists at that time were rather more focussed on the ‘news of the Mississippi floods.’284 It was at this point, Condliffe noted, that certain well-placed individuals sought to rally support for the idea of a pact.285 One of those individuals was Butler and, according to Zimmern, it was the publication in the New York Times on April 25 of a letter penned by Butler that ‘proved the starting point of a movement for a worldwide treaty on the lines of the 282  Zimmern, League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 390. For the date of the interview, see James T. Shotwell and J. P. Chamberlain, ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States and …,’ in John B. Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Honolulu, Hawaii, July 15 to 29, 1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 507. 283  Aristide Briand, 1927, quoted in Zimmern, League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 390. See also Henry Kittredge Norton, ‘The Story of the Kellogg Pact,’ The Saturday Review of Literature, January 26, 1929, 619–620. 284  On Shotwell’s campaign in favour of the Pact of Paris, see Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. 285  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ 13–4. On the role played by other prominent figures in the campaign, see Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy, chapters 7–9 and Zimmern, League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 390.

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Briand message,’ the issue having laid dormant for almost three weeks.286 It is noteworthy that in his letter Butler was careful to make the point that Briand’s proposal was thoroughly practical: Briand did not ask the government of the United States to adhere to the covenant nor to accept the principles enshrined in the Locarno Treaties.287 Meanwhile, in collaboration with his colleague from Columbia and successor as chair of the Social Science Research Council, Joseph P. Chamberlain, Shotwell began to draft a treaty: a treaty that the United States, as Condliffe put it, ‘might be expected to ratify,’ and to this end  Shotwell  picked out ‘words and phrases’ from the texts of treaties previously approved by the United States’ Senate. The treaties that guided Shotwell in his efforts were the Arbitration Treaty of 1908, which was due to expire on February 27, 1928, and the so-called Bryan Peace Treaties (named  after the former  secretary of state William Jennings Bryan) of 1913 and 1914: the Treaties for the Advancement of Peace Between the United States and Other Powers. Shotwell also took care to draft a treaty open to being extended into a ‘treaty for universal peace.’288 Shotwell called his proposed treaty a ‘draft treaty of permanent peace between the US and other countries,’ stating that its objective was to enshrine ‘all the mutual obligations which the adaption of the principle of Locarno to America would imply.’289 Shotwell knew that the government of the United States government favoured the extension of Briand’s proposed pact. Concerned with security in the Pacific, it considered that Japan’s adoption of it in particular would be a ‘great step towards peace.’290 Shotwell too was concerned to  Zimmern, League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 390.  Nicholas Murray Butler, ‘Briand Proposes Eternal Peace with the US: An Important Message to the American People which Butler Fears has Escaped Full Attention,’ New York Times, April 25, 1927. 288  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ 14 and ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 460. On the two earlier treaties, see Shotwell and Chamberlain, ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States and …’ 507. 289  Shotwell and Chamberlain, ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States and …,’ 507. For the full text of the Bryan Peace Treaties, see Treaties for the Advancement of Peace Between the United States and Other Powers Negotiated by the Honourable William J. Bryan, Secretary of State of the United States, with an introduction by James Brown Scott (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1920). 290  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ 14. See also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 113. 286 287

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see Japan adhere to the proposed treaty, not only in order to secure bilateral relations between the United States and Japan but also because he wanted to ‘extend over the world the spirit of Locarno,’ and it is worth noting in this regard that the text of the provision renouncing war in the draft treaty was ‘literally’ that of Locarno.291 Shotwell presented the draft treaty at the second IPR conference which took place in Honolulu between July 15 and 29, 1927, a conference at which Shotwell presided and  at which he commended the increasingly prominent role played by experts ‘in international life … as they uncovered the common interests of states and developed the true “strategy of peace.”’292 Importantly, Shotwell’s audience included ‘a representative group of Japanese citizens,’ and in the course of his presentation, he consulted with them on the question of whether or not his plan would be acceptable to the Japanese people. On returning to Japan, these same citizens proceeded to educate the Japanese public in regard to the benefits of the proposed treaty. As it turned out, public opinion in Japan would play an important role in prompting the Japanese government to act.293 291  Shotwell and Chamberlain, ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States and …,’ 503, 508. 292  DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 386–7 and Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ 14. 293  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ 14. Akami argues that Japanese foreign policy experts debated the draft treaty ‘not as a multinational treaty for peace, but as a bilateral US-Japan Security Treaty. They were unanimous over the need for such a treaty with the United States because it was not a member of the League of Nations and welcomed the draft proposal. Nonetheless, they criticised the draft as to American-centred.’ Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 114. Shotwell and Chamberlain observed that a study of the ‘document will show that it involves no real departure from … [the] … settled policies’ of the United States, adding that it is a document that ‘carefully safeguards American sovereignty with reference to every other prerogative except that of aggressive war’ and that it ‘has avoided all the entanglements of the League Covenant.’ Shotwell and Chamberlain, ‘Section 27: Draft Treaty of Permanent Peace Between the United States and …,’ 508. Henry Forbes Angus, a member of the Canadian unit of the IPR, pointed out that at the Honolulu conference in 1927 the Japanese ‘in particular criticised’ the draft presented by Shotwell ‘as not going far enough and as being one-sided.’ Henry F. Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area: A study of the Work of the Institute of Pacific Relations and its Bearing on the Problem of Peaceful Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 68. On the role of public opinion, see Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy, vii. On Shotwell’s consultation with Japanese IPR members, see Takayanagi Kenzō, ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 231.

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On the suggestion of Briand, Shotwell (whose idealism, Condliffe claimed, ‘frightened’ some Britons), sought to talk Frank B. Kellogg, the American secretary of state, ‘into the negotiations’ on the pact.294 On December 28, 1927, Kellogg communicated to Briand, after having considered a draft treaty that Briand had issued on June 20 under the heading of ‘Pact of Perpetual Friendship,’ that while the American government was favourable to the proposal, it thought that it was ‘essential that the pact should take the form of a multilateral treaty.’295 This position was reinforced on February 18 of the following year when the Sixth International Conference of American States in Havana adopted a resolution which affirmed ‘the desire of the American Republics to express their condemnation of [the use of] war as an instrument of national policy.’ The same conference also resolved on that day that since ‘there are no international conflicts,’ no matter how ‘grave’ they may be, that ‘cannot be settled by pacific means’ and since ‘wars of aggression constitute a crime against humanity,’ all wars of aggression ‘will be considered unlawful and as such declared prohibited.’296 It should be noted here that the conference did not define aggression and, according to Ian Brownlie, ‘in this respect the failure of the Conference to achieve agreement on the problem of intervention was highly significant.’297 Brownlie notes that the legality of intervention ‘to protect the lives and property of nationals’ was a subject of controversy in Havana and that a resolution put forward declaring that ‘no state had the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another, was withdrawn in the face of firm American opposition.’298 Against this background one can perhaps understand the assumption that American adherence to the Pact of Paris, as Brownlie writes, ‘was conditional on

294  ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Paul F. Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 460. 295  Colombos, ‘The Paris Pact,’ 88 and Russell, Theories of International Relations, 365. 296  Alejandro Alavarez, Le panaémericanisme et la sixième conférence panaémericaine tenue à la Havane en 1928. (Paris: Les Éditions internationales, 1928), 183–4. C. John Colombos notes that this resolution was adopted ‘unanimously by twenty-one American Republics, seventeen of which … [were] … members of the League.’ Colombos, ‘The Paris Pact,’ 89. 297  On the failure to arrive at a definition of aggression, see Ian Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 75, https://doi. org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198251583.001.0001. 298  Ibid. Ian Brownlie points out that ‘the question remained unsettled in relation to the American continent until 1936’ (ibid., 225).

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acceptance by the other signatories of the implications of the Monroe Doctrine.’299 Touching on this last point, Quincy Wright, an expert in international law,  observed that certain commentators maintained that the renunciations  contained within  the pact did not encompass  the  renunciation of ‘violent action in self-defense areas and violent action where the state acting enjoys a regional understanding like the Monroe Doctrine.’ Certain commentators also maintained  that  under the pact, ‘the scope of these exceptions was to be decided by the state taking advantage of them.’ In explaining the basis for such assertions, Wright pointed to the identic notes to fourteen governments issued by Kellogg on June 23, 1928, which accompanied the second American draft of the pact. Therein Kellogg stated the following: There is nothing in the American draft of an anti-war treaty which restricts or impairs in any way the right of self-defense. That right is inherent in every sovereign state and is implicit in every treaty. Every nation is free at all times and regardless of treaty provisions to defend its territory from attack or ­invasion and it alone is competent to decide whether circumstances require recourse to war in self-defense. If it has a good case, the world will applaud and not condemn its actions. Express recognition by treaty of this inalienable right, however, gives rise to the same difficulty encountered in any effort to define aggression. It is the identical question approached from the other side. Inasmuch as no treaty provision can add to the natural right of self-defense, it is not in the interest of peace that a treaty should stipulate a juristic conception of self-defense since it is far too easy for the unscrupulous to mold events to accord with an agreed definition.300

It seems that certain United States’ senators interpreted Kellogg’s statements concerning the inherent right of self-defence as meaning that international determinations as to the legitimacy of any such measures were ruled out. Wright observed that this appeared to be the conclusion 299  Ibid., 246. See also Quincy Wright, ‘The Meaning of the Pact of Paris,’ American Journal of International Law 27, no. 1 (1933), 39–61, 41. 300  Denys P. Myers, ‘Origin and Conclusion of the Paris Pact: The Reconstruction of War as an Instrument of National Policy,’ World Peace Foundation Pamphlets 12, no.2 (1929), 135–6. Identic notes were sent to the governments of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Irish Free State, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland and South Africa, and an accompanying Draft Multilateral Treaty for the Renunciation of War was delivered to their respective foreign offices on June 23, 1928.

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reached by the Senate’s Committee on  Foreign Relations as reflected in its report recommending ratification of the pact.301 Prepared and submitted by Senator William Edgar Borah, this report stated the following: The committee reports the above treaty with the understanding that the right of self-defense is in no way curtailed or impaired by the terms of conditions of the treaty. Each nation is free at all times and regardless of the treaty provisions, to defend itself, and is the sole judge of what constitutes the right of self-defense and the necessity and extent of the same. The United States regards the Monroe doctrine as a part of its national security and defense. Under the right of self-defense allowed by the treaty must necessarily be included the right to maintain the Monroe doctrine, which is part of our system of national defense.302

Wright suggested that it would be to misinterpret Kellogg’s note to maintain that under the Pact of Paris states remained ‘the sole judge of what constitutes the right of self-defense’ where that meant that states had complete discretion in determining when recourse to force was necessary. Certainly, Wright noted, the power to take defensive measures was not vitiated by the pact. However, as Wright also noted, ‘the question of whether the exercise of this power is within the “right of self-defense” … is a wholly different question, and Mr. Kellogg does not suggest that the limits of that right are to be decided by the state acting.’303 That Kellogg understood that it was of international concern as to whether or not a state claiming to act in self-defence was indeed acting out of necessity is reflected in the statement that if the state claiming the necessity of self-defence ‘has a good case, the world will applaud and not condemn its actions’: the state claiming necessity must later vie for international legitimacy.304 Two important qualifications in the report of the Committee on Foreign Relations should be noted at this point. Firstly, the report stated that ‘the treaty in brief pledges the nations bound by the same not to resort to war in the settlement of their international controversies save in bona fide self-­ defense.’ Secondly, the report endorsed the  following  statement  made by Professor Theodore Woolsey in June 1914: the Monroe Doctrine ‘was  Wright, ‘The Meaning of the Pact of Paris,’ 46.  Executive Report no. 1, 70th Cong., 2nd Sess., Con. Rec. vol. 70, 15 January 1929, 1730, reproduced in Myers, ‘Origin and Conclusion of the Paris Pact,’ 68–70. 303  Wright, ‘The Meaning of the Pact of Paris,’ 46–7. 304  Ibid., 47. 301 302

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justifiable by reason of the right of self-defense (which is a recognized principle of international law) …. [I]t called no new rights into being. Therefore, whenever it oversteps the principle of self-defense, reasonably interpreted, the right disappears and the policy is questionable because it then violates the rights of others.’305 However, whatever construction one places on the Foreign Relations Committee’s report, the report itself was irrelevant for the purpose of interpreting the pact: the report was never communicated to the other parties involved in its negotiation and therefore had no ‘interpretive value’ from an international legal perspective.306 That the right of self-defence disappeared when certain legal limits were crossed was well entrenched in American thinking is evidenced by, to cite one example, the Caroline case which involved a violation of the territory of the United States in 1837 by British forces with a view to preventing Americans from aiding Canadian rebels. In the diplomatic exchange which followed, there was no suggestion that ‘a state can relieve itself of international responsibility for violent action in foreign territory merely by alleging a defensive necessity.’307 In his reply to his British counterpart Lord Ashburton, Secretary of State  Daniel Webster wrote that ‘where it is admitted that exceptions growing out of the great law of self-­ defense do exist, those exceptions should be confined to cases in which the “necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation,”’ pointing out that as both governments understood these principles alike, ‘the difference between the two … is only whether the facts in the case of the Caroline make out a case for such necessity for the purpose of self-defense.’308

 Executive Report no. 1, in Myers, ‘Origin and Conclusion of the Paris Pact,’ 69–70.  Wright, ‘The Meaning of the Pact of Paris,’ 47. 307  Wright, ‘The Meaning of the Pact of Paris,’ 44. William Edward Hall observed the following: ‘As the measures taken by when a state protects itself by violating the sovereignty of another are confessedly exceptional acts, beyond the limits of ordinary law, and permitted only for the supreme motive of self-preservation, they must evidently be confined with the narrowest limits consistent with obtaining the required end. It is therefore more than questionable whether a state can use advantages gained by such measures to do anything beyond that which is necessary for immediate self-protection, which it would not otherwise be in a position to do.’ ‘It is frequently maintained that every violation is excused so long as it was caused by the motive of self-preservation; but it becomes more and more recognised that violations of other States in the interest of self-preservation are excused in cases of necessity only.’ William Edward Hall, International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880), 229. 308  Daniel Webster, 1842, quoted in Wright, ‘The Meaning of the Pact of Paris,’ 44. 305 306

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Critics of the Pact of Paris held that it was precisely because the pact the parties to it had the discretionary power to determine which conditions rendered defensive action necessary, as Wright noted, that the legal force of the pact and any chance of enforcing it  was effectively annihilated: ‘because any state by labelling its action defense … would thereby render the action in accord with the Pact.’309 Wright stated that if the premise of the critics’ argument were indeed true then their conclusion would seem to follow. However, he insisted that the premise of the argument put forward by the pact’s was false: there was a clear ‘presumption’ against their interpretation of the Pact of Paris given the widely recognised and well-entrenched rule that ‘the interpretation of treaties is a question of international law suitable for arbitration and judicial settlement and is not a question solely within the domestic jurisdiction of a single state.’310 None of the provisions in the pact, as Wright further noted, signalled ‘either expressly or by inference’ an intention to deviate from this rule in respect to treaty interpretation. Indeed, rather than to the pact itself, it was to the diplomatic correspondence which preceded its ­conclusion which its critics made reference in contending that the pact accorded parties an ‘unlimited power of self-defense.’311 As noted above, Kellogg’s note of June 28, 1928, was seen as evidence that such a power had been reserved. Certain statements appearing in the notes sent by the French, German, British, Japanese, South African, Polish and Czech governments  in the response to the Kellogg note were also mentioned in this regard. However,  as indicated above,  the Kellogg note made no such claim: it did not claim that the determination of what is an act of self-defence is a domestic rather than an international question  and the same  observation  applies to the other notes just mentioned. The notes in question did not claim that an unlimited power of self-defense ‘was reserved, but that “the right of legitimate defense,” “the sovereign right of defense,” “the right of self-defense,” “the natural right of legitimate defense,” the right of legitimate defense” was reserved.’ Further to this,  even if  some or all of these  notes  had made the claims imputed to them,  this would not be grounds for casting doubt on the

 Wright, ‘The Meaning of the Pact of Paris,’ 44.  Ibid. 311  Ibid., 41–3. 309 310

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pact’s status as a covenant against war involving definite legal obligations. As Wright pointed out, these notes were not attached to either the signatures or deposit of ratifications of the parties to the Pact. Secretary Kellogg stated that the instrument had been accepted without reservations. These statements, therefore, are not reservations to be treated as part of the treaty, but are preparatory materials stating the views of certain of the parties as to the meaning of the text, and as such have some value in interpreting the text. It seems doubtful whether they would be adequate to read this treaty out of the general rule that treaty interpretation is an international question, even if they clearly stated that opinion. However, they do not state any such opinion. These statements do not assert that an unlimited power of self-defence was reserved, but that ‘the right of legitimate defense,’ ‘the sovereign right of defense,’ ‘the right of self-defense,’ ‘the natural right of legitimate self-defense,’ ‘the right of legitimate defense’ was reserved. The states were concerned that the right of defense as it existed under international law should not be impaired by the treaty. As Secretary Stimson has said, ‘This right is so inherent and universal that it was not deemed necessary even to insert it expressly in the treaty. It also so well understood that it does not weaken the treaty. It exists in the case of the individual under domestic law, as well as in the case of the nation and its citizens under the law of nations. Its limits have been clearly defined by countless precedents.’312

That there was a large body of public opinion in the United States which understood the issues at stake and was ready to support the projected pact at the time when the formal negotiations of it commenced is testimony to the campaigning efforts of Shotwell along with those of other private citizens.313 And it is telling of Shotwell’s influence at the official level that this draft treaty and the resultant pact bore a close resemblance to each other.314 As Condliffe simply stated, ‘the wording was his.’315 Shotwell’s work in promoting the draft treaty in Honolulu and elsewhere culminated in the publication of a book entitled War as an Instrument of National Policy, a work which quickly became well known and which served as a basis for discussion at the 1929 IPR conference in Kyoto at which Shotwell also presided.316 In that book, which was com Ibid., 43–4.  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ 14. 314  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 113. 315  ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Paul F. Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 460. 316  The 1929 conference of the IPR heard that Shotwell’s book War as an Instrument of National Policy was ‘indirectly a product’ of the 1927 Honolulu Conference. See ISIPR, ‘A 312 313

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pleted on October 14, 1928, Shotwell could not help but reflect on the celebratory mood surrounding advent of the Pact of Paris, concluding that the pact ‘has so challenged the imagination of the world as to become—for the day at least—a sort of symbol of the larger movement’ and that because of it the world was ‘in the midst of a revolution in international affairs.’317 Writing in 1933, Frederick L. Schuman decried the pact as a ‘scrap of paper’ which offered ‘no assurance that … violence will not encounter resistance,’ an understandable observation in light of the failure to activate the LON’s collective security machinery in response to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria.318 Yet it should be noted that Shotwell himself had added a note of caution in welcoming the pact’s arrival. In War as an Instrument of National Policy, having noted the ‘paeans of triumph’ which greeted the pact in some circles, Shotwell observed that the achievement of international peace ‘is a very different thing from the formulation of a denunciation of war,’ adding that the pact in itself ‘is only the embodiment of a single phase of the movement to eliminate international war.’319 Manley O. Hudson made the same point in stating that while the pact, which he thought necessitated ‘a wider departure from the old law of neutrality,’ served as a ‘point de départ in discussion,’ such a ‘pronunciamento’ did not mean that war would ‘disappear from men’s minds.’ War would not, he continued, ‘lose its appeal because of a moral ukase. It will not be ended by a fiat. Institutions, methods, habits are needed to assure that intelligence will be brought to bear when situations become acute, and these mean international organization.’320 Given its role in helping set in train the Locarno Treaties and the Pact of Paris, it would seem fitting that the German Political Academy was chosen as the host of the first meeting of what would become the Pacific Research Program: A Record of Six Years of International Cooperation in Research Among the Member Countries of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ IPR Document no. 2, submitted to the Sixth CISSIR, London, 29 May–2 June 1933, 19,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2 UA. See also DeBenedetti, ‘James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,’ 386. 317  Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy, viii, 6–7. Colombos argues that the significance of the pact was that it involved ‘renunciation of war in general terms and subject to no qualification.’ Colombos, ‘The Paris Pact,’ 87. 318  Frederick L. Schuman, International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 682. 319  Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy, 6–7. 320  Manley O.  Hudson, Progress in International Organization (California: Stanford University Press, 1932), 95–6.

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ISC. Another consideration helping to justify its selection was touched on by Mantoux in 1935 in the context of an ISC discussion of the teaching of international relations: Mantoux recalled how in 1927, just when he was about to complete his term at the secretariat, he had been invited to establish and direct the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Mantoux stated that at that point, and as someone who had trained as an historian, he was not sure what was meant by the expression international relations as the name for an academic discipline. He explained to his audience that in order to better comprehend the subject matter of international relations, he embarked on a journey that took him to Germany, Great Britain and the United States, these being the three countries in which, in his view, the discipline was already well already established. In this regard, Mantoux singled out the CFR, the Brookings Institution, the RIIA, the LSE and the German Political Academy.321 Although it may appear a less obvious choice as a destination in the context of a study trip dedicated to an examination of the academic study of international relations than the United States and Great Britain, Mantoux’s trip to Germany had ample justification. An examination of the list of courses on offer at the academy for the 1926/1927 winter semester reveals that it had developed by then not only a substantial programme in German politics and political history (alongside courses in social philosophy, political theory, political psychology and cultural politics), but also an expansive range of courses in international relations.322 In regard to the matter of the selection of the academy as the venue for the first meeting of what would become the ISC, one needs also to consider the link between it and the Carnegie Endowment. Rietzler argues that it was with the help of the ‘contacts and prestige’ of the Carnegie Endowment that the academy was deemed an appropriate place for the meeting, noting that Butler had stressed to Jäckh at the outset of their collaboration the ‘importance of international cooperation’ and had suggested to Jäckh that the academy should enter into a cooperative relation-

321   Société des Nations  [hereafter SDN, Institut International de Coopération Intellectuel  [hereafter IICI], ‘L’enseignement universitaire des relations internationales,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, no. 57–58 (1935), 483–502, 490–1, IICI/01, UA. 322  Deutsche Hochschule für Politik: Vorlesungs-Verzeichnis für das Winterhalbjahr Semester 1926/27, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. This programme was established at a time when political science was not recognised as a distinct discipline in other German universities. See also Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’, 395.

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ship with institutions such as the RIIA and the Institut des hautes études internationales in Paris.323 Jäckh certainly did not hesitate in embarking on international intellectual cooperation, a course of action on the part of German scientists and intellectuals that the German Foreign Office had been urging for some time.324 For example, on June 12, 1926, and on the days which followed, just months before Germany’s entry into the LON, Jäckh gave a series of lectures at Zimmern’s Geneva School of International Studies.325 These lectures were entitled ‘The New Germany’ and were published in English under this heading the following year in a small volume that was dedicated to the memory of Hans Jäckh. The volume contained a general introduction authored by Zimmern in his capacity as deputy director of the IIIC. Zimmern also contributed an editor’s preface wherein he commended Jäckh for his belief that the way to ‘avert another war is to increase the amount of intelligence systematically devoted to public affairs’ and that the best way to ‘mobilize this intelligence is to provide a living national centre for political study.’326 Zimmern observed that this idea was but ‘a single step’ from the idea that gave rise to the Geneva School of International Studies, adding that the amicabilis concordia that now existed ‘between Geneva, Paris, and Berlin’ was testimony to the ‘new spirit’ of international intellectual collaboration that was ‘now growing up and taking practical shape.’327 In addition to establishing a close link with Zimmern’s school in Geneva, a link noted by Zimmern in his preface to The New Germany, the academy had established in 1926 links with the IIIC. This was two years before, as Jäckh later pointed out, the German government created the German National Committee of Intellectual Cooperation. It is testimony to the importance attached by the academy to the links between it and Zimmern’s school, on the one hand, and the IIIC, on the other, that these links were highlighted in a 1926 brochure publicising the academy’s activities.328 There is no doubt that its association with the Carnegie  Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research, and Revisionist Politics,’ 70.  Ibid., 65. 325  Zimmern, preface to Jäckh, The New Germany, 13. 326  Ibid., 14. 327  Ibid., 14–5. 328  Deutsche Hochschule für Politik: Aufbau und Arbeit, 13 and Jäckh (address, Sixth CISSIR, London, 1 June 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. See also Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 87. 323 324

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Endowment would have greatly added to the attractiveness of the academy (which the Prussian government had provided with ‘auspicious, centrally located quarters in the neoclassical’ Bauakademie of Karl Friedrich Schinkel), as a venue for the planned meeting of experts.329 And it is worth noting here that the European office of the Carnegie Endowment was one of the three international organisations that were represented at the actual meeting. At the same time, it is also the case that Zimmern and other figures both within and without the OIC who were involved in the preparations for the meeting, most notably Murray, Toynbee and Eisenmann, would have been acutely conscious of the symbolic significance of holding the meeting in Berlin: it could only serve to heighten the developing atmosphere of political and intellectual rapprochement, particularly that between France and Germany.330 In concluding a second lecture he gave at the Geneva Institute of International Relations in August 1926, a lecture entitled ‘The League of Nations and international Intellectual Co-operation,’ Zimmern, alluding to the boycott of German science, noted that there had been ‘remarkable improvement in the international intellectual atmosphere during the past twelve months.’ He then called attention to the humiliating experience of March 17 of that year: this was the last day of the first special session of the assembly  which had been  convened by the council on March 8  for the purpose of admitting Germany to the LON following its application for membership in accordance with promises that had been  made at Locarno. To the despair of most involved, the day of March 17, 1926, saw the German admission  postponed. In relation to this experience, Zimmern stated: ‘We have … one consolation for the failure of the March Assembly, namely, that it has enabled the scholars to go ahead of the politicians, and allowed the academic Locarno to be an accomplished fact before the political Locarno.’331 It is perhaps noteworthy in terms of the improvement in the international intellectual atmosphere and the desire to further the academic  Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’ 399.  Jäckh was a member of the German League of Nations Union. Indeed, he claimed that it was he who founded it on September 10, 1918. Jäckh further claimed that it was the ‘first organization of its kind in the world.’ Jäckh, The New Germany, 81–2. Note that the International Federation of League of Nations Societies had held its 11th Plenary Congress in Berlin in May 1927. On Eisenmann’s role, see Jäckh (address, Sixth CISSIR, London, 1 June 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 331  Zimmern, ‘The League of Nations and International Intellectual Co-operation,’ 150. 329 330

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Locarno that in 1927, Jäckh’s academy donated a sum of 6000 marks to the IIIC, an institution of which some in Germany remained suspicious.332 In his lectures on the subject of ‘The New Germany,’ Jäckh stated that the ‘German people of today are convinced that a policy of ideas is more beneficial and of stronger endurance than a policy of might.’333 It was in order to publicise this conviction in front of the world and strengthen it within Germany—a Germany, as Jäckh expressed it, ‘planted in the very heart of Europe’—that in response to a call by the IIIC, savants from a range of institutions in Britain, Europe and North America journeyed in March 1928 to Berlin.334

332  See the article drafted by the IIIC for publication in the Annual Survey of International Affairs, 22 November 1927; Luchaire to Toynbee, 18 January 1927; and Toynbee to Luchaire, 21 January 1927, B.IV.18, UA. 333  Jäckh, The New Germany, 74. 334  Ibid. On the IIIC’s role, see Bourdillon, ‘The Royal Institute of International Affairs,’ 31n.

CHAPTER 3

The Paris Peace Conference, Racial Equality and the Shandong Question

Japan’s Racial Equality Amendment at the Fifth Meeting of the League of Nations Commission In reflecting on the fact that the founders of the IPR saw the putative Hawaiian approach to race relations as a model for international race relations, Condliffe observed that what could be achieved in a small community  is  not easily transferred to the relations between sovereign states.1 Here, Condliffe may well have had in mind the racial equality amendment presented by Japan at the Paris Peace Conference as the fate of this amendment certainly well illustrates his point as will become clear. The amendment, which Japan sought to insert in the covenant on three occasions in Paris, grew out of concern about discriminatory treatment of Japanese nationals in certain countries. According to Roy Hidemichi Akagi, a former general secretary of the Japanese Students’ Christian Association in New York City and a Japanese delegate to the second IPR conference in 1927, it was also inspired by ‘a sense of pride as a nation which in seventy years had come all the way from a hermit kingdom to membership in the world’s “Big Five” at the end of the World War.’2 The acceptance of such an amendment was one of Japan’s two chief desiderata at the conference 1  ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 431. 2  Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific 1927, 599, and Roy Hidemichi Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936: A Short History (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1936), 323. See

© The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part One, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2_3

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Fig. 3.1  Council of Four at the WWI Paris Peace Conference, May 27, 1919 (candid photo) (L–R): Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Great Britain), Premier Vittorio Orlando (Italy), French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and US President Woodrow Wilson. Source: US Signal Corps photo/Edward N. Jackson (US Army Signal Corps)

and, further to Akagi’s observation, was seen by Japan as a means to obtain a ‘more complete recognition of her status as a great Power, equal to any other.’3 On February 7, at the fifth meeting of the League of Nations Commission, the Japanese delegation resented the amendment, the text of which was prepared in both English and French, insisting that it would

also G. F. Hudson, The Far East in World Politics: A Study in Recent History 2nd ed. (New York: Octagon Books, 1976), 182. Originally published in 1937 by Oxford University Press. 3  Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement: Written from this Unpublished and Personal Material, vol. 2 (New York: Double Day, 1923), 225, 233.

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Fig. 3.2  Japanese peace delegates in 1919 with Makino Nobuaki. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-B2-4921-7]

reinforce one of the fundamental principles on which the LON was to be based. The proposed amendment read as follows: The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.4

President Wilson’s press secretary in Paris, Ray Stannard Baker, who participated in the aforementioned meeting at the Hôtel Majestic and who went on to edit of President Wilson’s private papers, observed in respect to the proposed amendment that the 4  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 322. See also Minutes, Preliminary Peace Conference, Commission on the League of Nations, tenth meeting, quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 123.

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Japanese were on high ground and grappling with a problem—that of racial relationships—which during the next century or so is destined to play a great part in world affairs. We had at Paris the representatives of several powerful race groups, all asserting a new racial dignity, all working for the recognition of a new equality. Not only were there the powerful Japanese and Chinese, but there was a Jewish group and a Negro group. And no problems raised at Paris struck fire sooner than these: the hostility of the Poles to the Jews, the feelings of the Australians towards the Japanese.5

Despite this striking of fire, there was a desire among the American delegation to accommodate the Japanese concerns in some measure not only because the Japanese were on high ground but for the sake of the League idea. Baron Makino Nobuaki, a former foreign minister and the principal proponent of the amendment, was, according to Baker, a representative of ‘liberal and democratic forces at work in Japan,’ and as such he could be counted upon at Paris to support the ‘new cooperative ideas.’6 Makino had shown himself to be ‘deeply interested’ in the LON, announcing at a meeting of the conference’s Council of Ten (which was composed of the chief representatives and foreign ministers of France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and the United States), on January 22, that he ‘desired to say that Japan was sincerely desirous of cooperating with the Great Powers in this work, having for its object the future welfare of mankind.’7 On February 9, following conversations that he held with the Japanese delegation, Colonel House discussed the matter with Balfour, then the secretary of state for foreign affairs, in the company of Miller who, as an expert on treaties,  took a leading role  in the drafting of the covenant. Miller recorded that the discussion went along the following lines: Colonel House handed me a pencil memorandum which he showed to Mr. Balfour, commencing with the proposition taken from the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. Mr. Balfour said that was an eighteenth century proposition which he did not believe was true. He believed that it was true in a certain sense that all men of a particular nation 5  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 232. On Ray Standard Baker, see Dockerill, ‘Historical Note: The Foreign Office and the Proposed Institute of International Affairs,’ 666, and Ge-Zay Wood, The Shantung Question: A Study in Diplomacy and World Politics (London: Fleming H. Revell, 1922), 138. 6  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 227. 7  Ibid., and Council of Ten, Secret Minutes, 22 January 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 227.

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were created equal, but not that a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European. Colonel House said that he did not see how the policy toward the Japanese could be continued. The world said that they could not go to Africa; they could not go to any white country; they could not go to China, and they could not go to Siberia; and yet they were a growing nation, having a country where all the land was tilled; but they had to go somewhere. Mr. Balfour said he had a great deal of sympathy with this view.8

In view of the fact that the Japanese delegation had rejected the draft presented to them by House because, as House had intended, it had no legal effect, House instructed Miller to prepare a revised amendment. Miller duly responded, submitting a clause to House that read as follows: ‘Recognising that all men are created equal, the High Contracting Parties agree that the Executive Council may consider any external grievance affecting the nationals of any of the High Contract Parties and may make such recommendations in respect thereof as are deemed equitable.9 Miller did not like the outcome of his effort, telling House precisely this in a letter attached to his submission. Therein he explained that although it had no binding effect, his draft would render the general question of racial equality a matter of international concern and for this reason he strongly doubted that it would prove acceptable.10

The Amendment at the Tenth Meeting

of the Commission of the League of Nations

On February 13, at the tenth meeting of the Commission of the LON (which had commenced its work on February 3), Makino sought to append the amendment he had presented on February 7 to Wilson’s proposed article concerning religious freedom. Wilson’s article read as follows: ‘The High Contracting Parties agree that they will not prohibit or interfere with the free exercise of any creed, religion or belief whose practices are not inconsistent with public order or public morals.’11 In what Baker described as a strong speech noteworthy for its appeals to democratic ideals, Makino declared the following: 8  David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 183–4. 9  Ibid., 184. 10  Ibid. 11  Woodrow Wilson, 1919, quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 123.

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It is not necessary to dwell on the fact that racial and religious animosities have constituted a fruitful source of warfare among different peoples throughout history, often leading to deplorable excesses …. I am aware of the difficult circumstances that stand in the way of acting on the principle embodied in this clause, but I do not think it insurmountable if sufficient importance is attached to the consideration of serious misunderstanding between different peoples which may grow to an uncontrollable degree …. What was deemed impossible before is about to be accomplished. The creation of this League itself is a notable example. If this organization can open a way to the solution of the question, the scope of the work will become wider and enlist the interest of a greater part of humanity. As a result of this war, the wave of national and democratic spirit has extended to remote corners of the world and has given additional impulse to the aspirations of all peoples; this impulse once in motion … cannot be stifled, and it would be imprudent to treat this symptom lightly.12

Makino took care in his speech to acknowledge that ‘the question of race prejudice is a very delicate and complicated matter, involving play of human passion’ and that therefore it must be carefully managed.13 Further to this and in order to avoid any misunderstanding, he stressed that he was not demanding ‘an immediate realization of the idea equality of treatment between peoples,’ but was rather inviting ‘the Governments and peoples concerned to examine the question more closely and seriously, and to devise some acceptable means to meet a deadlock with at present confronts different peoples.’14 Having referred to the fact that different races had stood alongside each other in defence of the Allied cause and that the covenant obligated nations to defend each other against external attacks, Makino stated that ‘each national would like to feel and in fact demand that he should be placed on an equal footing with people he undertakes to defend even with his life.’15 An American student of the covenant, Felix Morley, expressed the view that the ‘implications of this amendment for countries with racial restrictions in their immigration and land laws were, of course, exceedingly far-­ reaching,’ a view shared by Miller who similarly described it as having ‘momentous’ implications and who told House that an amendment that 12  CLON, Minutes, 13 February 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 234. 13  Makino Nobuaki, 1919, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 322. 14  Ibid., 322–3. 15  Ibid., 323.

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had a ‘real effect’ would be ‘impossible.’16 As Akagi noted, for the representatives of Anglo-Saxon countries, the question of racial equality was an extremely ‘ticklish subject,’ their immediate thought being that specific recognition of the principle in the covenant ‘would be tantamount to the removal of the bars against Asiatic immigration throughout the world.’17 Cecil remarked that the subject had been dealt with in long and difficult discussions. It was a question which had raised extremely serious problems within the British Empire. It was a matter of a highly controversial character, and in spite of the nobility of thought which inspired Baron Makino, he thought that it would be wiser for the moment to postpone its examination.18

As other members of the commission were not prepared to explore the matter further, discussion of the racial equality was terminated. Wilson’s amendment on religious freedom, which the president had been so keen to see incorporated, was a casualty of this development because there was considerable force to Makino’s point that ‘matters of religion and race could go well together.’19 The amendment was not entirely without support: Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo declared that ‘he was naturally in full sympathy with the spirit of the proposed amendment.’20 Baker considered Koo’s expression of support significant given that the Chinese were suspicious of the Japanese in every other respect. He observed that Koo’s statement clearly gave rise to the following question: ‘If the Western white nations do not recognize the equality of the Asiatic races, will these Eastern races, which number half of the human race, be forced to a new kind of  Morley, Society of Nations, 123 and Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 183–4.  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 323. Ray Stannard Baker noted the following reaction: ‘But this claim of the Japanese struck fire at once. What did it mean in terms of Japanese rights in Australia, Canada, and California? What about Jews in Poland? Indians in South Africa?’ Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 235.  Wilson Leon Godshall observed that ‘[p]rohibitory legislation directed against Indians in South Africa and Japanese in Australia and Canada would be involved, as would the case of Japanese in the United States.’ Wilson Leon Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1929), 262. 18  CLON, Minutes, 13 February 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 235. See also Wilson Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 262. 19  Morley, Society of Nations, 123, and Makino quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 123. 20  CLON, Minutes, 13 February 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 235. 16 17

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racial alliance?’21 Although there were demands emanating from China at the time for an end to racially discriminatory policies on the part of Europe and America, the import of Koo’s statement may not be quite what Baker thought it to be: Wunsz King, who was secretary to the Chinese delegation in Paris, claims that Koo was in fact ‘embarrassed … by the Japanese move,’ but felt he had to express support for it as a matter of principle.22 The reason for this embarrassment relates to the Chinese delegation’s view that the proposed amendment was ‘intended to be an overhanging threat to wreck the Covenant,’ based on the belief that the United States Congress would almost certainly ‘refuse to ratify it if the instrument should contain an article providing for racial equality, inasmuch as such a stipulation would run counter to the American immigration policy vis-à-­ vis the Chinese and the Japanese.’23 Many other contemporary observers shared the Chinese delegation’s scepticism in regard to intention behind the amendment: they saw it ‘as something with which Japan could strike a bargain.’24

The Racial Equality Amendment: Revised and Then Rejected Undaunted by the initial reactions to their proposal, the Japanese government persisted with their diplomatic efforts. President Wilson had briefly returned to Washington while the conference was underway. On March 4, just as he was about to once more leave the United States for Paris, the Japanese ambassador in Washington rushed to the State Department, where he submitted a communication which urged politely but firmly full recognition of the principle of racial equality.25 This communication was  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 235.  Wunsz King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1961), 24. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 323. Akagi stated that aside from his expression of sympathy, Koo reserved his views on the matter on the basis that he had yet to receive instructions from Beijing. John Fulton Lewis notes that in December 1918, the Chinese editorialist Chen Duxiu (Ch’en Tu-hsiu) ‘wrote that Asian peoples demanded egalitarianism for all humanity, “with abandonment by Europe and America of discrimination against the colored races.”’ Lewis, China’s Great Convulsion 1994–1924, 171. 23  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 24. 24  Wood, The Shantung Question, 109. 25  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 235. 21 22

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handed to the president just as he commenced his journey across the Atlantic. It read as follows: The Japanese Government are much gratified to perceive the just and disinterested spirit in which the President is using his best endeavours to secure an enduring peace of the world. They also are sincerely grateful for the sympathy and support which the President and the American peace delegation were friendly enough to give to the proposition of the Japanese delegation on the question of doing away with race discriminations. In view of the fundamental spirit of the League of Nations the Japanese Government regards as of first importance the establishment of the principle that the difference of race should in no case constitute a basis for discriminatory treatment under the law of any country. Should this great principle fail of recognition the Japanese Government do not see how a perpetual friction and discontent among nations and races could possibly be eliminated. If such be the case, they are gravely concerned that the smooth functioning of the League of Nations will itself be seriously hampered. The Japanese Government are therefore disposed to continue their efforts for the adoption of this just and equitable proposition and they permit themselves to confidently hope that the President give further friendly support to them in this matter. As for the form and wording of the proposition, the Japanese Government have no intention to insist on the adoption of the original draft and any suggestion from the President on this point will be entertained with great pleasure.26

On April 11, at the fifteenth and final meeting of the League of Nations Commission and against a backdrop of assurances by America, France and Great Britain that they were intent on making peace, Makino again pressed the question of racial equality, pleading with his confrères to include among the general principles named in the preamble to the covenant as essential to the realisation of international cooperation and the realisation of peace and security an additional phrase as italicised below: by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations, by the endorsement of the principle of equality of nations and just treatment of their nationals by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among governments, and by the maintenance of justice and 26  Communication of the Japanese Government, 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 236. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 262.

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a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another.27

In introducing his new amendment, which was a greatly simplified and much sanitised version of the amendment he had pressed in February, Makino read a statement in which he stressed that the proposal did not entail any interference in the domestic policies of any state.28 Makino stated, I think it only reasonable that the principle of the equality of nations and of the just treatment of their nationals should be laid down as a fundamental basis of future relations in this world organization …. It is not intended that the amendment should encroach on the internal affairs of any nation …. This amendment does not fully meet our wishes, but it is an attempt to conciliate the viewpoints of different peoples.29

In an important respect, it was difficult to oppose the Japanese clause: it would mean expressing opposition to the fundamental basis of the whole League structure, namely, the principle of the equality of nations.30 Nonetheless in Morley’s view, which, it should be noted, was not a universal view, it was ‘perfectly apparent that no nation maintaining special Asiatic restrictions in its immigration policy could conscientiously subscribe’ to the Japanese proposal.31 The main voice raised in opposition to Makino’s proposal was that of Cecil who stated that he ‘regretted that he was not in a position to vote for the amendment although he was personally entirely in accord with the idea advanced by the Japanese delegation.’32 Cecil added that while ‘the British Government realised the importance of… racial equality,’ a remedy for it ‘could not be attempted by the Commission without encroaching upon the sovereignty of state members of the League’ and that its proper application by the LON would lead to

27  Makino Nobuaki, 1919, quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 198. Author’s italics. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 324, and Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement: Written from this Unpublished and Personal Material, vol. 2, 236–7. 28  Morley, Society of Nations, 198. 29  CLON, Minutes, 11 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 237. 30  Morley, Society of Nations, 198. 31  Ibid. 32  CLON, Minutes, 11 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 237.

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‘serious controversy and interference in … [their] … domestic affairs.’33 He then observed that as Japan would occupy a permanent position on the executive council of the LON, it would be placed in a position of ‘complete equality with the other Great Powers’ and that it would ‘always be possible for her to raise the question of the equality of races.’34 Viscount Chinda Sutemi, the Japanese ambassador to London and a person who was noted at the conference for being a particularly forceful advocate of Japanese interests, responded as follows: Japanese public opinion was so strongly behind this amendment that he asked that the Commission put it to a vote. If the amendment were rejected, it would be an indication to Japan that the equality of the members of the League was not recognized and as a consequence the new organization would be most unpopular …. Public opinion in Japan was very much concerned over this question, and certain people have even gone so far as to say that Japan would not become a member of the League of Nations unless she was satisfied on this point.35

During the ensuing discussion, strong support for the Japanese position was expressed in speeches by Koo and the Czech, French, Greek, Italian and Polish delegates, that is, by a majority of the members of the commission in attendance.36 It was against this background that Wilson intervened, expressing his concern that the insertion in the preamble of the Japanese amendment would inevitably cause tumult at the conference and making the point that the principle at stake in the amendment was in fact embodied in the covenant. The president stated that he felt the greatest difficulty lay in controversies which would be bound to take place outside the Commission over the Japanese proposal, and that in order to avoid these discussions it would perhaps be wise not to insert such a provision in the preamble. The equality of nations was a fundamental principle of the League of Nations. It was the spirit of the Covenant to make a faithful 33  The first quotation from Cecil’s speech is recorded in Morley, Society of Nations, 198n, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 262. The other two quotations are recorded in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 324. 34  CLON, Minutes, 11 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 237. 35  Ibid., 237–8. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 263. 36  Morley, Society of Nations, 198; Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 324; and Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 238.

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attempt to place all nations on a footing of equality, in the hope that the greater nations might aid the lesser nations in advantageous ways. Not only did the Covenant recognize the equality of States, but it laid down provisions for defending this equality in case it should be threatened.37

Makino responded that he did not want to prolong an ‘unprofitable discussion’; however, he added that as a representative in this matter of the ‘unqualified opinion’ of the Japanese government, he was bound to ask the commission for a ‘definite decision’ and therefore to vote upon the question of inserting his amendment in the preamble.38 Submitted to a vote, the amendment was carried with eleven out of the seventeen delegates of state present at the commission voting in the affirmative. In the affirmative were Japan, France and Italy, each of which had two delegates present, and Brazil, China, Greece, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, each of which had one vote. There were six abstentions: Cecil, House and Wilson abstained as did Poland’s Roman Dmowski, Portugal’s Jaime Batalha Reis and Romania’s George Danielopol. Jan Smuts, for the British Empire, and Paul Hymans, for Belgium, were absent from the final meeting of the commission.39 As chairman, Wilson declared that the amendment had failed of adoption ‘inasmuch as it had not received the unanimous approval of the Commission.’40 The validity of Wilson’s decision was questioned by one of the French delegates, namely,  Ferdinand Larnaude, who ‘called attention to the fact that a majority had voted in its favour.’41 Wilson pointed out in response that ‘decisions of the Commission were not valid unless unanimous’ and that the Japanese amendment had not received unanimous approval as ‘at least one of the governments represented at the Commission,’ namely, the govern37  CLON, Minutes, 11 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 238. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 324, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 263. 38  CLON, Minutes, April 11, 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 238. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 324. 39  Morley, Society of Nations, quoted in quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 199n, and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 324. 40  CLON, Minutes, 11 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 239. See also Morley, Society of Nations, 199; Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 263; and Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: The Ending of the War June 1918–November 1919, vol. 4 (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), 428. 41  CLON, Minutes, 11 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 239.

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ment of Great Britain, ‘formally opposed the proposal.’42 Morley observed that there was little doubt that Wilson was ‘technically correct’ in his action: at the third meeting of the commission in a discussion concerning the composition of the council, Cecil had stated that ‘all international decisions must by the nature of things be unanimous,’ a statement which met with no objection at the time and which subsequently received formal endorsement via the incorporation of the unanimity rule in Article 5 (1) of the covenant.43

A Diplomatic Herring? Thomas F. Millard, an American journalist based in Shanghai who acted as an unofficial adviser to the Chinese delegation in Paris, shared that delegation’s scepticism about the Japanese manoeuvrings in regard to racial equality. Discussing a memorandum that he had prepared while in Paris, Millard observed that ‘Japanese diplomacy’ had at times cleverly used the ‘so-called “racial equality” question,’  adding that this was  especially  the case in its relations with the United States. Japanese diplomacy had used it ‘in many ways and on many occasions,’ he continued, singling out as notable its use in the context of the discussions concerning the covenant in Paris.44 The view that the question had been diplomatically exploited in Paris by the Japanese delegation, according to Millard, was shared by others  at the conference:  Millard  claimed that in his assessment, ‘all of the official experts on the Far East attached to the principal governments at the conference regard Japan’s introduction of the race equality [amendments] as a diplomatic “herring.”’45 Millard’s Paris memorandum was dated April 6, 1919, and therein Millard pointed out that the racial equality question had ‘sprung out of conditions arising out of Japanese emigration to Western countries, principally in the United States of America.’46 Millard noted that as originally put, the objec42  CLON, Minutes, 11 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 239, and Morley, Society of Nations, 199. 43  Morley, Society of Nations, 85, 199, and Notes of Mr. Whitney Shepardson, 1919, quoted by Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 158–67, 160. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 263. 44  Thomas F.  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1924), 172. 45  Millard quoted in Wood, The Shantung Question, 109. 46  Thomas F. Millard, ‘Japan, “Race Equality,” and the League of Nations: Paris, April 6, 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 173. Emphasis in the original.

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tions of the Japanese government to the restraints placed on Japanese immigration to the United States concerned the position of Japanese alone: the government did not at first ‘pretend to be concerned (nor could it properly so act) about the position of Chinese and other Orientals in America,’ as its aim was that of improving the position of its own nationals.47 However, Millard continued, the Japanese government came to appreciate the utility of ‘this issue, when presented in a certain form, to the Pan-Asian propaganda which for a number of years Japan had been carrying on in all Asiatic countries, and it was expanded, as a doctrine, to its present “racial equality” form,’ presumably for the purpose of establishing Japan’s moral authority in those countries.48 Thus, Millard suggested, a distinction should be drawn between the laudable goal of promoting racial equality as a universal and international principle and the Japanese government’s desire ‘to secure admission of Japanese into Western countries, and their residences there on equal terms with white people’ out of concern for ‘the advantages and national pride of Japanese exclusively.’49 That the Japanese government’s concern was with the latter rather than the former, Millard argued, was demonstrated by the fact that immigration restrictions in Japan served to exclude ‘Chinese and other Oriental laborers from free competition with Japanese in Japan … and also by regulations favouring Japanese in Formosa and Korea (countries now governed by Japan) over the natives in order to enable Japanese to compete with the native labor and production, and also in commerce.’50 Most telling in Millard’s view, was the consideration that if the immigration policies of nations were made to genuinely conform to the principle of racial equality, and if this principle were then applied genuinely to the immigration policies of Western nations, the aim that the Japanese government desired, namely, that of bettering the situation of its nationals, would be defeated, an outcome which, Millard maintained, was well understood by that government. Millard thus stated that if all Oriental peoples should have the same privileges and rights, the practical advantages to Japan and to Japanese of such a status would diminish and perhaps vanish, for other Oriental immigrants could undercut the Japanese almost as easily and effectively as the Japanese undercut the Western natives. …. The Japanese Government, therefore, does not really desire to have a genuine application of the ‘racial equality’ principle to the racial equality to the immigration issue.51  Ibid. Emphasis in the original.  Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 49  Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 50  Ibid. 51  Ibid., 174. Emphasis in the original. 47 48

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Millard listed four reasons as to why the question of racial equality was raised by the Japanese delegation in connection with the proposed Covenant of the League of Nations: first, in order to further and strengthen the Japanese government’s campaign of Pan-Asian propaganda; second, to engender sympathetic feelings towards Japan in Western countries; third, in the event that the Japanese proposal  concerning racial  equality  was rejected, ‘to enable Japan to pose as having a grievance which should be redressed or compensated by the Conference’; and fourth, in the event that the Japanese request was accepted by the conference, to enable the Japanese government ‘to present something to assuage popular disappointment in Japan’ should Japanese efforts concerning what Millard stated was the ‘major object’ of the Japanese government at the conference prove unsuccessful. In stating this last, Millard was referring to the furthering of what he described as the chief purpose of Japanese foreign policy at the time, namely, the achievement of ‘hegemony in eastern Asia.’ 52 On the basis of his contention that the Japanese government did not really want to see the principle of racial equality applied in a consistent manner to the immigration policies of Western countries because that would be to the disadvantage of the Japanese in those countries, Millard maintained that one could ‘safely’ assume that a ‘vaguely worded clause of that import in the Covenant need give no special uneasiness to Western countries which have reason to dread an influx of Orientals.’53 Millard further maintained, recalling here that his aforementioned memorandum was dated April 6, that this was probably the reason why, as  had been reported he noted, the American government did not ‘especially object’ to the idea of placating Japan and other ‘Asiatic  peoples’  by  accepting the insertion in the preamble of a clause along the lines of the watered-down clause on racial equality that was proposed by the Japanese delegation on April 11 : it did not see the enactment of such a clause as inconsistent with the determination of the American people to stringently control ‘and, if need be to exclude, Asiatic and any other immigration.’54 Indeed, Millard claimed that  the members of the American Commission  to Negotiate Peace, far from feeling any uneasiness at the idea of conciliating Japan by inserting ‘some generalisation about race equality into the preamble,’ welcomed the idea as it would ‘deftly’ deprive Japan of an ‘alleged “grievance”.’55 In this connection, Millard expressed  Ibid., 174–5. Emphasis in the original.  Ibid., 175. 54  Ibid., 176. 55  Millard quoted in Wood, The Shantung Question, 109. 52 53

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the concern that should the amendment be rejected, Japan would obtain leverage in regard to vastly more important matters that concerned her: he feared that Japan would push for and be granted compensation or redress which he thought inevitably would be ‘at the expense of China.’56 Having stated that the Wilson at first supported the Japanese amendment of April 11, House went on to note that the president later shifted his position on the advice of House himself, observing in relation to this shift the following: ‘Cecil, under instructions from his Government, could not [support it]; and since I knew that [William  M.] Hughes [the Australian Prime Minister] would fight it, and make an inflammatory speech in the Plenary Session, I urged the President to stay with the British, which he did.’57 Among the Dominion delegates opposed to the racial equality clause, Hughes was the most strident. In the lead up to April 11, he repulsed all of House’s efforts at brokering a compromise, stating of one such effort the following: ‘It may be all right …. But sooner than agree to it I would walk into the Seine—or the Folies Bergères—with my clothes off.’58 Thus, when the covenant was adopted on April 28, it was without the Japanese amendment, causing Makino to declare that it was his duty to state that for his government and the Japanese people it was a matter of ‘poignant regret’ that the commission had failed to adopt Japan’s ‘just demand for laying down a principle aiming at the adjustment of this long-standing grievance,’ adding that the Japanese government would persist in seeking to have this principle adopted by the LON in the future.59 King observed in relation to this that the Japanese had ‘cleverly’  Ibid., 175. See also Wood, The Shantung Question, 110. Emphasis in the original.  Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 428. 58  William (Billy) Morris Hughes, 1919 quoted in Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 319. 59  Makino Nobuaki, 1919, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 324–5. In a memorandum written three days after the First Assembly convened, Millard observed that ‘[u]ntil within the last two months, Japan’s inspired propaganda has stressed the alleged intention of the Japanese Government to raise the “racial equality” issue before the Assembly of the League at Geneva. Recently, however, this propaganda has been suppressed, and instead the idea has been sent out that Japan will not bring up the question at this meeting …. It is probable that Japan’s manipulation of the “race” issue now is meant to influence the question of the renewal of the alliance with Great Britain.’ Millard went on to state that Great Britain was vulnerable to embarrassment on the racial equality question because of its ‘various Asiatic dependencies and the fact that all of Great Britain’s great self-governing Colonies, or Dominions, are strongly opposed to some interpretations that may be read into a recognition of “race equality” as a principle of international law.’ He also noted that recent 56 57

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reminded the conference of the proposal while refraining to take any further action on it.60 Even though the proposed racial equality amendment was used by the Japanese delegation as a bargaining chip as is illustrated below, this should not lead one to neglect the fact that the question of racial equality was regarded extremely seriously by Japanese public opinion. Baker observed in relation to the refusal to recognise ‘racial or even national equality’ that few people realised ‘how sharply the Japanese felt this hurt to their pride.’61 In the years 1931 to 1934, Akagi was a visiting lecturer in Japanese affairs at Columbia University. In 1936, he produced a study called Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936 which was intended as a response to what he had come to see as an urgent need in light of his experience at Columbia: the need for a connected account in English of Japan’s international relations over the previous four centuries.62 Therein, Akagi reflected on Japan’s struggle to insert in the covenant a racial equality amendment, stating of that struggle and its conclusion the following: It was a noble and gallant fight, truly worthy of Japan’s name, but it was a losing fight from the beginning. The world had not progressed enough to obliterate the color-line in international relations, and the odium of race prejudice and discrimination still continued to hinder Japan’s relations with some of the leading Western Powers. This bitter experience, with which the name of Woodrow Wilson is indelibly associated, and the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations left the profoundest impression on the Japanese mind.63

The Origins of the Shandong Controversy Akagi did not shy away from the fact that the ‘dramatic rejection’ of the racial equality amendment was used as a form of diplomatic leverage, observing that it was of great help in the context of negotiations concernevents had ‘minimized the use as a diplomatic expedient which Japan can make of the race equality question vis-à-vis America without reacting too strongly on Japan.’ Thomas F. Millard, ‘Subject: Japan, “The Racial Equality Question,” The League, and the AngloJapanese Alliance; Relation to the Interest of China: Geneva, November 18, 1920,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 177–8. 60  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 24. 61  Wood, The Shantung Question, 140. 62  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, v. 63  Ibid, 325.

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ing what he saw as by far the most important of the Japanese desiderata at Paris: the Japanese claim relating to the Chinese province of Shandong.64 On March 6, 1898, using the pretext of the murder of two German missionary priests in the interior of Shandong in November 1897, Germany compelled China through a show of force to sign a treaty which provided for the following: the establishment of a zone of fifty kilometres around the Bay of Jiaozhou (Kiaochow) at high water for the passage of German troops therein while reserving to China all rights of sovereignty; the leasing to Germany for a period of ninety-nine years of the Port of Qingdao (Tsingtao) at Jiaozhou Bay along with some surrounding islands; and the concession to construct through the medium of a Sino-German company to be established for the purpose, two lines of railway in Shandong and to develop mining properties in the territories adjoining the railways for a distance of fifteen kilometres also to be undertaken by a Sino-German company established for the purpose.65 Thus, as observed by Robert Lansing, the secretary of state in the Wilson administration and someone who, as a member of the American Commission  to Negotiate  Peace, was intimately involved in the negotiations over Shandong at the Paris Peace Conference, through the leasehold and ­concessions so extracted, the ‘sovereign authority over this “Holy Land” of China was to all intents and purposes ceded to Germany, which at once improved the harbour, fortified the leased area, and began railway construction and the exploitation of the Shantung [Shandong] Peninsula.’66 On August 6, 1914, following the outbreak of war in Europe, China declared its neutrality by a presidential mandate. Despite American and British efforts to discourage Japan from bringing the war into China, on August 15, 1914, not long after the Battle of the Marne, the Japanese government presented the German government with an ultimatum comprising two propositions with August 23 set down as the date ‘for its unconditional  Ibid., 325, 327.  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution to Herself of the Leased Territory of Kiaochow, the Tsingtao-Chinan Railway and Other German Rights in Respect of Shantung Province,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 323. See also Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 247–8. See further the statement of Wang Ch’ung-hui at the Washington Conference on December 12, 1921, quoted in Westel Willoughby, China at the Conference: A Report (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1922), 174; 111 Parl. Deb. H. C. (5th series) 21 July 1919, 1019; and John Fulton Lewis, China’s Great Convulsion 1994–1924, 39. 66  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 248. 64 65

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acceptance.’67 Concerning the first proposition, the Japanese government stated that in order to ensure peace in the Far East and the ‘general interest contemplated’ in the Agreement of Alliance between Japan and Great Britain of 1911 in an ‘enduring peace in Eastern Asia,’ that the Imperial government considered it its duty to advise the German government ‘to withdraw their men-of-war and armed vessels of all kinds from the Japanese and Chinese waters, and disarm at once all that cannot be withdrawn.’68 To the same ends, the second proposition advised the German government to ‘deliver up to the Japanese authorities by September 15, without condition or compensation, the entire leased territory of  Kiaochow  with a view to eventual restoration of the same to China.’69 China did not protest the ultimatum but rather, suspicious of Japanese intentions and not wanting to be excluded from a final settlement, intimated its desire to join the contemplated campaign against the leased territory; however, in this matter it was rebuffed by the Japanese government.70 As the German government failed to comply with the ultimatum, Japan declared war against Germany on August 23, launching on that same day a campaign of naval bombardment. Judging that the capture of the German naval base at the port of Qingdao required the use of land in addition to naval forces, the Japanese government on August 30 notified China concerning the deployment of Japanese troops on Chinese territory.71 On September 3, the Japanese government landed a force numbering 20,000 at the port of Longkou (Lungkow), 150 miles north of the leased territory.72 Against this background and having been effectively excluded  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 314. See also Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 243, and ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 326. 68  Japanese  Ultimatum, August 18, 1915, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 313–4. 69  Ibid., 314. Akagi observed in relation to the German leasehold at Jiaozhou, ‘it was suspected that, should Japan merely demand its return to China, Germany might enter into a secret agreement with China for the eventual return of the leasehold and, therefore, Baron Katō decided to request the transfer to Japan first to make the German relinquishment certain’ (ibid., 314). See also Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 248. 70  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 326. See also Mingchien Joshua Bau, The Shantung Question (Chicago: Chinese Students’ Alliance in the United States of America, 1921), 5, and Wood, The Shantung Question, 82–3. 71  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 326, and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 314. 72  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 327. 67

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from participation in the campaign by Japan, the Chinese government, following the precedent established by the Russo-Japanese War, issued a declaration delimiting a minimum area strictly necessary for military operation. Following the same precedent, the declaration stated that as far as that area was concerned, ‘we [the Chinese government] would not hold ourselves wholly responsible as a neutral State’ and reaffirmed the strict neutrality of the other parts of China.73 The delegations of the Powers in Beijing were issued with notes informing them of the war zone declaration on the same day. At the same time, an agreement was reached with the Japanese government that the ‘special military zone so declared extended from the sea to a point on the railway east of the Weixian (Weihsien) railway station, approximately 100 miles west of Qingdao, and that the Japanese troops should observe the limits and not encroach westward.’74 Nonetheless, on September 26, a contingent of over 400 Japanese troops occupied the Weihsien railway station on the  Sino-German Qingdao-Jinan (Tsingtao-Tsinan or Tsingtao-Chinan) railway line on September 26, an action which drew an immediate response from China in the form of a note of protest against the violation of its neutrality.75 On October 3 and 6 and on the same pretext, Japanese troops moved to take possession of the whole of the Qingdao-Jinan railway line and its adjoining territories (as had been flagged by the Japanese minister in Beijing on September 28), thereby drawing further protests from China.76 The 73  Ibid. ‘Appendix E (2): Notes on the Establishment and Abolition of the Special War Zone: First Note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the British and Japanese Ministers at Peking, Notifying the Cancellation of War-Zone, 7 January 1915,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 298. The Chinese president’s proposal to participate in the campaign was communicated to Sir John N. Jordan, the British minister in Beijing. The minister ‘discouraged such action as President Yuan’s proposal would naturally involve. The only alternative, then, was to limit hostile operations on Chinese territory to specified areas.’ Wood, The Shantung Question. 83. 74  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 327. See also ‘The Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Diplomatic Representatives at Peking Respecting Declaration of War Zone, Peking, 3 September 1914,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 297. 75  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 327, and ‘Appendix F (1): Note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Japanese Minister at Peking Protesting against Violation of Neutrality, 27 September 1914,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 301. See also Wood, The Shantung Question, 176. 76  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 323, 327. See also ‘Appendix F (2): First Note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Japanese Minister at Peking Protesting Against the Occupation of the Kiaochow-

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Chinese government noted that according agreements reached between China and Germany on March 21, 1900, both the railway and mining properties were to be under the protection of Chinese troops should the need for protection arise.77 The Japanese response to the Chinese protests argued in part that the railway line was not in fact owned by a private company but was under the control of the German government and that the aim of the war that had been declared by Japan encompassed not only the elimination of all German forces from the leased territory but the elimination of all bases of German operations in the Far East.78 Meanwhile, in company with a small British contingent of Indian troops which had landed inside the leased territory on September 23, the rest of the Japanese forces engaged with the Germans stationed at Qingdao, compelling the surrender of the fortress on November 7.79 Notwithstanding the Chinese protests, the actual occupation of Chinese territory caused a shift in the policy  of  the Japanese government: in December 1914, Baron Katō Takaaki, the Japanese foreign minister, declared in the Japanese Diet ‘that the restoration’ of Tsingtao ‘to China “is to be settled in the future” and that the Japanese Government had made no promises to do so,’ a declaration that seemed inconsistent with the ultimatum to Germany.80 In light of the capitulation of the German forces, the termination of hostilities and the abandonment of military action on the part of the belligerents, the Chinese government requested that Japan withdraw its troops from the interior of Shandong to Qingdao, the port of which was reopened on January 1, 1915. When Japan failed to accede to this request, the Chinese government communicated to the British and Japanese ministers in Beijing on January 7 that given the cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of all military preparations, all previous communications conChinan Railway, 30 September 1914,’ and ‘Appendix F (4): Second Note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Japanese Minister at Peking Protesting Against the Occupation of the Kiaochow-Chinan Railway, 9 October 1914,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 302, 306. 77  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 323, 325. 78  Ibid. 79  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 248; Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 211; and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 314. 80  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 248–9. Akagi noted out that while the capture of Qingdao was underway, the Japanese forces ‘were also busy annihilating all vestiges of German interests in Shantung, such as coal mines, iron works, and railroads.’ Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 314. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 211.

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cerning the delimited war zone that China had earlier declared were cancelled and that the original status of the area was to be restored.81 On January 9, the Japanese minister to Beijing, Hioki Eki, responded, accusing the Chinese government of a ‘want of confidence in international good faith’ and stating that ‘the Imperial Government would not permit the movement and action of their troops within a necessary period to be affected or restricted deems it necessary to declare that even if your Government by such act of cancellation.’82 Subsequently, on the evening of January 18, two days after a second note was received from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs concerning the cancellation of the war zone, Hioki presented the notorious Twenty-One Demands to President Yuan Shikai at Beijing, the Japanese government bypassing the diplomatic channel of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in order to render the matter secret until it was settled. Nonetheless, news of the demands and of their nature was  almost immediately leaked by Chinese officials to the press. The American minister to Beijing, Paul Samuel Reinsch, learnt of the demands as early as January 22.83 The demands were divided into five groups and were, according to a contemporary observed Wilson Leon Godshall, the best revelations of Japan’s intentions towards China during the period of the Great War which have come to light. They embody all the five fundamental policies of Japan in China, namely, economic exploitation, territorial expansion, paramount influence, political control, and an ‘Asiatic Monroe Doctrine.’84

The first group of demands provided concerned Shandong, the first article of which insisted that China ‘give full assent to all matters upon which the Japanese Government may hereafter agree with the German 81  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 327–8, and ‘Appendix E (2): First Note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,’ 298. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 338; 111 Parl. Deb. H. C. (5th series) 21 July 1919, 1019. 82  ‘Appendix E (3): Note from the Japanese Minister at Peking to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Refusing to Recognise the Cancellation of the War-Zone,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 298–9. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 338, and 111 Parl. Deb. H.C. (5th ser.) 21 July 1919, 1019. 83  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 207–9. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 338–9, and ‘Appendix E (4): Second Note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Japanese Minister at Peking Respecting the Cancellation of the War-Zone, 16 January 1915,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 299. 84  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 207–9.

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Government, relating to the disposition of all rights, interests and concessions, which Germany, by virtue of treaties or otherwise, possesses in relation to the Province of Shantung.’85 As Godshall noted, this demand seemed to proceed from the view that Japan alone was responsible for the capture of the former German territory, a view that if actually entertained, ignored the role played by the British forces. That said, Godshall concluded that it was very likely that some understanding had already been reached between the Japanese and British governments on the basis that the presence of the British contingent appeared to be ‘deliberate and not accidental.’ Godshall suggested that if there were such an understanding it possibly foreshadowed the secret agreement between the two powers of February 16, 1917, which is discussed below.86 Godshall’s conclusion would seem to be supported by Akagi’s observation that the matter of ‘the disposition of the German interests in Shantung was discussed by Japan and Great Britain soon after Japan’s declaration of war against Germany,’ although he claimed that ‘nothing resulted therefrom.’87 In any case, as Godshall rightly observed, the disposition of the former German territory should have been ‘left for action of the Peace Conference at the close of the war.’88 The second group of demands was aimed at strengthening what its preamble described as the ‘special position’ of Japan in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia, a position  which  the preamble  erroneously claimed, had always been recognised by China.89 As the use of the adjec85  ‘Appendix 6: The Original Secret Twenty-One Demands of Japan to China, 18 January 1915,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 491. Godshall explained that the ‘real significance of the first group hinges upon the railway situation in North China. In addition to the Shantung Railway, Germany had, December 21, 1913, secured a concession to construct branches or extensions southwest from Kaomi [Gaomi] to Ichowfu and Hanchung [Hanzhong] and westward from Tsinanfu [Jinan] to connect with the Peking-Hankow [Hankou] line. Japan claimed these rights and, in addition, the concession for a branch from Weihsien to Lungkow and Chefoo [Yantai]. By this arrangement Japan would be in a position to dominate China north of the Yangtze valley and be able to isolate Peking, by land as well as by sea, through control of the Gulf of Chihli [Zhili].’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 211–2. 86  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 211. 87  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 320. 88  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 211. 89  ‘Appendix 6: The Original Secret Twenty-One Demands of Japan to China,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 491. Godshall observed that China had never acknowledged Japan’s supposedly special position in South Manchuria or Eastern Inner Mongolia ‘beyond transferring to Japan under pressure in 1905 the concessions which had been Russian.’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 212.

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tive special might indicate, this group of demands seemed to be conceived in defiance of the principle of the Open Door in that the effect of its provisions would have  been  to secure Japanese predominance  in  the regions  specified.90 According to Godshall, the third group of demands reflected the Japanese desire ‘to control the largest iron works in China and to monopolize the mineral resources of the Yangtze valley,’ the fulfilment of which would mean the ‘introduction of Japanese influence into the very center of the British sphere of influence in central China.’91 Under the fourth group, which contained only one article and was ostensibly aimed at the effective preservation of the territorial integrity of China, the Chinese government was to engage ‘not to cede or lease to a third Power any harbour or bay or island along the coast of China.’92 Japan, of course, was excluded from this proscription (which was a response to reports that an American firm was in negotiations with China to lease a harbour ‘adjoining the Foochow [Fuzhou] Arsenal, Fukien [Fujian] province, for the purpose of reorganizing and modernizing the arsenal’), it being treated as a second power in this context.93 Group five comprised ‘particularly distasteful’ demands that reflected the Japanese ambition to gain political control over China.94 For example,  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 212.  Ibid., 212–3. 92  ‘Appendix 6: The Original Secret Twenty-One Demands of Japan to China,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 493. 93  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 213. In response to a March 13 protest by  Secretary  of State  William Jennings  Bryan against  the fourth and fifth groups  of the Twenty-One Demands, Katō presented to the State Department a memorandum in which he ‘pointed to Secretary Hay’s suggestion that the United States desired to improve a harbor in Fukien [Fujian] for a naval coaling station and to the reports that an American firm was actually negotiating with China for a contract for the improvement of that harbor, and stated that, because of its proximity to Taiwan, such an attempt would be detrimental to Japan and would be regarded as “unfriendly and inimical to Japan.” Bryan disclaimed such purpose or desire on the part of the United States and expressed his willingness to approve a SinoJapanese agreement “looking toward the withholding of any concession to any foreign Power which contemplates the improvement of any harbor on the coast of Fukien or the establishment of a coaling station or naval base along the said coast by any foreign Power.” Baron Katō lost no time to propose that, if such was the desire of the United States, China should know it. The State Department agreed to the Japanese proposal, and Baron Katō conveyed the American desire to China. Thus was buried, as a by-product of the 1915 SinoJapanese negotiations, the American plan to establish a naval base at Fukien.’ Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 348–9. 94  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 210. 90 91

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the first article of this group specified that the Chinese government ‘shall employ influential Japanese as advisers in political, financial and military affairs.’95 Explaining the Japanese approach before the Diet on May 22, Katō stated that the fifth group of articles concerned ‘miscellaneous wishes or suggestions which would strengthen Japanese interests if accepted but which Japan did not desire to enforce,’ this being the basis of Akagi’s claim that the Twenty-One Demands were more correctly described as ‘fourteen “demands” and seven “wishes”’. As the fifth group of demands were but wishes,  Katō  told the Diet,  the government had ‘considered it unnecessary to inform the other Powers’ about them.96   Although  Katō told the Diet that his country intended to ascertain China’s views on the fifth group, the language used therein was no less imperative in tone than that used in the other four groups.97 Further to this, according to Reinsch, Hioki had told the Chinese Foreign Ministry on February 18 ‘that the negotiations could not be confined to the first four groups,’ information that Reinsch conveyed to his government immediately after being apprised of it in order to correct the view in Washington, entertained as late as February 19, that Japan was not going to urge the fifth group.98 After having at first denied presenting any demands at all, Tokyo sought to deceive the outside world into believing that the fifth group of demands, along with some of the other more controversial features of the Twenty-One Demands, were not being pressed through issuing a sanitised version of the original consisting of eleven demands.99 95  ‘Appendix 6: The Original Secret Twenty-One Demands of Japan to China,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 494. 96  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 338, 340–1. According to Akagi, the following instruction was sent by Katō to Minister Hioki on December 3, 1914: ‘As regards the proposals contained in the fifth group, they are presented as the “wishes” of the Imperial Government. The matters which are dealt with under this category are entirely different in character from those which are included in the first four Groups. An adjustment, at this time, of these matters, some of which had been pending between the two countries, being nevertheless highly desirable for the advancement of friendly relations between Japan and China as well as for safeguarding their common interests, you are requested to exercise your best efforts to have our wishes carried out.’ Katō, 1914, quoted ibid., 340. See also Stanley K. Hornbeck, Contemporary Politics and the Far East (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 312. 97  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 210. 98  Ibid., 209–10. 99  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 208–9. ‘Japan’s allies in the Great War received the news [of the Twenty-One Demands] with surprise and incredulity. Official inquiries were made in Tokyo and Peking, the Chinese government “reluctantly” admitting the truth of the rumors and supplied copies of the demands. Japan made vigorous denials “upon the highest

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The Chinese government’s official statement on the negotiations, in the course of which no minutes were taken, records that at the first Sino-­ Japanese conference on the subject of the demands on February 2, China agreed in principle to Article 1 of the first group  which concerned the disposition of German rights in Shandong. However, the statement also records that this agreement came with certain conditions.100 These were as follows: Japan’s pledge to restore Kiaochow, China’s right to be represented at the negotiations between Japan and Germany when dealing with the disposal of Kiaochow, the indemnification of China’s losses due to Japan’s operations within the Chinese territory, the restoration of the control of the Maritime Customs, the telegraph and the post-offices in the possession of Japan, the removal of the Japanese military railway and telegraph lines and the withdrawal of Japanese troops.101

authority” in Washington and in the capitals of Europe, but later admitted having presented to China a memorandum comprising “eleven” proposals, omitting the most objectionable portions of the original Twenty-One Demands’ (ibid.). See also ‘Appendix 7: The Eleven Demands of Japan Upon China,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 494. See also ‘The Incorrect Version of Japan’s Demands Communicated by the Japanese Government to the Other Powers in Response to their Inquiries,’ in Thomas F. Millard, Democracy and the Eastern Question: The Problem of the Far East as Demonstrated by the Great War, and its Relation to the United States of America (New York: Century, 1919), 376–7. Akagi stated that the ‘contents of the Japanese demands, with the exception of seven “wishes” in Group V,’ were formally presented to Sir Edward Grey, the British secretary of state for foreign affairs, on January 22. Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936: A Short History, 346. Godshall noted that when questioned in Parliament on March 2 concerning the nature of the Japanese demands, Grey made a number of errors. Godshall wrote: ‘If we turn to Group II, Article 5, and to Group V, Article 1, we shall see to what extent the foreign minister was in error. Presumably he spoke, believing in the accuracy of his information, with no deliberate intention of misleading the British Parliament and people. This seems to indicate that Japan did not inform her ally, Great Britain, of the true content of the demands.’ Godshall further noted that on being questioned again on the subject on March 9, Grey stated there was no reason to suppose that the text received by Britain differed from that received by China. He added that Grey ‘declined to state whether or not the demands constituted an infringement upon the integrity of China. It is to be surmised that he knew full well that they were such an infringement but felt that his government was not in a position to act effectively even should it desire to champion China’s rights.’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 224. 100  Bau, The Shantung Question, 19. The Chinese government ‘later issued official reports of the proceedings of the more important conference’; however, they were ‘of necessity … sketchy and incomplete.’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 216. 101  Bau, The Shantung Question, 19.

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Periodic conferences were held after February 2 down to April 17 at which point negotiations were suspended at the insistence of Hioki.102 According to Godshall, the Japanese attitude displayed at these conferences was well summed up by the following statement by Hioki in defence of his government’s demands: ‘The present crisis throughout the world virtually forces my government to take far-reaching action. When there is a fire in a jeweller’s shop, neighbours cannot be expected not to help themselves.’103 On April 26, nine days after the suspension of the conferences, the Japanese minister presented the Chinese delegates with a list of Twenty-Four Demands, informing the Chinese delegation that this was ‘the final proposal of his government and must be accepted without delay.’104 The minister also declared that if China ‘would agree to the new demands without modification the Japanese government was prepared to state that the leased territory of  Kiaochow  Bay would be restored to Chinese sovereignty “at an opportune time in the future and under proper conditions.”’105 On May 1, in response to the revised demands of April 26, the Chinese government again offered its consent to any settlement that Japan might reach with Germany at the war’s end provided that Japan accept provisions designed to ensure the preservation of China’s sovereignty in Shandong and the leased territory.106 This response was deemed inadequate by the Japanese government, which replied by adding to the already  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 215.  Asia, November 1921, quoted in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 216. 104  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 218. See also ‘Appendix 8: Revised Demands of Japan Upon China, 26 April 1915,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 495–9. 105  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 218. 106  Bau, The Shantung Question, 19. ‘The Japanese Government declares that when the Chinese Government give their assent to the disposition of interests above referred to, Japan will restore the leased territory of Kiaochow to China; and further recognize the right of the Chinese Government to participate in the negotiations referred to above between Japan and Germany. The Japanese Government consent to be responsible for the indemnification of all losses occasioned by Japan’s military operation around the leased territory of Kiaochow. The customs, telegraphs and post-offices within the leased territory of Kiaochow shall, prior to the restoration of the said leased territory to China, be administered as heretofore for the time being. The railways and telegraph lines erected by Japan for military purposes are to be removed forthwith. The Japanese troops now stationed outside the original leased territory of Kiaochow are now to be withdrawn first, those within the original leased territory are to be withdrawn on the restoration of the said leased territory to China.’ ‘The Chino-Japanese Negotiations: The Chinese Official Statement, 1915,’ quoted in Bau, The Shantung Question, 19–20. 102 103

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large number of military reinforcements Japan had dispatched to Manchuria and Shandong in the middle of March, reinforcing troops in the Japanese concessions of Hankou (Hangkow) and Tianjin (Tientsin) and ordering warships into Chinese waters.107 On May 6, with the approval of the Japanese cabinet and emperor, an ultimatum was sent to the Japanese legation in Beijing and then presented to the Chinese president and his entourage on the afternoon of May 7.108 The ultimatum, contrary to usage, was in Japanese with no accompanying Chinese text.109 It contained a reference to the provisions China had set forth on May 1, and in this regard, it read as follows: Furthermore, the Chinese Government not only ignored the friendly feelings of the Imperial Government in offering the restoration of Kiaochow Bay, but also in replying to the revised proposals they even demanded its unconditional restoration; and again China demanded that Japan should bear the responsibility of paying indemnity for all the unavoidable losses and damages resulting from Japan’s military operations at Kiaochow; and still further in connection with the territory of Kiaochow China advanced other demands and declared that she has the right of participation at the future Peace Conference to be held between Japan and Germany. Although China is fully aware that the unconditional restoration of Kiaochow and Japan’s responsibility of indemnification for the unavoidable losses and damages can never be tolerated by Japan, yet she purposely advanced these demands and declared that their reply was final and decisive.110

It should be noted that the ultimatum omitted the fifth group of the original Twenty-One Demands, presumably because of the repeated assurances Japan had given its principal allies that it would not be pushing for Chinese accession to that group.111 Akagi observed that Katō had endeav Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 217–8.  Ibid., 218–9. Akagi asserted that President Yuan ‘suggested the use of an ultimatum in order to save his face.’ Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 343. 109  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 219. 110  The Chino-Japanese Negotiations: The Chinese Official Statement,’ 1915, quoted in Bau, The Shantung Question, 19. 111  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 219–20. Akagi recorded that the Sino-Japanese negotiations had ‘provoked … a storm of criticism all over the world,’ most especially in the United States. He noted in relation to this that ‘[s]uch a situation offered a superb field for China’s policy of inducing foreign intervention in her behalf. Baron Katō was extremely cautious in avoiding such a result’. Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936: A Short History, 343, 346. 107 108

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oured to proceed cautiously and that he was mindful of the protests issued by Great Britain and the United States. At the same time, however, Hioki was insisting on strong action in light of the lack of progress in the negotiations. He cabled Katō on April 27, stating that the revelation of the British and American expressions of concern had served to embolden the Chinese.112 By early May, Akagi observed, Katō had reached the end of his trail. At last he came to realize that his dream of a peaceful settlement could not materialise and reached the conclusion that, after all, duress, the method which the Western Powers invariably used so effectively against China in obtaining concession in the past, was the only method before which China would bow. But on the question of reviving Group V Baron Katō was firm. He insisted that the demands, if an ultimatum were to be used at all, should be something which was absolute, which permitted no room for suspicion of the Powers; that the items in the Group V from the very beginning were regarded as ‘wishes,’ not essential demands, which did not require any ultimatum to enforce; the difficulty in the Sino-­ Japanese negotiations was not centered in Group V but on the questions relating to Eastern Inner Mongolia; and that Group V must of necessity either be withdrawn or indefinitely postponed in order to make the essential demands based upon an ultimatum stand out as rational and reasonable.113

Under the ultimatum, China was given ‘twenty-seven hours within which to accept the revised demands or “the Imperial Government will take such independent action as they deem necessary to meet the situation.”’114 On May 9, the day after a lengthy meeting at the presidential palace of the Chinese cabinet and China’s military leaders took place, the Chinese government accepted the ultimatum and asked Hioki to ‘appoint a day to call at the Waichiaopu “to make literary improvement of the text and sign the agreement.”’115 In the event, Hioki attended the Chinese Foreign Ministry on May 25 whereupon he and the Chinese foreign minister, Lu Zhengxiang (Lou Tseng-Tsiang), signed two treaties and exchanged thirteen notes relating to the Japanese position in

112  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 342–3, 346–8. Akagi also observed that Chinese were emboldened by the British and American expressions of concern as they interpreted these as a prelude to intervention. 113  Ibid., 347. 114  Ibid., 344. 115  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 220, and Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 249.

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Shandong, South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia.116 Under the first article of the Sino-Japanese pact concerning Shandong, China engaged to assent to any arrangements upon which Japan and Germany might agree relating to the disposition of Germany’s rights, privileges and concessions in Shandong.117 Lansing observed in relation to this provision that it demonstrated that Japan did not consider that the military occupation of Jiaozhou or the taking possession of the German concessions gave it title to the territory or property occupied, ‘but looked forward to a future transfer by treaty’ or by some other form of agreement with Germany, an actor with whom China as a neutral country could not deal directly.118 Further to this, attached to the agreement was a letter in which Japan ‘promised’ that following its transfer, Japan would ‘restore the German-leased territory to China on condition that China granted to Japan a permanent point of occupation and made payment for public buildings turned over, and gave to Japan joint control of the railways.’119 The Chinese government had conveyed its position on the situation to the world on the day the ultimatum was delivered in the form of a communiqué which concluded as follows: In considering the nature of the course of action they should take in reference to the ultimatum the Chinese Government was influenced by its desire to preserve the Chinese people, as well as a large number of foreign residents in China from unnecessary suffering, and also to prevent the interests of other friendly Powers from being imperilled. For these reasons the Chinese Government was constrained to comply in full with the ultimatum, but in complying, the Chinese Government disclaims any desire to associate itself with any revision which thus may be effected in the various conventions and agreements concluded between other Powers, with respect to the maintenance of China’s territorial independence and integrity, the preservation of the status quo, and the principle of equal opportunity for the commerce and industry of all nations in China.120 116  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 220, and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 344. 117  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 334. 118  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 249. See also ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 335. 119  111 Parl. Deb. H.C. (5th series) 21 July 1919, 1020. 120   Sidney Osborne, The Problem of Japan: A Political Study of Japan and of her Relations with Russia, Great Britain, China, Germany, the United States, the British Colonies and the

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News of the negotiation of the agreements had given rise to considerable criticism in various parts of the world, most especially in the United States.121 As George Bronson Rea, a former editor and by 1918 the publisher of the  Manila-based  Far Eastern Review: Engineering, Commerce, Finance, explained in his analysis of the Sino-Japanese agreements, the German policy in Shandong had become ‘more and more liberal’ in recent times, thereby ‘tending to nullify the doctrine of exclusive privilege and encourage respect for China’s sovereign rights.’122 However, he added that the Japanese policy had the effect of reversing this trend, a development which, he noted, would have been to the dismay of the United States as that country had ‘long desired to force Germany to correct, in favour of China, the great wrong which she began to do … [to China] … in 1898.’123 Referring firstly to the Sino-German agreements of 1898 and secondly to the Sino-Japanese agreements of 1915, Rea wrote that Japan’s succession to Germany’s rights destroys the last hope that China will ever be liberated these provisions, for in the present treaties this principle [of exclusive privilege] has been expanded and perpetuated in Manchuria, and the attempt made to extend them to Fukien and apply to the iron and steel industry in the Yangtse  [Yangtze] Valley. The revival of the ‘Spheres of Influence’ policy by Japan, which undermine and subvert the authority of the Chinese Government, and tend to close the doors to others, sounds the death knell to the Open Door doctrine.124

It should be clear that in its communiqué of May 7, the Chinese government had declared in effect that should the rights of other friendly powers be impaired by the Sino-Japanese agreements, then responsibility would rest solely with the Japanese government.125 While a protest to the Japanese government on the part of Washington on March 13 succeeded in achieving an important alteration in the wording of the fourth group of Netherlands and of the World Politics of the Far East and Pacific (Rotterdam: C.  L. Van Langenh, 1918), 92–3. Sidney Osborne described himself on the title page of his book as an ex-counsellor of legation in the Far East. 121  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 220, and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations, 344. 122  Osborne, The Problem of Japan, 93–4. 123  T. H. Bliss to President Wilson, 19 April 1919, in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 75. 124  George Bronson Rea, Analysis of the Chinese-Japanese Treaties, quoted in Osborne, The Problem of Japan, 93–4. 125  Ibid., 93.

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demands concern Fukien, Washington failed in its attempt, in the form of a cable sent on May 6 to the Chinese and Japanese governments which urged ‘patience and mutual forbearance,’ to prevent or postpone the issuing of the ultimatum.126 On May 11, the United States sent identic notes to the governments of China and Japan which read as follows: In view of the circumstances of the negotiations which have taken place or which are now pending between the Government of China and the Government of Japan and the agreements which have been reached as a result thereof, the Government of the United States has the honour to notify the Government of the Chinese Republic (and Japan) that it cannot recognize any agreement or understanding which had been entered into, or which may be entered into, between the Governments of China and Japan impairing the treaty rights of the United States and its citizens in China, the political or territorial integrity of the Republic of China, or the international policy commonly known as the Open Door policy.127

The Japanese Claims at the Peace Conference On the morning of January 27, at a meeting at the Paris Peace Conference of the Council of Ten (which comprised the chief representatives and foreign ministers of France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and the United States), Wilson gave a speech in which he envisaged a mandate system under the auspices of the LON in an effort to defeat plans to apportion the former German colonies without reference to the new ideas of international trusteeship and self-determination.128 David Lloyd George endorsed the man126  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 223. ‘The government of the United States did protest to the Japanese government against special reference to any one nation in Fukien province and expressed approval of China’s withholding such concessions from all powers. It is probable that this position of the United States influenced the significant change in the wording of that section of Group IV of the Twenty-One Demands, omitting the phrase “to a third power” and substituting a provision applying alike to all foreign nations, including Japan.’ Godshall’s supposition is confirmed by Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 349. 127  ‘Appendix 9: American Identical Notes to China and Japan, 11 May 1915,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 499. 128  ‘The Supreme War Council [composed of France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States] had been organized by the principal powers [engaged in the war in Europe] in order to coordinate their respective efforts, and had resolved itself into a council to examine the “procedure and the methods to be followed in the conversations to settle the preliminaries of peace,” January 12 [1919]. Although President Wilson had favored informal conversa-

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date idea in relation to those German colonies conquered by British Imperial Forces; however, through ‘the medium of the Dominion premiers,’ that is, the premiers of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, Great Britain laid claim to the former German islands in the South Pacific and to German Southwest Africa. Against this background, Wilson posed the question as to whether or not the mandate principle should apply to the Pacific Ocean.129 He then suggested that the council hear from the Chinese and Japanese delegations on the matter, causing Makino to declare that he ‘did not wish to discuss in the presence of Chinese delegates Japanese claims on Germany.’130 Wilson persisted in the face of this attempt to exclude Chinese representation (an attempt which, according to King, was supported by the three European powers), and thus in the end the council agreed to invite the Chinese delegation to participate in the afternoon meeting, the Chinese delegation only learning of this invitation shortly before the meeting began.131 At that meeting, Makino recalled Japan’s capture of Qingdao and the German Pacific islands, following ‘consultation with the British government conformably with the [Anglo-Japanese] agreement of 1911.’132 He then stated that Japan ‘felt justified in claiming from the German government the unconditional cession of (a) the leased territory of Kiaochow together with the railways and other rights possessed by Germany in respect of Shantung province; (b) all the islands in German possession in the Pacific Ocean north of the equator, together with the rights and properties in connection therewith.’133 Wilson’s press secretary at the confertions among the principal powers, he also desired an organization of all the nations to prevent dictation by a minority of the states of the world. The outcome was another compromise creating the Council of Ten … and to make all decisions, subject to approval by the plenary sessions of all the Allied and Associated Powers.’ The meetings of the Council of Ten were ‘discontinued as superfluous’ on March 25, 1919, following the Council’s replacement by a smaller body formally known as the Council of Heads of States and informally as the Council of Four. It comprised the premiers of France, Great Britain, Italy and the United States assisted by a few confidential secretaries. The meetings of the Council of Four were not formally minuted until April 19, 1919. Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 252, 255, 264. 129  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 256. See also George H.  Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ Foreign Affairs 1, no. 11 (1922): 98–115. 130  Ibid. See also King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 5. 131  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 5. 132  Council of Ten, Secret Minutes, 27 January 1919, quoted in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 258. 133  Makino Nobuaki, 1919, in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 325.

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ence,  namely,  Baker, observed in relation to the first claim that it was ‘designed to carry forward … [Japan’s] … already well-formulated policy’ in respect to China and that Japan was in essence claiming all the rights, privileges and concessions in Shandong formerly enjoyed by Germany.134 Akagi observed that in making their claims, the Japanese delegation felt ‘fortified’ by  the  Sino-Japanese pact of May 25, 1915, that is, the pact under which China engaged to assent to any arrangements upon which Japan and Germany might agree relating to the disposition of Germany’s rights, privileges and concessions in Shandong, and by a supplementary Sino-Japanese  agreement made in 1918 which is discussed below. The delegation felt further  fortified by secret agreements Japan had entered into with the Allied Powers of France, Great Britain, Italy and Russia.135 These agreements were negotiated over a period extending from February 16 to March 23, 1917, in the case of Great Britain, France and Italy and between February 19 and March 8, 1917, in the case of Russia and effectively provided ‘that whatever Japan had been able to grab in China and the Pacific islands in the course of the war would be allocated to her in the peace terms if the Allies won the war.’136 An understanding common to these agreements was that the concessions made therein were a condition of Japan granting naval assistance ‘against the ravages of German and Austrian submarines in the Mediterranean.’137 It is noteworthy that the secret Anglo-Japanese agreement additionally provided that support for the Japanese claim was based on the understanding that Japan would, ‘in an eventual peace settlement, treat in same spirit Great Britain’s claims to German Islands South of the Equator.’138 It is also noteworthy that in a letter which declared that the French Republic was ‘disposed’ to support the Japanese claims, the French embassy in Tokyo drew the attention of the Japanese Foreign Ministry to Briand’s request that the Japanese government ‘give its support to obtain from  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 244–5.  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 325. See also Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 178. 136  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 57–63. Millard reproduces copies of these agreements. 137  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 244. See also Michael Summerskill, China on the Western Front: Britain’s Chinese Work-force in the First World War (Norwich: Page Bros., 1982), 176, and Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 61–2. 138  ‘The British Embassy to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 16 February 1917,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 57–8. 134 135

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China the rupture of its diplomatic relations with Germany, and that it [would] push this act to a desirable extent.’139 In relation to this request, it should be pointed out that up until the spring of 1917, Japan was alone among Allied nations in opposing China’s participation in the war.140 According to a report which was later denied by its subject, Ishii Kikujirō, the Japanese foreign minister, on being asked by the ambassadors of Great Britain, France and Russia to Tokyo to support China’s participation in November 1915, replied as follows: Japan cannot but ‘view with apprehension the moral awakening of 400,000,000 Chinese, which would result from their entering the war.’141 Approaching the Paris Peace Conference with confidence in their position in respect to Shandong (a position which was more reflective of the nationalist sentiment current among Chinese intellectuals than it was of the interests of the pro-Japanese military faction that had a firm grip on the government Beijing, the tractability of the latter meaning the Japanese government expected little trouble from China at the conference), the Chinese delegation appeared shocked on learning of the existence of the secret agreements when they were incidentally revealed by Makino on the afternoon of January 27.142 In explaining the delegation’s reaction, Millard wrote the following: 139  ‘The French Embassy to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 1 March 1917,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 60. See also Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 179, and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 320–1. 140  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 63. See also Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 177, and Wood, The Shantung Question, 83. 141  The statement was attributed to Ishii Kikujirō  in the following dispatch: Charles A.  Selden, ‘Japan’s Case Like Italy’s: Secret Agreements were made with Allies February, 1917, New York Times, April 22, 1919. On April 24, 1919, Ishii issued a statement denying that he had made such a statement, declaring that Japan looked forward to ‘this very awakening.’ Wood, The Shantung Question, 85. 142  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 249, and Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 57. Hudson noted that the decision to enter the war was made by the government of Duan Qirui (Tuan Chi-jui), ‘head of a pro-Japanese military faction which held power in Peking from 1917 to 1920. Japan did not anticipate that China would make any trouble for her at the Peace Conference, for Duan’s was the most tractable Chinese Government with which she had ever had to deal; it was financed by dubiously secured Japanese loans, which were promoted by a certain Nishihara acting in a semi-official capacity on behalf of the cabinet of Count Terauchi. But paying attention only to the subservient rulers in Peking, Japan failed to attach due importance to the growth of an intense nationalist sentiment among the Chinese intellectuals, who looked towards Canton for leadership. There a separate Kuomintang Government had come into being, weak as yet in military power, but strong in

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I am assured by a Chinese diplomat, that at the time when China was being urged by the allies en bloc to declare war on Germany, and when China very naturally wanted to obtain guarantees for her protection, some Allied diplomats in Peking denied that anything invidious existed to China in interallied war commitments and said that China could be sure of fair treatment. One understands, then, the feelings with which the Chinese delegation at Paris learned at a session of the so-called Council of Ten on January 27, 1919, of the existence of a series of secret agreements.143

According to a despatch from Paris by Charles A. Selden to the New York Times under the date of April 22, 1919, the revelation of the secret agreements came about when, against the background of Wilson’s insistence that the mandatory system should be applied to the German islands in the Pacific, Lloyd George found himself in the difficult position of having to acknowledge that alternative arrangements for their disposition had been made. According to Selden’s dispatch, [i]t was an awkward moment …. Mr. Lloyd George turned to Baron Makino for an explanation, whereupon Mr. Wilson was informed that Japan had received the promise of England, France, Italy, and Russia two years before, that she should have outright all German islands north of the equator, and that she had agreed that Australia should have all to the south …. After learning so much Mr. Wilson asked if there were any other secret agreements which had not been produced at the conference. It was then admitted that the agreement with Japan also included the British, French, and Italian promises to support her claims to the Chinese Province of Shantung as the price Japan demanded for allowing China to enter the war.144

Millard observed that notwithstanding the fact that well before the termination of the war there were ‘strong circumstantial indications’ that secret agreements had been made with Japan (suggesting on this basis that propaganda appeal both in China and abroad. In order that China might keep up appearances as a single state at the Paris Peace Conference, a delegation had to be formed by compromise between Peking and Canton, and as soon as the Conference opened, it was clear that the delegation was going to represent Chinese nationalist opinion and was quite beyond the reach of Nishihara’s influence.’ Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 177–8. 143  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 57. 144  The New York Times, April 22, 1919. Ge-Zay Wood offers a slightly different account of the revelation of the secret agreements which is as follows: ‘At the meeting of the Council of Ten, January 27, 1919, Baron Makino, in answer to the proposal that Shantung should be given back to China, intimated that this could not be done because of previous arrangements.’ Wood, The Shantung Question, 66.

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Wilson and Lansing either knew or, at the very least, ought to have known of their existence before they went to Paris), ‘their revelation at Paris was sensational and ominous.’145 What was made plain on January 27, he stated, was that at the time when the United States was on the cusp of entering the war and was urging China to follow its lead, principal Allied Powers were making agreements behind their back, ‘which, if sanctioned by the peace treaty, would impair American policy in China and would stultify diplomatic assurances given or implied by the United States’ to protect China’s interests.146 After having heard from Makino about these agreements, President Wilson requested that their texts be provided for the information of the conference. This was a request to which Makino at first assented, only to hesitate later on the ground that he ‘could not make 145  Millard pointed out that very soon after America entered the war, a British mission headed by Arthur Balfour visited the United States for the purpose of, or so it was announced in the press, informing Wilson ‘of the allied situation, plans and commitments,’ and it was ‘presumed that he did so.’ Millard noted that following the revelation of the secret agreements in Paris, a controversy arose as to whether the president had been told by Mr. Balfour (who on March 4, 1918, in response to a question as to whether Wilson had been communicated copies of all treaties, both secret and public, to which Britain was a party, had assured the House of Commons that the president was being kept fully informed by the Allies), ‘or any Allied statesman of the existence and character of those agreements. Men who know, choose not to be explicit on the point, but writers who have scrutinised every scrap of information that has been divulged since the war relating to the diplomacy of the war can reach no other conclusion than that President Wilson knew of most of those commitments before he went to Paris, although he may not have comprehended them.’ Millard stated that he himself did not want to imply that Wilson and Lansing ‘must have known before they went to Paris’ about the interallied secret agreements, although it is important to add that by this he probably meant he did not want to imply that they must have been officially informed of their existence: Millard went on to state that most commentators who had studied the circumstances asserted that they must have had unofficial knowledge of the agreements before they went to Paris. Millard insisted that in any case ‘it can be demonstrated that they ought to have known.’ He added that there was ‘sufficient ground for suspicion that such agreements existed for the American Government, when it entered the war, to have made definite inquiries and to have insisted on definite answers. For the American Government to have gone through the war and to have entered upon negotiations for peace lacking that information is, to say the least, a striking case of ineptitude.’ Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 65, 68–9. Wood maintained that the American delegates, Wilson among them, like the Chinese delegates, went to the Peace Conference ‘in absolute ignorance of these secret agreements.’ Wood, The Shantung Question, 66, 104. 146  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 65. ‘It is outrageous, to say the least, that any arrangement for the disposition of the German interest in Shantung should be made behind the back of China, who was not an enemy belligerent, but was about to join the rank of the Allied and Associated Powers.’ Wood, The Shantung Question, 67.

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them known without permission from Tokyo’; nonetheless, the texts were later provided.147 On January 28 at the Council of Ten, to the Japanese delegation’s ‘utter surprise and disappointment,’ Lloyd George pronounced himself in favour of the mandate system, insisting, with the support of Wilson, that ‘all German islands in the Pacific should be “ceded to the League of Nations” to be ruled under the League’s mandate.’148 Great Britain’s new-­ found enthusiasm for the principle of international trusteeship came about, according to Godshall, as a consequence of the French demand for the annexation of the Cameroons and Togoland, the knowledge that Belgium and Italy were interested in partitioning German East Africa and the fact that ‘even Portugal raised its voice for a share in the spoils.’149 Against this background, Lloyd George and Balfour concluded that ‘some concession must be made to the American position of opposition’ to the ‘distribution of former German possessions’ in the manner foreshadowed in the secret Anglo-Japanese agreement ‘if a deadlock was to be avoided.’150 In what proved to be a ‘heated’ discussion, the two men managed to persuade the Dominion premiers to support a compromise plan.151 Under this plan, the mandates would be divided into three categories: there would be A, B and C mandates, and the C mandate, in which would be included certain of the South Pacific islands and Southwest Africa, would

147  Wood, The Shantung Question, 66. See also Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 57. Lansing told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on August 11, 1919, in response to the committee’s inquiries and its ‘apparent implication that… [Lansing] … must have had knowledge, or should have had knowledge’ of the secret agreements, that he could now state that his ‘first knowledge of the actual agreements cane in the first part of February 1919. Under date of February 26 they were transmitted to the Department of State by the American Press Commission, and the department has no record or any knowledge of the treaties prior to that time’. Report of the Hearings on the Treaty of Peace before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, August 11, 1919, in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 66. 148  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 329. 149  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 259. 150  Ibid. 151  Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ Foreign Affairs 1, no. 1 (1922): 98–115, 99. Godshall noted the following: ‘Accordingly, they [Lloyd George and Balfour] persuaded the Dominion delegates to consent to an ambiguous resolution disguising their policies of annexation, but Wilson insisted that no action on mandates could be taken until the League had been framed.’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 259.

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be ‘administered under the laws of the Mandatory as integral portions of its territory.’152 Although the Japanese delegation insisted on the unconditional cession of the islands to which they laid claim on the basis of Japan’s secret agreements of 1917, on January 29, the Council of Ten decided that the former German colonies in the Pacific ‘should be transferred to the Allied and Associated Powers which would entrust them to different powers as mandatories of the League of Nations.’153 Later, the Council of Three, namely, Wilson, Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, would reach an agreement on the allocation of the Pacific mandates ‘so far as they alone could legally do so,’ according to which Japan was to be awarded the so-called class C mandates of the Caroline Islands (albeit with an American-inspired reservation in respect to Yap), the Mariana Islands (with the exception of Guam), and the Marshall and Pellet Islands.154 George Hubbard Blakeslee, a specialist in East Asian affairs from Clark University and one of the founders of the IPR, observed that Lloyd George’s compromise plan, which later found expression in Article 22 of the covenant, ‘was as near to outright annexation as could well be secured under the form of a Mandate.’155 Nonetheless, there were some important conditions placed on the administration of the mandated territories under the terms of the original mandate, among these being the following: the requirement to suppress abuses such as the slave trade and forced labour; to control arms and ammunition traffic; to prohibit  trafficking in  intoxicating liquor and the ‘military training of the natives for other than police purposes and the defence of the territory;’ and to pledge not to establish fortifications or military and naval bases.156 This last prohibition meant that the ‘potential strategic value’ of the mandated islands ‘was so far lost to Japan.’157 Yet as long as this restriction was applied to all mandated territories, Japan could not regard it as a matter for grievance, unlike the rejection of Japan’s 152  Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ 99. See also ‘Appendix 3: The Covenant of the League of Nations, 29 April 1919,’ in United Nations Library at Geneva: The League of Nations Archives, The League of Nations, 1920–46, 165. 153  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 259. 154  Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ 100. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 272. 155  Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ 99–100. 156  Charles Noble Gregory, ‘The Treaty as to Yap and the Mandated North Pacific Islands,’ American Journal of International Law 16, no. 2 (1922): 248–51, 249. 157  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 181.

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racial equality proposal which, as G.  F. Hudson stated echoing Akagi, ‘only emphasized the colour-line drawn by the United States and the British Dominions.’158

The Chinese Demand for the Restitution of Shandong Immediately after the meeting of January 27, Koo and Foreign Minister Lu called on Wilson. The president ‘expressed his surprise and distress about the naïveté by which the Japanese delegate had presented his country’s claims’ and urged that Koo ‘might speak just as plainly about China’s desires.’159 The following day, Koo delivered what was widely seen as a very impressive speech in the course of which he mounted a case for the direct restitution of Shandong based on cultural, economic, strategic, political and legal grounds.160 Koo pointed out that the province was the birthplace of China’s two ‘greatest sages,’ namely, Confucius and Mencius, and that as such it was a ‘Holy Land’ for the Chinese people and ‘cradle of Chinese civilization.’161 He pointed out that  the province of  Shandong was already overcrowded and that it could thus not sustain the surplus population of a foreign power. He then observed that the building up of a foreign sphere of interest in Jiaozhou would pose a danger to international trade and industries, that is, to the policy of the Open Door.162 In respect to strategic matters, the implied warning issued by Koo was that ‘with Japan already in control of Manchuria in the North its domination of Shantung would, by means of a pincers-like pressure on Peking, constitute a serious menace to China’s security and independence.’163 Koo also made appeal to the principles of nationality and territorial integrity, the very principles which the Allied and Associated Powers had agreed in con-

 Ibid., 181–2.  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 6. 160  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 253. Lansing stated that Koo ‘simply overwhelmed the Japanese in his argument.’ adding that this was the view of all those who heard it. See also King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 10. 161  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 330. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 258. 162  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 331, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 7. 163  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 7. 158 159

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vening the conference should form the basis of a ‘just peace.’164 In a memorandum subsequently submitted to the conference, Koo described the people of Shandong as proud and intensely patriotic. They are part and parcel of the homogenous Chinese race. They speak and write the same Chinese language, and believe in the same Confucian religion as the Chinese people in other Provinces of China. They meet every requirement of nationality; they are indeed the very embodiment of the principle itself. Nor is there any doubt of their earnest desire to free their own Province from the menace of Germany, or of any other Power.165

Koo told the Council of Ten on January 28 that China was appreciative of the debt it owed to Japan and Great Britain in eliminating the Germans from Shandong and to the other Allied Powers whose efforts in Europe prevented Germany from sending reinforcements  there. However, he added that grateful as they were, the Chinese delegation felt they would be false to their duty to China and to the world if they did not object to paying their debts of gratitude by selling the birthright of their countrymen and thereby sowing the seeds of discord in the future. The Chinese delegation therefore trusted that the Conference in considering the disposal of the leased territory and other rights held by Germany in Shantung, would give full weight to the fundamental and transcendental rights of China, the rights of political sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as her earnest desire to secure the cause of universal peace.166

Having declared this and having requested that the territory and properties in question be directly restituted to China rather than through the medium of Japan on the ground of efficiency and because to do so would ‘comport with … [China’s] … national dignity’ and be in conformity with the principles of right and justice for which the war against the enemy was fought, Koo then proceeded to contest the legal validity of the agreement

 Ibid, 7.  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 330. 166  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 7–8. 164 165

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concerning Shandong.167 He was well aware that this was no simple endeavour: according to King, although this agreement was signed under duress, ‘this fact alone’ did not render it invalid as the Japanese ultimatum had been accepted by the Chinese president. Irrespective of the conditions amidst which the agreement was entered into, King further observed, ‘it was nevertheless an agreement and it could not be broken unilaterally.’168 Koo advanced an argument for abrogation based on duress nonetheless, noting that China had been constrained to sign the agreement in light of an ultimatum issued by Japan with a view to compelling China to accede to the Twenty-One Demands. Quite apart from this, Koo stated, because the agreement largely dealt with a question arising out of war, it was viewed at best by the Chinese government as a temporary arrangement that would be subject to review by a peace conference.169 Godshall considered  that from a legal perspective the argument for abrogation on the ground of duress was the weakest of all the arguments presented by the Chinese delegation, observing in this regard the following: ‘Every commercial treaty of importance between China and European nations is the result of war or of some form of duress. We cannot invalidate treaties tainted with duress to which Japan is a party and at the same time recognize English, French, and Russian compacts with China.’170 By contrast, Lansing held that the Chinese case for rejecting the 1915 treaty on the ground of duress was a strong one, stating in this connection that the Chinese government had only agreed to it ‘in order to avoid an open rupture with … [an] … aggressive neighbour’ with whom China was in no political or military condition to fight.171 It is also noteworthy that Lansing rejected the validity of the Sino-German treaty of 1898, stating that Chinese government was right, both morally and legally, to denounce this treaty on declaring war on Germany and thereafter to treat ‘territorial rights acquired by coercion as extinguished.’172 Lansing stated that this treaty was the result of ‘indefensible duress,’ a description which would suggest that in his view China would have been right at any time after its 167  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 333. 168  Ibid., 8–9. 169  Ibid., 9 and ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 328–9, 334–5. 170  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 280. 171  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 249. 172  Ibid.

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conclusion to denounce it.173 Here, a distinction made by some publicists, as highlighted by Mingchien Joshua Bau in reviewing the Shandong question, is worth considering: It is, nevertheless, to be noted that what is recognized by international law is the validity of treaties made in consequence of war though imposed necessarily by the victor on the vanquished under duress, and that it is not conceivable that international law, postulating as it does the fundamental principles of territorial sovereignty and the equality and independence of states, will countenance and give validity to an agreement or treaty, the consent to which was exacted from a friendly nation in time of peace, and this in consequence of the violation of the latter’s neutrality. [Pasquale] Fiore says, while admitting the validity of treaties imposed by victorious states upon defeated in consequence of war, ‘treaties concluded between states must be freely assented to. Assent is not valid if given by mistake, extorted by violence or obtained by fraud.’174

Godshall agreed with this assessment to the extent that he allowed that the Chinese delegation’s case in respect to duress had considerable moral force. In this connection, he pointed to the fate of the treaties of Bucharest and of Brest-Litovsk, both of which, he observed, were negotiated amidst conditions of duress and were legally valid. Godshall pointed out that as part of the terms of the armistice, Germany was required by the Allies, Japan being among them, to assent to the abrogation of these treaties because their terms were extremely harsh on Romania and Russia respectively. He then posed the following question: ‘If treaties concluded by enemies could be abrogated under the plea of duress, why should not the treaties concluded under duress by allies be abrogated?’175 Makino later countered Koo’s argument in relation to duress, maintaining at a meeting of the Council of Four on the morning of April 22, at which he distributed copies of clauses in respect to Shandong for inclusion in the treaty with Germany, that ‘treaties signed as a result of force …  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 249.  Bau, The Shantung Question, 18. See also Pasquale Fiore, International Law Codified and its Legal Sanction, translation from the fifth Italian edition by Edwin Borchard (New York: Baker, Voorhis and Company, 1918), 332. 175  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 281. ‘The analogy of… [the 1915 agreements] … and the treaties wrung by Germany from Russia and Romania, which are now condemned, is apparent.’ Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 78. See further 111 Parl. Deb. H. C. (5th ser.) 21 July 1919, 1020–1. 173 174

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[are] … not invalid.’176 As King’s observation as to why Koo’s task was not an easy one would suggest, the Chinese delegation doubtless expected they would face a counter of this nature. This would help explain why Koo argued on January 28 that even if one were to accept that the 1915 treaty concerning Shandong was ‘entirely valid,’ the fact of China’s entry into the war had so vitally altered the situation contemplated in the first article of that treaty that on the principle of rebus sic stantibus it could no longer be enforced.177 Koo argued that China’s engagement under that treaty to assent to any arrangements reached by Japan and Germany in regard to the disposition of former German rights in Shandong was always subject to the tacit condition that China remained neutral throughout the war and, therefore, was unable to represent itself at a peace conference at its conclusion. However, nothing in the 1915 treaty with Japan, he pointed out, precluded China from declaring war and defending its interests and thus, from participating as a belligerent at a peace conference. To interpret China’s engagement under this article otherwise, Koo insisted, would be to accord to Japan an intention that would have been in conflict with a number of treaties and understandings to which Japan was a party, among these being  the treaty of alliance with Great Britain which upheld the political independence of China.178 Godshall contended that the argument that the Sino-Japanese agreement had become null and void because the situation envisaged at the time of its conclusion had ceased to exist was based on a ‘doubtful’ prin176  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 326. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 280. 177  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 9–10; ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 335; and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 9–10. ‘China advanced a doubtful principle of international law by claiming that a treaty becomes null and void when the conditions contemplated by its provisions or under which it is concluded cease to exist. The Chinese government maintained that it expected to remain neutral in the war and was led to believe that the necessary arrangements in regard to the German holdings in Shantung must be made by Japan directly with Germany. As a neutral state, China would have had no place in the peace negotiations and could not have spoken for herself or dealt directly with Germany. Consequently, the understanding that China was to remain neutral was an implicit condition under which the treaties of 1915 were concluded. This condition ceased to exist when China entered the war in 1917 and as a belligerent the Chinese Republic no longer needed the assistance of the Japanese government in treating with the German Empire.’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 277–8. 178  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 335, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 10.

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ciple of international law  by which he meant the principle of rebus sic stantibus.179 However, Godshall thought that the Chinese delegation was on strong ground in appealing to the principle, one which he observed was well established in state practice, that treaties are null and void if ‘entered into in disregard of existing pacts.’  Here  Godshall was referring  to the argument of the Chinese delegation  that  the Sino-Japanese pacts of 1915 and the accompanying thirteen diplomatic notes which, as we saw, concerned not only Shandong but also Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia, should be subject to nullification as they conflicted with a range of existing treaties and understandings guaranteeing the political independence and territorial integrity of China and equality of opportunity for trade and commerce in China.180 The existence of such a conflict was in fact implied by the identic notes sent by the United States government to China and Japan on May 11, 1915.181 Godshall thought that  the Chinese delegation was  also  on strong ground in arguing that the 1915 treaty in respect to Shandong was null and void on the ground that its object had disappeared: China’s entry into the war had abrogated Germany’s treaty rights in respect to Shandong.182 This abrogation was an element of China’s declaration of war on August 14, 1917, from which point, according to Koo, all the rights and privileges enjoyed by Germany in Shandong had ‘reverted in law to the territorial sovereign and original lessor state’ and thus there was no longer anything for the Germans to surrender.183 179  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 278. See also Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 277–8. 180  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 276, 279–80. The agreements with Japan conflicted with a range of international commitments, whether treaties or understandings, that Japan had entered into dating from the Hay notes of 1899 and 1900 and which entailed respect for the territorial integrity and political independence of China and for the principle of the open door and equality of opportunity. The 1915 agreements conflicted with the following treaties and understandings: Anglo-German Convention, 1900; Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902; Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1905; Russo-Japanese Treaty 1905; Russo-Japanese Convention, 1907; American-Japanese (Root-Takahira) Agreement, 1908; Russo-Japanese Agreement, 1908; Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1911; American-Japanese (Lansing-Ishii) Agreement, 1917. 181  Ibid., 280. 182  Ibid, 278–9. 183  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 335; King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 10; and Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 178. See also Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 249–50, and Bau, The Shantung Question, 7.

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As Lansing acknowledged, some might have questioned the argument that a state of war abrogated rather than merely suspended agreements of the nature of the Sino-German treaty of 1898 under the existing rules of international law. Some might have argued that the Sino-German treaty of 1898 was in fact  suspended rather  than  abrogated  on the basis that it involved a ‘cession of sovereign rights and constituted an international servitude in favor of Germany over the territory affected by it.’184 In relation to this line of argument and drawing on an observation of John Bassett Moore, Ge-Zay Wood maintained the following: [I]t may be said as a general rule of International Law that treaties which are transient in character and look to the continuance of a state of peace for their enforcement are usually considered as having been dissolved by subsequent war between the contracting parties, while those of a permanent and irrevocable nature are regarded as merely suspended for the duration of the war …. Again, war is a hostile measure which terminates all the usual friendly relations between states. All treaties of amity are ipso facto abrogated by a subsequent war between the contracting parties.185

From this, the following conclusion could be drawn in relation to the Sino-German treaty: The treaty of 1898 between China and Germany, being but a temporary one, with a limited period of life, was subject to abrogation upon the outbreak of war between the parties. When China entered the war the presidential mandate of August 14, 1917, specifically abrogated that treaty, and the Chinese government has consistently maintained, in answer to overtures by Japan, that her abrogation of the German lease leaves no necessity for negotiations. Japan’s contention was that the lease could not be abrogated by China’s participation in the war because the Kiaochow Territory was at that time not in the hands of Germany but of Japan. China claimed that Germany ceased to possess Kiaochow after the formal declaration of war by the presi Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 250.  Wood, The Shantung Question, 91–2. The jurist John Bassett Moore observed the following: ‘It is evident that… there was a recognition of the principle, which is now received as fundamental, that the question whether the stipulations of a treaty are annulled by war depends upon their intrinsic character. If they relate to a right which the outbreak of war does not annul, the treaty itself remains unannulled.’ John Bassett Moore, ‘The Effect of War on Public Debts and on Treaties—The Case of the Spanish Indemnity,’ Columbia Law Review 1, no. 4 (1901): 209–233, 217–8. 184 185

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dent of the Chinese Republic, since which time Japan has been occupying the territory of a friendly neighbour and ally. One of the objects of the treaties of 1915 disappeared with the abrogation by China of the German treaty of 1898.186

One might augment  the weight of conclusion  by observing that the 1898 treaty assumed a continuation of peace between the two parties, an assumption that was reflected in its preamble which declared the following: The incidents connected with the Mission in the Prefecture of Tsao-chau-­ foo, in Shantung, being now closed, the Imperial Chinese Government consider it advisable to give a special proof of their grateful appreciation of the friendship shown to them by Germany. The Imperial German and Imperial Chinese governments, therefore, inspired by the equal and mutual wish to strengthen the bonds of friendship which unite the two countries, and to develop the economic and commercial relations between the subjects of the two States, have concluded the following separate Convention.187

Further to this, it should be noted that under Articles 2 and 3 of the treaty, Germany was permitted in respect to the leased territory to exercise a right of jurisdiction and to construct fortifications for the purpose of protecting buildings and the entrance to the harbour. Clearly, to allow Germany to continue to exercise jurisdictional rights in the leased territory in a context of war or to use that territory as a base for mounting hostilities against China would have gravely endangered China’s safety and would have amounted to a renunciation by China of its inherent right of self-­ defence.188 Nonetheless, Koo was careful to observe in concluding his  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 278–9.  ‘Appendix 1: Treaty Between Germany and China, 6 March 1898,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 481. 188  Wood, The Shantung Question, 93–94. Also basing his argument on the criterion laid down by Moore, Bau stated the following: ‘The German lease convention of March 6, 1898, was extorted from China by the threat of the mailed fist. It further alienated from China her jurisdiction over the leased territory for ninety-nine years. In the event of war, the continuance of an alien jurisdiction on the soil of China would be inimical to her safety, and it is but natural, therefore, that she should avail herself of the opportunity of war to remove that source of danger and recover the delegated, or rather wrested, rights of sovereignty. Further, the lease convention granted to Germany the right of fortification, which meant that Germany, in time of war, could use the leased territory as a basis of action against China. It is but plain, therefore, that such a treaty should not be allowed to persist in time of war, but 186 187

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speech of January 28, the arguments presented therein being subsequently repeated in a memorandum submitted to the Council of Ten on February 15, that even if it were accepted that China’s declaration of war had not abrogated the 1898 lease convention, Germany would still not have been competent to transfer the leased territory to a third party.189 Under Article 5 of the treaty of 1898, Germany engaged ‘at no time to sublet the territory leased from China to another Power.’190 In respect to the ­Qingdao-­Jinan railway, Koo noted that under the Sino-German Railway Agreement of March 21, 1900, which was supplementary to the 1898 convention, the right to buy back the line from Germany was ‘expressly reserved’ to China, a reservation that implied ‘a prohibition against transfer to a third Power.’191 King pointed out that compounding the difficulty of the Chinese delegation’s task was the fact that barely four months before the Peace Conference commenced, the Chinese minister in Tokyo signed an agreement concerning adjustments to the situation in Shandong that concluded with the following statement: ‘the Chinese Government are pleased to agree.’192 King was referring to an agreement supplementary to the original Sino-Japanese agreement on Shandong signed on September 24, 1918. The immediate background to this  agreement was  the Japanese military occupation of the Qingdao-Jinan railway line and adjoining territories and the  fact that under an Imperial Ordinance (No. 175) of October 1, 1917, Japan had established a bureau of civil administration in should be abrogated upon the declaration of the same. As to the Tsingtao-Chinan Railway and the adjoining mines, while the agreements thereon were not intrinsically of a character as not incompatible with the status of war, their public character and their strategic and political relations to the safety of China warranted their being taken into custody by the territorial sovereign during the period of war, and pending the final settlement at the peace negotiation.’ Bau, The Shantung Question, 16. 189  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 335–6, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 10–1. 190  ‘Appendix 1: Treaty Between Germany and China,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 483. On the question of abrogation, see Wood, The Shantung Question, 91. 191  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 336. 192  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 8–9 and ‘Appendix H (3): Secret Agreements between China and Japan, 1918; Exchange of Notes between the Chinese Minister at Tokyo and the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Respecting Adjustment of Questions Concerning Shantung, Mr. Tsung Hsiang to the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs, 24 September 1918,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 314–5.

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Jiaozhou with branches in three other cities along the railway line.193 As the Chinese delegation reported to the Peace Conference, one of the branches of this office had even ‘asserted jurisdiction in lawsuits between Chinese and had levied taxes on them.’194 Under the September 24 agreement, which took the form of an exchange of notes in Tokyo between the Japanese foreign minister and Chinese minister to Japan, Japan engaged to withdraw the Japanese troops to Qingdao (albeit with the exception of a contingent of them to be stationed Chinanfu), and to abolish the civil administration offices in exchange for Sino-Japanese joint control of the railway and Japanese control of the railway police.195 The validity of this agreement was contested by the Chinese delegation on the basis that it was contracted for ‘an illegal consideration arising out of the violation of the fundamental principle of territorial integrity.’196 The illegal consideration in question was the establishment of a civil administration, its illegality stemming from the fact that it was ‘in consequence of a military occupation done in violation of China’s neutrality and sovereignty.’197 As the Chinese delegation maintained, the Chinese government ‘felt constrained’ to make the arrangement ‘because the continued presence of the Japanese troops and the unauthorised establishment of Japanese civil administrative bureaus which attempted to govern Shantung as Japanese territory aroused such popular indignation and opposition that no other course seemed open to the Chinese Government to rid the Province of their presence.’198 The Chinese delegation maintained that the agreement was viewed by the Chinese government as an interim measure aimed at appeasing Chinese public opinion, which viewed the establish193  Wood, The Shantung Question, 6, and ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution’ (ibid., 329). 194  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 329. 195  Mingchien Joshua Bau, The Shantung Question (Chicago: Chinese Students’ Alliance in the United States of America, 1921), 22. See also ‘Appendix H (3): Exchange of Notes between the Chinese Minister at Tokyo and the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 314. 196  Bau, The Shantung Question, 21. See also Wood, The Shantung Question, 99–100. 197  ‘It is an accepted principle that civil administration proceeds out of, and usually follows, military occupation, but, in this particular case, the military occupation was accomplished in violation of China’s neutrality and sovereignty.’ Bau, The Shantung Question, 21–2. 198  ‘Statement by the Chinese Delegation, 3 May 1919,’ and ‘Formal Communication to the President of the Council of Three, 4 May 1919,’  quoted in Wood, The Shantung Question, 99–100.

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ment of the bureau of the civil administration as a prelude to permanent occupation of the province, until that time that the war was terminated and a peace conference convened at which China’s interests could be considered.199 Further to this, as Lansing pointed out, while the notes exchanged record the fact that Japan was in possession of the abrogated German rights, nothing in those notes indicated ‘that they were there as a matter of legal right, or that the Chinese Government conceded their right of occupation.’200 Irrespective of these considerations, the revelation of Shandong railway agreement, news of the existence of which, King maintained, had been ‘deliberately withheld’ from the Chinese delegation until two days before the January 27 meeting, proved damaging to the Chinese case for ­restitution.201 Taken together, he stated, the 1915 and 1918 agreements ‘amounted to a virtual waiver on China’s part to a right of voice’ at the conference, albeit ‘purely from a legal point of view.’202 Indeed, Wood, who would later serve as an assistant to the press bureau attached to the Chinese delegation at the Washington Conference, contended that through signing the 1918 agreement, the Chinese, ‘either knowingly or unknowingly, had walked into a very dangerous diplomatic trap from which she hardly knew how to extricate herself.’203 The Japanese were acutely aware that the validity of the 1915 Sino-Japanese agreement would be subject to challenge in Paris in light of the circumstances in which it was enacted and China’s entry into the war. They were also aware that even if they could  count  on the support of the adherents to the secret Allied agreements in respect to their designs, they could not count on the support of the United States and other belligerent powers.204 As Wood observed, as ‘a stroke of diplomacy, then, nothing could be devised more astute and more assuring than to get China into these secret agreements of 1918, which could be held out as the evidence and proof of China’s

199  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 329, 335. See also Bau, The Shantung Question, 23. 200  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 251. 201  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 9. See also Wood, The Shantung Question, 98–9. 202  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 9. 203  Wood, The Shantung Question, 100. 204  Ibid.

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willingness to settle the Shantung question according to the terms that Japan desired.’205 In relation to the use of the plural of the word agreement in the last two sentences, it should be noted that a total of six notes were exchanged between the Chinese minister in Tokyo and the Japanese foreign minister on September 24, 1918. The second two notes exchanged that day concerned the adjustment of questions in relation to Shandong as discussed above, whereas the first two notes exchanged were concerned, at least on the face of it, with an entirely different matter.206 In the first note transmitted on September 24, the Chinese minister declared that his government had decided to obtain loans from Japanese banks for the purpose of constructing railway lines between Jinan (Chinan  or Tsinan) and Xingtai (Shunteh) and between Gaomi (Kaomi) and Xuzhou (Hsuchow). These planned lines were based on concessions formerly granted to Germany on June 24, 1914, and their construction was seen by Japan as important to the development of Qingdao as a commercial port and site for industrial development. The Chinese minister declared in his note that he had received an ‘authorisation’ from his government to request that the Japanese government take the ‘necessary steps to cause Japanese capitalists to enter negotiations,’ adding that other ‘suitable lines will be decided upon by consultation’ should the two lines be ‘deemed to be disadvantageous from the point of view of railway enterprise.’207 Immediately following the exchange of notes, a preliminary contract between China and Japan respecting the above-mentioned railway lines was signed by the Chinese minister and the vice-president of the Japanese Industrial Bank, the  latter  representing in addition to that bank, the Taiwan Bank and the Bank of Chosen. Under Articles 1 and 3 of the contract, the banks in question engaged to issue to the Chinese government bonds for the two railways that would expire at the end of forty years, the

 Ibid., 101.  Ibid., 96. 207  ‘Appendix H (1): Exchange of Notes between the Chinese Minister at Tokyo and the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Respecting the Construction of Chinan-Shunteh and Kaomi-Hsuchow Railways, 24 September 1918,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 310–11. Wood pointed out that ‘the argument that the Japanese Government used in securing this concession was that the grant made to Germany was made invalid by China’s declaration of war upon that power, and that the new grant to Japan covering the same routes would not be in conflict with the existing agreements.’ Wood, The Shantung Question, 177–9. 205 206

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total cost of the railway construction estimated to be 70,000,000 yen.208 Of most importance in this context, however, was Article 9 of the contract which provided that on the ‘conclusion of this preliminary contract, the banks will advance to the [Chinese] Government 20,000,000 yen in the full amount without any discount whatsoever.’209 Although the agreement concerning the financing of railway construction was formally separate from the agreement concerning the Shandong railway agreement (as was a third agreement of September 24, namely, an agreement concerning the construction of railways in Manchuria and Mongolia for which another advance of 20,000,000 was received), the two were viewed in connection with each other.210 The revelation of the railway financing agreement was also damaging to the case for restitution made by the Chinese delegation to the extent that elements in Paris took the view that a venal Chinese government had let the Japanese have their way in Shandong for the sake of Japanese yen. Such a view would have been encouraged by the following consideration: Japan had provided China with many loans in 1917 and 1918 and that the sums provided had been mainly used in order to carry out of civil war in China. Wood observed that it was thus ‘generally... believed that among the various reasons for the signing of the preliminary contract was the anxiety’ of Beijing ‘to secure the necessary funds in order to be able to hold out against the South. The sum of 20,000,000 yen promised in the preliminary contract was a timely relief’ for the Chinese government.211 The Chinese delega208  Appendix H (2): ‘Preliminary Contract between China and Japan Respecting the Construction of Chinan-Shunteh and Kaomi-Hsuchow Railways, 24 September 1918,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 311–2, and Wood, The Shantung Question, 97. The total sum required for the construction of the railways was not specified in the contract. However, on October 1, 1918, the Japanese government stated that the total cost was 70,000,000 yen. 209  Appendix H (2): ‘Preliminary Contract between China and Japan,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 312–3, and Wood, The Shantung Question: A Study in Diplomacy and World Politics, 97. 210  Bau, The Shantung Question, 23. See also Wood, The Shantung Question, 315–6. The third exchange of notes was reproduced by Wood under the following heading: ‘Appendix H (4): Exchange of Notes Between the Chinese Minister at Tokyo and the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs for Building Four Railroads in Manchuria and Mongolia, 24 September 1918.’ See Wood, The Shantung Question, 315–6. The exchange of notes on the building of railroads issued in a document reproduced by Wood under the following heading: ‘Appendix H (5) Preliminary Contract for Loans to Build Four Railroads in Manchuria and Mongolia, 28 September 1918.’ Ibid., 316–8. 211  Wood, The Shantung Question, 97–8. See also ‘Appendix C: Japanese Secret Loans to China in 1918,’ in B.  L. Putnam  Weale, The Truth about China and Japan (New York:

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tion in Paris in fact acknowledged that there was a connection between the two agreements, although not in the sense that the Chinese government had granted Japan control of the Shandong railway in consideration of an advance of twenty million yen. Rather, the Chinese delegation maintained that it was ‘in consideration’ of the preliminary agreement regarding the loan for railway construction that Japan had agreed to withdraw its troops and the civil administration from Shandong.212 Although it did not feature in the Chinese memorandum of February 15 and appears inconsistent with King’s explanation as to why the Shandong agreement could not be broken unilaterally, there is one other point raised by the Chinese delegation in favour of their case which is worthy of comment: that the pacts assented to by the Chinese president in 1915 lacked legislative sanction.213 Godshall pointed out that according to Chapter IV, Article 35, of the Provisional Constitution adopted in January 1912, ‘the Provisional president declares war, negotiates peace, and concludes treaties with the approval of the National Assembly,’ adding that it was thus unconstitutional for the Chinese government to enter into a pact without the approval of the legislature which is exactly what it did in 1915.214 Godshall then posed the following questions: Could China be expected to be bound by treaties concluded by the president but which lacked parliamentary approval? Could the United States, the constitution of which contains similar provisions, be said to be bound by the Treaty of Versailles which was executed by the president but not approved by the Senate?215 Wood raised the same point concerning constitutionality in relation to the agreement of September 24, 1918, for the construction of two new railway lines and the attendant loan contract. He noted that the concession in respect to the construction of the railway lines was made ‘by a few military leaders’ in the Beijing government through the Chinese minister at Tokyo  ‘but  without  the permission or knowledge of the Chinese Cabinet, without the Presidential sanction, and without legislative approval’ and that it was Premier Duan Qirui (Tuan Chi-jui) who, ‘on his Dodd, Mead, 1919), 178–9. 212  ‘Appendix J: The Claim of China for Direct Restitution,’  in Wood, The Shantung Question, 329. The Chinese delegation acknowledged that an advance of twenty million yen had been made, but added that to date, the final agreement had not been signed. 213  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 276. 214  Ibid., 277. 215  Ibid., 277.

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own responsibility, “authorised” the Chinese  Minister at Tokyo [sic] to enter into negotiations for the railway loan.’ Wood added in relation to the latter agreement that ‘the fact that such a contract had been entered into by the Chinese Minister and the representative of the Japanese Banks  was not generally known even to the cabinet members of the Chinese government.’ 216 On the basis of these considerations, Wood reasoned that the Chinese minister at  Tokyo lacked the authority to sign the railway agreement and the associated contract and that therefore they came under the heading of what the international lawyers called sponsions. As  such,  he observed,  they  were  not binding on the Chinese state until that time that they were ratified in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Chinese constitution which in the event they were not.217 Godshall and the author and journalist B. L. Putnam Weale (or Bertram Lennox Simpson to cite his real name), raised a similar point in relation to the Shandong agreement of the same date: that it lacked legislative sanction. Reporting from Beijing in early 1919 against the background of the Peace Conference, Weale had the following to say about this agreement: The Japanese Minister to Peking now maintains that there is no reason why the agreement should have been ratified by China, as it is binding on her in any case. The question is asked: “Can the Minister of any Power make with the State to which he is accredited a treaty that is binding, without further ratification, upon his own government?” If so, a new and very far-reaching principle in international law will have been established. The agreement has been cabled to China’s peace delegates in Paris, who have been instructed to lay it on the table of the Peace Conference. It will be observed that under this secret agreement, Japan proposes to garrison permanently the capital of Shantung Province, to control the police along the railway zone, and to place the Shantung railway under ‘joint control.’ These steps are tantamount to annexation.218  Wood, The Shantung Question, 98, 179.  ‘“Such engagements, when made without express authority, or beyond the limits of such as may be reasonably inferred, are called sponsions, are not binding until confirmed either by express or tacit ratification,” said Hannis Taylor, the well-known American authority on International Law. Or as Martens expressed it: “Whatever the chief or the inferior promises beyond the limits of the authority intrusted to him is only a simple sponsion which nothing but a subsequent ratification, either express or implied on the part of the nation, can render obligatory.”’ Wood, The Shantung Questions, 98. 218  Weale, The Truth About China and Japan, 185. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 245, and Madeleine Chi, ‘Ts’ao Ju-Lin (1876–1966): His Japanese Connections,’ 216 217

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The Response of the Japanese Delegation and the Reactions of the Council of Three Makino’s representations on behalf of his government at the Peace Conference in respect to the Shandong question bears out Wood’s observation as to the astuteness of the policy of inducing China to sign the secret agreements of 1918: they could later be cited as proof of China’s willingness to settle the Shandong question in accordance with Japan’s wishes. Following the presentation of the Chinese claims at the Council of Ten meeting of January 28, Makino ‘read pertinent extracts’ from the agreements of September 24, 1918, in order to demonstrate that China and Japan ‘had already arrived at an amicable settlement’ in regard to Shandong.219 Answering the Chinese nullification arguments on April 22 and having insisted on the validity of treaties signed as a result of force, Makino observed that China ‘had made no protest’ at the time when the additional agreements of 1918 had been negotiated.220 He then pointed out that in accordance with the terms of those agreements, ‘China had since received no less than twenty million yen.’221 Responding to statements in the Chinese memorandum of February 15 concerning China’s national dignity and the cause of right and justice for which the Allies fought, Makino made the acerbic observation that ‘the impression derived from the Chinese memorandum is that Japan must bear the burden of all sacrifices whilst China reaps all the benefits.’222 As noted above, at the meeting on the morning of April 22, Makino had  distributed copies of proposed treaty provisions in respect to  Shandong.  Following this,  Lloyd George produced the secret agreement between Japan and Great Britain.223 Lloyd George told the meeting that Great Britain ‘had a definite engagement with Japan, as recorded in the Note of the British Ambassador at Tokyo, dated 16 February in Akira Iriye ed., The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014) 149. Originally published in 1980. The leaking of this agreement to the press in China in April 1919 caused a public uproar. 219  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 326. 220  Ibid. 221  Ibid. See also Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 249. 222  Makino Nobuaki, 1919, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 326. 223  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 266, and Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 250.

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1917.’224 He pointed out that the Japanese government had engaged itself to support the British claims south of the equator and that the British government had engaged itself to support the Japanese claims north of the equator.225 However, following a statement by Makino to the effect that Japan was willing to support the British claims, Lloyd George then advanced his earlier suggestion that the mandate principle be extended to Jiaozhou.226 He urged that ‘Japan make no specified provision in the treaty for its disposition so that Australia and New Zealand would not make similar demands.’227 Chinda responded to this proposal by stating that Jiaozhou ‘was not part of a former German colony,’ and asking whether Lloyd George had intended in issuing his proposal to put the question ‘in abeyance.’228 Chinda then observed the following: The Japanese had a duty to perform to China in this matter, and they could not carry out their obligation to China unless Kiauchau  [Kiaochow]  was handed over to them. They were under an express instruction from their Government that unless they were placed in a position to carry out their obligation to China they were not allowed to sign the Treaty. Consequently, they had no power to agree to a postponement.229

Over Japanese objections, the Council of Four (or rather, Council of Three given Italy’s conspicuous absence), met with the Chinese delegation at 4:20 in the afternoon whereupon Wilson gave an account of the views expressed by Makino at the morning session and explained that he had not been able to persuade the Japanese to adopt a more conciliatory approach to the controversy.230 Wilson once more called attention  to 224  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 22 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 250. 225  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 266, and Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 250. 226  Ibid. 227  Zhang Yongjin, China in the International System, 1918–1920: The Middle Kingdom at the Periphery (London, Macmillan, 1991), 69. See also Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 250, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 266. 228  Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 69, and Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 22 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 250. 229  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 22 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 250–1. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 327, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 266. 230  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 14–5.

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the Sino-Japanese agreements of 1915 and 1918 concerning Shandong, reading for the benefit of those present from the notes exchanged between the Chinese minister and the Japanese foreign minister in 1918.231 He then elaborated on the complexities of the situation, stating the following: The Chinese delegation would see … the embarrassing position that had been reached. Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau were bound to support the claims of Japan. Alongside of them the Chinese had their exchange of notes with Japan. He reminded Mr. Koo that when urging his case before the Council of Ten at the Quai d’Orsay, he had maintained that the war cancelled the agreement with the German Government. It did not, however, cancel the agreement between China and the Japanese Government, which had been made before the war. What he had himself urged upon the Japanese was that, as in the case of the Pacific Islands, the leased territory of Kiauchau [Kiaochow] should be settled by putting it into the hands of the Five Powers as Trustees. He did not suggest that treaties should be broken, but that it might be possible, in conference, to bring about an agreement by modifying the Treaty. He also proposed to them that all governments should renounce the special rights they had acquired in China, so as to put China in a position free from the special limitations which had been imposed upon her. The Japanese were not willing to have Kiauchau handed over to the Five Powers, and the British and French Governments were embarrassed by their treaties.232

Despite Wilson’s disavowal of secret treaties, the president proceeded to defend the sanctity of  treaties and thereby  all the  secret agreements entered into in relation to Shandong, noting that the United States was the only country represented at the Council that day entirely unencumbered by such agreements. The question to be asked, Wilson pronounced, was how to get out of the extremely difficult situation created by them. China, Great Britain, France and Japan were all bound by treaties, he observed, and they were ‘bound to keep these treaties because the war has been fought largely for the purpose that treaties cannot be violated.’233 Wilson then pointed out that Japan and China would both be members of the LON. This meant, he said, that matters arising between them would  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 253.  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 22 April 1919, afternoon session, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 253–4. 233  Woodrow Wilson, 1919, quoted in King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 16. 231 232

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become  ‘the  concern’ of the LON as this body would be dedicated to preserving the territorial integrity and political independence of its members: with the creation of the LON, China would ‘receive a kind of protection’  that it  had  ‘never had before’ and ‘other nations  would have the right which they had never had before to intervene’ in support of China. Wilson went on to state that he was ‘prepared to advocate’ before the LON Council and Assembly that ‘the special position’ held by various powers in China should be ‘abandoned’, adding that Japan had declared that it was willing to support such a move. Wilson said he was stating this ‘as an element of security for China in the future’ should it not be given by the powers all that it wished for now.234 Returning to the question of treaties, Wilson stated that whatever doubts China had about its treaties with Japan, there was no question that Great Britain and France were bound to uphold their treaties with that country. He added that the only remaining question was whether China desired to uphold its treaty with Japan or would rather that Japan inherit the rights of Germany in Shandong.235 In response to Wilson, Koo questioned the validity of the secret agreements entered into by France and Great Britain in February 1917 and on grounds which overlapped with some of the arguments he had used to challenge the validity of the Sino-Japanese agreements. The secret agreements in question, he observed, had arisen out of war; their relevant object had ceased to exist once China itself had entered the war; and ‘[n]ew principles had been adopted by all the nations as the basis of the peace and the agreements and the agreements with Japan appeared to be in conflict with them.’236 In response to Koo, Wilson once more defended the principle of the sanctity of treaties, adding that even if past treaties were inconsistent with the principles now accepted as the basis of peace, the conference ‘could not undo past obligations’ as to do so would be to embark on a course with no end.237 Wilson stated that he hoped that the ‘quandary’ within which the powers found themselves would be explained to the Chinese people and that it would be demonstrated to them that ‘the 234  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 255–6. See also King, China at the Paris Peace Conference, 17. 235  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 18. 236  Ibid., 19. 237  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, April 22, 1919, afternoon session, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 256, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 19.

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undoing of the trouble depended on China’s uniting in reality with other nations including the Western nations.’238 Koo then stated that he ‘thought that the object of the peace was to undo unfortunate engagements,’ to which Lloyd George quickly responded by saying that this was not the object of the war.239 The engagements with Japan, the latter stated, had been solemnly contracted at a time when the Allies were in urgent need of Japan’s assistance, and as that assistance had been given, Great Britain could hardly now say ‘the treaty was a bad one and should not be carried out.’240 Within the framework of the treaties, he stated, Great Britain would do all it could to protect China’s interests, adding that in regard to the LON, he would always be prepared to stand up for China against any oppression, if there was oppression. China was a nation with a very great past and,  he  believed, with a still greater future. It would, however, be of no service to her to regard treaties as von Bethmann Hollweg had regarded them, as mere scraps of paper to be turned on when they were not wanted.241

At the end of Lloyd George’s speech, Clemenceau stated that ‘Mr. Koo could take every word that Mr. Lloyd George said as his own,’ soon after which, at 5:35 p.m., a dispirited Chinese delegation departed the meeting.242 Lansing believed, as did Baker, that Wilson was in agreement with the views of the members of the American Commission: with the views of figures such as General Bliss, the diplomat Henry White and Lansing himself in regard to the equity of the Chinese case. He based his belief on the fact that Wilson permitted the members of the commission extensive participation in the negotiations with both the Japanese and Chinese delega King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 19.  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 22 April 1919, afternoon session, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 256, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 20. 240  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 22 April 1919, afternoon session, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 256, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 20. 241  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 22 April 1919, afternoon session, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 256–7, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 20–1. 242  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 22 April 1919, afternoon session, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 257, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 21. 238 239

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tions  on the issue. Lansing supposed that Wilson may have chosen this course, which, he stated, was not typical of Wilson, on the ground that if there was to be ‘a departure from strict justice he desired to have his colleagues suggest a way to do so.’243 Lansing further suggested that the fact that he himself was directed to engage with the Japanese delegation and establish their views may have been because Wilson saw the question of Shandong as largely a legal question and had therefore ‘decided that the illegality of transferring the German rights to Japan could be more successfully presented to the Japanese delegates by a lawyer.’244 In the event, Wilson decided to depart from strict justice; however, none of his above-mentioned colleagues offered suggestions of how to do so. The strong recommendation of Lansing, Bliss and White was that on both legal and moral grounds the president should oppose the Japanese claims. From Lansing’s perspective, Wilson’s acquiescence in these claims provided yet another demonstration that the course of secret diplomacy is a perilous one for the arguments which in the end swayed the president ‘were those to which he listened when he sat in secret council with M.  Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd George.’245 In a similar vein, Godshall insisted that had an impartial commission heard the Sino-Japanese contentions,  the result would have been very different and that it was’[o]nly through secret interviews, agreements, and threats could the Japanese have been successful.’246 Most observers converged on the point that two other factors helped the Japanese case: the sudden withdrawal of Italy from the conference and, as already indicated, the rejection of the racial equality amendment.247 It was very fortunate for Japan that the controversy over Shandong reached its peak against the background of Wilson’s refusal of Italy’s demands in respect to the Adriatic. As Wilson’s expert advisers noted in a letter urging Wilson not to bend to Italy’s wishes as they contravened the principle that 243  Lansing stated that he did not think that his opinion and that of Wilson differed as to the justice of the Chinese case, although he added that the thought that ‘probably the soundness of the legal argument in favor of the extinguishment of the German rights appealed more strongly to...[him] ...than it did to Mr. Wilson.’ Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 263, 265–6. See also Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 262. 244  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 266. 245  Ibid., 244, 267. 246  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 272. 247  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 327, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 24.

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there ‘shall be no bartering of peoples,’ the Italian representatives were demanding the Adriatic port of Fiume, islands off the eastern side of the Adriatic and a considerable portion of the Dalmatian coast ‘in order to emerge from the conference with loot for their people.’248 The Italian claims were partly based in another war-time secret agreement: the Treaty of London which was concluded between Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia and signed on April 26, 1915, and which contained a list of territories that Italy was to receive under a future treaty of peace.249 At the Peace Conference, Wilson bluntly refused to accept the Italian claim to Fiume (a claim which had not been guaranteed by the Treaty of London as that treaty, as Wilson and Balfour pointed out at the conference, expressly gave Fiume to Croatia), which Italy had seized from the enemy and claimed at the conference  on  the basis of  the  principle of self-determination: in view of the Italian component of Fiume’s population.250 In respect to the Adriatic situation more generally, on April 23, 1919, the president issued a public statement in which he declared the following: When Italy entered the war she entered upon the basis of a definite, but private understanding with Great Britain and France now known as the Pact of London. Since that time the whole face of circumstances has been altered. Many other Powers great and small, have entered the struggle with no knowledge of that private understanding.251

As Millard noted in a memorandum entitled ‘Analogy of President Wilson’s Statement re the Adriatic Situation to the Case of China’ penned 248  Document 36: ‘Letter of Six American Experts to President Wilson urging him not to yield on the Italian claims, 17 April 1919,’ in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement: Written from this Unpublished and Personal Material, vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923), 278. 249  F.  Seymour Cocks, The Secret Treaties and Understandings: Text of the Available Documents with Introductory Comments and Explanatory Notes (London:  Union  of Democratic Control, 1918), 31–2. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 250. 250  Document 37: ‘Memorandum of A. J. Balfour, explaining attitude of Great Britain and France regarding the Italian Settlement, 24 April 1919,’ and Document 38:’ Public Statement of Woodrow Wilson on the Italian Settlement, 23 April 1919,’ in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 3, 281, 288. See also ‘Treaty with Italy, 26 April 1915,’ in Cocks, The Secret Treaties and Understandings, 35, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 267. 251  Woodrow Wilson, 1919, quoted in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 78.

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on April 23, in essence, the president was arguing that the provisions of the Treaty of London had been abrogated by events: the intervening years since that treaty was signed had seen new facts on the ground emerge and new principles publicly embraced. As Wilson himself explained: The Austro-Hungarian Empire, then the enemy of Europe and at whose expense the Pact of London was to be kept in the event of victory, has gone to pieces and no longer exists. Not only that. The several parts of that Empire, it is now agreed by Italy and all her associates, are to be erected into independent states and associated in a League of Nations, not with those who were recently our enemies, but with Italy herself and the powers that stood with Italy in the great war for liberty. We are to establish their liberty as well as our own. They are to be among the smaller states whose interests are henceforth to be as scrupulously safeguarded as the interests of the most powerful states.252

On the afternoon of April 24, the Italian prime minister Vittorio Orlando, highly dissatisfied with the limited concessions that Wilson was willing to make and seeking to moderate the impact in Italy of Wilson’s public appeal, withdrew the Italian delegation to Rome, thereby  formally reducing the Big Four to a Big Three.253 That same afternoon, sensing a tactical opening, Marquis Saionji Kinmochi, a politically powerful figure who served as the chief representative of Japan, sent a letter to the Council of Three in which he peremptorily insisted upon a ‘definite settlement of this question [of Shandong] … with the least possible delay.’254 On the evening of April 26 and at the request of Wilson, Lansing and Edward T. Williams, the American Commission’s chief expert on the Far East, conferred with Chinda with a view to dissuading the Japanese from pressing their demands and persuading them instead to  accept the pro252  Document 38: ‘Public Statement of Woodrow Wilson on the Italian Settlement, 23 April 1919,’ in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 3, 287. 253  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 267. Andrew Williams records that when Wilson ‘refused point-blank to recognise Italian claims to Fiume and Dalmatia he caused Orlando to “sob”. As Balfour related this later to [Sir Maurice A. P. H] Hankey: “he ha[d] known of countries fighting, bringing and intriguing their way to Empire, but he ha[d] never before heard of an attempt to sob their way to Empire.”’ Andrew Williams, Failed imagination? New world orders of the twentieth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 61. 254  Saionji Kinmochi, 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 259. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 321, 328.

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posal for an international trusteeship in respect to Shandong.255 However, their efforts were in vain, for, according to the record of the conversation, they found Chinda ‘even stiffer in “insisting upon the exact fulfilment of the treaty with China” than he had been in the Council of Four.’256 Lansing stated that at the meeting Chinda ‘made it very clear that Japan intended to insist on her “pound of flesh”’ and that there was no room for compromise.257  China  reiterated  at the meeting  with Lansing  the  statement he made at the Council on April 22: that the Japanese delegation was under instructions not to sign the treaty unless the German rights in Shandong were renounced in favour of Japan.258 The withdrawal to Rome of Orlando and his foreign minister Sidney Sonnino and the accompanying doubts as to whether the Italians would return to Paris (which in the event they did on May 6), in order to formally endorse the treaty, made Wilson especially anxious about the Japanese threats. According to Lansing and other observers, Wilson probably feared that should two of the five major powers decline to accept the treaty incorporating the covenant, the plan for the LON would be endangered and Wilson’s critics at home would be greatly encouraged.259 Although allowing that Wilson’s thinking concerning the implications of having two of the five major powers refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles and therefore decline to be parties to the covenant had logic on its side, Lansing contended it was based on a mistaken belief: that the Japanese delegates would carry out their threat to refuse to accept the treaty and

255  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 255. See also King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 25, and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 321. Zhang Yongjin states that the Japanese delegation had hoped to see a softening of the attitude of the Americans at this meeting; however, he adds that instead they found Lansing ‘still insistent on the invalidity of the secret treaties and suspicious of Japan’s purposes in Shandong.’ Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 71. 256  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 260. 257  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 254–5, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 25. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 321. 258  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 268. See also Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 261. 259  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 245. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 270n, 272–3, and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 327. Hudson wrote that Wilson ‘had given way because of his intense desire to include all the major Allied Powers in the LON and his fear that it would be ineffective for Far Eastern problems if Japan were outside it. Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 179.

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with it enter the LON unless the German rights were ceded to Japan.260 Lansing acknowledged that Wilson was sincere in his belief that the Japanese were not, as Wilson expressed it in conversing with Baker, ‘bluffers,’ a  belief  which was shared by House.261 As Wilson told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in a conference at the White House on August 19, 1919, in addressing Lansing’s contrary testimony given before the committee on August 6, ‘in his judgement the Japanese signatures could not have been obtained if he had not given Shantung to Japan.’262 Lansing had told the committee that he had been of the view and remained of the view that Tokyo would never have abandoned the superior international position that Japan enjoyed as one of the five principal powers at the conference and would  continue to enjoy  as a permanent member of the Council of the LON.263 Although confident that Italy would have eventually joined the LON even if it had not signed the treaty, Lansing considered that Italy’s position was different to that of Japan: irrespective of whether or not it joined the LON, Italy was assured of its great power status. By contrast, Japan could not be certain as to its exact location in the upper rungs of the international hierarchy. Tokyo would have very likely had been informed by Japanese delegates that Japan’s presence in the Council of Ten had been criticised in certain circles and would have doubtless taken note of Japan’s exclusion from the Council of Four.264 Lansing suggested that in terms of power and prestige, Japan did not have the luxury of following the Italian precedent, further suggesting that this was a consideration which the Japanese diplomats at the conference would have well understood, having shown themselves in that forum to be ‘cautious and shrewd.’265  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 245. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags,

260

273. 261  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 258, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags 269. 262  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 62–4. See also Testimony of Mr. Lansing, United States Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on the Treaty of Peace with Germany signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919, Senate Document Number 106, 66th Congress, First Session, in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 273. 263  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 245–6, 262–3. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 273. 264  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 246, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 273. 265  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 246–7. Zhang records that Kinmochi ‘practically told the other Japanese delegates at the end of April that nothing could be more stupid than to lose their heads over a petty imbroglio about Shandong, abandon the League of Nations,

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On the morning of April 28, after having given account of his meeting with Chinda on the evening of the April 26 to White and General Bliss at their regular morning conference, Lansing had a telephone exchange with Wilson, during the course of which Lansing informed the president of the unwavering determination of the Japanese to pursue their claims. That afternoon, at the fifth plenary session of the conference on the Preliminaries of Peace, Makino called attention to his racial equality amendment but then announced that that he would not be pressing it, thereby clearing the way to the adoption of the revised text of the covenant.266 Lansing later observed that he did not actually know what happened between the time of his telephone exchange with Wilson that morning and the adoption of the revised text on the afternoon of April 28; however, he interpreted the Japanese willingness to abandon the racial equality amendment as a sign that a settlement had been reached with Japan.267 In a memorandum written immediately after the plenary session, Lansing made note of the abandonment of the amendment and then recorded the following: At the Plenary Session of the Peace Conference this afternoon Baron Makino spoke of his proposed amendment to the Covenant declaring ‘racial equality’ but said he would not press it. I concluded from what the President said to me that he was disposed to accede to Japan’s claims in regard to Kiao-­ Chau [Kiaochow] and Shantung. He also showed me a letter from [Balfour] to Makino saying he was sorry their claims had not been finally settled before the Session. From all this I am forced to the conclusion that a bargain has been struck by which the Japanese agree to sign the Covenant in exchange for admission of their claims. If so, it is an iniquitous agreement. Apparently the President is going to do this to avoid Japan’s declining to enter the League of Nations. It is a surrender of the principle of self-determination, a transfer of millions of Chinese from one foreign master to another. This is another of those secret arrangements which have riddled ‘The Fourteen Points’ and are wrecking a just peace. In my opinion it would be better to let Japan stay out and withdraw from the Conference.’ He also notes that Hara Takashi, the Japanese prime minister, ‘in his diary entry of April 30, 1919 explicitly stated that he had instructed the Japanese delegates in Paris to wait for further instructions if Japan’s claims should be rejected.’ Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 73. 266  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 255. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 268. 267  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 255. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 268–9.

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of the League than to abandon China and surrender our prestige in the Far East for a ‘mess of pottage’—and mess it is. I fear that it is too late to save the situation.268

As noted above, this compromise had been effected by Balfour, who, following a request issued by the Council of Three at their meeting of April 25, had met the Japanese delegation on the afternoon of April 26, whereupon they were invited to ‘“dispel the suspicion” on the part of the British as to the motives of Japan’s insistence on holding the railway and its concentration of troops at Jiaozhou.’269 More than ten days before, Balfour had intimated to the Japanese that the British and French shared concerns regarding the Japanese intentions in Shandong and that Japan needed to concede ground in relation to this matter.270 Following his meeting with the Japanese delegation on April 26 and consultations with Makino, Balfour drafted on April 27 a compromise proposal in the form of a memorandum.271 The discussion of the Shandong question was resumed at the council late in the afternoon of April  28,  in the course of which Balfour presented the memorandum that he had drafted the previous day. 272 Therein, Balfour noted that the Japanese were insistent that they were not seeking to modify for their own benefit the arrangements reached by China and Germany in respect to the Shandong Peninsula and vigorously denied that the Sino-Japanese convention of 1915 would have had that effect. He further pointed out that Japan was willing to give explicit assurances that it would not exercise the rights transferred to it in a way that would breach

 Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 255–6.  Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 71. On the council’s request, see Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 260. 270  Ibid., 72. 271  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 261–2. On Balfour’s memorandum, see also Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 72. 272  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 261–2. See further Document 42: ‘Memorandum by Mr. Balfour of his conversation with the Japanese Delegates presented to the Council of Four, April 28, with important letter of Mr. Balfour to Baron Makino of the same date in which the relationship of the Shantung settlement to Japanese acceptance of the League of Nations is set forth,’ in  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 3, 311–2. 268 269

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the policy of Open Door and equality of opportunity.273 After Balfour presented his memorandum, the following exchange took place: President Wilson [said] he had told the United States delegation that his line was this: ‘If Japan will return Kiauchau [Kiaochow] and Shantung to China and relinquish all sovereign rights and will reduce her claims to mere economic concessions foregoing all military rights, I would regard it as returning these possessions to China on better terms than Germany had held them.’ Mr Balfour said that there was no doubt whatsoever that Japan was returning these territories to China on incomparably better terms than Germany had held them. President Wilson said his experts did not agree. Mr. Balfour said that the United States’ experts had not heard the Japanese case. The same had applied to his expert, Mr. [Ronald] Macleay …. Mr. Balfour continued that the Japanese Government now in power was not the same government as had made the Treaty of 1915 with China. He honestly believed that this Government intended to adopt a more liberal policy and had been influenced by what the Japanese representatives had learned in Paris.274

The council further renewed discussion of the Shandong question on April 29, deciding on the following day that in light of Japan’s acceptance of the compromise proposal put forward by Balfour  to insert into the Treaty of Peace with Germany three articles, which, as it turned out, were  almost identical to the articles presented  earlier  to the council  by Makino: what emerged as  Articles 156, 157 and 158  of the  Treaty of 273  Document 42: ‘Memorandum by Mr. Balfour of his conversation with the Japanese Delegates presented to the Council of Four, April 28,’ Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 3, 311–2. On being asked  by Senator Frank B.  Brandegee whether the Japanese assurances took the form of ‘a verbal statement between the representatives, and which ones, and whether it appears at length in the process-verbal; whether it is accessible so that the terms can be known,’ an expert adviser to the American Commission, namely, Edward T. Williams, replied as follows: ‘I do not know whether Japan made anything more than a statement that her agreement of 1915 with China would be carried out, and that to make any further promises in the treaty would be a reflection on her bona fides. Therefore, it is not stated in the treaty.’ ‘Report of the Testimony of Prof. Edward T. Williams of the University of California, Chief Adviser on Far Eastern Affairs to the American Commission at Paris, given before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 22 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 124. 274  Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 28 April 1919, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 261. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 270. The experts in question were Williams and Hornbeck.

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Versailles.275 The opening lines of the first of these three articles stated the following: ‘Germany renounces, in favour of Japan, all her rights, title and privileges—particularly those concerning the territory of Kiaochow, railways, mines and submarine cables virtue of the Treaty concluded by her with China on March 6, 1898, and of all other arrangements relative to the Province of Shantung.’276 However, it should be noted that not only was Japan awarded all the rights that Germany had previously possessed in Shandong, under Article 157 it was also awarded the rights to the ‘movable and immovable property owned by the German interests in the territory of Kiaochow, as well as all the rights which Germany “might claim” in consequence of the works or improvements made or the expenses incurred by her.’277 Mounting a defence of the Chinese refusal to sign the Treaty of Versailles, a development which is discussed below, a member of the House of Commons stated the following in reference to Article 157: ‘I am at a loss to understand how it was that that provision was allowed to enter into the Treaty. “All the rights which Germany might claim”—how are we to know what rights Germany “might claim,” and what limit is to be placed on the rights that Japan may claim under the provisions of that particular Article?’278 This point helps explain the following exchange between Senator Hiram Johnson and Edward T.  Williams  (the latter of whom shared Lansing’s view that the Japanese were bluffing in threatening to not join the LON), during the aforementioned Senate hearings: ‘Senator Johnson. Will you state whether or not in your opinion those provisions [in the Treaty] give to Japan more in Shantung than either the convention of 1915 or the German lease? Prof. Williams. I think they do.’279  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 271. See also Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia,

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80. 276  ‘Appendix 7: Section VIII of the Versailles Treaty Bearing on Shantung,’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 506. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 270. 277  111 Parl. Deb. H. C. (5th series), 21 July 1919, 1021. 278  Ibid. 279  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 261, and ‘Report of the Testimony of Prof. Edward T.  Williams of the University of California, Chief Adviser on Far Eastern Affairs to the American Commission at Paris, given before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 123. See also Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 258n. Williams’s view of the Japanese attitude was shared by the other Far Eastern expert advising the commission, namely, Stanley K.  Hornbeck. Bruce A.  Elleman offers a contrasting view of Wilson’s approach to the Shandong negotiations. ‘According to all the documentary evidence, Wilson had in fact succeeded in negotiating a compromise

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A Settlement to Save the League? The details of the putative compromise arranged by Balfour was contained in a statement prepared by Wilson dated April 30 which was cabled to his private secretary Joseph Patrick Tumulty in Washington ‘for public use at such time as the matter may come under public discussion.’280 A copy of the statement was also issued to Baker, who, on instructions from Wilson, immediately gave the substance of it, although not the text, to American press correspondents.281 Therein the president outlined an understanding in the form of verbal assurances given by Japan in light of the unreserved transfer to it in the treaty of all the German rights in Jiaozhou and the province of Shandong. Before going on to observe that the arrangement gave to Japan only such rights as were enjoyed by one or two other great powers in China and that in future the relationship between China and Japan would fall under the LON’s guarantee of territorial integrity and political independence, Wilson stated the following: Japan voluntarily engages, in answer to questions put in conference, that it will be her immediate policy ‘to hand back the Shantung Peninsula in full sovereignty to China, retaining only the economic privileges granted to Germany and the right to establish a settlement under the usual conditions at Tsingtao. Owners of the railway will use special police only to insure security for traffic. They will be used for no further purpose. The police force will be composed of Chinese, and such Japanese instructors as the directors of the railway may select will be appointed by the Chinese Government.’ It was understood in addition that inasmuch as the sovereign rights receded to China were to be unqualified, all Japanese troops remaining on the peninsula should be withdrawn at the earliest time.282 solution with Japan that represented a significant diplomatic victory for China. This was especially true as the terms of his compromise represented an enormous improvement over China’s own 1915 and 1918 agreements with Japan. By refusing to sign the Versailles Peace Treaty and by rejecting Wilson’s Shandong compromise, the Chinese delegation also rejected Wilson’s attempts to safeguard China. ‘For a contrasting view of outcome of the Shandong negotiations, see Bruce A. Elleman, Wilson and China: A Revised History of the Shandong Question (Routledge: London, 2015), 130. 280  Document 43: ‘Statement of President Wilson regarding the Shantung settlement, 30 April 1919,’ in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 3, 315. 281  Ibid., and Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 265. 282  Document 43: ‘Statement of President Wilson on the Shantung Settlement,’ in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 3, 315–6. This part of Wilson’s statement is exactly the same as that recorded in the minutes of the meeting of the Council of Four on

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As we saw, Williams testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that in his view the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles concerning Shandong, which as the Chinese delegation noted ‘were worded in the sweeping language of conquest,’ gave to Japan more in that province than had been obtained by Germany in 1898 and had been granted to Japan under the convention of 1915.283 The Chinese delegation, in a press statement issued on May 4,  1919, argued similarly: it declared that the council’s supposed compromise arrangement with Japan appeared to ‘sanction, for example, the policing of the Shantung railway—a privilege which Germany did not exercise or claim, and, it is apprehended, substitutes  a permanent Japanese settlement under Japanese control and administration for a German leasehold limited to a fixed period of years.’284 At the council meeting of April 29, Chinda had shown an unwillingness to enter into any ‘definite’ engagements and thus, in effect, all that was required of Japan the following day  when the matter was  finally decided,  was a vague promise that it would return at some unspecified date what it might please Japan to return to China.285 The indignation which Lansing, White and Bliss felt at the idea of acceding to the Japanese claims and the reasons why they thought the president should firmly oppose them had been conveyed to Wilson in a forthright letter penned by Bliss, whose judgement was ‘greatly trusted’ by the president, on the morning of April 29 with the wholehearted approval of Lansing and White.286 Therein, after having noted the very oddness of the notion of Japan pledging to return territory to China which by right belonged not to Japan but to China, Bliss raised the issue of what the Japanese government meant in practical terms when they stated it was their policy to give Jiaozhou back to China. What it did not mean, he stated, was that Japan would give back ‘the railway, the minds or the port’: April 30. See also Council of Four, Secret Minutes, 30 April 1919, quoted in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 271. 283  ‘Press Statement of the Chinese Delegation,  4 May 1919,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 122. 284  ‘Press Statement of the Chinese Delegation, 4 May 1919,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 122–3. 285  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 270. See also  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 27. 286  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 256–7, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 269. On Wilson’s view of Bliss’s judgement, see Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 262.

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what would be returned would be ‘[n]othing but such parts of the leased territory as are of no value.’287 Bliss added that the Japanese conduct in this regard was tolerable only to the extent that it was ‘right for a policeman, who recovers your purse, to keep the contents and claim that he is fulfilling his duty in returning the empty purse.’288 Bliss’s point here was that the vaunted compromise with Japan was illusory as it involved nothing of substantial value. This point was  echoed  by Lansing in a memorandum composed on the morning of May 1 wherein he stated the following: It is true that China is given the shell called ‘sovereignty,’ but the economic control, the kernel, is turned over to Japan. However logical may appear the argument that China’s political integrity is preserved and will be maintained under the guaranty of the League of Nations, the fact is that Japan will rule over millions of Chinese. Furthermore, it is still a matter of conjecture how valuable the guaranty of the League will prove to be. It has, of course, never been tried, and Japan’s representation on the Council will possibly thwart any international action in regard to China.289

According to Godshall, Wilson’s argument that the LON would guarantee China’s political integrity and sovereignty over Shandong only served to illustrate the fact that Wilson did not properly appreciate Japan’s aims, the same point being implicit in the observations above of Bliss and Lansing. Sovereignty over Shandong, Godshall observed, was something which the Japanese government did not need or desire, as Japan’s newly acquired economic rights were all sufficient to constitute in effect political control. Manchuria has demonstrated this. The question of returning to China full sovereignty over Shantung was but a subterfuge behind which to hide the real issues; as Japan never legally possessed such sovereignty, she could scarcely return it.290

 Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 259–60. See also Bau, The Shantung Question, 30.  ‘Appendix 12: Letter from Tasker H. Bliss to President Wilson,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 505. 289  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 262. See also Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 79–80. 290  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 281–2. 287 288

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A Bitter Chinese Reaction The president’s reason for his acquiescence in the decision of the Council of Three on the Shandong question was conveyed to the Chinese delegation on the evening of April 30 in the form of an unofficial memorandum which was delivered to them at their headquarters at the Hôtel Lutetia by Baker at the request of the president.291 A member of the Chinese delegation informed Lansing about this event later that evening, telling him that Baker (who had found the delegation, just as Wilson had expected, bitterly disappointed), had explained that the president ‘was very sorry that he had not been able to do more for China but that he had been compelled to accede to Japan’s demand “in order to save the League of Nations.”’292 Millard was present when Baker explained to the Chinese delegation the president’s reasons for acceding to the Japanese demands. He later recalled that late that night or  early  on the following morning, against a background of pouring rain, all the experts on Far Eastern affairs on the American Commission visited the Chinese delegation in order ‘to express their sympathy and their personal dissent’ from the Shandong decision. One of these experts remarked to Millard: ‘This will destroy the treaty so far as America is concerned; and I fear it will ruin the President.’293 This was a point which Millard took up in a brief memorandum on the situation that he penned upon his return to his hotel in rue de Rivoli: ‘I believe that the decision of the conference on Shantung, acquiesced in by President Wilson, will not be acceptable to the American people, and probably, taken in conjunction with other features of the treaty and the covenant of the proposed league of nations, it will ensure its modification or rejection by the Senate.’294 Zhang Yongjin states that when news of the Shandong decision reached Beijing, the ‘pious hope’ that had had been pinned on Paris in light of Wilson’s invocation of the idea of national self-determination turned into ‘deep despair.’295 Hu Shih, the Chinese philosopher who would later play a prominent role within the framework of the IPR, pronounced that on hearing the news, ‘Young China’s faith in Wilsonian idealism was shat Ibid., 261. See also Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 89.  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 261. See also Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 266. 293  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 84, 95. 294  Ibid., 85. 295  Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 74. 291 292

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tered to dust. “The New World Order” was no more!’296 As Williams had predicted it would when registering his objections to the suggested transfer in the context of the American Commission, the policy arrived at by the Big Three on April 30 raised a storm of protest in China.297 Millard observed that the decision ignited ‘to what amounted to an explosion of patriotic sentiment among Chinese,’ beginning with demonstrations by around three thousand students in Beijing on May 4, 1919, which were then replicated by students from both schools and universities and ‘of both sexes’ throughout the country.298 As it was started by students, the outpouring of protest was referred to as the student movement; however, it is important to note that the students ‘quickly secured the encouragement and support of influential elements of the people’ as well as winning adherents among the nation more broadly.299 Zhang points out that the students themselves ‘soon dubbed it the “May Fourth Patriotic Movement”, or the “May Fourth Movement” for short.’300 Hudson observed the following in relation to the movement: For the first time Chinese nationalism appeared as a force which had to be taken seriously, and its new strength in action was all the more remarkable because it was a contemporary with a greater degree of disintegration of the state than China had known since the T’ai P’ing rebellion. The new nationalist spirit had its strongholds outside the strictly political sphere, and was therefore able to exert nation-wide influence in spite of the division of the country between warring factions. Its centres of power were the schools and universities which had been founded everywhere to provide Western-type education and had usurped the prestige of learning, formerly the possession of the Confucian literati.301

In the midst of this sustained nationalist upheaval which manifested itself not only in the form of demonstrations but in commercial boycotts (the latter at first threatening each nation held responsible for denying 296  Hu Suh [Hu Shih], ‘Intellectual China in 1919,’ Chinese Social and Political Science Review 4, no. 4 (1919): 345–353, 346–7. 297  ‘Report of the Testimony of Prof. Edward T. Williams of the University of California, Chief Adviser on Far Eastern Affairs to the American Commission at Paris given before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 123. 298  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 160. 299  Ibid. 300  Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 75. 301  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 195.

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Chinese sovereignty at Paris but which was limited to the Japanese in the event), whether or not China would sign the Treaty of Peace with Germany emerged as a burning question.302 After having pointed out that the protests and anti-Japanese actions extended beyond China itself to places such as Singapore, Godshall noted that the attention of the Chinese had been drawn to the naming of two sections of the Treaty of Versailles concerning the Far East: Part IV, Section II, Articles 128–134 was headed China and Part IV, Section VIII, Articles 156–158 was headed Shandong, thereby implying that the two sections ‘dealt with separate and distinct regions.’303 In his memorandum written on the night of April 30, Millard observed that he was certain that the decision in regard to Shandong was final and unmodifiable as far as Paris was concerned and thus he had no reservations in advising the Chinese delegation not to sign the treaty. He later recorded that the same advice was privately given by some of the ‘Oriental experts’ attached to the American Commission with whom Millard was in close contact.  These same experts, Millard noted,  ‘after a primary feeling of sympathy with China,’ focussed their mind on the implications for their own country of what they knew to be a ‘disastrous, perhaps … fatal blow … to the Asiatic policy’ of the United States.304 Against this background, Millard advised the Chinese delegation to take ‘every care … to establish China’s protest and position and to get them into the records of the conference’ because even though the ‘struggle at Paris was over’ in respect to Asiatic questions, it would soon be ‘transferred to Washington.’305 On the afternoon of May 1, the Chinese delegation met with Balfour who, on behalf of the council, verbally informed them of the settlement reached by the council and of the assurances given by Japan to it.306 After listening to Balfour’s explanation of the settlement, the Chinese delegates ‘expressed their disappointment and requested him to be good enough to ask the Council of Three to send them at their earliest convenience a copy of the draft clause to be inserted in the Peace Treaty and of the records of 302  Ibid., 74. See also Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 160, and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 275. 303  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 275. See also King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 27. 304  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 85–6. 305  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 84–6. 306  Wood, The Shantung Question, 119–20, and Delegation Chinoise au Congrès de la Paix to the President of the Council of Three, 4 May 1919, in Wood, The Shantung Question, 124.

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the proceedings of the Council bearing on the Kiaochow-Shantung question.’307 In the event, Balfour did not respond to this request until May 9, sending the Chinese delegation a draft of the treaty’s provisions on Shandong (which had already been circulated at a plenary session of the conference on May 6), and a copy of a press statement issued by Makino on May 5 in which Makino ‘endeavoured to point out, in vague terms, that Japan would restore Shantung in “full sovereignty,” retaining only the economic rights, formerly granted to Germany, and the right to establish a settlement under the usual terms in Tsingtao.’308 Following unsuccessful appeals to Wilson for the relevant council minutes and thus, it would seem, having been ‘denied information on a settlement they were supposed to accept without reservation,’ the Chinese delegation issued on May 3 a forceful and detailed statement of protest which had been drafted by Koo.309 After informally receiving more details of the settlement, they issued their aforementioned press statement of May 4. On  the same date,  in a letter addressed to the president of the conference, namely, Clemenceau, the  Chinese delegation,  after  having detailed what they had been given to understand by Balfour, expressed their ‘keen disappointment’ in and registered a formal protest against the settlement, going on to reiterate once more the grounds for direct restitution.310 On May 6, at the sixth plenary session of the conference which was held ‘for the rubber-stamping of the Conditions of Peace,’ Lu, who attended in the company of Wang Zhengting (Chengting Thomas Wang), a former minister for agriculture and commerce, entered a ‘formal protest...also designed as a reservation’ in respect to the Shandong articles, ‘notwithstanding that diplomatic influence had been brought to bear on 307  ‘Delegation Chinoise au Congrès de la Paix to the President of the Council of Three, 26 May 1919,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 124. See also Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 266. Zhang records that Colonel House noted the following in his diary after Wang Zhengting came to see him on May 1: Wang ‘was distressed over the decision concerning Shantung. I made him admit that he did not know what had been decided, or how well China had been protected. I requested that he get a text, read it carefully, and then if he had any complaint, do let me know.’ Edward E. House, 1919, quoted in Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 90. 308  Wood, The Shantung Question, 119, 126, 151–2. The point that Japan would restore Shandong in full sovereignty to China was emphasised again by Viscount Uchida Yasuya in a statement given to the press in Tokyo on August 6. 309  Ibid., 119–20. 310  ‘Delegation Chinois au Congrès de la Paix to the President of the Council of Three, 26 May 1919,’ in Wood, Shantung Question, 124–6.

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the Chinese delegates to prevent it.’311 This reservation was made in accordance with the instructions of the Chinese government and was recorded in the procès-verbal of the session.312 The reservation read as follows: The Chinese delegation beg to express their deep disappointment at the settlement proposed by the Council of the Prime Ministers. They also feel certain that this disappointment will be shared in all its intensity by the Chinese nation. The proposed settlement appears to have been made without giving due regard to the consideration of right, justice, and the national security of China—consideration which the Chinese delegation emphasised again and again in their hearings before the Council of the Prime Ministers against the proposed settlement. In the hope of having it revised, and if such revision cannot be had, they deem it their duty to make a reservation on the said clauses now.313

Following the plenary session of May 6, the Chinese delegates, among them Koo in particular, energetically sought the permission of the conference to sign the treaty with a reservation, proposing at first that they sign the treaty with the following reservation over their signatures: ‘Subject to the reservation made at the Plenary Session of May 6, 1919, relative to the question of Shantung (Articles 156, 157, and 158).’314 On being consulted on the matter, Ronald Macleay, head for the Far East Division of the Foreign Office, claimed that ‘China could neither refuse to sign nor make reservations, because the Peace Treaty must be signed by the Allied and Associated States in a spirit of unity with the enemy state, Germany.’315 Stephen Pichon, the French foreign minister, having already told the Chinese delegation that reservations in a treaty were unacceptable (a point on which Lansing dissented), advised the Chinese delegation on May 26 that ‘if China created a precedent by making reservations on Shandong, Italy might make reservations on Fiume. And if all other nations which 311  Wood, The Shantung Question, 126. See also ‘Delegation Chinois au Congrès de la Paix to the President of the Conference, 26 May 1919,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 128. The full text of the Conditions of Peace was handed to German plenipotentiaries on the evening of May 7. 312  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 28. 313  Reservation of the Chinese Delegation, 1919, quoted in Wood, The Shantung Question, 126–7. See also King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 28. 314  Wood, The Shantung Question, 128. See also King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 28. 315  Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 91.

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were not fully satisfied with the Treaty following the precedent and made their reservations, the treaty would be broken.’316 On that same day, in a letter addressed to Clemenceau as president of the conference, Lu announced the intention of the Chinese delegation, pursuant to instructions from the Chinese government, to sign the Treaty of Peace with a reservation in respect to its Shandong articles, explaining their decision as follows: The announcement of the Council’s conclusion … has caused a nation-wide disappointment in China and evoked voices of protest from the Chinese people everywhere. The Chinese delegation has received messages from the Parliament, the Provincial Legislatures, the Chambers of Commerce, Educational and Agricultural Associations, and other important organizations both in China and abroad, urging the Chinese Delegates not to sign the Treaty of Peace with Germany. In view of this unmistakable indication of the views of the Chinese people, the Chinese Government have little choice as to the course open to them vis-à-vis the Treaty of Peace with Germany; but sincerely desirous to avoid, if possible, any step capable of being construed as marring the unity of purpose of the Allied and Associated Powers in restoring peace to the world, as in prosecuting the war against Germany, they have decided to sign the Treaty of Peace with Germany under the reservation already made at the Plenary Session held on May 6th.317

Although the Chinese delegation had been informed by the secretary-­ general of the conference, Paul E. Dutasta, who had been appointed French ambassador at Bern by Clemenceau in 1918, on May 28 that their letter of May 26 had been transmitted to the council, it was not until June 24 that they received a response.318 On that day, Koo met Dutasta, who told him on behalf of the president of the conference that no reservations in the text were permissible. Dutasta explained that this was ‘[p]artly for want of precedent, partly for fear of establishing one.’319 Koo countered  Ibid.  ‘Delegation Chinoise au Congrès de la Paix to the President of the Conference, 26 May 1919,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 129. 318  Wood, The Shantung Question, 130. 319  Wood, The Shantung Question, 130, 135, and King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 28. Zhang notes that when the question of the Chinese reservation was briefly addressed at the Council of Four meeting on June 25, Clemenceau remarked that neither Romania nor Serbia had been permitted to make reservations and adds that Lloyd George 316 317

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the argument that reservations in the text of a treaty were unprecedented by pointing out that in 1815, a Swedish plenipotentiary was permitted to sign the Treaty of Vienna ‘with a reservation to three articles of that treaty under his signature.’320 Dutasta then stated that should China be p ­ ermitted to make a reservation, then Germany along with other countries might seek to make reservations as well, to which Koo responded by stating that ‘he felt sorry that the conference should deem it proper to apply to an ally in the war the standard meted out to the common enemy’ after which he took his leave.321 The Chinese delegation next proposed that the reservation  take the form of an annex to the treaty. When this was refused, they proposed ‘to send to the President of the Conference, before proceeding to Versailles, a separate declaration to the effect that the Chinese plenipotentiaries would sign the treaty subject to the reservation of May 6’ with a view to enabling China, following the signing of the treaty, to ask for a reconsideration of the Shandong question.322 This proposal was put to Pichon on the morning of June 26; however, on June 27 at 5:30 p.m., ‘in another unpleasant interview,’ Pichon informed Koo that Clemenceau had ruled that ‘no reservation of any kind was to be admitted either in the text of the treaty or separately before signing but that the Chinese delegation could send him [Clemenceau] a declaration after the signing.’323 An angry Koo rejected this proposal based on the view that the validity of a declaration made after signing was doubtful, insisting instead on the right of making

‘was worried that Italy would follow China’s example.’ Zhang further notes that Makino, who was present at the meeting, ‘simply threatened that, if China’s reservations were to be accepted, Japan would also reserve accordingly.’ Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 93. 320  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 274; King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 29; and Wood, The Shantung Question, 135. See also Parl. Deb. H.C. (5th series) 21 July 1919, 1020–1. 321  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 29. 322  Ibid., 28, and Wood, The Shantung Question, 131, 135. Zhang points out that on the evening of June 25, Koo met with Wilson who ‘made it clear to him that he would not agree to any formal reservations. The only suggestion he offered was that China might send in a letter, declaring it had the right, when deemed opportune, to reopen the question of Shandong in the future.’ Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 94. 323  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 29. See also Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 94.

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a reservation in advance.324 That same day, against the background of an attempt by Chinese students and other overseas Chinese in Paris at barricading the Hôtel Lutetia in order to prevent the delegation from proceeding to Versailles where the signing ceremony was to take place the following afternoon, the Chinese delegation decided to make one final démarche, albeit ‘in a spirit of compromise.’325 While still insisting on making their declaration in advance, ‘out of deference to the decision of the Council to admit no reservations whatever,’ the delegation ‘proposed a further modification of the wording’ such that it would make no reference to the reservation of May 6 but would rather simply point out that the signing of the treaty by Chinese plenipotentiaries ‘was not to be taken to preclude China from demanding a reconsideration of the Shantung question.’326 The modified declaration, which was signed by Lu and Wang, read as follows: In proceeding to sign the Treaty of Peace with Germany today, the undersigned plenipotentiaries of the Republic of China, considering as unjust Articles 156, 157, and 158 therein, which purport to transfer the German rights in the Chinese Province of Shantung to Japan instead of restoring them to China, the rightful sovereign over the territory and a loyal co-­ partner in the war on the side of the Allied and Associated Powers, hereby declare in the name and on behalf of their Government, that their signing of the Treaty is not to be understood as precluding China from demanding at a suitable time the reconsideration of the Shantung question, to the end that the injustice to China may be rectified in the interest of permanent peace in the Far East.327

On the following day, some hours before the signing ceremony commenced, the Chinese minister to France and one of the Chinese delegates, Wu Wei-teh, delivered this declaration ‘as an essential preliminary to signing’ to the Quai d’Orsay where he was received by Dutasta.328 At the 324  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 29, and Wood, The Shantung Question, 133. 325  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 29, and Wood, The Shantung Question, 136. On the protests outside the Hôtel Lutetia, see Lewis, China’s Great Convulsion 1994–1924, 179, and Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 217. 326  King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 29, and Wood, The Shantung Question, 133, 136. 327  Wood, The Shantung Question, 131–3. 328  Ibid., 131.

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precise time of the minister’s visit, Clemenceau was in a meeting with Wilson at the place des États-Unis and thus Dutasta ‘read the reservation to M. Clemenceau on the telephone who evidently repeated it to President Wilson. In a few minutes, Dutasta reported that neither M. Clemenceau nor President Wilson approved of China’s proposed reservation as a preliminary to signing. In the meantime, the same reservation was submitted to Premier Lloyd George with the same result.’329 Denied the official recognition they were so anxious to obtain for their reservation before the signing, the Chinese delegation decided to decline to sign the treaty that day. This decision was communicated to Clemenceau via the ­secretary-­general of the conference in the form of a letter also bearing the signatures of Lu and Wang. It read in part as follows: The Supreme Council of the Conference [the Council of Four] having ruled that no reservation of any kind, either in or outside the text of the Treaty, and having declined to accept before the signing of the Treaty every compromise compatible with their sense of right and justice, even a declaration to the effect that the signature of the Chinese plenipotentiaries was not to be understood as precluding China from demanding at a suitable moment the reconsideration of the Shantung question, the undersigned plenipotentiaries of the Republic of China, beg to inform you that they do not feel warranted to sign the Treaty of Versailles today. They are communicating the latest decision of the Supreme Council to their Government and meanwhile beg hereby to reserve, in the name and behalf of their Government, the right the Republic of China to take a final decision vis-à-vis the Treaty of Peace with Germany.330

The absence of the Chinese plenipotentiaries from the central gallery of the Palace of Versailles, that is, the Hall of Mirrors, on the afternoon of  Wood, The Shantung Question, 132.  Wood noted that this letter and the copy of the reservation were returned to the Chinese delegation that same day, thereby refusing ‘China’s just pleas a proper place in the records of the Peace conference.’ Wood, Shantung Question, 133–4. Zhang records that ‘[b]y noon, the Chinese delegation received a formal note from the Secretariat General of the Conference.’ According to Zhang, this note read as follows: ‘The Secretariat General of the Peace Conference has the honour to deliver herewith to His Excellency the Chinese Minister the two notes which he was good enough to deliver this morning. In returning them, it is intended to permit the Chinese Delegates to sign the treaty in the session of this afternoon, if it thinks it ought to do so without any reservation, as was indicated to the Chinese Delegation upon instructions from the Supreme Council.’ Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 218. 329 330

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June 28 was conspicuous, China being alone among all the countries participating in the Peace Conference in declining to sign the Treaty of Peace.331 In the evening of June 28, the Chinese delegation issued an official statement on its position which read in part as follows: The announcement of the settlement evoked a nation-wide protest in China, which was participated in by the Chinese people in every part of the world. In view of the united opposition of public opinion, the Chinese Government had no course open to them except to decline to accept the clauses in question …. The Chinese Plenipotentiaries regret having had to take a course which appears to mar the solidarity of the Allied and Associated Powers; but they were firmly of the opinion, however, that the responsibility for this step rests, not with themselves, who had no other honorable course to pursue, but rather with those who, it is felt, unjustly and unnecessarily deprived them of the right of making a declaration to safeguard against any interpretation which might preclude China from asking for a reconsideration of the Shantung question at a suitable moment in future, in the hope that the injustice to China might be rectified later in the interest of permanent peace in the Far East. The Peace Conference having denied to China justice in the settlement of the Shantung question, and having in effect prevented her from signing a treaty without the sacrifice of her sense of right, justice, and patriotic duty, the Chinese delegates submit their case to the impartial judgment of the world.332

The decision of the Chinese delegates on behalf of their government, the situation of which meant that they had some latitude in the matter, elicited criticism from elements in Britain, for example, from the London Times and from Balfour. By contrast, as Lansing later stated, it was looked on with quiet approval by the American commissioners who judged it to be ‘the only patriotic and statesmanlike course to take.’333 The New York  Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 94–5.  ‘Official Statement of the Chinese Delegation, 1919,’ in Wood, The Shantung Question, 134–7. See also ‘Chinese Explain Refusal to Sign: Wanted to Write Reservation in the Treaty above their Signatures,’ New York Times, June 29, 1919. 333  Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 264. Zhang points out that against the background of domestic resistance in almost all quarters to the idea of China affixing its signature to the treaty without reservations, the premier and cabinet, who had wavered on the question, resigned on June 10. With government now in the hands of a ‘weakened caretaker cabinet,’ 331 332

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Times echoed the sentiment of the American commissioners, asking was there any representative at Versailles other than the representative of the ‘beneficiary of the bargain’ who did not ‘sympathise with the attitude of the Chinese,’ remarking of the delegation’s statement that it was ‘dignified and in striking good temper considering how deep is the grievance that China suffers in the decision of the Allies.’334 Notwithstanding the pressure not to sign being exerted by Chinese public opinion, it was a bold course to take: it came with the risk that, having so displeased the powers, China would find them unsympathetic or indifferent when China pressed its grievances at a later date. According to Millard, sources reportedly close to Wilson, Balfour and ‘others of equal eminence,’ put it to the Chinese delegation that if China refused to sign, it ‘would not be permitted to join the League of Nations, and therefore could not go to any quarter for redress; that she would be isolated, outside the international comity.’335 Against this background, Koo sought to establish that there was a path to China joining the LON other than by signing the Treaty of Versailles and what he found was this:  that as the covenant was embodied not only in the Treaty of Peace with Germany but in the Treaty of Peace with Austria, that is, in the Treaty of St. Germain, China could enter the LON by signing the latter treaty. This China did on September 10, 1919, thereby rendering itself a member of that organisation and without having to consent to the offending articles enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles. Five days later, on September 15, 1919, President the delegation in Paris had even more discretionary power at its disposal. It was not until around 5  p.m. on the day of the signing that the Chinese delegation received their final instruction from the Chinese government, which was that they should not sign unless a reservation is permitted. Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 88, 93. See also King, China at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, 30. 334  The New York Times quoted in Wood, The Shantung Question, 137n–8n. 335  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 79, 85–6. Millard drew attention to ‘the weight’ being brought to bear ‘by certain diplomacies’ in Beijing (i.e., the British, French and American legations, in order to persuade the president, the premier and the Foreign Ministry that China should sign the treaty. He further noted that Japanese influence in China’s capital was brought to bear on the Chinese government (ibid., 86). Zhang records that Lu, in a telegram to the Chinese cabinet on May 14, urged caution in regard to the decision as to whether to sign or not to sign. He stated therein ‘it is expected that three Powers [Britain, America and France] will look on indifferently [when China negotiates with Japan in the future] because we [China] have not appreciated their mediation [at the Paris Peace Conference].’ Lu Zhengxiang, 1919, quoted in Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 82.

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Xu Shichang (Hsu Shih-chang) promulgated a presidential mandate in which he explained why China had not signed the Treaty of Peace and in which he addressed another outstanding legal question arising from China’s refusal to do so: how to end the war with Germany? In his presidential mandate of September 15, the Chinese president ‘declared the state of war between his country and Germany at an end.’336

336  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 275. See also Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 129. The details of the peace with Germany were left for later negotiation. On the method by which China joined the LON, see also Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 93.

CHAPTER 4

The Quest for a Machinery of Cooperation in the Pacific: The Covenant Rejected, the Washington Conference and the 1924 Exclusion Laws The Struggle Over Shandong in Washington In the court of American public opinion, the Shandong decision was condemned in the most severe terms: it was denounced as a flagrant violation of international morality in that it involved the sacrifice of a nation, weak from internal disunity and through a lack of military capacity, in order to appease a nation strong in political and military terms.1 Important in terms of the American public’s attitude towards the issue was the fact that China was a fledgling democracy, struggling for self-determination, whereas the Japanese government was controlled by the old military party and had adopted, it was frequently alleged, ‘the Prussian model in its foreign diplomacy.’2 In his letter of resignation to President Wilson as ambassador at Beijing on June 7, 1919, Reinsch, who too had been bitterly disappointed by the Shandong decision, described the Japanese government as an ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘reactionary military regime centred in Tokyo, 1  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 224. See also Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 266–7. 2  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 227. Lansing stated immediately after the decision was taken: ‘China has been abandoned to Japanese rapacity. A democratic territory has been given over to an autocratic government …. The result was that China was offered up as a sacrifice to propitiate the threatening Moloch of Japan.’ Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 261–2.

© The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part One, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2_4

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Fig. 4.1  The Conference on Limitations of Armaments, Washington. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, photograph by Harris and Ewing [LC-H27- A-4041]

a­ bsolutist in tendency, cynical of the principles of free government and human progress’ and warned that if it remained ‘unopposed then there will be created in the Far East the greatest engine of military oppression and dominance that the world has yet seen.’3 Reinsch’s assessment as to what the decision held out for the future can be contrasted with that of Colonel House who advised Wilson as follows: ‘We cannot meet Japan in her desires to land and immigration, and unless we make some concessions in regard to her sphere of influence in the East, trouble is sure, sooner or 3  Reinsch further warned that should Japan ‘be given a freer hand’ in East Asia and ‘should anything be done which could be interpreted as a recognition of a special position of Japan,’ then ‘forces will be set in action which make a huge armed conflict absolutely inevitable within one generation.’ ‘Appendix F: Letter of Resignation to President Woodrow Wilson by Paul S.  Reinsch as Ambassador to China, 7 June 1919,’ in Fulton Lewis, China’s Great Convulsion 1994–1924, 207. See also Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 331.

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Fig. 4.2  The Punahou School in Honolulu where the first conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations took place in 1925. Source: 1909 postcard published by H. F. Hill, Honolulu, Hawaii

later to come.’4 At the same time, one might usefully compare it with the following observation made by Bliss in his letter to Wilson of April 29: ‘If we support Japan’s claim, we abandon the democracy of China to the domination of the Prussianized militarism of Japan. We shall be sowing dragon’s teeth.’5 In The Far East in World Politics: A Study in Contemporary History (1937), G. F. Hudson described the American reception of the Shandong decision and the feelings that it stirred in respect to China and Japan as follows: A volume of pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese sentiment which had been accumulating in America for several years suddenly burst forth with extraordinary violence …. Ever since 1911 there had prevailed in the U.S.A. a romantic cult of the ‘sister republic’ of China, fostered by enthusiastic 4  Edward M. House, 1919, quoted in Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 330. 5  Bliss to Wilson, 19 April 1919, in Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 260.

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American missionaries who believed it to be a field ripe for the Christian harvest, and skilfully worked by the propaganda of American-educated Chinese nationalists. This sympathetic, protective attitude towards China was not, indeed, free from an element of condescension; as an American writer puts it: ‘We seldom, as a nation, feel much affection for people we cannot be sorry for.’ Formerly, Americans had had just this kind of patronizing enthusiasm for Japan, as for a child clever beyond its years and oppressed by European bullies; but feeling had undergone a great change since Japan had begun to assume the style and diplomatic habits of a Great Power to exclude American capital from Manchuria. Exasperation against Japan had grown pari passu with the increase of sympathy for China as for a nation struggling to be, not only independent, but also democratic.6

Millard had been correct in his prediction that the struggle over Shandong would not end in Paris but would be transferred to Washington. In fact, upon reaching America from Paris, Millard made every effort to ensure that this very transference took place. On reading in the American newspapers that Senator Johnson of California was a leading figure among the opponents of the Treaty of Versailles and the covenant, Millard decided to write to him. In a letter dated July 8, 1919, Millard commenced with the observation that he had read in the New York Times that day that Wilson had summoned members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to a conference at the White House where he intended to explain his handling of matters in Paris and answer questions concerning the treaty and the covenant. In view of this and based on his intimate knowledge of certain developments in Paris, Millard proceeded to enumerate a set of questions that the members of the committee might like to pose to the president and which he thought would be of particular interest to Johnson both as a critic of the results at Paris and as a member from a Pacific Coast state, the latter status suggesting to Millard that Johnson might be particularly concerned about problems in the Asian and Pacific regions.7 Under the heading of ‘In Reference to the Shantung Decision,’ Millard first suggested that the committee ask the president as to whether or not at the time when the United States was urging China to sever its diplomatic relations with Germany and then when it actually declared war on Germany, assurances were given to China concerning the protection of its territorial rights in the settlement of the war. Referring again to the period 6 7

 Hudson, The Far East in World Politics. 180–1.  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 90–1.

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when the United States was urging China to sever its diplomatic ties with Germany, he suggested that the committee ask the president whether the United States government had any knowledge that Japan had asked the British, French, Russian and Italian governments to enter into secret agreements concerning the disposition of German rights in Shandong in favour of Japan should the Allies be successful in the war. The next question, which assumed a response in the negative to the preceding question, asked when it was that the United States government became aware of the existence of such agreements and how soon after becoming so aware did it apprise the Chinese government of their existence or whether it had ever done so.8 Millard then raised four highly potent points: If it is true that the existence of these agreements was withheld from the American and Chinese governments by their ‘Allies’ until the disclosure could no longer be avoided, and that in effect they contradict China’s rights and stultify the diplomatic assurances (?) given by the American Government to induce the Chinese Government to enter the war, does not the incident amount to giving America and China the ‘double-cross’? In permitting these secret agreements to supersede and to overrule China’s rights, and also the diplomatic commitments of the American Government to China, did not President Wilson sacrifice the honor of the United States, and yield its diplomatic prestige to secret agreements made by the other Powers, such as the President himself often has denounced in principle? Does not such an action virtually give notice to all nations that the American Government is unable or unwilling to sustain its own just and proper diplomatic engagements when they conflict with the improper and secret engagements of other Powers? and will not such an act undermine the diplomatic influence and prestige of the American Government hereafter not only in China, but also with all nations?9

Millard further suggested that the president be asked whether promises had been obtained from Japan in regard to the evacuation of the Shandong province and the port of Qingdao within a specified time-frame and whether, if indeed such promises had been obtained, they were entered in the minutes of the Council of Four and of the conference in general. He suggested that the president be asked whether in endorsing the Shandong decision, he obtained assurances from the British and French governments 8 9

 Ibid., 91–2.  Ibid., 92.

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(now that they had ‘paid in full’ their secret agreements with Japan), that they would aid the United States in preserving China’s territorial integrity and political independence and the Open Door for commercial ventures in China.10 Having posed these questions, Millard, under the heading of ‘In Reference to the Covenant of the League,’ raised what was one of his more devastating questions in terms of providing ammunition to the American opponents of the nascent LON: in the event of ‘a divergence of viewpoint, or of interest,’ about the interpretation of the Hay Doctrine or the American-Japanese joint declaration of November 2, 1917, concerning the intentions of the American and Japanese governments with regard to China, or over Japan’s ‘alleged promises to evacuate’ Shandong and ‘restore Chinese territories and autonomy’ between the governments of the United States and Japan, or between Japan and China, how could the United States or China hope ‘to obtain satisfaction or redress from a League of Nations whose real ruling power is constituted in five Powers, three of which acted in collusion on these points throughout the Paris conference, and are believed to still have [private] regional understandings with each other to the contrary?’11 In stating this last, Millard was referring to his belief that in Paris and before the Shandong decision had been reached, representatives of Japan had approached representatives of Britain and France on the question of creating a tri-power entente for the purpose of dividing all of Asia into spheres of influence. This allegation was discussed in detail in a memorandum called ‘Conjectural Bases of the Alleged British-French-Japanese Entente Regarding Asia’ which Millard had penned in Paris on May 8 and which he had then showed to the Far East experts attached to the American Commission.12 The memorandum, which he enclosed in his letter to Johnson, stated the following: It is currently but unofficially reported in Paris that an entente or tri-Power private agreement regarding all of Asia has been made by the British, French, and Japanese governments. If that is correct, it scarcely can be doubted that its formula coincides with the status given to Japan in Shantung, and by the Manchurian agreements, which in practice is a definite revival and recognition of the ‘spheres of influence’ thesis. It is utter folly to  Ibid., 92–3.  Ibid., 93–4. 12  Ibid., 99.  10 11

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presume that the British and French governments are not fully informed as to the true character of Japan’s policy and actions in China, or that they have any illusions as to its future import and tendency …. Such a private (or public) entente would practically eliminate the United States from political influence and commercial equal opportunity in Asia …. In that connection, it is interesting to consider how France can consistently ask (as she is doing) the United States to guarantee her military security in Europe, and to finance her economic reconstruction, while at the same time she is entering a combination to exclude American commerce and influence from Asia; and which will fasten Japanese imperialism on democratic China …. If such a combination becomes effective, the United States must either submit to its rulings in Far Eastern affairs, or go to war to maintain its rights …. The effect of such an agreement would be to destroy the political autonomy and territorial integrity of China, as is guaranteed by the Hay Doctrine and various other international treaties.13

Although Millard later confessed he did not know how the British government had received the putative Japanese proposal, he noted that the experts to whom he showed his memorandum, based on ‘circumstantial evidence,’ had become ‘very uncertain as to the real British policy toward the China questions.’14 Millard himself offered the view that at the time Britain ‘felt … the absolute need to stabilize Asia; and with the United States pursuing a vague and actionless policy there, such a combination with Japan, which government at least knew what it wanted, promised better results,’ and that the British attitude toward the problem of eastern Asia ‘was quite apparent in Paris.’15 In regard to France, Millard stated that after having read his memorandum, the Chinese delegation obtained confirmation that the French Foreign Ministry had the matter of a new understanding about Asia under consideration and was not hostile to it, adding that it was ‘no secret’ that Pichon ‘thought that a frankly imperialistic policy is the only way to recoup the position of France in the world.’16 However, Millard further noted that in light of the French desire to obtain from America guarantees of French security in Europe, prudence dictated that the French government should withhold its assent to a new understanding with Japan until after America had ratified the treaty and had acted 13  Thomas F.  Millard, ‘Confidential Memorandum: Conjectural Bases of the Alleged British-French-Japanese Entente Regarding Asia, May 1919,’ ibid., 100–2. 14  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 99, 106. 15  Ibid., 107. 16  Ibid., 99, 106–7.

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on the so-called supplement to the treaty, that is, the proposed Anglo-­ French-­American Alliance.17 Finally in respect to this matter, Millard reasoned that the support given to Japan’s claims by the British and French governments in Paris was ‘founded on an understanding for the future, as well as on the secret Shantung agreements.’18 Millard told Johnson that he was present on the occasion of the Shandong decision being communicated to the Chinese delegation and thus he heard the president’s spokesman declare that the president would try to see justice obtained for China from the LON. He then outlined the Chinese delegation’s doubts (which were the same doubts that had been enumerated by Millard himself in his memorandum of advice to that delegation), about the prospect of having the treaty articles reversed by the LON. Millard then drew Johnson’s attention to the fact that China, after having had its proposal to enter reservations rejected, had refused to sign the treaty. In relation to this, Millard pointedly observed that despite its weak and almost friendless condition, China had the ‘courage’ to refuse sign a treaty it deemed inimical to its interests, adding that yet there were ‘some people’ who maintained that unless the United States ‘accepts what was done at Paris without reservation, and on superficial examination, we will suffer some great disaster.’19 Millard suggested to Johnson that the Senate should summon the Far East experts attached to the American Commission if it wanted to obtain the facts about the Shandong decision and gain an understanding of how adverse it was to the interests of both China and the United States.20 Elaborating on what he saw as the adverse consequences of the decision for his own country, Millard stated the following in his letter: I think you will agree that the Asiatic problem as it touches on America is left in a very dangerous situation by results of the Paris conference; a situation which tends to be aggravated and confirmed by provisions of the treaty of peace in conjunction with the covenant of the League of Nations, as those stand now. There are objections to both the treaty and the covenant on other grounds, but I am confining my criticism now chiefly to conditions in the Far East. The danger is not imaginary. Since I returned from Paris I have  Ibid., 91, 106.  Ibid., 107. 19  Ibid., 95–6. See also Zhang, China in the International System, 1918–1920, 89. 20  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 96. 17 18

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been going over newspapers from Japan, and the Japanese press is in full cry against America, which is accused  of trying to ‘evade’ the … [American-­ Japanese joint declaration] … (Japan’s interpretation).21

Millard’s objection to the covenant as it related to the Asiatic policy of the United States concerned, above all, Article 21 which provided that ‘[n]othing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the validity of international engagements, such as treaties of arbitration or regional understandings like the Monroe doctrine, for securing the maintenance of peace.’ Millard put the question to Johnson that given this provision, if it were the case that Britain, France and Japan had some private understanding in respect to Asia, would not the LON have to accept it ‘as fait accompli, along with the Monroe Doctrine?’22 Indeed, Millard suggested to Johnson that Article 21 of the revised covenant had been phrased in a manner so as to provide Britain, France and Japan with ‘the means to confirm and enforce’ whatever private mutual understanding they may have reached or, indeed, might reach in respect to their policies in Asia ‘even over the objections of the United States.’23 Returning to the specifics of the matter in so far as it concerned the interests of the United States, Millard put it  to Johnson that should there  already be  in  existence or should  there  come into existence a tri-­ power entente in respect to Asia and should such an entente be reported to and thereby made legitimate under the constitution of the LON, the effect would be as follows: of aligning the British and French governments with Japan should a difference arise, ‘already distinctly foreshadowed,’ between Japan and the United States over the interpretation of  the  American-Japanese  joint  (Lansing-Ishii)  declaration  of 1917 which was also a regional understanding. He put it to Johnson that the effect of the same considerations would be to ‘virtually align’ the British and French governments with Japan in other disputes that might arise between Japan and the United States concerning the Asia-Pacific region, such as over interpretations of the Hay Doctrine or over the ‘“mandated”

 Ibid.  Ibid., 93. 23  Ibid., 94. 21 22

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islands in the Pacific Ocean.’24 Millard concluded his letter with an indictment of the treaty and the covenant which read as follows: [I]f the covenant cannot be amended and separated from the treaty it had better be rejected regardless of uninformed outcry or the fear, largely chimerical, I believe, of serious adverse consequences. I wish, however, that it could be found possible to save the League and the idea embodied in it. But the way it was framed in Paris, in conjunction with the treaty, I feel that it is a device to carry on the old system, and that a majority of the so-called Principal Powers have devised it as a means to strengthen and confirm in particular designs. As I analyse the treaty and the covenant, they will work in practice adversely to the American thesis in world politics and also very likely against American economic interests. The Senate is the last court of review in so far as America is concerned. I hope that its members will subject the treaty, the covenant, and the proposed alliance, to careful scrutiny.25

Soon after writing to Johnson and in order to spread the view that aspects of the treaty were unjust and that both it and the covenant contained provisions that were potentially harmful to American interests, Millard made copies of his memorandum of May 8 and posted these to every member of Congress, members of the cabinet and some prominent writers and editors.26 Among this last category of recipients was Charles R. Miller, the editor of the New York Times, the  Times being among the ‘numerous and influential’ newspapers which were then editorialising in favour of a swift ratification of the treaty and the covenant.27 In a letter dated July 18, 1919, Millard told Miller that he simply could not accept the latter’s argument ‘that after the treaty and the League are adopted by us, “pressure will be brought on Japan to make it play the game properly in the Far East,” adding that when the issue of Shandong ‘is joined (coming soon now) between the Japanese and the American interpretations’ of the American-Japanese joint declaration,’ the pressure would more likely be on America than Japan ‘unless something is done to alter conditions.’28 In the summer of 1919, the treaty and the covenant dominated discussions in Washington and during that period Millard spent some time there, engaging in private conversations with opposition senators. He later noted that while he found the latter to be strongly antipathetic to the treaty and  Ibid., 93.  Ibid., 97–8. 26  Ibid., 99–100. 27  Ibid., 108 and Thomas F. Millard to Charles R. Miller, 18 July 1919, ibid., 109–10. 28  Ibid., 110. 24 25

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the covenant, he also found that even the most resolute among them lacked confidence in their efforts to prevent ratification. They seemed to think, he noted, that at best all they could achieve would be to attach reservations.29 Millard reported that one of these senators told him the following: ‘I know the whole thing ought to be beaten, but no power on earth can defeat the League of Nations. The people think they want it.’30 Millard realised that a major cause of the confusion as to how to address the question of ratification was that scarcely anything was known about what had transpired in Paris: as they lacked information, those antipathetic to the treaty and the covenant found it very difficult to counter the ‘tremendous obscurant propaganda’ promoted by governments in favour of ratification which was then prevalent in the American press.31 He noted that at this stage of the process, the Bliss letter was ‘not heard of in Washington,’ adding the thought that it was in fact he who ‘brought the first news of its existence.’32 Millard had some success in his campaign to make known what had transpired or what he alleged had transpired in Paris. His May 8 memorandum became public: it was put into the record of the Senate’s hearings, whereupon it was met with denials from British and French sources. Millard dismissed these  denials  as the ‘usual and expected diplomatic dementi’ and continued to maintain that ‘something of the nature’ of what he alleged took place in Paris, later claiming that it was only due to ‘unexpected events’ that the putative tri-power entente regarding Asia did not become effective.33 Irrespective of the veracity of his allegation concerning the formation of  a tri-power entente  made in his memorandum, its publication was bound to prove damaging to the cause of the LON. Set against the background of the Shandong decision, Millard’s allegation would have had an air of plausibility  and, to this extent, would have helped fuel the suspicion that the treaty and the LON were, as Millard suggested, devices for preserving the old order and had been designed to promote the interests of certain powers to the cost of others. Millard had told the senators with whom he conducted interviews that one of the principal mainstays of American foreign policy, namely, the Hay Doctrine, had effectively been  Ibid., 107–8, 111.  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 108. Millard observed that at the time of Wilson’s return from France on July 8, senators remained ‘obsessed with the belief that the American people could not be detached from support of a league of nations’ (ibid., 116). 31  Ibid., 98. 32  Ibid., 108. 33  Ibid., 99. 29 30

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scrapped in Paris, maintaining in relation to this that for the United States to ratify the covenant would be to legally sanction its scrapping. The latter point was a key feature of Millard’s testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee on August 20, 1919: Article 21 could serve as a vehicle for validating and further entrenching spheres of influence in China in complete disregard of the Hay Doctrine.34 By the time of Millard’s testimony, the existence of the Bliss letter and something of its nature had also become a matter of public record: on August 8, under questioning from Senator Borah, Lansing acknowledged its existence. Borah asked whether the letter was ‘in the nature of a protest,’ to which Lansing replied that that it was a matter of advice to the president, prompting Borah to ask whether the advice corresponded with what was later decided in respect to Shandong, to which Lansing replied ‘No.’35 On August 23, the Foreign Relations Committee by a majority of one voted an amendment to Articles 156, 157 and 158 of the Treaty of Peace with Germany according to which the word ‘China’ was to be substituted for  the word  ‘Japan’: by this amendment, all the German rights and concessions in Shandong would be transferred to China and not Japan.36 This amendment was never put to the vote in the Senate, its ‘impractical nature’ being ‘quickly realised by the Senators responsible for it.’37 However, senatorial deliberation on the Shandong question did not end there: on November 15, the Senate, by a vote of 53 to 41, agreed to the following reservation to the Treaty of Versailles: ‘The United States withholds its assent to Articles 156, 157, and 158, and reserves full liberty of action with respect to any controversy which may arise under said articles.’38 The Shandong reservation was thus included along with other 34  Thomas F.  Millard, ‘“Regional Understandings” and the Shantung Decision,’  ibid., 112–5. 35  ‘Stenographic Report of the Testimony of Hon. Robert Lansing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 6 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 117–8. 36  Wood, The Shantung Question, 165. 37  Ibid., 166. 38  The reservation as originally drafted by Senator Henry Cabot  Lodge read as follows: ‘The United States withholds its assent to Articles 156, 157, and 158, and reserves full liberty of action with respect to any controversy which may arise under said articles between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan.’ Wood noted that it was alleged at the time that the phrase ‘between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan’ was omitted from the final reservation ‘due to the desire to avoid anything that would reflect upon the good faith of the Japanese Government’ (ibid., 167–9). See also George A. Finch, ‘The Treaty of Peace

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reservations in the resolution of ratification of the Treaty of Versailles which, in the event, was rejected by the Senate on November 19, a development which, Toynbee observed, gave ‘significance’ to the Chinese refusal to sign it.39 According to Millard, the actions of the Senate ‘did much to “save the face” of America with the Chinese, and to restore their belief in the good will and good intentions of the United States.’40 Baker later noted that the Japanese crisis at the conference, although ‘shorter and sharper’ than the other difficulties that beset the conference, ‘troubled the President more than any other—and the result of none, finally, satisfied him less.’41 Wilson had fought hard to protect China’s interests but in the end felt compelled to make substantial concessions to Japan because he believed such concessions were necessary in order to save LON. Ironically however, the result of his efforts in respect to Shandong was to provide powerful ammunition to the opponents of the covenant in the United States. Hudson observed that no part of the Treaty of Versailles was used with more telling effect in the anti-Wilson campaign of the Republicans which resulted in America’s non-ratification of the Versailles Treaty and abstention from membership of the League of Nations …. The Covenant itself was a target for criticism, but the heaviest fire was directed at the Treaty settlement with which it was bound up, and no part of it was so shocking to American opinion as the Shantung question …. The sentiment thus engendered was a powerful factor in turning the American public against Wilson and his Treaty, and it expressed itself also in discriminatory legislation against Japanese immigrants in California and 11 other Western States …. Japan thus achieved her purpose with regard to Shantung at the Paris Peace

with Germany in the United States Senate,’ American Journal of International Law 14, no. 1–2 (1920): 155–206, 180. 39  Arnold J.  Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1920–1923 (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 426. 40  The Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles meant that the United States would not participate in the LON and, therefore, would not be able to help China in its endeavours to obtain satisfaction in that forum. This would have been of little concern to Millard as he was deeply sceptical of the idea that China could obtain justice from the LON. He called Wilson’s intimation in this regard a ‘crumb of consolation.’ Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 79,160. 41  Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 2, 223. See also Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 179.

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Conference, but only at the cost of arousing a dangerous antagonism both in China and the United States.42

Japan’s Three Great Problems: Shandong, Siberia and Naval Rivalry in the Pacific As indicated, the antagonism aroused in China found expression in a boycott campaign which, as it turned out, was much more commercially harmful to Japan than had been the three previous such campaigns mounted by Chinese patriots and which the government was unable to control. Continuing into the spring of 1920, such was the damage caused by it that Japanese exporters greatly reliant on the Chinese market began to press their government to reach a settlement with China.43 Against this background, the Japanese government made repeated overtures to their Chinese counterparts to enter direct negotiations for the return of Qingdao only to be met with ‘passive resistance, delay, and evident intention not to negotiate’ as the Chinese government ‘was powerless to oppose the intense national feeling aroused through the country by the Paris settlement, despite the fact it was controlled by the pro-Japanese militaristic party.’44 National feeling in China dictated that no direct negotiations could take place with Japan unless they were on terms other than a settlement which China had never endorsed: China would only consider such negotiations following the return to China of Qingdao and the Shandong Railway and the withdrawal of all Japanese forces in the province.45

 Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 179–81.  Ibid., 195 and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 282. 44  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 289. ‘A document drawn up at the request of the premier in March 1920, for presentation to the legations in Peking, clearly explains the motives beneath the Chinese policy of refusing to negotiate with Japan concerning Shantung, but it was suppressed by the [Chinese] military group. According to this statement, China insisted upon the evacuation and the restoration of Tsingtau and the Shantung Railway before any negotiations with Japan alone could be considered, but it expressed willingness to arrange an international loan to buy the railway stock, to institute customs control under the direction of the Inspectorate of Maritime Customs, and to internationalise the port of Tsingtau. Unless Japan would accede to these proposals the only adjustment which would be acceptable would be by an International tribunal’  (ibid., 282). See also  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 386, and Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 196. 45  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 283. See also Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 265. 42 43

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According to Article 158 of the Treaty of Versailles, the transfer of the German rights in Shandong was to take place within three months of the coming into force of that treaty, a period which came to an end on April 9 and it was in view of this that on April 26, the Japanese minister at Beijing was advised by Tokyo to make further overtures. In an official statement issued on May 22, 1920, China insisted that it would not enter into direct negotiations with Japan ‘until after the Shantung settlement had been revised by the League of Nations.’46 Between 1920 and 1930, liberal elements prevailed in the political arena in Japan, and in 1921 these elements were very concerned to address three interconnected problems: the tension between Japan and China, Japan’s impaired relations with the United States and how to withdraw Japanese forces from Siberia given the desire to establish a rapprochement with Russia.47 Japan’s involvement in Siberia had begun on August 3, 1918, as part of an anti-Bolshevik campaign in cooperation with the British, French and Americans. At the beginning of 1920, when these three nations withdrew, Japanese forces remained behind: elements in Tokyo entertained the ambition of territorial expansion into the region. Japanese liberals were against the idea of territorial aggrandisement and it should be noted that the branch of the Japanese armed services that the liberals tended to favour, that is, the navy, was similarly opposed to ‘continental expansion’ unlike the army and its political supporters.48 Rapprochement with Russia was not the only imperative behind Japanese plans for withdrawal from Siberia: continuing Japanese operations in the area were opposed by the United States, which on May 31, 1921, issued a note stating that ‘the Government of the United States can neither now nor hereafter recognise as valid any claims or titles arising out of the present occupation and control, and it cannot acquiesce in any action taken by the Government of Japan which might impair existing treaty rights or the political or territorial integrity of Russia.’49 The Japanese military activity in Siberia was thus not politically prudent; nor was it economically wise because as a large-scale military enterprise, it was placing considerable

46  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 283 and Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 193. 47  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 284. 48  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 188–9, 193. 49  Ibid., 190–1.

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pressure on an economy already under strain as a result of the Chinese boycott and the cost of the intensifying naval rivalry with the United States.50 The conflict between Japan and the United States over the former’s military occupations in Shandong and Siberia, which some interpreted as part of an attempt to exclude United States’ trade and investment from the Far East, intensified the naval competition between the two powers. At the same time, as Hudson observed, like the ‘Anglo-German naval rivalry before 1914, it became in itself a more serious case of alarm and enmity than any clash of interests.’51 Like Japan itself, the United States wanted to normalise American-Japanese relations, and thus, encouraged by what American opinion saw as a less chauvinistic attitude on the part of Tokyo, President Warren G.  Harding, with congressional backing, sent on July 10, 1921, a preliminary invitation to France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan to participate in a conference, most likely to be held in Washington, with a view to discussing the limitation of armaments and unsettled questions endangering the peace of the world.52 Having received the immediate assent of the first three of those countries and the somewhat cautious assent of Japan, this last being wary that the question of Shandong and also that of the Pacific mandates might be placed on the agenda, the American government on August 11 issued a formal invitation to Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Portugal to attend a conference in Washington to begin sitting in November that year. The invitation specified that the conference would be ‘on the subject of limitation of armament, in connection with which,’ on the ground that a reduction of armaments would not be achievable unless ‘a practical effort was made to remove causes of misunderstanding,’ Pacific and Far Eastern questions ‘should also be discussed.’53 A  Ibid., 191–2.  Ibid., 197. 52  Senator Borah introduced a resolution on April 3, ‘requesting President Harding to take this step,’ and this resolution was adopted by the United States Congress, on May 25, 1921. Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 287. 53  ‘The Japanese government delayed several days, while secret conferences were held to determine its course of action before replying. On July 14 Japan expressed her willingness to accept the invitation, but first wished to be advised as the scope and nature of the subjects to be discussed. It was semiofficially stated in Tokyo that Japan would not discuss subjects already settled or which solely concerned a given nation. The United States government chose to regard the Japanese note as an acceptance in principle and effect and expressed the hope that Japan would leave the nature and scope of the problems to be discussed open for adjustment by the conference itself. The Japanese government was thus placed in an awk50 51

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separate invitation addressed to China, included the following statement of intent: It is not the purpose of this Government to attempt define the scope of the discussion in relation to the Pacific and Far East, but, rather, to leave this to be the subject of suggestions to be exchanged before the meetings of the conference, in the expectation that the spirit of friendship and cordial appreciation of the importance of the elimination of sources of controversy, will govern the final decision.54

Japanese suspicions concerning the real purpose of the conference were heightened on learning that China had been invited to participate, especially as Beijing had recently advised Koo, who was China’s representative on the LON Council, that the Chinese government was going to lay the case of Shandong before the assembly.55 As Japan rightly expected that China would attempt the same in Washington, Japan made a renewed effort to open direct negotiations with China, submitting to it on September 7, 1921, a memorandum putting forward nine proposals as the terms of a definitive settlement.56 As it was the Chinese view that under these proposals Japan would not be surrendering any ‘vital interests’ such that it would still be in a position to economically dominate Shandong and that Japan had failed to meet ‘any fundamental objection of the Chinese’ as to the illegal origins of Japan’s claims, this latest overture was rejected.57 On October 5, the Chinese government responded as follows: With reference to the important Shantung Question which is now pending … China has indeed been most desirous of any early settlement for the ­restitution of her sovereign rights and territory. The reason why China has not until now been able to commence negotiations with Japan is because of ward position To refuse to participate would sacrifice the position as a world power which Japan had attained and would concede that world problems could be adjusted without Japan’s approval.’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 287–8. For the stated purpose of the conference, see ‘Appendix 14: China’s Invitation to the Washington Conference,’ ibid., 506–7. See also Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 199. 54  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 288 and ‘Appendix 14: China’s Invitation to the Washington Conference,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 507. 55  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 288–9. 56  Bau, The Shantung Question, 35, 36–44. Bau discusses each of the nine proposals in detail. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 289. 57  Bau, The Shantung Question, 45.

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the fact that the basis upon which Japan claims to negotiate are all of a nature either highly objectionable to the Chinese Government and the Chinese people, or such to which they have never given their recognition. Furthermore, in regard to the Shantung Question, although Japan has made many vague declarations she has in fact had no plan which is fundamentally acceptable. Therefore the case has been pending for many years much to the unexpectation [sic] of China. On September 7, Japan submitted certain proposals for the readjustment of the Shantung Question in the form of a memorandum together with a verbal statement by the Japanese Minister to the effect that in view of the great principle of Sino-Japanese friendship Japan has decided upon this fair and just plan as her final concession, etc. After careful consideration the Chinese Government feels that much in Japan’s new proposals is still incompatible with the repeated declarations of the Chinese Government, with the hopes and expectations of the entire Chinese people, and with the principles laid down in treaties between China and the foreign powers. If these proposals are to be considered the final concession on the part of Japan, they surely fall short to prove the sincerity of Japan’s desire to settle the question.58

The final observation of the Chinese response, namely, that given the sharp cleavage between the opinions of the two countries on the question it appeared likely that the dispute would remain unresolved and that therefore China reserved to herself ‘the freedom of seeking a solution of the question whenever a suitable occasion presents itself,’ was a clear signal that, with the agreement of other interested parties, the issue of Shandong  would  be raised at the Washington Conference.59 Lest there were any doubts on this score, the Chinese government, in a memorandum addressed to Japan on November 4, restated its position, explaining that the Japanese proposals were ‘altogether too remote from the hopes and expectations of the Chinese government and people, who therefore are obliged to await patiently an opportunity suitable to Japan for a reconsideration of her position.’60

58  Copy of Chinese reply of October 5, 1921, furnished by the Chinese Legation, Washington D.C., quoted in quoted ibid., 46. 59  Chinese Delegation to the Washington Conference, Official Statement, 1922, quoted in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 290 and Bau, The Shantung Question, 47. 60  Chinese Delegation to the Washington Conference, Official Statement, 1922, quoted in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 291.

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The Agenda of the Washington Conference The Washington Conference sat at the Continental Memorial Hall on Seventeenth Street from November 12, 1921 to February 6, 1922. It was  equipped with a formal agenda, the basis for which was a tentative statement drafted by the State Department that encompassed the distinct but politically related topics of limitation of armament and Pacific and Far Eastern questions. Although the latter topic chiefly concerned China, the questions of Siberia and the Pacific mandates were included within its scope. Of the two nine-power treaties issuing from the conference that concerned China, the most important was the Nine-Power Treaty Relating to Principles and Policies to be followed in Matters Concerning China which was published on February 4, 1922, and signed two days later. This treaty, which is discussed in more detail in the next chapter, sought to assure the sovereignty, independence, and territorial and administrative integrity of China, promote its economic development and political stability, and finally bring to an end the competition for special rights and privileges in China and to internationalise the principles of the Open Door and equality of opportunity.61 In respect to Siberia, Shidehara Kijūrō, Japan’s vice-minister of foreign affairs and ambassador to the United States, assured the conference on January 23 that Japan intended to eventually (no fixed date was mentioned), withdraw its forces from the region, stating ‘that it is the fixed and settled policy of Japan to respect the territorial integrity of Russia and to observe the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of the country, as well as the principle of equal opportunity for commerce and industry of all nations in every part of the Russian possessions.’62 Shidehara’s assurances that Japan would terminate its Siberian expedition were cautiously accepted by Charles Evans Hughes, the American secretary of state and the elected chairman of the conference, in a s­ tatement 61  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 199–200. The formal agenda of the conference was published on September 21, 1921. The Nine-Power treaty concerning China was published and signed on February 4 and 6 respectively. This treaty provided for Chinese customs administration. ‘In advance of the meeting of the Conference the State Department prepared a tentative statement of agenda which was submitted to the invited Powers.’ Quincy Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ American Political Science Review 16, no. 2 (1922): 285–97, 285, 289. See also ‘Appendix 15: The Agenda of the Washington Conference, 1921,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 508–9. 62  Shidehara Kijūrō, 1922, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 391.

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made on January 24.63 Together with the terms of the aforementioned Nine-Power Treaty, these assurances were the ‘essential political conditions’ for the Five-Power Limitation of Naval Armaments Treaty signed by France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and the United States.64 Under the latter agreement, the allotment of tonnage was limited to 500,000 tons each for the United States and Great Britain and 300,000 for Japan. Japan at first demanded a 10:10:7 ratio as between Great Britain, the United States and Japan, however, it later accepted the American plan, thereby agreeing to a 5:5:3 ratio provided  that the status quo be accepted in regard to Pacific naval bases and fortifications. The bargain thus struck was somewhat controversial  in the eyes of  some in the United States. It proved especially  controversial with  elements in the American navy  who  feared that the  limits imposed  on the expansion of  the  United States’ Pacific bases and fortifications  under the agreement  would leave  the United States’ bases in the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii vulnerable.65 By contrast, the Japanese saw in the naval agreement a very welcome deal all in all because the ratio of tonnage was of less concern to Japan than was the limitation on the expansion of Pacific naval bases: Article 19 of the treaty ‘secured [Japan] against new British or American naval base development nearer to her shores than Hawaii or Singapore’ as it provided for a ‘standstill’ situation in respect to Hong Kong, the Philippines and Guam in addition to certain of Japan’s insular possessions in the Pacific.66 Within a few years of the conclusion of the naval treaty, Toynbee observed the following of the impact of Article 19: An examination of the map will show that, while this Article left the British Empire free to enlarge its naval base at Singapore, it also secured Japan against the establishment of a first-class naval base by either of the other two principal naval Powers within striking distance of her main islands …. The result was to make the defensive position of Japan in the Western Pacific absolutely impregnable by sea, and thus not only to safeguard Japan herself 63  After accepting Shidehara’s assurances, Hughes stated that the ‘assurances were taken to mean that Japan does not seek rights of the Russian people in any respect, or to obtain any unfair commercial advantages, or to absorb for her own use the Siberian fisheries, or to set up an exclusive exploitation of either of the resources of Sakhalin or of Maritime Province.’ Charles Evans Hughes, 1922, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 391. 64  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 200. 65  Ibid., 200–1. See also Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 287. 66  Ibid., 201.

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against any attack or invasion but to assure one of the chief objects of her policy—the object for which she had been building up her great navy— which was the uninterrupted security of her communications in wartime with her continental possessions and with China. On the other hand, Article 19 left Hong Kong and the Philippines at the Japanese navy’s mercy, so that in war (absit omen) with the British Commonwealth of the United States, Japan was now certain to gain the valuable advantage of the first success.67

The Shandong Agreement It will be recalled that in concluding a note addressed to Japan on October 5, 1921, the Chinese government stated that it reserved to itself the right to seek a solution of the Shandong question whenever a suitable occasion presented itself. As widely expected, the Washington Conference proved to be such a suitable occasion. On November 29, it was announced to the Committee of the Whole on Pacific and Far Eastern Questions that Hughes and Balfour, the latter representing the British Empire at the conference, had ‘offered their good offices’ to the Chinese and Japanese delegations with a view to helping them settle the questions of the leased territory of Jiaozhou and Shandong in general.68 Hughes and Balfour suggested that the method of settlement should take the form of a series of friendly conversations between the two delegations conducted outside of but concurrently with the conference in the presence of American and British observers. The ‘expedient’ of addressing the issue outside the conference was adopted because nearly all the powers present were signatories of the Treaty of Versailles and as such they were unlikely to abrogate even a small section of it as this ‘would tend to disintegrate the entire document:’ in conference they would have ‘felt obligated’ to support the terms of the treaty. 69 The conversations, thirty-six in all, commenced almost immediately, that is,  they commenced  on the afternoon of December 1, 1921. The Chinese delegation was under considerable pressure: Chinese merchants  Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1920–1923, 489–90.  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 311. 69  Ibid., 290, 311. ‘[N]one of the ex-Allied signatories could question the clauses dealing with Shantung without making a breach in the sacrosanct Versailles system. There could be no diplomatic support for revision from England and France, and Washington was not likely to make a direct attack on the Paris settlement in spite of American public sympathy for China’s case’ (ibid., 320). See also Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 196. 67 68

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and students in Washington were actively voicing their opposition to the negotiations and reportedly sought to prevent the Chinese delegates from attending the meetings. Upon being approached by these protestors, the Chinese delegates explained that China was not entering into direct negotiations with Japan as the meetings were being facilitated by the good offices of Hughes and Balfour. At the same time, they also made it clear that as it was ‘a case of “good offices,”’ there was no question that China was subjecting itself  to a process of arbitration. Should the discussions become deadlocked, the American and British delegates might well make certain suggestions; however, these would not have any binding force.70 Nonetheless, and doubtless adding to the pressure, the representatives of the Shandong People’s Union in Washington declared ‘that no decision of the negotiators unfavourable to the Chinese peoples would be approved at home and that no effort would be spared to obstruct any conclusion contrary to the wishes of the thirty-eight million persons involved in the award.’71 The last conversation in the series took place on the afternoon of January 31, 1922, in the context of which the two delegations prepared notes addressed to Hughes and Balfour to accompany the copies of the formal treaty and the terms of understanding, the latter being recorded in the minutes of the conversations, that they had agreed upon and which were to be presented the following morning.72 The Chinese note underlined in particular the Chinese delegation’s appreciation of the fact that the Washington Conference had ‘afforded an opportunity for the settlement of this important international question.’73 On February 1, Hughes told the fifth plenary session of the Washington Conference that the Shandong question had been settled, thereby making the settlement part of the conference record even though it had been negotiated outside of its formal confines.74 Following Hughes’s announcement, Alfred Sao-Ke Sze  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 311, 319.  Ibid., 319. 72  Ibid., 422, 425. See also ‘Appendix 17: Agreed Terms of Understanding Recorded in the Minutes of the Japanese and Chinese Delegations Concerning the Conclusion of the Treaty for the Settlement of Outstanding Questions Relative to Shantung, 4 February 1922’ (ibid., 516–8). 73  Japanese Delegation, Minutes of the Conversations Between the Chinese and Japanese Representatives in Regard to the Shantung Question, Washington, 1922, quoted in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 422. 74  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 422 and Wood, The Shantung Question, 265. 70 71

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‘expressed the thanks of his government and of the Chinese people for the extension of good offices which had made possible the recent conversations.’75 Thus, following two months of negotiations, the Treaty for the Settlement of Outstanding Questions Relative to Shandong was signed on February 4 in a building next door to the Continental Memorial Hall where the sixth plenary session of the Washington Conference was then taking place.76 Ge-Zay Wood, a member of the Chinese delegation to the conference, reported that one eyewitness stated of the event the following: ‘Nothing could have been more spectacular and impressive than the scene of the signing of the Treaty when the two mediators (Mr. Hughes and Mr. Balfour) sat  at the end of the long table in the main hall of the Pan-­ American building watching smilingly the two delegations at work.’77 Under the terms of the treaty, Japan declared that it would fully restore to China the former German-leased territory of Jiaozhou and the Qingdao-­ Jinan railway and its branches; withdraw Japanese troops, including gendarmes, stationed along the railway and Japan’s garrison in Tsingtao within six months and thirty days of signature respectively; and ‘not seek the establishment of an exclusive Japanese settlement, or of an international settlement’ in the former leased territory.78 In addition, Japan renounced in an annex to the treaty ‘all preferential rights with respect to foreign assistance in persons, capital and material stipulated in the Treaty of March 6, 1898, between China and Germany.’79 The significance of the renunciation of preferential rights was that Japan was depriving itself of an ‘instrument for building up in Shantung a semi-colonial system such as existed in Manchuria.’80 In light of these and other considerations, Japan was granted certain limited concessions of a strictly economic nature, such as the right to develop the former German mines in conjunction with China, and was promised financial compensation on fair terms for, among other things, the transfer to China of the Japanese wireless stations at  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 422.  Ibid., 422–3. 77  Wood, The Shantung Question, 264–5. 78  ‘Appendix 16: Treaty for the Settlement of Outstanding Questions Relative to Shantung, 4 February 1922,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 508–16. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 387–8. 79   ‘Appendix 16: Treaty for the Settlement of Outstanding Questions Relative to Shantung,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 514. 80  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 196. 75 76

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Qingdao and Jinan and the appurtenant properties of the Qingdao-Jinan railway line and its branches.81 It should be evident that the Chinese delegation were well satisfied by the outcome of the negotiations, and in China itself ‘almost unanimous’ was the ‘view that China … [had] … scored a great victory’ at the conference.82 Opinions in Japan, however, were ‘far from being united’ with Japanese diplomacy at the conference being subject to ‘adverse criticism’ by some newspapers and politicians.83 Critics observed that the Shandong question had been settled wholly in China’s favour even though, as one Japanese observer noted in an echo of an observation made by Makino at the Peace Conference, China had ‘expended neither a drop of blood nor a cent of money for the recovery of Jiaozhou from Germany, while Japan’s expenditure involved in the Tsingtau campaign was not small.’84 On December 29, the Japanese Privy Council passed resolution censuring the cabinet for its ‘weak policy toward China.’85 Yet according to Iyenaga Toyokichi, a former professorial lecturer at the University of Chicago, despite the criticism being heaped on it, a large majority of Japanese thought that all ‘the sacrifices and concessions’ that Japan made at the conference were worthwhile to the extent that they promoted ‘cordial and friendly relations’ with Japan’s two neighbours: China and the United States.86

The Controversy Over Yap and Other Pacific Mandates That the State Department placed the mandated islands in the Pacific on the agenda of the Washington Conference was for two reasons: first, because one of those islands had become in recent times, as Blakeslee observed, a source of ‘severe international friction’ between the United States and Japan; and second, because the United States still contested the 81  ‘Appendix 16: Treaty for the Settlement of Outstanding Questions Relative to Shantung,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags,  512–14 and Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 387–8. 82  Iyenaga, Toyokichi, ‘How Japan Views the Arms Conference,’ Current History Magazine 16, no. 1 (1922), 24. 83  Ibid., 22, 24. 84  Ibid., 23, 25. 85  Ibid. 86  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 427.

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validity of the title of the Pacific mandates which they regarded as having ‘strategic and naval value,’ particularly in the event of a conflict between the United States and Japan.87 As noted previously, Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau had agreed in Paris on the distribution of the Pacific mandates; however, a ‘misunderstanding’ soon arose over one of the islands in the Caroline group, namely, the island of Yap.88 On the morning of April 21, Wilson, after urging Makino and Chinda to accept the proposal that Lansing put forward in the Council of Foreign Ministers on April 15, namely,  that ‘all the German rights in China be ceded to the Allied and Associated Powers for subsequent distribution,’ declared that the United States had a particular interest in the island of Yap given its importance in terms of international cable communications: Yap was the point of intersection for cable lines connecting San Francisco, Shanghai, New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies.89 In maintaining that the case of Yap be treated differently from the other German islands, Wilson was following the advice of Lansing who had suggested at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers on April 13, that precisely because of its value as a cable station, Yap ‘should be internationalized and administered by an international commission in control of cable lines.’90 On April 24, at a meeting of the Council of Three, Wilson stated that he had reminded Makino and Chinda that morning that while it was understood that Japan was to have a mandate for the islands in the North Pacific, he had made a reserve in respect to Yap which he thought should be ‘internationalised’ rather than passed into the hands of a single power.91 On May 6, the day that the sixth plenary session of the conference approved the Treaty of Versailles and the Italian delegation returned to Paris, Wilson made the point in the course of a discussion of the Pacific mandates in the Council of Four, as he later told the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, that the question of the final disposition of Yap  Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ 98.  Ibid. 89  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 265 and Charles Noble Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ American Journal of International Law 15, no. 3 (1921), 419–27, 419. See also Document 64: ‘Letter of Walter S.  Rogers, communications expert of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, to President Wilson discussing the disposition of the captured German oceanic cables, 2 May 1919,’ in Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. 3, 443–6. 90  Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 422. 91  Ibid. 87 88

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should be left for determination at the forthcoming general conference ‘on ownership and operation of cables.’92 Charles Noble Gregory wrote the following of this meeting of the Council of Four: Lloyd George expressed his understanding that Japan should receive certain islands north of the equator. According to the record, President Wilson consented in principle to this, with an explanatory statement that as to mandates the ‘open door’ would have to be applied and that there must be equal opportunities for the trade and commerce of other members of the league. To quote the American note: ‘The Island of Yap, having been previously cited as a special case for particular future consideration, was not intended to be included among the ‘certain islands’ designated as available to Japan under mandate. This seems obvious, as Yap appears to have been the only island north of the equator in regard to the disposition of which there had existed any difference of opinion. There is no indication in the minutes of any further discussion with regard to this island.93

When  the anticipated general conference  on ownership and operation  of cables  finally  met, it was  under the heading of  Preliminary International Conference on Electrical Communications of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. The conference opened in Washington on October 8, 1920, and remained in session until December 14, 1920, whereupon it was indefinitely postponed. The conference, which had its origins in discussions in Paris in May 1919, was held with a view to determining the allocation of the submarine cables renounced by Germany under the Treaty of Versailles in favour of the principal powers and preparing the ground for a conference of all the nations concerning the creation of a regime covering all forms of international communications. At the 92  Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 422. Japanese delegates were absent from this meeting and from a meeting of the Council of Ten on the following day. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 272 and Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 422. 93  Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 421–2. Emphasis in the original.  Charles Noble Gregory noted the following in relation to an appendix to the minutes of the meeting of May 7, the day on which the completed Treaty of Versailles was presented to the German minister for foreign affairs: ‘[The appendix], purporting obviously to be a codification of the agreement reached on the 6th as to the North Pacific Islands … is understood to be the basis of the claim of Japan [to these islands]. This does not expressly include all the islands in this category, though the word “certain” is omitted; but the Acting Secretary of State held that the erroneous publication of such a decision, of which this government was not aware, would not validate it, and he stated that the President recollects no proposal at this meeting to change the decision of the 6th, and he agreed to no change’ (ibid., 422). 

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conference, the government of the United States maintained that the Supreme Council (that is, the Council of Four), at the request of President Wilson had ‘reserved for future consideration the final disposition of Yap, in the hope that it might be placed under international control and thus rendered available as an international cable station.’94 Great Britain and Italy were inclined to support the American claim; however, Japan and France were unbending. Japan maintained that the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference ‘had awarded to her a mandate over all islands, ceded by Germany, north of the equator; that Yap came within this description, which latter must be conceded.’95 Japan insisted that there had been no reservation in respect to Yap, basing this claim on the fact that an appendix to the minutes of a Supreme Council meeting of May 7, which purported to be ‘a codification’ of the agreement reached on May 6 in regard to the distribution of the islands of the North Pacific, failed to record the word ‘certain,’ although at the same time it did not explicitly state that all the islands, as opposed to certain islands,  in that region were to be allocated to Japan.96 In response to this line of argument, the United States maintained that the ‘erroneous publication of such a decision,’ of which the United States was unaware, ‘would not validate it.’97 The dispute over Yap soon became a broader controversy as to the right of certain of the principal powers or of the LON Council to ‘dispose of and allocate the territory and rights captured from the enemy, without the concurrence and consent of one chief participant, namely, the United States.’98 The Treaty of Versailles contained no provision concerning the allocation of mandates but rather provided under Article 119 that Germany renounced to the Principal Allied and Associated Powers all its rights and title to its overseas possessions. Following the failure of the United States to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, the other four principal powers, ‘without the official consent or knowledge of the American Government, formally awarded the “C” Mandates, the Pacific islands and Southwest Africa, and

 Ibid., 421. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 388–9.  Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 420. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 388. 96  Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 421–2. See also Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ 103. 97  Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 420. 98  Ibid. 94 95

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drew up the [identic] terms under which they should be administered,’ an initiative which was endorsed by the council on December 17, 1920.99 On February 22, 1921, the American secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, presented to the council a note of protest, its key argument being that any ruling by the council concerning the mandates required the concurrence of the United States in order to acquire validity.100 Commenting on the controversy over Yap which he too characterised as being of a serious nature, Charles Noble Gregory noted that the council’s response under date of March 1 was conciliatory, calling attention to the complications arising from the fact that the United States had abstained from ratifying the Peace Treaty and had not taken her seat in the Council of the League of Nations. While inviting the United States to participate in two other forms of mandates, not yet finally disposed of, they said they had not the same liberty of action as to the ‘C’ Mandate, which covered German possessions in the Pacific; that this mandate was ‘defined by the Council at its meeting in Geneva on December 17, 1920.’ They reminded the Secretary of State that ‘the allocation of all the mandated territories is a function of the Supreme Council and not of the Council of the League;’ that any misunderstanding, therefore, was between the Allied Powers and not between the United States and the League; that the note had been, therefore forwarded to the Governments of France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan.101

On April 5, Hughes, Colby’s successor as secretary of state as of March 4, sent a vigorously worded identic note to the governments of France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan. Hughes contended therein that the right to dispose of Germany’s overseas possessions was among the spoils of victory in the war and that  as one of the chief participants in that victory the United States was among those powers which had jointly acquired this right. Against this background, he then made the following four points: there could be no valid disposition of Germany’s overseas possessions without the acquiescence of the United States; that as the United States had ‘never vested either the Supreme Council or the League of 99  Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ 100. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 389. 100  Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 420 and Gregory, ‘The Treaty as to Yap and the Mandated North Pacific Islands,’ 250–1. 101  Gregory, ‘The Mandate Over Yap,’ 420.

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Nations with any authority to bind her or to act on her behalf’ neither of these bodies were in a position to make any decision affecting the rights of the United States; that abstaining from ratifying the Treaty of Versailles in no measure detracted from the rights of the United States as those rights had been acquired prior to that treaty and that in any case through providing that Germany renounced in favour of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers all its rights and title over its overseas possessions the treaty served to confirm the position of the United States; and that the United States had never assented to the inclusion of Yap in the Japanese mandate and that Wilson had made specific reservations to this effect as recorded in the proceedings of the Supreme Council.102

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the Imperial Conference and the Four-Power Treaty The question of the Pacific Mandates was only addressed by the Washington Conference proper in the context of the negotiation of the Four-Power Treaty for the maintenance of peace in the Pacific which was submitted by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to the opening meeting of the conference on December 10. The four powers in question, namely, the United States, Great Britain, France and Japan, agreed ‘as between themselves, to respect their rights in relation to their insular possessions and insular dominions in the region of the Pacific Ocean.’103 As Senator Lodge told the conference, the treaty ‘covered islands ranging in size from “Australia, continental in magnitude to atolls where there are no dwellers but the builders of coral reefs,” islands upon which “still shines the glamour of some of the stories of Melville and the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson.”’104 In addition to agreeing to submit any disputes between parties concerning the insular rights addressed in the treaty to a joint conference should diplomacy not produce a satisfactory result, the treaty provided 102  Ibid., 424–5. ‘The rule spoken of applies much more widely and absolutely in all international transactions than in matters of private property. It is universally agreed, it is believed, that a sovereign nation by joining in an international congress or conference in no way submits to be bound by a majority, unless she has so expressly agreed …. The Supreme Council, which is in the nature of an international conference, plainly cannot, by a majority vote, deprive any nation even if there represented, of rights or territory unless that nation acquiesce’ (ibid., 426–7).  103  ‘The Four Power Treaty,’ Advocate of Peace 83, no. 12 (1921): 424–5, 424. 104  Henry Cabot Lodge, 1921, quoted in Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 287.

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that should any of the same rights be ‘threatened by the aggressive action of any other power,’ the contracting parties would ‘communicate with one another fully and frankly in order to arrive at an understanding as to the most efficient measures to be taken, jointly or separately, to meet the exigencies of the particular situation.’105 The two major purposes of the treaty from the perspective of the American delegation were that of dissolving and supplanting the Anglo-­ Japanese Alliance as renewed on July 13, 1911, and the protection of the Philippines.106 On July 8, 1920, the British and Japanese governments jointly notified the LON that the Anglo-Japanese Agreement, ‘though in harmony with the spirit of the Covenant of the League of Nations, is not entirely consistent with the letter of that Covenant, which both governments desire earnestly to respect,’ and that they therefore recognised that if the agreement were to continue after 1921, ‘it must be in a form which is not inconsistent with that Covenant.’107 In light of this, the general assumption on June 20, 1921, the opening date of the Imperial Conference of 1921 which had been convened in order to consider imperial foreign policy, was that unless it was renewed at the conference, the alliance would terminate on July 13, 1921, this being the date on which it was set to expire provided that one or other of the parties had notified their intention to terminate twelve months prior. However, by the time of the 1921 Imperial Conference, the British cabinet had decided in favour of renewal, albeit ‘in correct League of Nations form, for a short term of years, pending broader agreement on Pacific affairs.’108 The cabinet’s decision was informed by the fact that Japan was not disposed to view the joint declaration as being in effect a denunciation of the alliance. As a matter of honour, the British were reluctant to unilaterally denounce an alliance which Japan had loyally observed during the war, in particular, through providing naval protection to British interests in the Pacific, thereby allowing Great Britain to redispose its naval forces.109 John  ‘The Four Power Treaty,’ Advocate of Peace, 424.  Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 293; ‘The Four Power Treaty,’ 424; and Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 313. 107  LON, Treaty Series 1, no. 1 (1920), 24. 108  Bartlet Brebner, ‘Canada, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Washington Conference,’ Political Science Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1935): 45–58, 46, 48, 51. See also ‘Appendix 5: Great Britain and Japan,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 489–90. 109  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 283–4 and Bartlet Brebner, ‘Canada, the AngloJapanese Alliance and the Washington Conference,’ 48, 51. See also ‘Appendix 5: Great 105 106

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Bartlet Brebner noted that the appreciation of Japan’s service during the war served to dull the British government’s awareness of the use which Japan had made of British preoccupations elsewhere by embarking on the dismemberment of China. They were plagued, too, by the prevalent assumption that the Japanese were more sensitive to offense, and less easy to deal with as statesmen to statesmen, than Europeans. It was somehow a unique task to restrain Japan and a risky business to terminate an alliance with Japan.110

Although fully aware of the delicacy of the situation in respect to Anglo-­ American relations, the British government, Brebner observed writing from the perspective of 1935, was nonetheless inclined towards renewal of the alliance because, above all, of the prevalence in the United States of isolationist and pacifist sentiments: The great cloud lowering in the diplomatic sky was one which it is easy to forget. The surprising defection of the United States from the peace settlement, the League and international affairs generally, had left behind it a bewildered uncertainty among the framers of foreign policy. A Great Power had never acted in just that way before. The stunning effects of American abstention had dulled attention to the incipient activity which a few observers detected in the new President and in his Secretary of State, the Hon. C. E. Hughes. The habit of the day was to expect little or nothing from the United States except perhaps obstruction and to take it as axiomatic that no dependable engagement for continuous policy on anything could be obtained from her.111

That the American delegation  at the  Washington  Conference  sought the dissolution of the alliance was because it seemed to Washington that an alliance originally formed in 1902 against Russia, and then renewed in 1905 and 1911 against Germany, in 1921 could have no other objective, given the removal of these two threats at least temporarily, than the United States.112 As Balfour stated, the alliance had become ‘the cause … of some Britain and Japan,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 489–90. 110  Brebner, ‘Canada, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Washington Conference,’ 47, 54n. See also Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 295. 111  Brebner, ‘Canada, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Washington Conference,’ 47. 112  Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 293 and ‘The Four Power Treaty,’ Advocate of Peace, 424.

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suspicions, of a good deal of animadversion in important sections of opinion’ in the United States.113 Despite the fact that under Article 4 of the revised treaty of alliance of 1911, as Japanese and British officials tirelessly pointed out, British assistance to Japan in the event of a war between Japan and the United States was precluded, the treaty ‘was looked upon as the most dangerous menace’ to the United States.114 The Canadian prime minister, Arthur Meighen, went to the Imperial Conference opposing renewal as he felt that it would ‘imply some measure of toleration towards Japanese aggression in the Far East,’ a feeling shared by many Americans and which risked  of, in the United States context, overshadowing the knowledge of the pact’s special provision qualifying Britain’s obligation to assist its ally.115 Meighen feared that the alliance’s renewal would prove a very ‘potent a threat to good Anglo-American and Canadian-American relations upon both of which Canada depended for her sense of security.’116 Helping to fortify  Meighen’s  stance  was  the fact that, as noted in the House of Commons in June 1920, Beijing had indicated its opposition in protesting to London that there should be no renewal without prior consultation with China.117 The British foreign secretary George Curzon, that is,  Lord Curzon, had already been informed by the British ambassador at Washington that Secretary of State Hughes ‘strongly disapproved’ of renewal when he, Curzon, presented the British cabinet’s case in favour of it on June 28, in  Arthur Balfour, n. d., quoted in Iyenaga, ‘How Japan views the Arms Conference,’ 423.  Article 4 of the revised agreement of 1911 qualified the Anglo-Japanese alliance in the following fashion: ‘Should either High Contracting Party conclude a treaty of general arbitration with a third Power, it is agreed that nothing in this Agreement shall entail upon such Contracting Party an obligation to go to war with the Power with whom such treaty of arbitration is in force.’ Iyenaga, ‘How Japan views the Arms Conference,’ 423. See also ‘Appendix 5: Great Britain and Japan,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 490. The significance of  Article 4 of the revised agreement  is that it precluded British assistance to Japan in the event of a war between the United States and Japan. See further ‘The Revised Anglo-Japanese Treaty,’ The Spectator, July 22, 1911, 6–7. The provision precluding an Anglo-American conflict came into effect in September 1914 ‘in spite of the earlier defeat in the Senate of [Sir Edward] Grey’s arbitration treaty, by reason of Bryan’s Anglo-American “cooling off” treaty, and American attention had been repeatedly and pointedly drawn to it by Japanese and British public utterances.’ Brebner, ‘Canada, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Washington Conference,’ 48. 115  Brebner, ‘Canada, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Washington Conference,’ 48. 116  Ibid., 49. 117  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 284. See also, 130 Parl. Deb. H. C. (5th series), 10 June 1920, 584–5 and 130 Parl. Deb. H.C. (5th series), 24 June 1920, 2365–6. 113 114

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the course of which he apprised the conference of the American attitude.118 The following day, Meighen presented the Canadian view, declaring that Canada opposed renewal of the Alliance in any form because the reason for its existence was past, such entanglements were incompatible with the League of Nations idea and both the US and China would regard any treaty with mistrust, as implying benevolent neutrality towards Japanese aggression. He reminded the Conference that good Anglo-American relations were the touchstone of British policy and the hope of the world. As early as February, in opposing renewal, he had urged on Lloyd George a conference about Pacific affairs among Japan, the United States, China and the British Empire. He still thought that that was the best step to take.119

Meighen’s presentation met with a fierce response from the Australian prime minister William M. Hughes, who accused Meighen of doing the bidding of the United States, a country which, he noted, had ‘broken all commitments.’120 He warned that abandoning so loyal an ally as Japan would cause deep offence and that Japan ‘quite properly would seek revenge.’121 Although a year earlier the Australian government had seemed hostile to the proposed extension of the alliance, it had recently concluded that as ‘Australasia … could count on little British effectiveness in a naval race in the Pacific,’ and as the United States appeared to have retreated from world affairs, Japan was needed as an ally: the British Empire ‘must have a reliable friend in the Pacific.’122 Meighen presented his case against renewal once more on July 1, the thrust of his discourse being that Britain and the Dominions should ‘gamble possible American willingness to collaborate on Pacific affairs against what they believed to be a certain affront to Japan and possible revenge,’ a gamble that Lloyd George, following another display of pugnacity by Hughes, indicated his government was willing to accept.123 Curzon, on the prompting of Meighen,  then outlined a plan for a conference on Pacific affairs, a plan in which Secretary of State Hughes had already expressed interest, which would involve China, the British Empire, Japan  Brebner, ‘Canada, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Washington Conference,’ 55.  Ibid., 53. 120  Ibid., 54. 121  Ibid. 122  Ibid., 51–2. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 284. 123  Brebner, ‘Canada, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Washington Conference,’ 55–6. 118 119

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and the United States. It was in this way, that the Britons signalled the termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Nine days later, President Harding issued his invitation to what became the Washington Conference. Although the plan for the Washington differed somewhat from the plan for a Pacific conference that had been proposed by Curzon at the Imperial Conference, this was of little consequence such was the ‘appeal of possible international collaboration on the Pacific tension and on naval disarmament.’124 The American delegation at the Washington Conference well understood that from the British point of view, jettisoning the alliance was difficult: Japan was owed a debt for its wartime service and there was a certain sensitivity about wounding Japanese pride. Referring to the difficulty of terminating the alliance, Wright observed that it seemed that adding the United States and France to the mix was ‘the easiest way out and this was achieved by the four power pact.’125 The utility of this approach was also appreciated by elements in Japan who were concerned that whatever its past value, the treaty had become a barrier to mutual understanding between the United States and their own country. Thus, Iyenaga observed the following: The new pact provides a graceful exit from the dilemma in which Great Britain and Japan found themselves in respect to the renewal of the Anglo-­ Japanese Alliance. Both powers had come to the realization that the treaty had already outlived its usefulness, for neither the Russian nor the German menace any longer existed; but neither of them was disposed to take an initial step for the abrogation of the alliance. The friendship that had lasted for twenty years, ‘that had served a great purpose in two wars, and stood the strain of common sacrifices, common anxieties, common efforts, common triumphs’ and proved the bulwark of peace in the Far East, could not be easily brushed aside …. When, therefore, a way was found whereby that most desired American friendship and co-operation could be secured, and at the same time the Anglo-Japanese Alliance could be annulled without the parting of the two former friends, or, rather, be superseded by the new compact, which would embrace all the great powers in the vast area of the Pacific and definitely

 Ibid., 56.  Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 295.

124 125

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assure peace therein, we can well imagine the keen satisfaction that must have been felt by the negotiators.126

Iyenaga considered that the Four-Power Treaty would later be regarded as a ‘masterpiece of constructive statesmanship’ not only because it cut though the dilemma concerning the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, but because it paved the way to the resolution of other sensitive issues at the conference.127 However, he added the proviso that its historical standing would depend on whether or not it was ‘wrecked’ by non-ratification by one of the signatory powers.128 Some were anxious that the United States was potentially one such wrecker because the pact, although confined to four powers and to insular and dominion possessions in the Pacific, in certain respects appeared to closely resemble Article 10 of the covenant and for this reason many felt it was bound to meet with opposition in the Senate.129 In presenting the treaty to the conference and after having declared that following its ratification by the signatories the Anglo-Japanese Alliance would be terminated, Senator Lodge pointed out that all that the treaty required of its adherents, as specified under Article 1, was joint conciliation should a controversy arise between any of the parties involving their rights and,  as  specified  under Article 2, joint consultation in the case aggression by any other power against the insular possessions of any of the parties.130 There was, he continued, ‘no provision for force to carry out any of the terms of the agreement, and no military or naval sanction lurks in the background.’131 In making these points, Lodge was rehearsing the arguments he would later employ in defending the treaty against the objections of the so-called Irreconcilables (that is, the isolationist opponents of the Treaty of Versailles in the Senate), led by Senators Borah and [David] Reed, who argued precisely that it incorporated Article 10.132 Although it appeared likely that the treaty would not fail of ratification, Lodge was anxious about the Senate’s response to it as perhaps also was President Harding who, on presenting the treaty to the Senate on February

 Iyenaga, ‘How Japan Views the Arms Conference,’ 23.  Ibid. 128  Ibid. 129  Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 293. 130  ‘The Four Power Treaty,’ Advocate of Peace, 424–5. 131  Henry Cabot Lodge, 1921, quoted ibid., 425. 132  ‘The Four Power Treaty,’ Advocate of Peace, 424. 126 127

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10, 1922, carefully stressed that the only sanction envisaged by it was that of world opinion: There is no commitment to armed force, no alliance, no written or moral obligation to join in defense, no expressed or implied commitment to arrive at any agreement except in accordance with our constitutional methods. It is easy to believe however, that such a conference of the four powers is a moral warning that an aggressive nation, giving affront to the four great powers ready to focus world opinion on a given controversy, would be embarking on a hazardous enterprise.133

Wright questioned this interpretation of the pact on the ground that it was hard to see why embarking on aggression would be any more hazardous an enterprise  ‘with the treaty than without it’  if  the  parties to the treaty were neither expressly nor morally obliged to join in defence. In fact, Wright thought that the language of the pact was indicative of a commitment to armed force. Nonetheless, the view that the pact involved ‘no war commitment,’ as Harding stated earlier in his speech to the Senate, remained the definitive American interpretation.134 After much robust debate, the pact was adopted by the Senate on March 25, 1922, by a vote of 67 to 27 with the reserve that ‘the United States understands that in the statement in the preamble or under the terms of this treaty there is no commitment to armed force, no alliance, no obligation to join in any defense.’135 Iyenaga was also of the view that under the treaty there was no obligation to resort to armed force, observing that the new treaty was of a completely different character to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and that  it was  precisely because of its lack of teeth  that  it had been seized on by Japanese critics of the Washington Conference. In this regard he pointed out that the Yorodzu, a Tokyo daily, had declared that ‘the Pacific convention was brought to submerge the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and it was the handkerchief which a magician uses to spellbind the spectators—it has no meaning at all.’136

 Henry Cabot Lodge, 1922, quoted in Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 293.  Wright, ‘The Washington Conference,’ 293. 135  Ibid., 290. 136  Iyenaga, ‘How Japan Views the Arms Conference,’ 22–4. 133 134

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The Yap Treaty At the time when the Four-Power Treaty was concluded, the representatives of the four powers involved signed an agreement which recorded the reservations of the United States concerning its rights in respect to the mandated islands in the Pacific, both north and south of the equator, and which removed from the scope of the treaty’s Article 1, which referred to ‘controversies arising out of any Pacific question,’ such domestic sources of contention as Japanese immigration to California.137 In relation to the mandated islands, the text of that agreement stated the following: That the treaty shall apply to the mandated islands in the Pacific Ocean; Provided, however, That the making of the treaty shall not be deemed to be an assent on the part of the United States of America, to mandates and shall not preclude agreements between the United States of America, and the mandatory powers, respectively, in relation to the mandated islands.138

Although the conference agenda placed under the heading of questions relating to mandated islands the subject of ‘electrical communications in the Pacific,’ the Yap controversy was not addressed at all by the conference proper but was approached in the same way as was the Shandong controversy: a settlement was negotiated outside of but concurrently with the conference.139 The consequent treaty as to Yap and the Mandated North Pacific Islands between the United States and Japan was signed on February 11, 1922, according to which the United States officially recognised, having acknowledged that it had not ratified the Treaty of Versailles, the Japanese mandate over all the former German islands in the Pacific north of the equator. In this way, Japan, alone among the mandatory powers, came to possess ‘undisputed title:’ the titles of all the other mandatories  had  yet to be perfected by means of special agreements with the United States.140 Under the Yap Treaty, the United States obtained

 ‘The Four Power Treaty,’ Advocate of Peace, 424–5.  Ibid., 424. Emphasis in the original. 139  ‘Appendix 15: The Agenda of the Washington Conference, 1921,’ in  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 508. See also Charles Noble Gregory, ‘The Treaty as to Yap and the Mandated North Pacific Islands,’ American Journal of International Law 16, no. 2 (1922): 248–5, 249. 140  Blakeslee, ‘The Mandates of the Pacific,’ 113. 137 138

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(1) equal cable rights in Yap; (2) a definite guarantee, given both in the original Mandate and respected in the present treaty, that ‘no military or naval bases shall be established or fortifications erected in the territory,’ a provision which, in largest part, does away with the menace of these islands remaining in Japan’s possession; (3) protection for American missions and American traders; (4) a recognition of its rights as one of the original trustees of the Mandate—shown especially by Japan’s agreement to send annually to the United States a duplicate of the report on its administration which is to be made to the Council of the League of Nations.141

Thus, at the Washington Conference, another source of controversy between the United States and Japan was skilfully brought to an end and a period of détente between the two powers ensued.142

Race and Immigration: The Termination of the Gentleman’s Agreement This relaxation of tensions  between the United States and Japan  was rudely interrupted on May 26, 1924, by  the coming into effect of the Immigration (Restriction) Act or Johnson-Reed Act, which saw for the first time Japanese immigrants as a national group excluded from the United States. Anti-Chinese exclusion laws of an increasingly severe character had been introduced in the United States between 1882 and 1904. From around 1900, and against a background of an increasing number of Japanese labourers entering the continent via Hawaii, there was growing agitation in areas such as San Francisco for the exclusion laws to be extended to Japanese immigrants.143 141  Ibid., 104. See also Gregory, ‘The Treaty as to Yap and the Mandated North Pacific Islands,’ 249–50. Akagi noted that the United States obtained from Japan ‘all the rights and privileges [in respect to the mandated islands] granted to the members of the League of Nations. The United States also secured free access for American citizens to the island of Yap on an equal footing with Japanese subjects or any other nationals “in all that relates to the landing and operation of the existing Yap-Guam cable, or of any other cable which may hereafter be laid or operated by the United States or by its nationals in connection with the island of Yap.” The same rights and privileges were secured with respect to the radio-telegraphic communications, the same to be suspended so long as Japan maintained an adequate station.’ Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 389. 142  Gregory, ‘The Treaty as to Yap and the Mandated North Pacific Islands,’ 248–5, 251 and Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 202. 143  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 432–3.

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The Immigration Act of February 20, 1907, authorised the president to deny entry to the continental territory of the United States immigrants in possession of passports ‘issued by any foreign government to its citizens to go to any country other than the United States or to any insular possession of the United States,’ should the president be ‘satisfied’ that these ‘are being used for the purpose of enabling the holders to come to the continental territory of the United States to the detriment of labor conditions therein.’144 In accordance with this authorisation, President Theodore  Roosevelt issued an Executive Order on March 14, 1907, according to which ‘Japanese or Korean labourers, skilled and unskilled, who have received passports to go to Mexico, Canada or Hawaii, and came therefrom,’ could be denied ‘permission to enter the continental territory of the United States’ should the president be satisfied that those passports ‘are being used for the purpose of enabling the holders’ to come to that territory ‘to the detriment of labor conditions therein.’145 The Immigration Act  of 1907  further authorised the president to enter into ‘such international agreements as may be proper to prevent the immigration of aliens who, under the laws of the United States, are or may be excluded from entering the United States, and of regulating any matters pertaining  to such immigration.’146 Under this authority, President Roosevelt entered into negotiations with Japan in order to arrive at a modus vivendi which, as he expressed it, would conduce to ‘a maximum of efficiency’ with respect to the regulation of Japanese immigration to the continent of the United States while at the same time ensuring ‘a minimum of friction’ between the two countries.147 These negotiations resulted in what became known as the Gentleman’s Agreement: an executive agreement according to which the Japanese government agreed on a voluntary basis to restrict the issuing of passports to the continental United States to a limited number of categories of Japanese

144  Department of Commerce and Labor, Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration Laws and Regulations of July 1, 1907, 11th ed. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910), 5. 145  Ibid., 41. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 434. 146  Department of Commerce and Labor, Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration Laws and Regulations of July 1, 1907, 21. 147  Theodore Roosevelt, 1907, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 434.

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emigrants.148 The agreement was unpopular on the Pacific Coast, and on May 9, 1913, the Californian legislature, by way of compensating for the failure to have the exclusion laws extended, passed the Alien Land Law Act, which ‘denied to “aliens ineligible for citizenship” the right to own land or lease agriculture land for more than three years,’ notwithstanding the opposition of President Wilson who sought to have the legislation stayed.149 Chinda, then the ambassador to Washington, protested this measure, declaring it ‘unjust and unequitable [sic],’ as inconsistent with the provisions of the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation signed in Washington on February 11, 1911, between Japan and the United States and contrary to the spirit of cordiality and friendship that should govern the relations between the two countries.150 Such protests proved futile as on November 1920, the same legislature, doubtless emboldened by the anti-Japanese sentiment consequent upon the Shandong controversy, passed a new and even harsher Alien Land Law Act.151 148  Akagi observed that although the agreement ‘was not applicable to Hawaii, Japan applied substantially the same restrictive measures to Japanese emigrants who were destined to the Hawaiian islands; she also similarly limited the Japanese emigration to Mexico.’ Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 434–5. 149  Ibid., 436. 150  Chinda Sutemi, 1913, quoted ibid. Article 1 of the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between the United States and Japan stated the following: ‘The citizens or subjects of each of the high contracting parties shall have liberty to enter, travel and reside in the territories of the other to carry on trade, wholesale and retail, to own or lease and occupy houses, manufactories, warehouses and shops, to employ agents of their choice, to lease land for residential and commercial purposes, and generally to do anything incident to or necessary for trade upon the same terms as native citizens or subjects, submitting themselves to the laws and regulations there established.’ This treaty superseded a treaty of the same name signed in Washington on November 22, 1894. Article 1 of the 1894 provided that ‘the citizens or subject of the two High Contracting Parties shall have full liberty to enter, travel or reside in any part of the territories of the other Contracting Party.’ ‘Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between the United States and Japan,’ supplement, American Journal of International Law 5, no. 2 (1911): 100–6, 100. See also Charles I. Bevans, ed., Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America: 1776–1949, vol. 9 (Washington: Department of States, 1972), 387–8. 151  ‘The new Alien Land Law … provided that all “aliens ineligible to citizenship” could not own or lease agricultural land nor could they become members or acquire shares in any corporation owning agricultural land nor could they become guardians of a minor owning agricultural land, and that any real estate acquired by such aliens after 1920 in violation of this Law should escheat to the State of California. In 1923, the series was completed when

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The 1790 Naturalization Law of the United States as amended in 1870 ‘granted the privilege of naturalization to “free white persons and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.”’152 In a ruling issued on November 13, 1922, in the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States, which concerned the eligibility to American citizenship of a man born in Japan of Japanese descent who had immigrated to Hawaii, the Supreme Court concluded ‘that the words “white person” are synonymous with “a person of the Caucasian race”,’ although the court added that in reaching this conclusion it was not ignoring the fact that there had been border-line cases in the past or pretending that there would be none such cases in the future.153 However, in the cause of  Takao  Ozawa v. United States, the court declared that as the appellant was ‘clearly of a race which is not Caucasian,’ his case belonged ‘entirely outside the zone [of more or less debatable ground] on the negative side.’154 In the view of Akagi, it was significant that the closing section of the court’s determination insisted that neither in the relevant law nor in the court’s interpretation of it was there ‘any suggestion of individual unworthiness or racial inferiority.’155 Encouraged by the Supreme Court’s decision and the passage of alien land laws by several state legislatures, the proponents of Japanese exclusion now agitated for the termination of so-called Gentleman’s Agreement and ‘the sealing of American ports to Japanese immigration’ via a new immigration bill.156 The aforementioned Immigration Act of 1924 was the outcome of such agitation: it provided, as amended by the Senate, that ‘no alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States’ and its effect was indeed to seal American ports to Japanese immigration, albeit with a limited number of exceptions.157 an additional legislative enactment deprived all “aliens ineligible to citizenship” of the right to enjoy the use of cropping contracts.’ Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 439. 152  Takao Ozawa v. United States, 260 US 178 (1922). 153  Ibid. 154  Ibid. 155  Ibid. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 440. 156  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 441. 157  Immigration. Act of 1924, United States Statutes at Large, 68th Cong. Sess. I, Ch. 190, 153–62. Among the exceptions were persons previously lawfully admitted to the United States who were returning from a temporary visit abroad, ministers of any religious denomination who were coming to the United States solely to carry out their vocation, professors appointed to institutions of higher learning and bona fide students.

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In a letter addressed to Secretary of State Hughes sent on April 10, 1924, at the direction of the Japanese foreign minister, Ambassador Masanao Hanihara noted that under the Gentleman’s Agreement Japan had voluntarily undertaken to limit the emigration of Japanese labourers to the United States in lieu of a policy of exclusion which would have served to injure national feelings in Japan.158 Hanihara acknowledged the sovereign right of the United States in respect to the exclusion of immigrants; nonetheless, he offered the following frank assessment of the situation: The important question is whether Japan as a nation is or is not entitled to the proper respect and consideration of other nations. In other words, the Japanese Government asks of the United States Government simply that proper consideration ordinarily given by one nation to the self respect of another, which after all forms the basis of amicable international intercourse throughout the civilized world …. In other words, the manifest object of the [section denying citizenship to ineligible aliens] is to single out Japanese as a nation, stigmatizing them as unworthy and undesirable in the eyes of the American people …. It is indeed difficult to believe that it can be the intention of the people of your great country, who always stand for high principles of justice and fair play in the intercourse of nations.159

In closing his letter, Hanihara expressed the belief, which, he stated, he thought Hughes shared, that if the clause were retained ‘grave consequences would inevitably’ be brought ‘upon the otherwise happy and mutually advantageous’  relationship  between the two countries.160 Unfortunately for Hanihara and the cause he served, the expression grave consequences was seized on by proponents of the exclusion clause. In a debate in the Senate on April 11, Senator Lodge used the terms ‘improper’ and a ‘veiled threat’ in order to characterise Hanihara’s letter, stating that in light of this he could not support an amendment to the bill proposed by the Senate’s Immigration and Naturalisation Committee, based on a

158  Masayo Umezawa Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy: The Oahu Sugar Strike (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999), 305. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 442. 159  Hanihara Masanao, 1924, quoted in Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy, 305. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 442. 160  Hanihara Masanao, 1924, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 442.

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suggestion by the secretary of state, that would have had the effect of preserving the Gentleman’s Agreement.161 Hanihara was deeply offended by the fact that he, as someone who was known to be a great friend of the United States, had been accused of ‘the wanton act of using a veil threat against that very country.’162 On April 18, under instruction from the Japanese foreign minister who had been shocked by the reaction in America to Hanihara’s letter, the ambassador issued the following public pronouncement: We did not intend it to mean war or a threat. The Japanese Exclusion Act tramples on the prestige of our nation, and gives to Japanese citizens’ minds the impression of deep resentment that can never be eradicated. As a result the Japanese government’s effort … to maintain good relations between Japan and the U.S. will be nullified …. This is of grave consequences for the Imperial government which has been upholding the ideal of harmony among the peoples of the world and placing great weight on Japan-U.S. relations toward that end. This is the context which the term ‘grave consequences’ was used.163

This pronouncement and a note which had been sent by Hanihara to the secretary of state on April 17  with a view to clarifying the former’s meaning in his note of April 10 and which was made public on April 20, failed to sway congressional opinion. On May 15, the bill, unamended, was passed by large majorities in both Houses.164 Three days later Cyrus E. Woods, Hanihara’s American counterpart in Tokyo, resigned. Although 161  Henry Cabot Lodge, 1924, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 443. On the adoption of Hughs’s suggestion by the Senate Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, see Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 442–3. 162  Hanihara, 1930, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 447. Hanihara further observed that ‘the resentment is felt now as it was then, nor will it ever die out so long as the wound inflicted remains unhealed’ (ibid., 447). 163  Hanihara, 1924, quoted in Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy, 306. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 445–6. 164  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 443–4. In his note to Secretary of State Hughes on April 17, Hanihara ‘expressed his inability “to understand how the two words read in their context could be construed as meaning anything like a threat” as he had “no thought of being in any way disagreeable or discourteous and still less conveying ‘a veiled threat,’” and explained that he “simply tried to emphasize the most unfortunate and deplorable effect upon our traditional friendship which might result from the adoption of a particular clause in the proposed measure.”’ See also Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy, 306. The vote was 308 to 58 in the House of Representatives and 69 to 9 in the Senate.

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Woods cited family reasons, it was known at the time that he had been ‘very disappointed in the action of the American Congress.’165 Hanihara himself, embarrassed by the fact that his letter had had the perverse effect of assisting the passage of the offending bill, would soon afterwards return to Japan. Before doing so, on May 31, a week after a disapproving President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act into law, Hanihara presented the Japanese government’s formal protest to the United States via Secretary of State Hughes.166 In what was a lengthy memorandum, the Japanese government observed that ‘international discrimination in any form and on any subject,’ above all, ‘discrimination based on race … [is] … opposed to the principles of justice and fairness upon which the friendly intercourse between nations must, in the final analysis depend.’167 It noted that the new legislation was contrary to the spirit of the commercial treaties concluded between Japan and the United States in 1894 and 1911, one of the chief objects of which from the Japanese perspective was the protection of Japanese nationals from discriminatory immigration legislation. As the exclusion provision of the new legislation was clearly targeted at Japanese, the memorandum continued, Japan could no longer uphold the Gentleman’s Agreement, the ‘self-denying regulations’ of which it had so scrupulously observed over more than sixteen years.168

165  On resigning as ambassador, Cyrus E. Woods stated the following: ‘I consider that in this crisis, the government and people of Japan have acted with dignity and self-restraint which, promises well, better indeed than might have been expected, for the continuation of friendship between Japan and America.’ ‘News in Brief,’ Advocate of Peace, 86, no. 66 (1924), 373. 166  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 444–6. President Coolidge ‘affixed his signature upon the Immigration Act, accompanying it, however, with a statement in which he criticized the method used by Congress to obtain Japanese exclusion, but recognizing “that the enactment of this provision does not imply any change in our sentiment of admiration and cordial friendship for the Japanese people”’ (ibid. 444). Masayo Umezawa Duus writes that the Japanese had expected that Coolidge would veto the legislation. However, having ‘been thrust unexpectedly into the presidency … his power base was not yet solid. Yielding to strong pressures from West Coast congressmen, President Coolidge, despite Hughes’s urging, was unable to come up with a compromise plan. The prospect of a national election … was the backdrop for the passage of the new immigration law that took effect on July 1, 1924.’ Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy, 306–7. 167  Memorandum of the Japanese Government, 1924, quoted in Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 444–5. 168  Ibid., 445.

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As a measure of the depth of the feelings aroused in Japan by the exclusion provision and the claims made during its debate in Congress about the non-assimilability of Japanese immigrants to the American way of life and American values, one might note a recollection drawn on by Toynbee following an address given at Chatham House in 1935.169 In support of his contention that in the field of foreign affairs, the Japanese ‘certainly had a sense of an imposed inferiority made the more bitter by its clash with an inward sense of superiority,’ Toynbee suggested that it might be useful to recall that when the news arrived in Japan that the Japanese had been ‘put into the Oriental Exclusion chapter of the [Immigration] Act, two Japanese had committed suicide on the steps of the American Embassy in Tokyo.’170 In terms of regional relations and just as Secretary of State Hughes had feared, the effect of the 1924 Immigration Act was to greatly undermine the ‘psychological value’ of the work of the Washington Conference, a development that was of much concern given that the machinery of cooperation in the Pacific was of such a rudimentary character.171 The resentment aroused in Japan as a result of Congress’s adoption of the exclusion clause very much played on the mind of the founders of the IPR.172

169  Virgil S.  McClatchy, the first witness to appear before the Senate Committee on Immigration and Naturalization during its hearings on the Senate’s immigration bill between March 11 and 15, stated the following: ‘I have a very high regard for the character and ability of the Japanese nation and the Japanese people. And I realize that it is in effect their strong racial characteristics which make them so dangerous a factor if admitted to this country as permanent residents. With great pride of race, they have no idea of assimilating in the sense of amalgamation. They never cease to be Japanese. They do not come to this country with any desire or any intent to lose their racial or national identity. They come here specifically and professedly for the purpose of colonizing and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato race.’ Virgil S. McClatchy, 1924, quoted in Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy, 303–4. See also Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 445. 170  Arnold J.  Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ International Affairs 15, no. 1 (1936): 26–56, 56. See also Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy, 309–10. 171  Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific 1927, 169. See also Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 167; Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 447; and Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy, 302. 172  Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1–2. On the impact of the Immigration Act, see also Nicholas Murray Butler, preface to International Conciliation 11, no. 228 (1926), 123–4.

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The Background to the Institute of Pacific Relations: The First International Institution for the Study of International Relations The background of the IPR concerns the United States’ rapid emergence as a Pacific power in the early twentieth century and the growing involvement of Americans in trade, missionary work, journalism and scholarly research in the region, most particularly in Japan and China.173 A Pan-­ Pacific movement soon emerged as reflected in the establishment in 1917 of the Pan-Pacific Union (PPU), which was based on the example of the Pan-American Union. The founder of the PPU was an American named Alexander Hume Ford, who had successfully launched the Mid-Pacific Magazine in 1910 and who thought that ‘multi-ethnic Hawaii was a compelling model for the improvement of relations in an increasingly interconnected world.’174 The PPU was well-received by Hawaii’s business and social elites and managed to establish political connections in Washington. Its foundation directly led to the formation of Pan-Pacific Clubs in a variety of countries throughout the region. The appearance of these clubs and the series of regional conferences  which  Ford commenced in 1920 and  which examined topics ranging from ‘science to women’s rights,’ ensured an intellectually and institutionally hospitable base for the formation of the IPR.175 Condliffe later suggested that the idea that gave rise to the IPR ‘probably originated in the fertile brain’ of Ford, noting that of his numerous initiatives both the Pan-Pacific Women’s Group and the Pacific Science Association became, unlike the PPU itself, permanent organisations. Condliffe recalled that Ford had claimed that it was he who had originated the idea for a conference of members of Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) drawn from the Pacific region.176 Ford’s claim would seem to be confirmed by the observation of J. Merle Davis, one of the founders of the IPR, who noted that as early as 1916, Ford had proposed to the secretary of the YMCA ‘the plan of a Pan Pacific Y.M.C.A. conference which should  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 35.  Paul Hooper, ‘History,’ Pan-Pacific Union Records, http://manoa.hawaii.edu/library/ research/collections/archives/manuscript-collections/other-manuscript-collections/ pan-pacific-union-records/. 175  Ibid., and Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 35–6. 176  ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in  Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 430. 173 174

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assemble representative association men from the Pacific countries for considering the human problems of the Pacific.’177 A plan to hold a conference in Honolulu of YMCA representatives from the Pacific region was ‘tentatively’ put forward in 1919 and then was ‘seriously discussed’ at the Young Men’s Christian Association Employed Officers’ Conference which took place at Lake Geneva in Wisconsin in June 1921.178 The plan was subsequently presented to the general secretary of the international committee of the YMCA, namely, John R. Mott, who, in a letter dated October 8, 1921,  which was  addressed to Frank C.  Atherton, chairman of the YMCA’s Territorial Executive Committee in Hawaii and president of the firm Castle and Cooke, stated: ‘I am deeply interested to learn of the plan proposed by the Honolulu Young Men’s Christian Association to call a conference of representatives of Associations from the countries bordering on the Pacific to meet in Honolulu in 1923.’179 On December 19, at a meeting at the Pacific Club, Atherton, and other prominent members of the Hawaiian the YMCA, discussed the proposed conference. The original idea seemed to be that of hosting a discussion of the organisation  of  training for YMCA secretaries in Pacific countries, although there was a hint of other concerns in the following suggestion made at the meeting: that ‘the basic business of such a conference should be to discover what is fundamental and universal in Christianity and consider how this might be made a common basis of understanding and motivation for the Pacific peoples.’180 Subsequent to this and with the backing of Mott, a member of the Honolulu YMCA, Lloyd R. Killam, discussed the proposed conference with YMCA ‘leaders of the Orient’ at a meeting of the World Christian Student Federation meeting in Beijing in June 1922.181 In light of the fact that the idea had won the support of the aforementioned leaders, a meeting in Honolulu was called by Atherton and by Robbins B. Anderson, president of the board of directors of the Honolulu YMCA, ‘at which thirty-five representative men of Honolulu’ voted

177  J. Merle Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ International Conciliation 11, no. 228 (1926): 125–146, 125. 178  Institute of Pacific Relations [hereafter IPR], Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925: History, Organization, Proceedings, Discussions and Addresses (Honolulu: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1925), 7. 179  John C. Mott, 1921, quoted ibid. 180  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 8. 181  Ibid.

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­ nanimously to call a Pan-Pacific YMCA conference.182 At this meeting, u the objects of the planned conference were described as follows: To discuss the relation of the character and ideas of young men and boys to the progress of Pacific nations; the responsibility of the Association movement for their improvement; the interchange of ideas regards successful methods. To strengthen the world programme of the Association, especially as it is related to the Pacific lands, through increased knowledge of conditions. To strengthen the lay leadership of the movement in all countries. To strengthen the bonds of friendship between the peoples of the Pacific through personal acquaintance and fellowship of the delegates. To magnify the place of Jesus Christ in the lives of all men and boys in the Pacific countries.183 On May 31, 1923, at the Second World’s Conference of Young Men’s Christian Association Workers Among Boys which was held at Pörtschach in Austria, Atherton and Charles F. Loomis, the latter being secretary of the Hawaii Territorial Executive Committee, presented the plan for the conference to a group of representatives from Pacific countries, including representatives from China, Japan and America.184 The upshot of this presentation was a series of resolutions passed by the conference which, in brief, approved the holding of a Pacific YMCA conference in Honolulu in February 1925 and called on Hawaii to take the initiative in preparing for it. Notably, the preamble to the aforementioned resolutions included the following statement: Realising the great need for strengthening the moral, religious, intellectual and physical training of the boys and young men of those nations bordering the Pacific, and the urgent need for a Christian solution of the pressing problems of the Pacific, and; Believing that Hawaii’s geographical location in the centre of the Pacific, the promotion for a number of years of a community of interest among the peoples of the Pacific basin, and the progress which it has made in the development of inter-racial understanding and  Ibid.  Honolulu YMCA, 1922, quoted ibid. 184  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 9 and ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 430–1. 182 183

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good will make it an eminently fitting place to hold a Young Men’s Christian Association Conference.185

Against the background of a report of the Pörtschach meeting prepared by Loomis, a letter dated December 7, 1923,  which was  signed by Atherton and Loomis in the name of the Hawaiian Territorial Executive Committee, was forwarded to the YMCA’s national committees in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the Philippine Islands and the United States, asking them to approve and participate in the organisation of a ‘Christian conference’ in Honolulu under the auspices of the YMCA.186 Importantly, the letter stated that the purpose of the conference was ‘to consider some of the problems of Pacific peoples from a Christian viewpoint and to formulate some practical constructive plans that will help in their solution.’ This statement was seen by contemporary observers as marking a shift in the way the conference was conceptualised: whereas the original focus of the planned conference had rested squarely on the YMCA and its activities, the emphasis had now come to rest on the problems of Pacific peoples, albeit  as  considered from a Christian perspective.187 The business and professional people and social and religious workers in the Hawaiian Islands whose discussions gave rise to the IPR shared many of the concerns that gave rise to the PPU.188 In particular, they were greatly troubled by the ‘rising racial tension’ in the Pacific.189 They feared that the great contrasts displayed by Pacific nations in respect to economic resources, standards of living, population pressure and industrial and political organisation might give rise to war and that a war among Pacific nations might  be ‘embittered by racial antagonisms.’190 Indeed, according to Davis whose involvement in the IPR in its early years is discussed below, they feared that should ‘an armed conflict break out between the white and yellow races, they and all their interests, material and cultural, would be wiped out of existence.’191 Davis stated that having  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 9.  Ibid., 9–10. 187  Ibid., 10–11. 188  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 521 and Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations: History and Proceedings,’ 125. 189  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 125. 190  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 521, 529. 191  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 126. 185 186

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witnessed the nations of the Atlantic ‘struggle toward understanding and economic and political adjustment after four years of mutual destruction,’ the founders of the IPR were determined that in the Pacific region the ‘struggle for understanding and adjustment should come before the struggle with arms.’192 As both Davis and Condliffe observed, island leaders such as Atherton were encouraged by their experience of the racial diversity of the Hawaiian Islands: they were ‘impressed with the success that had attended the efforts to approach racial and social problems in the Hawaiian Islands by the method of friendly continuous discussion among interested parties.’193 They hoped that by means of a conference in which certain frictions affecting the relations of peoples of the Pacific were ‘brought out into the open’ and discussed with ‘entire frankness by men and women of different racial or national backgrounds,’ what was otherwise opaque might become ‘clear and misunderstandings might tend to resolve themselves.’194 As Condliffe later observed, Atherton’s ‘basic idea was that the Hawaiian method of bringing together leaders of the different racial communities for free and frank discussion of their difficulties and differences in a friendly Christian atmosphere was worth trying on a larger stage.’195 Condliffe thought that in this idea there were ‘two elements of unreality’: first, Hawaii was a less harmonious society than it seemed ‘on the surface,’ and second, what could be achieved in ‘a small, essentially paternalistic community was not easily transferable to the relations between sovereign states’; nonetheless Condliffe concluded that the idea had ‘vitality and pointed the way to international understanding.’196

Preparations for the First IPR Conference Following the passing of resolutions by the aforementioned national committees of the YMCA endorsing the proposed conference and the appointment by them of three members to each a General Calling Committee,  Ibid., 125.  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 521. See also Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 125–6. 194  Third Biennial Conference of the IPR, Kyoto, 28 October-9 November 1929, Second Announcement, 1 July 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.  See also Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 127. 195  ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 431. 196  Ibid., 431–2. 192 193

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several meetings took place in Honolulu concerning the conference’s programme. At these meetings, the shift in emphasis of the conference was furthered, with lengthy consideration being given to such topics as ‘how may the Christian spirit be made to prevail in economic and commercial life’ and how can it ‘control international politics.’197 The General Calling Committee met at Atlantic City on September 21, 1924, where, among other matters, the following decisions were taken: 1. That the objective of the Conference should be education, centring on the stimulation of that clear thinking which is based on more adequate facts and wider sympathies. 2. The program should be built and developed out of defined Pacific problems on which men are confused and in terms of which action must be taken. 3. That the attendants should be a small select group of people of influence in forming public opinion …. Attendants need not be Christians but should be interested in the Christian approach toward the solution of Pacific problems. 4. That the procedure be an educational process, including addresses at forums but making the central feature round tables in which attendants should study simultaneously the various phases of the same problems, with experts participating and under the leadership of the chairmen; an attempt being made to unify the work of round tables, forums and addresses.198 In addition to these decisions, the committee approved a statement issued by the Hawaiian group which represented their plans for the conference as developed up until that point. Tellingly, this statement bore the following heading: ‘A Conference on Problems of the Pacific Peoples... to Consider Contacts and Conflicts and to Foster Understanding and Co-operation,’ a title that reflected Atherton’s concern that the conference address ‘a full range of Asian and Pacific issues.’199 The statement explained that the background to the conference concerned the fact that the Pacific Ocean no longer posed ‘an almost insur IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 11.  Ibid., 12. 199  Ibid., 12–13 and Paul Hooper, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies,’ Pacific Affairs 61, no. 1 (1988), 98–121, 99. 197 198

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mountable barrier to the intercourse of the peoples which it separates’; rather, according to the statement, the Pacific had become ‘a highway of travel and commerce’ with ‘cable and wireless’ uniting people ‘by almost instantaneous communication.’ 200  Having suggested that the trend towards  interdependence in the Pacific would only intensify in the future, the statement went on to observe that the present situation was one in which the ‘glamour which surrounded the countries which viewed each other across the Pacific’ had evaporated and in which ‘racial antipathies’ and national selfishness were on the rise.201 In respect to the spirit of the conference, the statement explained that  it  would discuss the issues that came before it with ‘entire frankness’ as only this approach would allow members to hear one another’s point of view. Following such discussion, the statement added, the conference would consider how to ‘remedy present errors and misunderstandings and to develop better relations in the future.’202 In terms of the scope of the conference, the statement observed that it would be confined to questions that ‘vitally concern the Pacific peoples, which are international in bearing and relate to mutual understanding of the several peoples and feelings and conduct toward one another.’203 That the conference would be held under the auspices of the YMCA, the statement explained, was because the YMCA ‘is international and is adapted to the promotion of such an enterprise of widely Christian purposes,’ adding that Hawaii ‘as a laboratory of racial relations, central in location, is a fitting place for the Conference.’204 At the same time, and on the suggestion of Atherton, membership of the conference was not to be confined to members of the YMCA or to adherents of Christianity more broadly: the statement specified that invitations to membership would be to men and women ‘known to be in sympathy with the spirit and purposes of the Conference regardless of religious affiliation.’205

 IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 13.  Ibid. 202  Ibid., 14. 203  Ibid. 204  Ibid., 14–15. The Hawaiian planners of the conference chose the YMCA as its host organisation because of the YMCA’s character as a ‘homogenous international organization.’ Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 126. 205  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 15. See also Hooper, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies,’ 99. 200 201

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The statement identified the most vexing of the present problems of the Pacific as coming under the three following heads which it put forward as the basis of the conference’s programme: . Problems involved in migration and immigration 1 2. Problems growing out of the international, commercial and industrial relationships 3. Problems created by religious, ethical and cultural contacts A central executive committee was appointed by the General Calling Conference. It was composed of Hawaiians of European, Chinese and Japanese ethnicity and charged with organising the conference in all its detail. Empowered at Atlantic City to add to its number, the committee subsequently enlarged itself, a development which saw three women included among its membership and Davis joining Loomis as one of its two executive secretaries.206 Davis came from a noted missionary family in Japan and had a degree of fluency in Japanese. When he departed the IPR in 1930, having served since 1926 as its general secretary, Davis joined the International Missionary Council in Geneva.207 At the time of his appointment as executive secretary, Davis was the administrative director of what was called ‘The Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast’ and a member of the national staff of the YMCA in the United States.208 As executive secretary, Davis spent much of his time raising funds in the United States for the purpose of the conference and conferring with cer IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 19.  On Davis’s missionary background and post-IPR role, see ‘Appendix 2: HollandHooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 184, 224, and Charles W. Forman, ‘Davis, J(ohn) Merle,’ in Gerald H. Anderson ed., Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B.  Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), 171. 208  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 20; Hooper, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies,’ 100; and ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 431. See also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 50, 136, 287. Davis had previously been general secretary of the international committee of the YMCA before becoming the administrative director in 1923 of what was named  ‘The  Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast.’ This survey was  jointly undertaken and organised by five Pacific Coast regional committees and the Institute of Social and Religious Research, New York City. Institute of Social and Religious Research. A Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast [US] (publisher not identified: 1924). 206 207

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tain prominent Americans whose interest in the project had already been elicited by Atherton and Loomis, both of whom had visited the mainland in the summer of 1924.209 Among those figures who had earlier expressed an interest in the conference were Ray Lyman Wilbur, the  president  of Stanford University, who had been chairman of the ‘The Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast,’ and several of the leaders of the Institute of Politics of Williamstown, Massachusetts,  among them  Blakeslee of Clark University and George Grafton Wilson of Harvard University.210 As carefully explained in a chapter introductory to the proceedings of the conference, Davis had learnt while conferring with Americans interested in the project that there was ‘some uneasiness over possible developments at the Conference’ and that it ‘was felt that … [the conference] … should be playing with fire in attempting to discuss some of the more delicate matters of international relations in the Pacific.’211 It was against this background that at the suggestion of Roland S. Morris, the former ambassador of the United States at Tokyo, ‘it was decided to invite a group of men of wide experience in various aspects of the Pacific situation and in international relations to a meeting where the whole plan could be reviewed and evaluated.’ The invitation to this meeting  was  issued by a temporary American committee which included Wilbur, Mott, Blakeslee and John H. Finley of the New York Times among its members.212 The invitation, which was issued on February 5, 1925, read as follows: Problems arising from the increasing intercourse between the Peoples of the Pacific Basin have inspired the proposal to hold at Honolulu an institute somewhat similar to the Williamstown Institute, under the auspices of an international committee made up of representatives from Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, the Philippines, Canada, and the United States. The proposal seems to us of such importance and the problems with which it will deal of such urgency that we are asking a few of those like your209  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 19; Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 126; and ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 431. 210  Davis,’ The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 125, and ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 432. 211  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 127, and IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 19. 212  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 128, and IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 19.

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self, who are particularly interested in inter-racial and international questions, to come together for an informal conference to consider the plan of the proposed institute, its purpose, scope and method and the nature of American participation in it. We earnestly request you to join us at half past two o’clock, Sunday afternoon, February twenty-second, at the Yale Club, 50 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York City, to devote the afternoon and evening to this purpose.213

The meeting  at the Yale Club, which was chaired by Wilbur, was attended by some thirty-eight persons, among these being Buell, then an instructor in government at Harvard University, Shotwell, and Edward C. Carter who had been a delegate to the Atlantic City meeting.214 Carter, who also had a YMCA background and who would become the IPR’s secretary-general in 1933, was executive secretary of The Inquiry, a programme based in New York which borrowed the name of, but was established separately from the Committee of Inquiry, generally known as The Inquiry, that had been established by Colonel House in 1917 with a view to providing expert advice to the American Commission at the Paris Peace Conference.215 Holland  later recalled that the Carter programme had ‘already  put  out several booklets on such topics as “what makes up my mind on international questions” and “on race relations”,’ adding that it was ‘concerned with promoting the application of a Christian way of life to race relations, industrial relations, and international relations’ and that it was ‘brought in with the idea that it would make a contribution with respect to conference techniques’ presumably because the discussion methods in which the YMCA believed were considered wanting.216 In  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 19–20.  Ibid., 19–21. 215  Ibid. See also Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 127. On the relation between the original Inquiry and the programme of which Carter was executive secretary, see ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 205. 216  ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 203–4. Condliffe observed that the YMCA believed in ‘the sort of discussion methods associated at that time with Professor James Kilpatrick of Teachers’ College, Columbia, all discussion, on the simplest and most repetitive basis, with little content.’ ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 433. Akami notes that Edward C. Carter’s Inquiry was originally called the ‘National Inquiry into the Christian Way of Life.’ She adds that with ‘good [Rockefeller] funding, Carter ran his Inquiry,’ which lasted until 1932, ‘from 129 East Street, an annex of 213 214

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regard to the expressed concern about conference techniques, it is noteworthy that the statement prepared by the Hawaiian group for the Atlantic City meeting had promised that well in advance of the conference, an outline of the state of Pacific affairs along with a set of suggested questions concerning specific problems would be sent out to individuals and groups planning to attend ‘for discussion and criticism.’ The statement also notably specified that at the conference different study groups would participate in daily round table discussions of up to two hours under the ‘direction of men qualified and coached’ for the task and which would be aided by ‘“Experts” who … should be present there as participants in the discussion, offering information and points of view as needed to forward the study of the group.’217 Holland later recalled that the expression ‘the race problem,’ on  the subject of which he had heard John R. Mott speak at the University of Canterbury during one of Mott’s tours of New Zealand, ‘in practice meant the problem of anti-Japanese immigration policies in the United States.’218 Indeed, the statement  prepared for  and  in  the event  endorsed  by  the Atlantic City meeting cited ‘the question of Oriental immigration’ to the United States as an example of one of ‘the most perplexing of the present problems of the Pacific’ and with this in view detailed some its ramifications.219 By way of illustrating the conference’s procedure, the statement listed a number of questions raised by this most perplexing problem, some of which were as follows: ‘What is the ethical right of one nation to discriminate as to whom it will admit within its borders?... Just why do the people of Japan resent the present legislation?... What are the underlying facts as to biological differences, if any, between occidental and oriental peoples? What is assimilation and non-assimilability, if the latter is a fact?’220 In light of  questions such as these, once can understand  why certain feelings of unease were communicated to Davis by Americans attracted to the idea of a conference of Pacific peoples. The posing of such questions may also explain  why at the Yale Club meeting it was pointed out that there were ‘certain dangers inherent in unofficial public discussion of the YMCA building at number 135, facing Lexington Avenue.’ Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 50. 217  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 17. See also Hooper, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies,’ 99. 218  Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1. 219  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 15–16. 220  Ibid., 16.

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international matters’ and why concern was expressed at the same meeting about the ‘desirability of holding such an Institute at the time proposed, particularly in view of the possible deadlock of opinion which might result from the discussion of such controversial subjects as migration.’221 It is useful to note here Davis’s observation that the State Department looked on the project with some suspicion, it being ‘fearful lest irresponsible and uninformed discussion should aggravate an already embarrassing situation between the United States and Japan.’222 Nonetheless, the main principles of the programme were endorsed at the Yale Club meeting, albeit that the Yale meeting passed on to the central executive committee in Hawaii the following suggested modifications: That the programme stress common interests rather than points of difference. That it be informative and educational rather than  argumentative. That it provide for the use of facts which have been carefully gathered in advance. That a number of addresses be given regarding the increasing importance of the Pacific, the community of interests in that area, and detailing the changes that have taken place in each of the countries during the past fourteen years. That the Institute consider the possibility of forming a permanent body.223

Having addressed its concerns in relation to the forthcoming Honolulu conference, the American group elected an executive committee and an advisory council to facilitate American participation in it. Similar moves were afoot elsewhere. At a meeting in Shanghai on February 24 and in a further sign that the conference would be wider in terms of its personnel and scope than originally planned, representatives of the Bankers’ Association,  the  General Chamber of Commerce, the Journalists’ Association, the Provincial Educational Association, the Shanghai Women’s Club, the YMCA and the Young Women’s Christian Association met in order to form a local executive committee in view of Chinese participation  in the conference which  would in part be funded by the

221  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 127 and IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 21. 222  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 131. 223  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 21–2. See also Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 127. The modifications mentioned were accepted.

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Chinese  government.224 Also in Shanghai, this being the main Chinese centre of activity in relation to the conference, eight commissions ‘were set up to study a number of special questions such as tariff, immigration, narcotics, extra-territoriality, education, race, labor and religion.’225 In other parts of China, discussion groups were formed with a view to studying ‘critical problems in Pacific Relations.’226 In Japan too a special committee was formed; funds were raised in order to fulfil the Japanese quota of expenses by the Japanese industrialist Viscount Shibusawa Eiichi, who was greatly interested in the project, as was the financier and former finance minister Baron Sakatami Yoshirō.227 In addition to support from the business community, the Japanese committee was assisted by a group of Japanese professors many  of whom held positions at  the Imperial University in Tokyo. At a meeting of professors called for March 26 at the Imperial University at the invitation of Anesaki Masaharu and Takaki Yasaka, respectively  professor of the science of religion and professor of American constitution, history and diplomacy at that university, and Saito Soichi, general secretary of the Tokyo YMCA, the formation of a Japanese delegation and the preparation of studies was discussed. With a view to the preparation of studies, three sectional committees were established. The first of these  committees  was charged with studying race problems and immigration, the second with studying international commerce and industry and the third with studying religious, cultural and ethical problems.228 According to Davis, the Japanese Foreign  Ministry  was ‘sympathetic to the undertaking and placed its seal of approval upon the hearty participation of the Japanese group.’229 In Australia, Canada and New Zealand also moves were being made to elicit interest in the planned conference and to organise representative delegations and preparatory studies. In light of all this progress, the central executive committee decided to change the name of the conference to 224  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 22 and Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 128. 225  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 22. See also Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 128. 226  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 23. 227  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 128. See also IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 23. 228  IPRs, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 23. See also Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 128. 229  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 128.

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Institute of Pacific Relations as it felt that this was ‘more expressive of the real nature of the undertaking.’230 This change in name reflected the fact that the  conception of the  conference had drifted far from its original YMCA mooring. As Davis observed, one could discern three distinct stages in the evolution of the conference. As we have seen, the first idea was for a conference addressing certain of the concerns and activities of the YMCA and the second, for a conference on the problems of Pacific peoples to be held under the auspices of the YMCA with a view to finding solutions to these problems ‘in which the Christian spirit should prevail.’231 In its third and final stage, as Davis pointed out, the conference organisers ‘looked forward to the Institute of Pacific Relations as a self-governing body concerned with promoting the best relations between the Pacific peoples, avoiding misunderstandings and conflicts, and promoting friendship and cooperation.’232 The record of the 1925 conference notes that the final printed statement issued by the central executive committee, which appeared  under the heading of ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations (Originally called “Conference on Problems of Pacific Peoples”),’ announced that the institute would ‘be self-governing’ in that it would be left to the institute ‘to make its own decisions as to what it wished to discuss and how.’233 The same conference record further noted that when it became clear that the conference had evolved beyond the ‘normal scope’ of the YMCA, that YMCA had ‘relinquished control of the project.’234 The YMCA, it added, had ‘without protest or criticism allowed the Institute to become a selfgoverning body’ and that as a result, any ‘idea of Christian propaganda, which was somewhat prominent in the earlier stages in the evolution of the Institute, was wholly dropped.’235 The foregoing suggests that the severing of the link between the institute and the YMCA took place not long before the 1925 conference took place. However, in the Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations that he would later prepare, Condliffe claimed that ‘there was no intent to form a permanent, ongoing, separate organization’ before the 1925 con IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 23.  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 127. 232  Ibid. See also IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 77. 233  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 24. 234  Ibid., 23–4. 235  Ibid., 24. 230 231

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ference.236 Certainly, it is the case, as the conference record shows, that a formal decision to establish the institute on a permanent basis took place during the conference as is discussed below. However, Condliffe’s claim suggests that the severing of the link with the YMCA occurred at the same time as that decision was taken and not before. That said, the question of exactly when it was decided that the link with the YMCA should be  severed is not what  is  of interest in this context. What  is of  interest is why that link was severed and it would seem that the principal reason for this related to  the fact that the immigration controversy loomed so large for almost all of the countries involved in the conference. On being asked when the decision was made to establish a separate organisation, Holland’s response was as follows: I simply took Condliffe’s word on it, I’ve always assumed it became apparent during the first conference, which was so much concerned with immigration policies, that the subjects they were discussing had a wider dimension than the YMCA could embrace. It’s my impression that the fact that the immigration problem was a major issue in Australia and to some extent New Zealand—places where the YMCA was far less significant than it was in America—at least in part explains why they saw the need for a separate organization. I also think the fact that these concerns were even more pronounced in Japan and elsewhere in Asia—a part of the world where the YMCA was still less significant—made the need that much greater. I was not aware that there is a question on this point.237

A Meeting in Honolulu The first IPR conference was held between June 30 and July 14 and saw around 143 men and women from eight countries of the Pacific Basin, namely, Australia, China, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines and the United States meet in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, the ‘cross-roads of the Pacific,’ most of whom had travelled thousands of miles by steamers.238 The cost of  transportation, which was significant, 236  ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 202. 237  Ibid., 202. 238  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 125, 128. On the membership of the first institute, see IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 35–40. The figure of 143 is based on the list of members, associate members and secretariat staff included in the official conference proceedings. It excludes three participants who are

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plus that of accommodation, promotion, the maintenance of a secretariat, publication, travel, and entertainment and so on, saw the total cost of the institute balloon to around US$90,000. The national groups other than that of the United States, raised $33,000 to contribute towards this sum; the mainland United States’ group,  $27,000;  and the Hawaiian group,  $30,000. Among the principal donors to the mainland United States’ group were the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Peace Foundation; among the principal donors to the Chinese group were the Chincheng Bank, the Bank of Communication and the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce; and  among the principal donors to the Hawaiian group was Atherton.239 The conference was held at the Punahou School, just a short drive from Waikiki Beach, the central executive committee having accepted the school’s offer to let the institute use its campus and buildings for its meetings and to house its members in the school’s dormitories. The  Punahou School’s  offer was gladly accepted because of  ‘the belief that two weeks of intimate fellowship would be an important factor in securing the right spirit in the work of the Institute.’240 The delegates were supposed to be broadly representative of the publics of their respective countries, and thus counted among them were representatives of religious groups, student bodies, the worlds of politics, business and commerce, women’s and labour organisations, the press and social agencies. As had been planned and as became IPR practice, included among the delegates were international experts: experts in such areas as law, politics, immigration, racial questions, religion, history and economics.241 Davis observed that the IPR ‘aimed to secure from each country

described as being at large and who did not reside in a Pacific Basin country. Note that reports of the numbers in attendance vary slightly. See also Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific 1927, vii. Condliffe reported that 111 people attended the first IPR conference; however, this calculation would largely seem to be based on a restrictive interpretation of participation in the conference. Elsewhere, that is, in his article entitled ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ Davis mentioned a participation figure of 147. 239  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 128–9. See also IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 25. According to the conference proceedings, the original budget was US$75,000. The conference proceedings noted that the Japanese group contributed $11,500 to the conference costs but added that at the time of writing, the names of individual donors were not available. 240  On the location of the conference, see IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 25 and Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 93. 241  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 130.

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the highest available unofficial intelligence and experience upon the Pacific Basin.’242 The preparatory work undertaken in relation to the subject matter of the conference was considerable, especially that undertaken in Australia, China, Japan and the United States. In the first three of these countries, preparation mainly took the form of study and discussion groups which devoted themselves to analysing key issues in the Pacific area. The work of these groups issued in a series of recommendations which were then submitted to the central executive committee  for consideration as items to include on the conference agenda. In addition to organising conferences of professors at the Imperial University, the Japanese committee compiled ‘illustrative and statistical material bearing upon Japanese economic, social, moral, and educational questions.’243 In the United States, preparation took the form of the compilation of material, under the direction of Jay A.  Urice of the International YMCA, addressing American public opinion on Pacific and international questions and the composition of a bibliography entitled ‘Problems of the Pacific: A Bibliography’ compiled  by Buell. The material on American public opinion in respect to Pacific and international affairs and Buell’s bibliography were widely circulated before the conference. Of all the preparatory materials, it was Buell’s bibliography, which had been prepared for the conference on behalf of the World Peace Foundation of Boston and which was published in 1926 in the periodical publication of the Carnegie Endowment’s Division of  Intercourse and Education, namely, International Conciliation, which was the most substantial.244 In 1925, Buell had been appointed research director of the FPA and had commenced teaching a course called International Relations at Harvard University where he was an instructor. Also in that year, Buell issued a publication which was later deemed to be the first textbook  Ibid.  Ibid., 129. 244  Ibid., 129–30. See also Raymond Leslie Buell, ‘Problems of the Pacific: A Bibliography,’ International Conciliation 11, no. 228 (1926): 147–71. International Conciliation ‘was the only periodical publication’ of the Division of Intercourse and Education...It was originally founded by the American Association for International Conciliation in 1907 and appeared under its imprint until July 1925, when that Association was dissolved and its activities assumed by the Endowment.’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Records, 1910– 1954,  www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/CEIP/index.html?ceip?V. html&1. 242 243

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on international relations, a publication in which he ‘defiantly,’ as he put it, insisted  that a distinct ‘field of international relations exists which is almost as distinct from international law as the study of American government is from constitutional law.’245 Buell listed his textbook, which was simply called International Relations, in ‘Problems of the Pacific: A Bibliography,’ because its first part included a chapter concerning the ‘racial problem’ (entitled therein ‘The Conflict of Color’), and because the second part was devoted entirely to the subject of the problems of imperialism. In keeping with the thinking of the LON’s Permanent Mandate Commission, Buell concluded in relation to the colonial question that while ‘in certain circumstances the establishment of foreign control over backwards peoples is inevitable,’ such control should be subject to some form of international control in order to ensure that the obligation of trusteeship is realised in practice.246 The many papers distributed to and round tables convened at the  Honolulu  conference covered a wide range of topics, including the function of religion in solving the problems in the Pacific; the role of education in improving international relations; the effects of industrialisation in the Far East; the international dimension of industrialisation and the role of government in relation to it; opium as an international problem; the role of foreign missionaries; standards of living in the Pacific; the role of education and religion in promoting inter-racial and international relations; armaments in the Pacific; and machinery for inter-governmental cooperation.247 However, the two major issues that emerged  at the conference  and which were discussed in one or more of their aspects by the majority of round tables were immigration (along with the associated questions of population, food supply and the treatment of resident aliens), and ­extraterritoriality in its application to China.248 In regard to the second of these issues, it should be noted that not long before the conference, there 245  Kirk, The Study of International Relations in American Colleges and Universities, 5–6. On the budget for the conference and the list of donors, see IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 25. 246  Raymond Leslie Buell, ‘Problems of the Pacific: A Bibliography,’ 157. See also Raymond Leslie Buell, International Relations (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1925), vii. 247  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 156–205 and Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 136–7. 248  Ibid., 137.

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had been riots against foreigners in Shanghai, these riots reaching their peak in June.249 At first, the riots mainly involved the denunciation of Japanese foreigners; however, they soon took the form of ‘demand for the overthrow of “imperialism”’ in general.250 As Roger Morgan points out, ‘the international discussion stimulated by the clashes between Chinese and foreigners’ in Shanghai in 1925 was ‘carried on inter alia’ at the inaugural conference of the IPR.251 Davis later recorded that the Honolulu conference witnessed a vigorous portrayal by the Chinese delegation of the ‘injustice of early treaty conventions and the special rights enjoyed by foreigners under extraterritoriality, as well as the desire and capacity of China for complete autonomy.’252 However, Davis also observed that because the members of the Chinese delegation, who were mostly drawn from academia, had ‘no experience in official or international relationships’ and were not ‘technically versed in the diplomatic and treaty background of their country nor her contact with Western Powers,’ they were placed in a ‘position of disadvantage’ when discussing the Chinese grievances with American delegates versed in these fields.253 Nonetheless, the leader of the Chinese delegation demonstrated an acute awareness of one of the outstanding reasons as to why the real significance of the so-called Unequal Treaties was only slowly realised in China: China’s lack of familiarity with European international legal norms meant that for a long time it did not recognise the denial of its sovereignty that the Unequal Treaties, a description which at the time was of relatively recent origin, represented. In an incisive exchange at the meeting, an American delegate asked the Chinese delegation the following question: ‘Why is it, if China has been suffering these various injustices at the hands of the foreign powers for so long, that she has only now begun to com249  Roger Morgan, ‘“To Advance the Sciences of International Politics …”: Chatham House’s Early Research,’ in Bocco and Navari eds., Chatham House and British Foreign Policy, 130 and Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 138–9. 250  ‘Shanghai Riots,’ New York Times, June 3, 1925 and ‘Riots in Shanghai: Foreigners Denounced,’ Sydney Morning Herald June 1, 1925. 251  Morgan, ‘“To Advance the Sciences of International Politics …”: Chatham House’s Early Research,’ 130. 252  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 139. 253  Ibid.

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plain about it?’ Davis noted that upon registering this question, the leader of the Chinese delegation rose to his feet and ‘retorted in perfect English’ as follows: I’ll tell you a story. Once there was a man who was brought before a judge for striking his neighbour. ‘Why did you hit this man?’ asked the Judge. ‘Because he called me a hippopotamus’, replied the prisoner. ‘When did he call you a hippopotamus?’ queried the Judge. About three years ago, your Honor.’ ‘Well why on earth if he called you a hippopotamus three years ago, did you only hit the man today?’ asked the judge in amazement. ‘But, your Honor, I never saw a hippopotamus until this morning.’254

At the same time, the Chinese group willingly conceded their lack of expertise in the field of international treaties and the obligations attendant upon them, assuring the audience that Chinese experts in this field would be present at the next meeting of the IPR.255 Such an assurance was seriously meant: from the outset, Chinese delegates viewed IPR conferences as an opportunity to publicise and win sympathy for the Chinese perspective on the concessions accorded foreigners in China, hoping that their IPR audience might ‘exercise some influence on the men who directed policy in the countries from which they came.’256 In relation to this, the following statement by David Z. T. Yui, general secretary of the Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations of China, in an opening address to the 1927 conference given on behalf of the Chinese national group, should be noted: ‘Our people also deeply appreciate the fact that at this Institute all delegates not only meet on an absolutely equal basis, but are capable of discussing and are going to discuss all Pacific problems and relations in a frank, unreserved, fair-minded, constructive and fraternal spirit.’257 Chinese representatives were not entirely wrong in  calculating  that within the confines of the IPR they might find an audience receptive to the airing of Chinese grievances.  Condliffe, an enthusiastic regionalist who would undertake extensive work in various parts of China, seeking while there to organise and encourage research by Chinese scholars, recounted not long after the 1925 Honolulu conference that those assembled had  Ibid.  Ibid. 256  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 18. 257  David Z.  T. Yui, ‘China and Pacific Relations During 1925–1927,’ in Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific 1927, 17. 254 255

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listened with ‘sympathy and appreciation’ to the Chinese delegation’s statement of the aims and its ‘explanation of the aspirations’ of ‘Young China.’258 Davis conveyed a similar impression, stating that the Chinese delegation won the ‘sympathy of the whole Institute,’ adding that its members had impressed their IPR audience with their ‘great personal charm and Christian idealism’ and with the intensity of their devotion to the ‘task of building a new China based upon a fusion of Eastern and Western culture.’ Indeed, Davis stated that the most ‘outstanding impression of the Institute carried away by its members’ was that of how a ‘little group of Chinese idealists is successfully grappling with the giant problem of Chinese illiteracy.’ In relation to this, Davis observed that not only the members of the IPR ‘but all of Honolulu had thrilled with the story’ of China’s Mass Education Movement as told by its founder and director, Y.  C. James Yen.259 Stanford University’s Wilbur, who had been made chairman of the IPR, had been similarly enthused by the story of China’s Mass Education Movement, the headquarters of which, according to  the IPR’s News Bulletin, were at ‘22 Shih-Fu-Ma-Ta-Chieh Peking,’ describing it as ‘one of the most significant movements in the history of education.’260 Like the Chinese delegates, Japanese delegates presented a case for peaceful change at the 1925 meeting. Indeed, as Henry Forbes Angus, a member of the Canadian Council of the IPR, suggested in The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area: A Study of the Work of the Institute of Pacific Relations and Its Bearing on the Problem of Peaceful Change (1937), the 1925 IPR conference wholly anticipated the calls that emerged in the mid-1930s for the LON’s collective security system to be supplemented with ‘machinery for facilitating international co-operation’ with a view to ‘producing by consent more far-reaching changes in international relations than the mere adjustment of disputes whether by conciliation or by 258  Third Biennial Conference of the IPR, Kyoto, 28 October-9 November 1929, Second Announcement, 1 July 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. See also Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ Pacific Affairs 2, no. 3 (1929), 103–115, 107 and Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 134. 259  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 139–140. Akami writes that for Davis, the ‘equal status of Japan and China, the new powers in Asia, was of prime importance’ and that he tried to promote this as general secretary of the IPR.  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 129. See also IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 30. The title of Y. C. James Yen’s address was as follows: ‘One of China’s Constructive Forces—The Mass Education Movement.’ 260  ‘Chinese Mass Education Movement Progresses Strongly,’ News Bulletin: Institute of Pacific Relations, 16 October 1926, 1.

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force.’261 Hessel Duncan Hall was head of the Australian delegation to the IPR in 1925. He was also a member of the Australian League of Nations Union and would go on to work at the LON Secretariat from 1927, first in the Social Questions and Opium Section and then, from 1935, in the Information Section with a special responsibility for the British Dominions.262 In an address to the 1925 conference and after having contended that neither the British Commonwealth nor the LON were wholly adequate to the task of facilitating international cooperation in the Pacific, Hall declared that these institutions needed to be supplemented at the regional level. Hall asked his audience the following question: How can we build up group life in the Pacific which will not be a competitor or rival of existing organs but be complementary to them?263

He then stated the following: We need a Pan-Pacific group of governments and peoples for Pacific needs … Many people still regard the League of Nations primarily as an organ to prevent war. As a matter of fact, this has been the least successful aspect of the League. In the Pacific we must not make the mistake of subordinating the development of peace to the prevention of war.264

Answering the question he initially posed, Hall declared the following: What is required in the Pacific is some sort of loose conference machinery which would bring governments together at regular intervals to promote international co-operation in matters particularly affecting the peoples of

 Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 165.  B.  H. Fletcher, ‘Hall, Hessel Duncan (1891–1976),’ in Australian Dictionary of Biography Online (National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2006–2019), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hall-hessel-duncan-10394/text18417. Originally published in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 14 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1996). On Hall, see also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 111. 263  Hessel Duncan Hall, ‘Co-operation Among Pacific Countries,’ in IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 136. 264  Ibid. 261 262

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the Pacific … [W]hether or not this development of peace in the Pacific takes place depends mainly on the attitude of the United States of America.265

It is worth noting here that Hall, as recorded by Tomoko Akami, conveyed the view to the Australian government that the 1925 Honolulu conference  was ‘one of the most important incidents after the Washington Conference.’266 Condliffe similarly looked forward to the establishment of ‘international government in the Pacific area’ as a supplement to existing organs, suggesting that should such government emerge it would more likely resemble the ‘consultative methods’ of the British Commonwealth, as reflected in its ‘irregular “Imperial Conferences,”’ rather than the ‘authoritarian structure’ of the LON.267 The Japanese proposal in regard to the fostering of peaceful relations in the Pacific came in the form of a request for ‘forbearance on the part of other nations in exercising what were conceded to be their legal rights.’268 One of the legal rights in question was that of domestic jurisdiction over immigration policy: Japanese delegates expressed their disapproval of the immigration laws of English-speaking countries which formally or effectively prohibited Japanese immigration. Peaceful change was needed in this area, the Japanese delegation insisted, as racial exclusion gave rise to resentment and friction, as did the discriminatory treatment of ‘citizens of Japanese race in English-speaking communities.’269 The Japanese were not alone in stating their grievances in regard to racially discriminatory practices in the context of the IPR. As Angus noted, Chinese delegates also complained at IPR conferences about ‘exclusion from certain countries and of disabilities imposed on racial grounds on those who had been admitted’ and, indeed, claimed that ‘in some cases the exclusion  [of Chinese] took a more drastic form than for the Japanese, and the disabilities were greater.’270 In regard to the Japanese demand for racial equality in the two respects mentioned, Angus observed that there was no ‘very satisfactory attempt’ to respond. He stated that the general view appeared to be that ‘exclusion  Ibid., 138.  Hessel Duncan Hall, 1925, quoted in Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 110. 267  J. B. Condliffe, ‘Memorandum on the Relation of the British Commonwealth to Pacific Problems,’ News Bulletin: Institute of Pacific Relations 16 October 1926, 1–2, 12–16. 268  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 34. 269  Ibid., 35. 270  Ibid., 18–19. 265 266

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should be courteous in form’ and that all citizens should be treated equally whatever their racial background, although certain elements pointed out that there were political difficulties involved in ‘giving effect to this view.’ Angus also noted that at the conference there was ‘no serious suggestion that any international machinery for peaceful change could be invoked— or invented—to restrain communities from exercising their sovereign rights … so as to produce racial discrimination.’271 In regard to the matter of so-called courteous forms of exclusion, Davis observed that the conference heard that Australia, Canada and New Zealand had all adopted a policy of ‘Oriental exclusion’ like that of the United States, but had maintained the ‘friendship and good will of … [their] … Asian neighbours’ because of the methods by which this policy was enforced.272 Explaining the Australian situation, Stephen Henry Roberts, a lecturer in ‘modern history and race problems’ at the University of Melbourne, noted the following: As regards population, Australia has a clearly defined policy. This is the policy known usually as ‘White Australia,’ but the Australian delegation to this Institute while realising that racial elements do enter, hold that this term gives quite a wrong orientation to the color element by placing it at the very forefront. The term, ‘immigration policy,’ in that it is non-committal and is more in accord with the facts, has therefore been used in its place …. It is a simple and non-discriminatory law saying that any person of any nationality may be excluded, who cannot pass a dictation test in any given European language. Recent amendments have changed this so that the test may be administered in any language whatsoever. The test is avowedly not to determine fitness to enter, but to keep out those persons who are deemed undesirable. For instance, in two well-known cases, (1906), (1915), undesirable Germans were excluded by a test of fifty words in classical Greek. And it is conceivable that a person might be given a test either in the most technical botanical jargon or in Amaric [sic]. In the Act, no specific country or race is anywhere mentioned and, although all knew it was directed primarily against Asiatic immigrants, it is not primarily on a racial basis …. Certain outside elements are positively to be excluded: all that Australia tries to do is to effect this without any invidious discrimination, without any offence to the

 Ibid., 35–6.  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 140. See also John Nelson, ‘Canadian View of Pacific Relations’ and J. B. Condliffe, ‘New Zealand’s Outlook upon Pacific Problems,’ in IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 65–8, 90–1. 271 272

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susceptibilities of the peoples concerned, and in the most gentlemanly way possible.273

Davis interpreted the Australian delegation as claiming that Australia’s Naturalisation Act with its so-called dictation test aroused ‘no resentment’ because it was ‘absolutely non-discriminatory,’ an interpretation which somewhat  misconstrues  the defence of that act put forward by the Australian delegation and glosses over the fact that the act had long been a cause of offence.274 As a Japanese delegate told the meeting, ‘the real purpose of the law was easily perceivable.’275 Nonetheless, at Honolulu in 273  Stephen H. Roberts, ‘Australian View of Pacific Relations,’ in IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 62. ‘The following particulars are given in view of an error which has crept into International Conciliation, no. 128 (March 1926), 140. It is there said that “the examination may be given in Latin, Greek, Sanscrit [sic] ….” I am informed by Mr. Merle Davis, the author of the paper referred to, that this statement is based on a passage in an address read at the Honolulu conference of the Institute in July 1925, by an Australian delegate, and reading as follows: “For instance, in two well-known cases (1906–1915) undesirable Germans were excluded by a test of 50 words in classical Greek, and it is conceivable that a person might be given a test either in the most technical botanical jargon or in ‘Amharic’ (Proceedings, p. 62). In the absence of the names of the Germans referred to, it has proved impossible to trace these cases in the records of the Ministry of Home and Territories. Nor is there any record that classical Greek has ever been used for the purpose of the dictation test. Moreover, the officer in charge of the administration of the act in 1906, of whom inquiry has been made, states that he would not have sanctioned the use of this language, had it been suggested. As regards the case in 1915, it is pointed out that a German national would have been excluded as an enemy alien under the War Precautions Act, 1914, without recourse to a dictation test under the immigration act. The second sentence in the passage quoted, is, as an interpretation of section 3 of the statute, doubtless correct: but, as stated before, a European language means in Australian official practice concerning immigration a living European language, and not a dead one. Both of the sentences quoted must, it is conceived, have been written under a misapprehension.’ A. H. Charteris, ‘Section 24: Australian Immigration Laws and their Working,’ in Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific 1927, 485n. 274  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 140. On the origins of the dictation test and the ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ between Australia and Japan in 1904 and similar agreements of a subsequent date with other governments which involved concessions in regard to the liability of certain classes of foreigners (from Japan, India, China, Ceylon, Burma, Hong Kong and Straits Settlements, Annam, Egypt, the Philippine and Hawaiian Islands) to the test, see Charteris, ‘Section 24: Australian Immigration Laws and their Working,’ in Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific 1927, 483–4. 275  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 140 and Sawayanagi Masatarō, ‘A Japanese View of Pacific Relations,’ in IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 78.

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1925, it was the United States’ Immigration Act of 1924 rather than the restrictive immigration policy of Australia, or that of Canada  or New Zealand for that matter, that was the target of Japanese criticism. Davis observed that ‘unmistakable was the tone disappointment, bitterness and disillusionment of the Japanese at total exclusion’ from the United States and ‘especially at the discriminatory measure’ by which this had been achieved.276 Sawayanagi Masatarō, a member of the Japanese House of Peers, former vice-minister of the Japanese Department of Education, former president of Kyoto Imperial University and president of the Japanese Educational Association, declared that while Japan did not demand the right of free entry into the territory of another country, it objected to discrimination on the basis of race. He then stated the following: Such discrimination is highly offensive to our self-respect as individuals and as a nation. I would not be telling you the truth if I did not say that there exist among our people deep feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction and even resentment over the discriminatory immigration law passed by the American Congress last year …. As for Canada and Australia, we have also had occasion to complain of their attitude on this question. But it might be admitted that they have shown more tact and wisdom in dealing with the difficulty.277

In light of later developments, one should note that the Japanese delegation’s request for forbearance on the part of other nations related to not only a question of principle but also to economic concerns. For example, Komatsu Takashi drew attention to Japan’s ‘grave problems of over-­ population,’ insisting that industrialisation was key to dealing with these problems and suggesting that this, in turn, necessitated that Japan have access to natural resources.278 In relation to the issue of over-population, the Japanese group suggested that an ‘overcrowded’ Japan might be afforded ‘at least temporary relief’ through immigration.279 In his speech at the meeting, Takayanagi Kenzō, a professor of law at the Tokyo Imperial University, summed up the Japanese proposals for peaceful change both in

 Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 140.  Sawayanagi, ‘A Japanese View of Pacific Relations,’ 77–8. 278  Takashi Komatsu, ‘Industrialization of Japan,’ in IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 128, 130. 279  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 35. 276 277

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respect to the principle of racial equality and in respect to Japan’s economic needs as follows: [I]f we conceive of sovereignty as absolute and unlimited, just as eighteenth and nineteenth century jurists thought of private property as absolute and unlimited, international life would become unbearable and no sound international cooperation in the cause of world civilization would be possible. Therefore, I submit that ‘sovereignty’ of the state as applied to immigration be so exercised that the interests and requirements of all of mankind be duly taken into account, that the desires of the people of other nations as well as those of its own people be not unduly restricted, or that the feelings and sensibilities of other nations or races be unduly injured by too vigorous assertion of the so-called ‘sovereign right.’280

The discussion of the American handling of immigration issue not only greatly distressed the Japanese delegation, it almost saw the Chinese delegation withdraw from the meeting. However, despite the tensions that arose in relation to this and other sensitive issues, the Honolulu conference was believed to have advanced the cause of international understanding in the Pacific. Delegates departed the conference with a view to speaking to audiences in their home countries about the ‘prospects of more kindly courtesy and more even-handed justice in all that affects relations between the East and West.’281 Loomis, who in 1925 remained an officer of the YMCA in Hawaii while also enjoying the role of executive secretary of the IPR, asserted that the meeting had shown that it was entirely possible to bring to a ‘common table’ people of ‘different cultural and racial backgrounds’ in order to ‘discuss frankly problems which cause misunderstanding between peoples and governments.’282 His fellow executive secretary in 1925, namely, Davis, was of the same view. He hailed the conference’s frank but safe and profitable exchanges ‘between members of very opposite racial groups’ on the ‘most intimate and delicate racial matters.’283 Indeed, Condliffe 280  Kenzō Takayanagi, ‘A Suggestion for more Enlightened Immigration and Emigration Policies,’ in IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 111. 281  Judge Thomas Burke, 1925, quoted in Butler, preface to International Conciliation, no. 228 (1927–1927) 123–4. 282  IPR: Summary of Activities, 1931–1932, Honolulu, 11 April 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. On Loomis’s role in founding the IPR, see Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 48, 287. 283  Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 140.

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insisted that the exchanges of views on controversial topics, rather than disturbing the conference, were ‘an essential condition for mutual respect and understanding,’ noting the observation of a leading Japanese participant that the meeting in Honolulu in 1925 marked ‘the first occasion on which the Occident had approached the Orient with nothing to sell, nothing to preach, and nothing to teach.’284 If, as Condliffe claimed, there had been no intention of forming a separate, permanent organisation before the Honolulu conference, then that intention must have formed very quickly as the conference stirred to life. On the afternoon of June 30, against a background of informal preparatory meetings led by Urice, one of those members whose steamer schedule saw him arrive earlier than others, and with almost all members present, the institute moved quickly to address items of business. It appointed an executive committee which then proceeded to appoint three other committees one of which was called the Committee on Permanent Organisation. This committee held two meetings, the issue of which were the following two  recommendations: that the Institute  of Pacific Relations  should become a permanent organisation and that as such it should be equipped with a central headquarters and secretariat. These recommendations were approved by the conference’s executive committee and adopted enthusiastically by the institute as a whole.285 Also approved by the executive committee and adopted by the institute, was the following statement on the purpose and scope of the IPR prepared by a subcommittee of the Committee on Permanent Organisation: The Institute of Pacific Relations is a body of men and women deeply interested in the Pacific area, who meet and work, not as representatives of their Governments, or of any other organizations, but as individuals in order to promote the well-being of the peoples concerned …. Its main efforts will be devoted to collecting and elucidating the facts of international significance, which, by their influence in guiding public opinion may assist constructively, the development of the countries concerned; to encouraging the  ‘Appendix 6: ‘Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 526.  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 526. Hooper notes the following: ‘Further research indicates that Condliffe’s version is correct. The original plan was for a one-time institute, to be called the Institute of Pacific Relations, but the response to this gathering was so enthusiastic that the planners decided to create a permanent organization with the same name.’ ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’  in Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 203n. 284 285

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i­mprovement of legal and administrative procedure where present methods tend to hinder international harmony and good feeling; and directly to promoting international friendship by personal association and by the study of economic, educational, social, political, moral and religious conditions with a view to their improvement. The Institute aims to keep its work practical, so that it may be of direct service in the removal of difficulties in international relations and in the promotion of constructive measures of assistance. Scientific investigations of questions that may be purely academic for the present, although ultimately of vital importance, as for example the biological and social effects of race intermixture or the best means of financing countries in need, are to be undertaken so far as financial resources permit. In all of its work, the Institute will cooperate with other organizations of similar purpose, so as to achieve the best and most far-reaching results.286

Following the conference, Davis toured the principal Pacific countries and branches of the IPR quickly formed in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, New Zealand and the United States.287 On October 5, 1925, at a meeting in San Francisco, the first nominations were made to the IPR’s governing body, namely, the Pacific Council, these nominations being made by the autonomous national councils then in the process of forming. The October meeting also established a permanent international secretariat for the organisation, namely, the International Secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations (ISIPR), with Davis and Loomis being appointed general secretary and assistant general secretary  of the ISIPR  respectively. The premises of the ISIPR were initially located  at 1641 South Beretania Street in Honolulu. However,  by late 1935, all of the ISIPR functions had been transferred to New York with a view to further enhancing the IPR’s growing status.288

286  IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations: Honolulu Session June 30 to July 14, 1925, 25–6 and Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 141. 287  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 521. 288  Third Biennial Conference of the IPR, Kyoto, 28 October-9 November 1929, Second Announcement, 1 July 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2UA. See also Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 142–3, 146.

CHAPTER 5

The Institute of Pacific Relations 1927–1929 and the Evolution of the International Studies Conference 1928–1930

The Second Honolulu Meeting The second IPR conference was held in Honolulu, between July 15 and 19, 1927. In his foreword to the conference proceedings, Davis, writing as general secretary of the IPR, well conveyed a sense of the distinctiveness of the Pacific as an arena of world politics. He also well summed up the key features of the IPR’s  emerging identity  as an institution devoted to the study of international problems which was in the vanguard of such institutions: the emerging identity of the IPR was that of an institution that was for  its racially, culturally, socially and ideologically diverse make-­up; the participation in it of women alongside men; its cognisance of world interdependence; its democratic and unofficial character; and for the enthusiastic embrace by its members of the scientific attitude. As Davis explained, referring to the  conference  proceedings which had been edited by Condliffe, [t]his book portrays the encounter of diverse civilizations who met to confer in the middle of the Pacific in the summer of 1927 upon matters of mutual concern. Opinions were exchanged, facts were examined, fears, hopes, and prejudices frankly aired, and friendships formed between members of nine of the leading peoples living in, or having great interests in, the Pacific area. This book also reflects an intensely human experience. The attempt of men and women of conflicting interests and different backgrounds, with various social, economic, and political concepts of life, to find out whether it is © The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part One, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2_5

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Fig. 5.1  Old engraving of the building of the School of Politics (Schinkelsche Bauakademie). Source: Politik als Wissenschaft/hrsg. von Ernst Jäckh, Berlin 1930, S.2 ­ ossible to live together harmoniously in a world that is constantly growing p smaller. These people wished to study the factors that underlie racial contacts and adjustment of conflicting interests and to examine the possibility of creating a new type of international community in the Pacific area built upon reciprocity and mutual understanding. The book is the story of a democratic procedure applied to international relations. The Conference was unofficial. The members represented no governments or governmental or private interests…. People within the Pacific countries of widely contrasted viewpoints and types of mind attended the Conference. The national groups represented not bloc opinion or sympathies. The liberal and conservative, idealist and materialist, labor leader and capitalist, internationalist and nationalist were present and stated their opinions…. The chief characteristic of the meeting, however, centred upon facts: the collection, exchange, discussion, and analysis of facts related to the big problems of this part of the world. The members all shared in a thirst for new data—data that would throw light on obscure and difficult situations— and they also shared in a willingness to readjust their attitudes and opinions on the basis of such data.1

1

 J. Merle Davis, foreword to Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927, v.

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Fig. 5.2  International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (League of Nations). Plenary Session in the Palais Wilson, between 1924 and 1927. Source: United Nations Archives in Geneva, League of Nations Pictures, File CM 067

New to the conference were observers from the LON and the ILO. The IPR had almost from the outset established links with these two organisations, both of which had warmly welcomed the IPR’s appearance on the scene. Indeed, observers from the LON and the ILO would attend every IPR conference down to 1945.2 The most significant new presence, however, came in the form of a British delegation, the IPR’s Dominion groups, in particular the New Zealand group, having suggested at the 1925 meeting that the RIIA be invited to cooperate on behalf of Great Britain.3 As Condliffe later explained, 2  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 114, 285–6, and Condliffe, ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations’, in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 521. 3  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 521.

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the members of the Institute from the British Dominions felt very keenly the need for adequate representation of the important points of view of the British investors and traders in countries like China, and of the British trading and working community generally. This need was perhaps felt most keenly by the New Zealand members since the interest of New Zealand in Pacific problems is probably less direct than that of the other Dominions, while on the other hand New Zealand’s political, economic and cultural relations with the Motherland are peculiarly close.4

It was because Great Britain was not represented in Honolulu in 1925 that the IPR organised for a presentation to be given one evening during the conference by a New Zealand member on ‘the position of Great Britain and the British Commonwealth in relation to the international problems of the Pacific area.’ However, this presentation was not included in the printed record of the conference proceedings and as a result, according to Condliffe, there had been ‘some comment upon the absence in the published records of any recognition of the point of view of Britain and other European powers whose nationals are concerned with investment in the Far East.’ In light of this and the decision of the IPR to invite Britons to join it, the IPR’s executive committee decided to circulate  the following:  ‘Memorandum on the Relation of the British Commonwealth to Pacific Problems,’ a document that had been prepared for it by Condliffe, who was then professor of economics at Canterbury College, Christchurch, and secretary of New Zealand unit of the IPR.5 Akami points out that Condliffe was not ‘anti-colonial’ and concedes that like many of his compatriots at the time, his ‘loyalties may have been to the British empire.’6 Yet as Akami’s study, namely, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, and the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1919–­ 1945 (2002) suggests, it would be wrong to assume that Condliffe viewed the Pacific area through the prism of British interests. Condliffe, as a committed regionalist, understood that while Great Britain was a Pacific power, it did not, and could not, share in a Pacific identity: Britain, he insisted, remained ‘irrevocably a European nation…tied to the European Mainland.’ For this reason, Condliffe maintained that the ‘keystone’ of British foreign policy must be support for the LON (an institution that, he correctly 4  Condliffe, ‘Memorandum on the Relation of the British Commonwealth to Pacific Problems,’ 1. 5  Ibid., 1–2, 13. 6  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 134.

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pointed out, had little power in the Pacific), irrespective of the ‘criticisms and hesitations’ on this score on the part of certain sections of British opinion. At the same time and because Great Britain had ‘vast interests at stake’ in the Pacific area, Condliffe thought it important that British views, as well as those of continental European powers with ‘Eastern interests,’ be heard in the context of the IPR.7 In relation to this, Condliffe observed that it had thus been generally agreed at Honolulu in 1925 that a full understanding of such problems as China offers at the present time was not possible in the absence of members able to speak from personal knowledge of the facts as seen by those foreign elements—missionaries, traders, bankers, shippers, civil servants—which are active in the Far East.8

Equally, however, he considered it important that representatives of the European powers be made to listen to views which were at variance with their own regarding their regional role. Touching on the fundamental purpose of the IPR, he stated the following: It is even more important to realise that, without adequate representation of the European Powers, chiefly Great Britain (including especially those sectional interests which are most active in the Far East) there is little possibility of carrying back any shifts of attitude, personal friendships, new avenues of knowledge, such as they are likely to influence public opinion in these countries in the desired direction of peace and goodwill.9

In 1927 the RIIA became the British unit of the IPR.  According to Condliffe, Lionel Curtis brought the RIIA into the IPR because of British concerns about how to respond to the nationalist revolution in China.10 It was against the background of this revolution and in light of such related events as the Shanghai riots, that the RIIA had established a new study group: a study group dedicated to the study of ‘Pacific Problems.’ Emanating from this study group in 1927 was Sir Frederick Whyte’s China and Foreign Powers: A Historical Review of Their Relations. The ‘first of the “Chatham House Monographs” series,’ China and Foreign Powers was presented to the IPR conference that same year by the British 7  Condliffe, ‘Memorandum on the Relation of the British Commonwealth to Pacific Problems,’ 13–4. 8  Ibid., 13. 9  Ibid. 10  ‘Appendix 3: Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ 472.

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delegation, which, to the dismay of Davis and Condliffe and contrary to the IPR’s unofficial and scientific character, proceeded to treat the IPR as a ‘quasi-diplomatic’ forum.11 Putting to one side this unwelcome development, Condliffe, writing in Pacific Affairs in March 1929, was pleased to note that reinforced by the presence of the British group, the 1927 conference spent more time discussing China’s relations with foreign powers than any other subject. As a result of this discussion, Condliffe stated, it was ‘generally felt that notable progress had been made towards an understanding of the issues involved’ in regard to the restoration of China’s tariff autonomy, the abolition of extraterritoriality and the rendition of foreign settlements and concessions, these being the three demands that the Chinese delegation had issued at Honolulu in 1925 and which were explored at length in 1927.12 Beyond these China-related issues, there was discussion at the various round tables of the question of food and population sustainability; industrial development; immigration and emigration;  the  treatment of alien minorities; Indigenous peoples, mandates and the principle of trusteeship; diplomatic and peace machinery in the Pacific; postal and radio communications; and international education.13 In relation to this last topic, the conference proceedings noted that ‘underlying the whole of the Conference discussions…is the assumption that it is important to educate public opinion concerning international problems and relations. The Institute of Pacific Relations is an experiment in this form of adult education. While its field and its methods differ from other bodies formed for the study of international problems, it has arisen, like many other institutes and councils, from a realization in recent times of the changed nature of international relationships.’14 In relation to the question of food and population sustainability, the leader of the Japanese delegation at the 1927 conference  addressed a ­developed a point that had been touched on in 1925 by Takayanagi: 11  Morgan, ‘“To Advance the Sciences of International Politics…” Chatham House’s Early Research,’ 125, 130. On the British group’s approach to the IPR, see Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 107–8, and Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 128. 12  On these three demands, see Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 19, 21, 27. 13  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 282, and Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 100, 109–10, 121–2, 156. 14  Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927, 162–3.

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Sawayanagi Masatarō, in an opening statement on behalf of the IPR’s Japanese unit, suggested that nations ‘are not morally entitled to insist on the letter of their legal rights’ in relation to their land or resources where these are evidently surplus to their requirements and where another peoples stand in need: for a nation to insist on the letter of one’s legal rights in such a situation would be an ‘abuse of a right’ and might give ‘rise to some sort of equitable claim against the country guilty of the abuse.’15 Addressing the specific case of Japan, Sawayanagi pointed out that over the past seventy years, Japan had experienced an ‘amazing advance’ in terms of its standard of living while at the same time its population had increased ‘with leaps and bounds.’16 As a result of these two developments, he declared, Japan was facing two acute problems: the problem of population and that of food supply. Sawayanagi then stated that of all the proposed methods of dealing with these problems, such as emigration, industrialisation, birth control and an intensification of agricultural production, the one of emigration was ‘the most vital to Japan and [the one] on which the Japanese people…[were]… the most sensitive.’17 Having observed that Europe was nearly as densely populated as Japan, Sawayanagi pointed out that it was only in Pacific countries, most notably Australia and North and South America, ‘that there are vast territories still undeveloped and sparsely settled,’ adding that in almost all these countries, Japan, despite the grave pressure of its population and the limitation of its food supply, ‘now faced the stone wall of exclusion’ with doors having been ‘shut in her face.’18 Sawayanagi emphasised that the Japanese group did not wish to revisit the immigration question at this time. Nonetheless, he sought to place on the moral defensive those countries whose doors had been shut in Japan’s face in stating the following: Our government fully respects the sovereign right of nations to enact exclusion laws, but only questions the right of enacting discriminatory laws on the basis of race. On the other hand, Japan humbly expects other nations to respect her honor and sovereignty in the same degree that she respects their sovereignty, and when her honor is at stake, she feels that she has the sover Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 4. Emphasis added.  Sawayanagi Masatarō (address, Second Conference of the IPR, Honolulu 15–29 July 1927), in Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927, 31. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid. 15 16

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eign right to protest against invidious discrimination. In short, the issue is not so much the question of sovereign right to exclude certain racial groups as respect or disrespect toward another sovereign state which is jealous of her dignity.19

Sawayanagi assured his audience that the Japanese group was convinced that Japan would never ‘resort to arms on account of immigration’ or go to ‘war over the question of population.’20 He acknowledged that there were ‘a few chauvinists’ in Japan who voiced such ideas but advised that the ‘intelligentsia and the general public will never hearken to their opinion,’ adding that Japan, ‘like her sister nations of the East, has long been and will remain a peace-loving nation.’21 Elevating the case just discussed from the realm of the particular to the universal, Sawayanagi then stated that he was convinced of another and perhaps more important thing. The only satisfactory method of solving the problem of immigration is not through discriminatory legislation, but through the recognition by the nations bordering on the Pacific Ocean of the natural right of immigration. We are living in a new day when the notion of unlimited individualism is undergoing a decided change and the spirit of social sharing and co-operation is gradually gaining ground. I believe that the natural right of all humankind to share the resources of the world on some equitable basis and to enjoy freedom of movement and residence will be recognized by the thinking leaders of all progressive lands. This recognition will come, however, not simply as a desire to relieve the pressure of population, but as a result of unreserved acceptance of justice and fair play as fundamental principles of international and inter-racial relations.22

Returning to the particulars of the Japanese grievances in respect to immigration, Sawayanagi observed that the realisation of the natural right of migration confronted ‘several barriers, often labeled  “reasons” for exclusion.’23 He noted in relation to this that the most commonly invoked of these reasons was the standard of living. Obviously however, Sawayanagi was sceptical about the sincerity with which the economic justification for  Ibid., 32.  Ibid. 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid. 23  Ibid. 19 20

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exclusion was advanced. Explaining his scepticism, he noted that the countries bordering the Pacific encompassed ‘two mighty branches of the human race, the white and the yellow or brown,’ both of which were ‘proud of their past and ambitious for the future.’24 However, the white race, he stated, had developed a strong feeling that only by erecting ‘artificial barriers’ and thereby denying the ‘natural right of migration’ could its ‘racial identity’ be maintained.25 Sawayanagi then stated that it was in fact the ‘fetish of race superiority’ that was the determining factor behind the American exclusion law of 1924. The same fetish, he suggested, was also the key factor behind Australia’s so-called dictation test which seemed to him ‘merely a scheme to dress up the discriminatory immigration policy in a transparent disguise.’26 Appealing to  the  raison d’être and guiding ethos of the IPR, Sawayanagi concluded his  discussion of racial exclusion in declaring that [t]he intrinsic superiority or inferiority of races is a fable, with the possible exception of some of the vanishing races, unsupported by anthropology, psychology, and sociology. It is a matter of sentiment rather than of reason, and we can remove the unnecessary fear and sentimentalism through education based upon scientific investigation. Here again we look to such an impartial group as this Institute for its priceless contribution.27

The Right to Live Doctrine Sawayanagi’s address to the IPR in 1927, as with the address of Takayanagi in 1925 in a certain respect, was somewhat reminiscent of what was widely known as the Japanese ‘“right to live” doctrine, or the right to economic expansion,’ and it is worth pausing here to consider briefly this doctrine and the doctrine with which it was ‘interwoven’: the Japanese Monroe Doctrine.28 In an article published in Foreign Affairs in July 1933, Blakeslee explained that the ‘Monroe Doctrine for Asia’ had arisen in Japan soon after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, that it insisted on Japanese paramountcy in East Asia and that it had been ‘emphasized by  Ibid., 32–3.  Ibid., 33. 26  Ibid. 27  Ibid. 28  George H.  Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ Foreign Affairs 11, no. 4 (1933): 671–81, 675. 24 25

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the Japanese during the periods when they…[had]…been carrying on an aggressive foreign policy.’29 According to Carl Walter Young, the Far Eastern representative of the New York–based Institute of Current World Affairs who, like Blakeslee, would later  serve as a technical advisor to the LON’s Commission of Enquiry to the Far East, the Japanese Monroe Doctrine had been ‘fathered’ by Baron Komura Jutarō, the Japanese foreign minister, in an address to the Japanese Diet following his return to Japan after signing with Russia the Treaty of Portsmouth at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in September 1905. In the course of that address, Komura ‘lamented the growing congestion of population in Japan and proclaimed the necessity of unrestricted liberty of emigration to Korea and South Manchuria.’30 The Japanese Monroe Doctrine formed the ideological backdrop to the Japanese colonisation of Korea, the impact of which was raised by Korean delegates at the first two IPR conferences. Helen K. Kim, dean of Ewha College in Seoul, gave what Condliffe later described as a ‘rousing nationalist speech’ at the 1925 conference. In 1927, in an opening statement on behalf of the Korean group, she told the IPR that the ‘new world of peace is waiting for the Institute of Pacific Relations to initiate the usage of the ethical standard into all international relationships,’ mentioning in this regard the issues of immigration and food supply.31 Although Kim’s appeal to the ethical standard  was  similar  in nature to  Sawayanagi’s appeal to justice and equity at the same conference, it should be noted that the appeals of Kim and Sawayanagi had different targets. It was the behaviour of the Japanese that Kim was putting in question rather than that of the Western powers. She called attention to the ‘hardship of peasants in Korea and suggested that the damage had been done by Japanese agrarian immigration policy.’32 In a study issued under the auspices of the secretariat of the IPR  and which had been assisted in its planning stages by Condliffe when he was the IPR’s research secretary and Bowman as direc29  Ibid., 672. Ian Nish describes Blakeslee as a ‘highly regarded expert on contemporary Chinese affairs.’ Ian Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism: Japan, China and the League of Nations, 1931–1933 (London: Kegan Paul International, 1993), 61. 30  Carl Walter Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931), 331. See also Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 61–2. 31  ‘Appendix 3: Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ 434, and Helen K.  Kim,  1927, quoted  in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927, 35. 32  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 99. See also Kim, 1927, quoted in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927, 36–7.

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tor of the American Geographical Society, Hoon K.  Lee, vice-president and professor of agricultural economics at the Union Christian College of Korea,  noted that many prominent scholars, including many Japanese scholars, were of the view that Japan ‘should not settle her people in Korea, because it is over-saturated with population.’33 Nonetheless, Lee continued, ‘the more influential imperialistic and militaristic circles’ in Japan would not heed such views and so the agricultural colonisation of Korea was well underway, causing rural Koreans to quit their villages in order to seek work in urban areas.34 Barred from emigrating to Japan because they competed with Japanese workers, Lee observed, these Koreans had drifted to Manchuria.35 In an account of the plight of Koreans in Manchuria given at the 1929 IPR conference, a spokesman for the Korean group, to use the description appearing in the conference proceedings, stated the following: They [Koreans] swarm into Manchuria simply to seek rice. They have been one of the leading factors of the opening of the country. They have opened vast areas to rice cultivation and in that way have helped the Chinese as well as themselves. You can see scores of Koreans with but a few yen, who desire only to live…. There should be no cause of hardship between the Koreans and Chinese. It is the presence of undesirables who produce misunderstanding. We have undesirables in Korea, as everybody does. They have made the Chinese think that the Koreans want something more than to live. The abolition of extra-territoriality has been suggested by some of our Japanese friends. As far as Koreans are concerned, such a step would immensely improve conditions. The charge is that wherever Koreans go, Japanese consular police follow them. This is resented by the Chinese, and the Koreans are made to suffer.36 33  Hoon K. Lee, Land Utilization and Rural Economy in Korea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936) iv, 281. 34  Ibid., 274, 281. 35  Ibid., 274. 36  Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1929: Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Nara and Kyoto, Japan, 23 October–9 November (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1930), 195. The Korean group had no separate representation at the 1929 conference unlike in 1925 and 1927. In 1929, the Korean group was ‘invited to send a representative as a local/ethnic group of the Japanese Council,’ a mode of representation against which the Korean group protested. The explanation for the eventual refusal of separate Korean representation concerns the opposition of certain members of the Japanese Council of the IPR to it on the ground that Korea was part of the Japanese empire; the view, in light of this attitude, of certain members of the  American group that good relations between United States and Japan was ‘a key to the success of the IPR’; and ‘the implications’

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Blakeslee observed that  during the First World War and against the background of the Japanese success in expelling the Germans from China and the North Pacific, the Japanese Monroe Doctrine enjoyed widespread support in Japan.37 Young supported this view, noting that the expression ‘Asia Monroe Doctrine’ had ‘principal vogue’ in the years between 1914 and 1919, when Japanese policy in China was more ‘aggressive’ than it had ever been, as evidenced by the Twenty-One Demands of 1915 and the Japanese efforts in the years 1916 to 1919 ‘to obtain from Russia, Great Britain, France and the United States a recognition of their desired role of paramountcy with respect to Chinese politics’: recognition, ‘in favor of Japan, of a “Monroe Doctrine” for China,’ a recognition that the powers in question were not inclined to give.38 Of particular note in this regard was a visit to Washington in 1917 by the now Viscount Ishii in his role as special ambassador of Japan at Washington. During this visit, Ishii referred to a Monroe Doctrine for Asia and asked Washington to recognise Japanese paramountcy in China.39 Ishii had been appointed chief of a special mission to Washington in the spring of 1917, arriving there in early September following what he described as the ‘whole-­hearted’ welcomes he received in Honolulu and San Francisco when en route.40 The Japanese mission followed in the wake of the so-called war-­missions undertaken by Balfour,  in his role as foreign secretary, in April and the French justice minister René Viviani in April–May for the stated purpose of congratulating the United States for its entry into the war on the side

of separate Korean participation ‘for other colonial powers’ represented at the conference. As a result of their exclusion as a separate group, the Koreans decided to leave the IPR in 1931. They did not rejoin it until 1942. Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 56, 98–9, 142–4. According to Angus, China maintained at the time of the 1929 conference that the Japanese no longer enjoyed extraterritoriality in China due to China’s ‘unilateral denunciation’ of the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895, although the Japanese maintained that this treaty was still in operation. Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 24. 37  Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ 672. 38  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 331–2. 39  Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ 672. See also ‘Testimony of Hon. Robert Lansing before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, 11 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 167. 40  Ishii Kikujirō, ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ Chapter 6 of Notes on Diplomacy (1930), translated from the original Japanese by and reproduced in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 376.

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of the Allies.41 As Ishii recorded in his memoirs, while the immediate purpose of the Japanese war-mission was congratulatory, it also had an additional purpose: the Japanese government wished to seize the occasion ‘to attempt an exchange of frank opinions between American and Japanese responsible persons regarding the Chinese situation and to make some headway toward an understanding.’42 At the time of Ishii’s visit, as Akagi noted referring to the secret agreements of 1917, the United States was the only one of the powers, that is, the only one of ‘the future “Big Five”,’ with whom Japan had yet to reach an agreement in regard to her ‘“special interests” in the Far East.’43 In a meeting with Secretary of State Lansing, in Washington on September 6, Ishii observed that the United States and Japan must be on guard against enemy propaganda aimed at estranging two countries which had united against a common foe. While acknowledging that the immigration question was a source of tension between the  United States and Japan, Ishii stated that as there was ‘no timely interest’ in that question, he believed that ‘malicious measures will be taken principally with reference to the China question.’44 Lansing responded that he had heard propaganda to the effect that while the European powers were ‘engaged in life-and-death struggle,’ Japan was ‘taking a free hand in the Far East and…[was]…especially establishing an unsurpassably superior position in China.’45 Some contended, Lansing added, that if the situation were left alone, territorial integrity and the principle of the Open Door and equal opportunity in China would become ‘mere paper doctrines.’46 Lansing told Ishii that he believed that 41  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 375. Roland S. Morris reproduced in an article he wrote a translation of parts of the chapter in Ishii’s published diaries that Young translated and reproduced in full in Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria. Morris observed in his article  that the portions of the  published diaries, the title of which he translated as Diplomatic Recollections, which addressed Japan’s special interests in China and the LansingIshii agreement deserved ‘special translation.’ Roland S. Morris, ‘The Memoirs of Viscount Ichii [Ishii],’ Foreign Affairs 10, no. 4 (1932): 677–87, 679–80. 42   Ishii, ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ in  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 375, and Ishii Kikujirō, 1930, quoted in Morris, ‘The Memoirs of Viscount Ichii [Ishii],’ 679–80. 43  Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936: A Short History, 321. 44   Ishii, ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ in  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 378. 45  Ibid. 46  Ibid.

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the announcement of a joint declaration by the United States and Japan reiterating their respect for these doctrines would ‘not only be useful in preventing the enemy’s evil propaganda, but also become a guide for the American and Japanese people.’47 Ishii responded that while Lansing’s proposal was ‘thoughtful,’ it was insufficient to address the current situation: if the declaration were to be timely and useful, it should also include ‘new matters of different scope together with the above principles.’48 It was at this point in the meeting that Ishii touched on the Monroe Doctrine for Asia, declaring the following: From our point of view, Japan possesses interests superior (yuyetsu) to other powers in China as a whole (Shina zentai), especially in the contiguous regions, much as the position of your country in the Western Hemisphere, especially in Mexico and Central American countries. Such a circumstance is the actual condition resulting from providential topography (tenbu no chisei) and, although the effectiveness of the above condition does not require the recognition of other powers, yet there are occasions when such recognition is advantageous. This is the reason why our country’s special interests (tokushu riyeki) in China had been voiced first in the Anglo-Japanese treaty and then in the Franco-Japanese and Russo-Japanese treaties.49  Ibid.  Ibid., 379. 49  Article 1 of the first Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Alliance (1902)  recognised that both countries had ‘special interests, of which those of Great Britain’ related ‘principally to China, whilst Japan, in addition to the interests’ which it possessed in China, was ‘interested in a peculiar degree, politically as well as commercially and industrially, in Korea.’ The AngloJapanese Alliance, January 30, 1902, https://www.jacar.go.jp/nichiro/uk-japan.htm. Ishii contended that this article reflected the Japanese position that Japan ‘possessed “grave interests superior to those of other powers in Korea” and also “special interests” in China which she will not concede to any European or American power.’ He added that Great Britain came ‘to recognize the Japanese claim in the first Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902’ (ibid., 374–5, 379). Ishii further  observed that even at the time of the negotiation of the first AngloJapanese Treaty of Alliance, the Japanese government considered that the phrase special interests was ‘inadequate as a description of the peculiar relations which it felt then…should be recognized as governing its policy in China.’ Ishii, 1930, quoted in Morris, ‘The Memoirs of Viscount Ichii [Ishii],’ 682. The main clause of the Franco-Japanese Treaty signed in Paris on June 10, 1907, declared the following: ‘The governments of France and Japan being in agreement to respect the independence and integrity of China; as well as the principle of equality in the treatment of that country, and having special interest in securing order and peace guaranteed, particularly in the regions of the Chinese empire in the vicinity of the territories over which both have sovereign rights of protection or occupation, engaged actually to support each other to assure the peace and security of these regions with a view to the 47 48

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Ishii told Lansing that a joint declaration which embraced the above characterisation of Sino-Japanese relations, in addition to restating respect for China’s territorial integrity and the principles of the Open Door and equal opportunity in China, would serve not only to ‘exterminate…the evil effect of propaganda’ but would ‘prevent misunderstanding between our own people’ through ‘clarifying the existing conditions in the Far East.’50 In response to Ishii’s proposal, Lansing remarked that the conversation had ‘unexpectedly…come to possess a serious bearing’ and said that he would carefully consider the matter before they met again at which point the conversation terminated.51 Ishii felt that Lansing, whom he considered pro-Chinese, had been taken aback by his proposal and that he was not favourable towards it, although he had ‘a streak of hope’ that Wilson, with whom Lansing was to confer on the matter, might prove more amenable.52 Such hope was based on an initial conversation with Wilson, during which Wilson told Ishii that the ‘United States had no other desire as long as the principle of the Open Door and equal opportunity was faithfully carried out in China. The fact that the Powers maintain their position in China by establishing so-called spheres of influence in various quarters maintenance of the situation held by each and the territorial rights of the two contracting parties upon the Asiatic continent.’ See ‘Franco-Japanese Pact a Defensive Alliance,’ San Francisco Call 102, no. 18, June 18, 1907, 8. The Russo-Japanese Convention of 1907 came into force on July 30, 1907, and, as with the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Alliance and the Franco-Japanese Treaty, had both public and private clauses. Article 2 of the public clause stated the following: ‘The two High Contracting Parties recognize the independence and territorial integrity of the Chinese Empire and the principle of equal opportunity for the commerce and industry of all nations therein and engage to uphold and support the maintenance of the status quo and respect for this principle by all pacific means at their disposal.’ John Albert White, Transition to Global Rivalry: Alliance Diplomacy and the Quadruple Entente, 1895–1907 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 304–7. The private or ‘secret clause reaffirmed Japan’s “special” position in Korea and Russia’s “special” position in Outer Mongolia…. The secret clause also reaffirmed the divisions of respective spheres of influence in Manchuria.’ Joseph P.  Ferguson, Japanese-Russian Relations, 1907–2007 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 12. Morris observed that the Japanese treaties of 1907 with France and Russia recognised Japan’s special interests in China ‘either in writing or by suggestion.’ Morris, ‘The Memoirs of Viscount Ichii [Ishii],’ 679. 50  Ishii, ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 379. 51  Ibid., 380. 52  Ishii wrote in his memoirs that Lansing was pro-Chinese due to the fact that he was ‘the son-in-law of Mr. Foster, former Secretary of State and later adviser to the Chinese Government, and a man who, helping his father-in-law, took trouble to defend China’ (ibid., 380, 383).

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of China is a menace to that principle and is regrettable.’53 Ishii’s immediate response was to say that Wilson’s position was ‘reasonable.’ He next stated that as Wilson knew, spheres of influence were ‘first advocated by Russia and Germany in Manchuria and Shantung,’ although  Ishii  hastened to add that both Russia and Germany had since expressed agreement with the principle of the Open Door and equal opportunity.54 Ishii then stated that it went without saying that Japan, although having established a presence in Manchuria as a consequence of the Russo-Japanese War, had defended without hesitation the principle of the Open Door and equal opportunity in that region.55 Following his conversation with Lansing, Ishii left Washington for New York where he was to be received by the mayor of that city. While in New York, Ishii availed himself of several opportunities to speak directly to the American people, emphasising in  that context Japanese support for China’s territorial integrity and the Open Door whilst also trying ‘in a roundabout way to present the inference of what may be called an Asiatic Monroe Doctrine (Asia Monroe-shugi).’56 Meeting with Lansing again in Washington a week later, Ishii, according to his memoirs, was asked what sort of phrase he proposed for the text of the planned declaration in order 53  Ishii further stated: ‘I felt that this general conversation was interesting; perhaps the President also found that there was unexpected flexibility in Japan’s viewpoint. The President expressed the hope that I would discuss the matter at length with Secretary Lansing, and we parted.’ Ishii, 1930, quoted in Morris, ‘The Memoirs of Viscount Ichii [Ishii],’ 680–1. 54  Ibid., 680. 55  Ishii urged Tokyo to agree to support the abolition of spheres of influence as ‘there was the likelihood that the other point,’ namely, the question of the nature of Japan’s interests in China, ‘would be more conveniently settled.’ Ishii ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 376, 383. 56  Ibid., 380. ‘In an address in New  York City on September 29, 1917, Viscount Ishii declared that Japan merely wished to establish good government, peace and security in China so as to promote the development of opportunity there. He claimed that circumstances for which his government was in no way responsible gave Japan certain rights in Chinese territory, but at no time had she or would she desire to take territory from China or despoil her of her rights. Furthermore, it was Japan’s intention to maintain and defend the integrity and the independence of China against any aggressor. Two days later, in an address to New York press representatives, he stated he had no reference to a Monroe Doctrine for Asia, as there was a fundamental difference between that policy and Japan’s attitude towards China. Mr Ishii explained that, whereas the United States made no promises to the American republics, Japan voluntarily agreed not to violate the political and territorial integrity of her neighbour and to observe the principle of the “open door” and equal opportunity.’ Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 236.

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to describe his earlier statement that Japan possessed interests ‘superior (takuyetsu) to other powers in China as a whole (Shina zentai), especially in the regions which are contiguous.’57 Wanting a description of the ‘peculiar relation…governing…[Japan’s]…policy in China,’ that was ‘more accurate and more definite’ than special interests, Ishii stated that he thought ‘“paramount interest” best described Japan’s interest in China.’58 Lansing told Ishii that the United States government could not accept such a phrase because it had ‘an “extremely” strong meaning’: the country that recognised that Japan had such interests ‘must blindly follow Japan’s activities of whatever description in China’.59 Ishii observed that he was only using an expression that the United States’ officials had used in relation to Mexico and that he had deliberately chosen the language of Lansing’s country ‘because our country’s interests in China are not different from those of his country in Mexico.’60 At this point, Lansing reiterated that it was impossible to use the phrase, adding that President Wilson also had a strong objection to it, whereupon Ishii stated that he would not insist on the phrase ‘paramount interest.’61 After negotiations concerning Ishii’s suggestion that the phrase ‘special interests and influence’ be used as an alternative, the two men reached a compromise: they adopted the expression ‘“special interests” by dropping “and influence”.’62 Ishii explained in his memoirs that although the phrase ‘paramount interest’ was of American origin, he understood why the United States might see potential danger in it: the second Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1905) ‘contained an article which recognized that Japan had “paramount political, military and economic interests in Korea” and later Japan annexed Korea.’63 The key clauses of the American-Japanese joint declaration, popularly known as the Lansing-Ishii agreement, was issued on November 2, 1917. It declared the following: 57  Ishii, ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ in  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 381. 58  Morris, ‘The Memoirs of Viscount Ichii [Ishii],’ 682, and Ishii, ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 381. 59   Ishii, ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 381. 60  Ibid., 381–2. 61  Ibid., 382. 62  Ibid. 63  Ibid.

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In order to silence mischievous reports that have from time to time been circulated, it is believed by us that a public announcement once more of the desires and intentions shared by our two Governments with regard to China is advisable. The Governments of the United States and Japan recognize that territorial propinquity creates special relations between countries, and, consequently, the Government of the United States recognizes that Japan has special interests in China, particularly in the part to which her possessions are contiguous. The territorial sovereignty of China, nevertheless, remains unimpaired, and the Government of the United States has every confidence in the repeated assurances of the Imperial Japanese Government that while geographical position gives Japan such special interests they have no desire to discriminate against the trade of other nations or to disregard the commercial rights heretofore granted by China in treaties with other Powers. The Governments of the United States and Japan deny that they have any purpose to infringe in any way the independence or territorial integrity of China, and they declare, furthermore, that they always adhere to the principle of the so-called ‘Open Door’ or equal opportunity for commerce and industry in China. Moreover, they mutually declare that they are opposed to the acquisition by any Government of any special rights or privileges that would affect the independence or territorial integrity of China or that would deny to the subjects or citizens of any country the full enjoyment of equal opportunity in the commerce and industry of China.64

On August  11, 1919, the Committee on Foreign Relations, in the course of its hearings on the Treaty of Peace with Germany, interrogated Lansing on the Lansing-Ishii agreement, during which the secretary of state noted that at a hearing on the previous Wednesday, he had been asked twice concerning what knowledge he had of the secret agreements between Japan and Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy. Lansing then stated the following:

64  ‘Appendix 11: The Lansing-Ishii Agreement, November 2, 1917,’ in Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 502–3. Morris, a former American ambassador at Tokyo, wrote that this ‘informal agreement, indicating a more generous attitude of the American Government toward Japanese aims and ambitions in China, was received by the Japanese people as a distinct diplomatic victory, giving Japan a relative freedom of action in further developing her special interests in Southern Manchuria.’ Morris, ‘The Memoirs of Viscount Ichii [Ishii],’ 678.

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Gentlemen, in connection with those inquiries and the apparent implication that I must have had knowledge, or should have had knowledge of those agreements prior to the Lansing-Ishii agreement, I can now state that my first knowledge of the actual agreement came in the first part of February 1919. Under date of February 26 they were transmitted to the Department of State by the American Peace Commission, and the department has no record or any knowledge of the treaties prior to that time.65

Millard suggested that in his testimony, which President Wilson would cite in  responding  to questions in regard to his  own  knowledge of the secret agreements during his conference with the committee at the White House on August 19, 1919, it was possible that Lansing may have relied on an important feature of diplomatic language: for a diplomat to say in public that they have knowledge of a particular matter is to say that they have been ‘officially informed,’ and thus, it may be permissible to deny knowledge of a particular matter in public while nonetheless having some unofficial knowledge of it.66 Although stating that he did not want to imply that President Wilson and Lansing knew of the interallied secret agreements before going to Paris, Millard noted that most commentators who had surveyed the circumstances had concluded that if Wilson and Lansing had not been officially informed of the agreements at that time, they must have known of them unofficially. In any case, Millard observed, it could be demonstrated that Wilson and Lansing ‘ought to have known’ that such agreements existed: there was ‘sufficient ground for suspicion’ for the American government when it joined the war in August 1917, ‘to make definite inquiries and to have insisted on definite answers.’67 Addressing  the Lansing-Ishii agreement, Lansing told the Senate Committee that when he first discussed the prospective agreement with Ishii on September 6, 1917, the only indication that Ishii gave regarding the existence of an understanding between Japan and Great Britain in respect to German possessions in China was in the following account: Ishii told Lansing that in 1915, he had visited Sir Edward Grey before return65  ‘Report of the Hearings on the Treaty of Peace Before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 11 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 65–6. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 233. 66  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 171. See also ‘From Official Report of the Conference between President Wilson and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations at the White House, 19 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 65. 67  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 68–9.

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ing to Tokyo (Ishii having been recalled by Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu from his position as ambassador to France in order to replace Katō who had resigned on August 10), whereupon he told Grey that Japan ‘intended to return Kiaochou to China, but that the islands would have to be retained.’68 In response to this testimony, Senator Borah stated that Lansing would now be aware that Ishii had made this statement at a time when Japan had entered a secret agreement with Great Britain, in addition to other powers, in respect to the disposition of Shandong. He then asked Lansing whether or not in his view Ishii had either ‘affirmatively or by his silence concealed it from the Secretary of State of this nation?’69 Lansing responded by saying this was indeed the truth, adding that he did not know whether it was ‘an intentional concealment.’ Borah stated that it had not been the committee’s intention to indicate that Lansing ‘must have had knowledge of these things’: rather, Borah declared, ‘[m]y desire was to show what Ishii of was doing.’70 Borah then read out the following statement appearing in the  record of the  parliamentary debates of the House of Commons of March 4, 1918. Mr. King asked the Secretary for Foreign Affairs whether there have been communicated to President Wilson copies of all treaties, whether secret or public, and memoranda of all other agreements and undertakings, to which the country has become a party since August 4, 1914; and if not, whether copies of all such documents will be handed to the American Ambassador in London. Mr. Balfour. The honourable member may rest assured that President Wilson is kept fully informed by the Allies.71 68  ‘Report of the Hearings on the Treaty of Peace Before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 11 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 67. Before his departure for Japan, Ishii ‘reached with Premier Okuma’s approval a preliminary understanding with [Théophile] Decassé at Paris and Lord Grey at London with regard to Japanese participation in the London Declaration [of September 4, 1915].’ The London Declaration was ‘jointly made by Great Britain, France, and Russia. It was an agreement which bound the participating Powers not to enter into separate peace and to consult each other upon peace plans before the discussion of peace terms.’ As a result of Ishii’s interview with Sir Edward Grey, ‘a formal invitation was issued in the name of the British Government on August 19, and Japan became a member of the London Declaration on August 19. Italy soon followed suit and made it a five-Power pact. The Revolution of 1917 eliminated Russia from the entente, but the United States came in her place and these give Powers constituted the “Big Five” of the Peace Conferences at Paris and Versailles.’ Akagi, Japan’s Foreign Relations 1542–1936, 316–7. 69  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 67. 70  Ibid. 71  Ibid., 68.

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Borah asked Lansing whether he thought that this statement showed that the secret agreements must have been made known to the president, to which Lansing carefully responded that he ‘should very much dislike to interpret the language of Mr. Balfour.’ Following this exchange, Lansing went on to fully concur with Borah’s conclusion in relation to Lansing’s own state of knowledge in respect to those agreements prior to the end of the war: ‘[n]ot withstanding the statement of Viscount Ishii and the statement of Mr. Balfour, it is a matter of fact that the Secretary of State of the United States had no knowledge of those treaties until after the signing of the armistice.’72 During his testimony of August 11, Lansing was asked by the committee whether or not, up until the time of the exchange of notes between the governments of Japan and the United States which embraced the Lansing-­ Ishii agreement, there had been any conferral with diplomatic representatives of the Republic of China on the matter. On being told that the Chinese Republic had not been informed until after the agreement had been negotiated, Senator Atlee Pomerene asked the following: ‘As this related to Chinese territory, what reason was there, if any, for not conferring with the diplomatic representatives of China about it?’73 Lansing’s response was to say that the declaration was simply a declaration of common policy between Japan and the United States in respect to their ‘attitude toward China’ and that as it did not ‘directly affect any rights of China, except that the two governments agreed that they would keep their hands off.’74 In response to the committee’s observation that newspaper dispatches had stated that the Chinese government took exception to the agreement, Lansing reported that he had suggested to Ishii that it would be wise to reaffirm the Open Door in the agreement in light of reports that Japan was seeking to take advantage of the war for the purpose of extending its influence over China. It was at this point, Lansing told the ­committee, that Ishii had raised the issue of Japan’s special interests in China, a matter on which, Lansing added, the Japanese government had been most insistent. Lansing stated that at a later interview, he informed Ishii that if by special interests he meant paramount interests, then the issue could not be  Ibid. See also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 233.  ‘Testimony of Hon. Robert Lansing before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, 11 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 164–5. 74  Ibid., 165. 72 73

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discussed further, but that if it meant only special interests based on geographical proximity, he would consider inserting it in the note. Lansing also told the committee that in response to Ishii’s suggestion that a Monroe Doctrine was needed for the Far East, he had explained to Ishii that there appeared to be a misunderstanding of that doctrine.75 Lansing stated at the committee hearing the following:. And I told him that there seemed to be a misconception as to the underlying principle of the Monroe Doctrine; that it was not an assertion of primacy or paramount interest by the United States in its relation to other American Republics; that its purpose was to prevent foreign powers with the separate rights of any nation in this hemisphere, and that the whole aim was to preserve to each Republic the power of self-development. I said further that so far as aiding in this development the United States claimed no special privileges over other countries…. I told Viscount Ishii that I felt that the same principle should be applied to China, and that no special privileges, and certainty no paramount interest, in that country should be claimed by any foreign power. While the phrasing of the notes to be exchanged was further considered, the meaning of ‘special interests’ was not again discussed.76

In response to questioning, Lansing informed the committee that Ishii had responded to the above statement by maintaining silence, at which point Borah, in an attempt to establish a connected account of the Japanese manoeuvrings, observed in the form of three questions that the TwentyOne Demands had been issued in early 1915, that China had soon after acceded to the first four groups of these demands and that China’s accession to them ‘had been made known to the world’ before Ishii appeared in the United States in order to negotiate the exchange of notes.77 Having established these points, Borah, echoing an earlier question posed to Lansing, asked whether Ishii had indicated at any point that he was willing to accept Lansing’s construction of the phrase special interests: that it did not mean ‘political control or paramount control.’78 Obtaining a negative response to this question, Borah then asked whether it was not a fact that before and after Ishii arrived in the United States his government had, ‘officially or semi-officially, placed the con Ibid., 165–6.  Ibid., 166. 77  Ibid., 166–7. 78  Ibid., 167. 75 76

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struction upon these words which Ishii had placed upon them?’79 In order to verify this claim, Borah then cited a confidential dispatch from the Russian ambassador at Tokyo, namely, Vasily Krupensky, to his home government sent on October 22, 1917, which, as Borah  noted,  had been reproduced in Millard’s Democracy and the Far Eastern Question (1919), it having been earlier made public by the Kerensky government. Reading from the dispatch in question as it appeared in Millard’s book, Borah stated: The Japanese are manifesting more and more clearly a tendency to interpret the special position of Japan in China, inter alia, in the sense that other Powers must not undertake in China any political steps without previously exchanging views with Japan on the subject—a condition that would to some extent establish a Japanese control over the foreign affairs of China. On the other hand, the Japanese Government does not attach great importance to its recognition of the principle of the open door and the integrity of China, regarding it as merely a repetition of the assurances repeatedly given by it earlier to other powers and implying no new restrictions on Japanese policy in China. It is therefore quite possible that in some future time there may arise in this connection misunderstandings between the United States and Japan. The minister of foreign affairs then confirmed today in conversation with me that in the negotiations by Viscount Ishii the question at issue is not some special concession to Japan in these or in other parts of China, but Japan’s special position in China as a whole.80

Borah then went on to quote from another dispatch of the Russian ambassador to his home government in this case under the date of November 1, 1917, in which the ambassador gave an account of another exchange, in this case with Viscount Motono Ichirō, the Japanese foreign minister at the time, part of which read as follows: that in the future misunderstandings might arise from the different interpretations of Japan and the United States of the meaning of the terms ‘special position’ and ‘special interests’ of Japan in China, Viscount Motono replied by saying [a gap in the original]. Nevertheless I gained the impression from the words of the minister that he is conscious of the possibility of misunderstandings also in the future, but is of the opinion that in such a case Japan

 Ibid.  Ibid., 168. See also Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ 674.

79 80

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would have better means at her disposal for carrying into effect her interpretation rather than that of the United States.81

Borah then noted that immediately after the Lansing-Ishii agreement was reached, the Japanese press, including the government controlled press, placed exactly the construction on it that Lansing had told Ishii was unacceptable to the United States.82 Responding to a senatorial inquiry as to whether special interests meant both political and economic interests, Lansing declared that Japan’s special interests were understood by both parties to be ‘not political in nature,’ adding that ‘the danger of a statement of special interest was that it might be so construed, and therefore I objected to making such a statement.’83 On Lansing’s understanding (which he argued Ishii had accepted by virtue of the fact that he had continued the discussion  in spite  of  Lansing ‘s  rejection of  Ishii’s political interpretation), the expression special interests denoted in particular ‘the commercial and industrial advantage which Japan enjoyed in China due to its geographical position,’ and ‘had no political significance.’84 Ishii stated in his memoirs that he found Lansing’s testimony astonishing and that he felt that it was ‘made under pressure of the inquisition’ that Lansing had been subject to by a Republican-dominated committee who were accusing him of agreeing to an understanding of special interests ‘overly favorable to

81  ‘Testimony of Hon. Robert Lansing before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, 11 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 169. ‘The divergence between the Japanese and American Governments as to the significance to be attached to the recognition by the United States, and the assertion by Japan, that “territorial propinquity creates special relations between countries,” and, consequently that “Japan has special interests in China, particularly in the part to which her possessions are contiguous,” was disclosed in letters of the Russian Ambassador to his Government which reported statements made to him by the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs.’ Westel L.  Willoughby, China at the Conference: A Report (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press: 1922), 193–4. 82  ‘Testimony of Hon. Robert Lansing before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, 11 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 169. 83  Treaty of peace with Germany: Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate. 66th Congress, First Session on the Treaty of peace with Germany, signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919, and submitted to the Senate on July 10, 1919, by the President of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), 223. See also Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 384. 84  Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ 673. See also ‘Testimony of Hon. Robert Lansing before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, 11 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 167.

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Japan.’85 He maintained that Lansing well understood that special interests meant ‘principally political matters,’ pointing to the fact that commercial and industrial interests were addressed in a paragraph separate from the paragraph which spoke of special interests.86 For Ishii, the true or properly political meaning of Japan’s special interests as they related to China, as he wrote in an entry in his diary in September 1919, was as follows: Whenever an occasion arises when there is a danger to the lives and property of natives and foreigners as a result of natural catastrophes; or (2) whenever the lives of natives and foreigners are in peril as a result of the prevalence of epidemics in China; or (3) when there arises in China a civil war which continues without interruption; or, finally, (4) when an occasion is evident when China is overflooded with dangerous thoughts (kiken shiso) and there is danger of it spreading abroad…, under such circumstances it cannot be expected that the Japanese Government can be satisfied with such simple procedure as giving up their properties and fleeing from the country. When natural catastrophes in China destroy the very soil, when epidemics prevail over China and the roads are filled with victims, when China is absorbed in a semi-permanent civil war, or when China becomes the nest of Bolshevism, while European and American countries need not fear therefrom direct danger to the existence of their countries, Japan alone cannot exist without China and the Japanese people cannot develop without the Chinese people. Civil disturbances arising in China or epidemics and heresies prevalent in China will readily pass over to Japan and will not stop until they afflict and victimize Japan along with China. This is the foundation of the special interests which Japan possesses in China…. This is the providential relationship resulting from the so-called geographical conditions and it is an irremovable fact from which Japan cannot escape no matter how she tries. This is a circumstance which neither Europe nor America can possibly attempt to rob from us or to alter…. More intimate and more material are Japan’s interests vis-à-vis China than those of Europe and America, and, consequently, Japan’s responsibilities must be the greater, and her right to express herself (hatsugen no ken) the more obvious. These are Japan’s special interests in China.87

 Ishii, ‘Japan’s Special Interests in China,’ 385.  Ibid., 386. 87  Ibid., 388. 85 86

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Millard also might well have been astonished by Lansing’s presentation of the understandings arrived at in the course of the Lansing-Ishii negotiations because in his view, the effect of the agreement was potentially less benign  than Lansing would have had the Foreign Relations Committee believe. It is noteworthy in this regard that on November 8, 1917, following the presentation of information on the notes by Baron Hayashi Gonsuke to the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs on November 4, one day before the agreed date of their public release and against a background in which news, believed to have been ‘inspired’ by the Japanese government, circulated in Britain, China, and the United States that Japan had achieved a great diplomatic triumph, the Chinese minister to Japan delivered a note, ‘registering objection to Japan’s having acted on a Chinese problem without consulting the government of China.’88 On November 12, this note was followed by the issuing of a declaration by the Chinese government setting forth an interpretation of the Lansing-Ishii agreement that was wholly in accord with that of the Americans. This latter development was canvassed during the Committee on Foreign Relations’ hearings on the Treaty of the Peace with Germany in the course of which Borah chose to describe as a protest what had been formally termed by the Chinese government, as Lansing hastened to point out to the committee, a declaration.89 Millard  well appreciated a central point pursued by the Foreign Relations Committee, namely, that of the slipperiness of the phrase special interests, and it is worth noting in this regard that Young considered as ‘irreconcilable’ Lansing’s statements in reply to the question ‘as to whether “special interests” meant political interests as well as economic’ with the fact  that the agreement was signed without Ishii expressly accepting a restricted interpretation of the phrase.90 Millard concluded in relation to the agreement the following:  Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 238.  ‘Testimony of Hon. Robert Lansing before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, 11 August 1919,’ in Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 170. 90  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 384. In respect to Ishii’s account in his memoirs of Lansing’s explanation before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as to what he, Lansing, understood by Japan’s special interests, Young wrote the following: ‘Viscount Ishii here, in a lengthy section, expresses surprise at Secretary Lansing’s testimony before the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee on August 11, 1919. His argument here is extremely difficult to follow, being at times inconsistent with other statements made in the same section. It resembles, but is more obviously confused,’ than Lansing’s testimony before the committee (ibid). On the lack of explicit agreement on the meaning of special interests, see also Godshall, Tsingtau Under Three Flags, 237. 88 89

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Mr. Lansing’s testimony to the Senate, in conjunction with other known facts about the matter, shows that when it made the Lansing-Ishii agreement, the American Government (which, in that case, was probably not more than two men, the President and the Secretary of State) understood perfectly that Viscount Ishii was trying to ‘put something over,’ and understood that the agreement in the form it was signed was ambiguous and susceptible to different interpretations. The agreement was a diplomatic finesse directed to an existing war situation to hold Japan with the Allies, or it is a rare bit of diplomatic ineptitude on the part of the American Government.91

As noted, the Japanese Monroe Doctrine was closely interwoven with the right to live doctrine, the latter being developed by Japanese officials and publicists because the treaty rights that Japan enjoyed in Manchuria were insufficient to ‘establish legal claims to a general superiority of economic and political position.’92 The crucial feature of the latter doctrine was the assertion that a nation that is ‘manifestly poor in the gifts of nature has a right, moral or legal, to require a comparatively richer but politically weaker state to provide for the uninterrupted flow of such resources to the needy nation.’93 According to Young, the only formal articulation of such a right in the context of Japan’s relations with China, and with Manchuria in particular, before the Washington Conference was in the correspondence preliminary to the creation of the new International Banking Consortium for China. This consortium, which was made up of American, British, French and Japanese financial groups, was organised in the period 1919–1920.94 It is noteworthy in particular that efforts to bring this consortium to life occurred during the Paris Peace Conference and that Lansing was its chief advocate.95 The background to this consortium was described by Young as follows: The Great War had diverted the attention of the financial groups of the United States and of European countries from Chinese loan enterprises,  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 172.  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 298. Morley observed that no official text of the treaties on which Japan’s putative rights in Manchuria were based ‘has ever been published, and their validity has been consistently contested by the Chinese government.’ Morley, Society of Nations, 453n. 93  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 300. 94  Ibid. 95  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 178. 91 92

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leaving the field to the Japanese. New circumstances, however, favored the renewed participation of western financial groups in loan enterprises in China. There was, for example, a wide conviction that, if the field were to continue to be exploited only by the Japanese, it would be exceedingly difficult, after the coming of peace in the West, for them to enter the loan field in China. There was also a desire on the part of the American Government to counteract false impressions as to American policy in China which had been spread as a result of the negotiation of the Lansing-Ishii agreement of 1917.96

One of the main aims of the United States and Great Britain in pushing for the creation of a consortium was to put an end to all claims of spheres of interest in China. For example, in a memorandum issued on November 19, 1919, the British government declared that ‘the fundamental idea underlying the Consortium is to abolish spheres of interest and throw open the whole of China to the activities of an international financial combination.’97 Despite this, the Japanese embassy at Washington sent a memorandum dated March 2, 1920, to the State Department, which appeared to assert exactly such a claim: the very claim that Lansing had rejected in his private meetings with Ishii in 1917.98 And it is worth noting that in a written submission requested by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations dated August 20, 1919, Millard had warned ‘in connection with the newly formed international financial group to operate in China,’ that it was already being reported that the Japanese government  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 261–2.  Memorandum of the British Government, 1919, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 176. Willoughby insisted that there could be no doubt that the intention behind the consortium was to abolish claims to spheres of interest in China on the part of the powers. He notes that Thomas W.  Lamont of the firm J.  P. Morgan and Company and ’the spokesman for the American banking interests, which had the support of the American Government, in his Preliminary Report on the Consortium had said: “Certainly if the principle laid down for its organization is carried out we shall see no more ‘spheres of interest’ set up in China.” In its memorandum of August 11, 1919, submitted to the Japanese Government, the British Government said: “One of the fundamental objects of the American proposals as accepted by the British, Japanese and French Governments, is to eliminate claims in particular spheres of interest and to throw open the whole of China without reserve to the combined activities of an International Consortium. This object cannot be achieved unless all the parties to the scheme agree to sacrifice all claim to enjoy any industrial preference within the boundaries of every political sphere of influence.”’ (quoted ibid.). See also Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 281–2. 98  Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 179. 96 97

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intended ‘to insist that Manchuria and Shantung will be excepted from the operations of the Group, Japan reserving these regions for her exclusive economic exploitation.’99 Addressing itself to two of the three regions in China which had been  the  subject of the  contentious agreements and notes between Japan and China on May 25, 1915 (the third being the province of Shandong), the Japanese memorandum stated the following: From the nature of the case, the regions of South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia which are contiguous to Korea stand in very close and special relation to Japan’s national defense and her economic existence. Enterprises launched forth in these regions, therefore, often involve questions vital to the safety of the country. This is why Japan has special interest in these regions and has established there special rights of various kinds.100

The memorandum then went on to refer to the threat to Japanese security posed by the spread of Bolshevik ideology, stating the following: Furthermore, the recent development of the Russian situation, exercising as it does an unwholesome influence upon the Far East, is a matter of grave concern to Japan…. Now South Manchuria and Mongolia are the gate by which these direful influences may effect their penetration into Japan and the Far East to the instant menace of their security.101

The memorandum closed in proposing a formula that the American and British governments were requested to accept, namely, that in matters…relating to loans affecting South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia, which in their opinion are calculated to create a serious impediment to the security of the economic life and national defense of Japan, the

 ‘“Regional Understandings” and the Shantung Decision,’ ibid., 114.  Memorandum of the Japanese Government, 1920, quoted in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Consortium: The Official Text of the Four-Power Agreement for a Loan to China and Relevant Documents, pamphlet no. 40 (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1921), 35. 101  Memorandum of the Japanese Government, 1920, quoted in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 273. See also Millard, Conflict of Policies in Asia, 178–9. The question of Japan’s privileged position in South Manchuria and ‘Inner’ Mongolia had been raised with Lamont when he visited Japan in the spring of 1920. While in Japan, Lamont  held meetings with Japanese bankers and diplomats. Lamont also visited China during this period in order to study the situation there. 99

100

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Japanese Government reserves the right to take the necessary steps to guarantee such security.102

According to Young, Japan was seeking recognition of two claims in this context:  the  first  of these claims  concerned  Japan’s assertion of  the right to exclude from the operations of the consortium any project Japan deemed prejudicial to the economic existence and national defence of Japan, and the second, Japan’s assertion of the right ‘to take steps necessary to prevent “direful influences” from Russian territory spreading beyond Manchuria,’ this latter assertion later being seen as a ‘forerunner of Japan’s assertion of the right of military intervention in Manchuria to preserve “peace and order” there during 1925 and 1929.’103 The United States issued a response on March 16, declaring its ‘grave disappointment’ that the Japanese memorandum was composed in terms ‘so exceedingly ambiguous and in character so irrevocable’ as to ‘indicate a continued desire on the part of  the  Japanese Government to exclude American, British and French banking interests from participation in the development, for the benefit of China, of parts of that Republic’ and warning that such a desire was incompatible with the principle of the independence and territorial integrity of China.104 The American memorandum went on to state the following: The Government of the United States is not unsympathetic with the professed objects of the principle embodied in the Japanese formula: it considers, on the other hand, first, that the right of national self-preservation is one of universal acceptance in the relations between states, and therefore would not require specific formulation as to its application in any particular instance; and, second, that the recognition of that principle is implicit in the terms of the notes exchanged between Secretary Lansing and Viscount Ishii 102  Memorandum of the Japanese Government, 1920, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 194. See also Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 275. 103  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 274. See also Willoughby, China at the Conference, 194. The Japanese  memorandum stated that the insistence on Japan’s special interest in Manchuria did not stem from ‘a desire of making any territorial demarcation involving the idea of economic monopoly or of asserting any exclusive political pretensions or of affirming a doctrine of any far-reaching sphere of interest in disregard of the legitimate national aspirations of China, as well as of the interests possessed there by the Powers concerned.’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Official Text of the Four-Power Agreement for a Loan to China and Relevant Documents, 35. 104  Willoughby, China at the Conference, 195.

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on November 2, 1917. This Government therefore considers that by reason of the particular relationships of understanding thus existing between the United States and Japan, and those which, it is understood, similarly exist between Japan and the other Powers proposed to be associated with it in the Consortium, there would appear to be no occasion to apprehend on the part of the Consortium any activities directed against the economic life or national defense of Japan. It is therefore felt that Japan could with entire assurance rely upon the good faith of the United States and of the other two Powers associated in the Consortium to refuse their countenance to any operation inimical to the vital interests of Japan; and that Japan’s insistence that the other three Powers join with it in the proposed formula as a condition precedent would only create misapprehension.105

On March 16, the Japanese embassy in London sent to the British Foreign Office a memorandum worded similarly to the memorandum which had been sent to the State Department on March 2 to which the Foreign Office responded on March 20.106 The British government declared that the Japanese memorandum was so ambiguous and general in character that it might be held to indicate on the part of the Japanese Government a continued desire to exclude the cooperation of the other three banking groups from participating in the development, for China’s benefit, of important parts of the Chinese Republic and therefore creates the impression that the Japanese reservation cannot be reconciled with the principle of the independence and the realization of the integrity of China.107

Touching on one of the principal purposes of the consortium, the British made the following declaration in respect to the Japanese submission: The admission of such a claim to a monopoly of commercial interests in a large geographical area of China would be a direct infringement of the fundamental idea underlying the creation of the Consortium, which was to abolish spheres of interest.108 105  Memorandum of the United States Government, 1920, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 195–6. 106  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 276. 107  Memorandum of the British Government, 1920, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 194–5. 108  Memorandum of the British Government, 1920, quoted in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 281–2.

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In rejecting the Japanese government’s proposal, the British Foreign Office too offered Japan some assurance: it stated that it recognised ‘the legitimate desire of the Japanese nation to be assured of the supplies of food and raw material necessary to her economic life and her justifiable wish strategically to protect and maintain the Korean frontier’ and that it  was prepared to subscribe  to a  written guarantee that the consortium would not permit operations that were inimical to Japan’s economic existence and national defence.109 Accepting the assurances contained within the American and British memoranda, the Japanese government withdrew its statement of claim.110 Although the Japanese press would interpret them more loosely, it is important to note that the assurances given to Japan did not add to Japan’s international legal rights: rather, they were simply ‘declaratory’ of the right which all states enjoy under international law to secure their ‘independence and continued existence.’111 The American memorandum was clear on this point in stating that ‘the right of national self-preservation is one of universal acceptance in the relations between states, and therefore would not require specific formulation as to its application in any particular instance.’112 Upon withdrawing its claim, the Japanese government placed on record that it rejected ‘the idea of economic monopoly or of asserting any exclusive political pretensions or of affirming a doctrine of any far-reaching sphere of interest in disregard of the legitimate aspirations of China, as 109  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Official Text of the Four-Power Agreement for a Loan to China and Relevant Documents, 45. Young observed that irrespective of this assurance, the British government ‘did not believe that to exclude three railways in western Manchuria from the sphere of loan operations of the Consortium was at all essential to provide for the security that Japan was conceded.’ Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 302. 110  Willoughby, China at the Conference, 196, and Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 282. 111  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 276. Millard observed that ‘after much diplomatic squirming the Japanese Government decided to participate in the consortium… with a “reservation” in the form of a mutual “understanding” to the effect that the American Government and the consortium had no purpose to encroach upon or interfere with Japan’s existing vested interests in Manchuria. No-one in China, except Japanese, felt satisfied with leaving the matter in that form, especially as the “inspired” Japanese press “distorted” the understanding; but as there was no prospect of the consortium’s doing any business then, there seemed no use in adding to the existing diplomatic aggravations by prolonging the controversy.’ Millard Conflict of Policies in Asia, 179. 112  Memorandum of the United States Government, 1920, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 195.

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well as of the interests possessed there by the Powers concerned.’113 A formal agreement establishing the consortium was thus signed in New York on October 15, 1920, by representatives of various banking groups of Great Britain, France, Japan and the United States.114 Young observed that one of the most ‘sweeping, and perhaps the most responsible’ statements of the right to live doctrine was in a speech entitled ‘Reflections on Lasting Peace’ given by Prime Minister Hara Takashi in 1921  in  view  of the forthcoming Washington Conference and just shortly before his assassination.115 Therein Hara appealed to the natural law notion of the right of all peoples to enjoy the fruits of the earth, stating in this regard that it is the will of the Creator that his children should make the entire earth their common home…and strive in perfect unison for boundless prosperity. It is clearly against the will of God that his beloved children should divide themselves into groups and attempt to perpetuate among themselves the inequalities which have arisen from mere accidents.116

As a condition of lasting peace, Hara continued, it is necessary that all nations recognise the ‘fundamental truth that nations and races do not differ in their desire to live and develop’ and that they have ‘no right to force another people to commit national or racial suicide’ through perpetuating inequalities, borne of natural or historical contingencies but which were often sanctified ‘on the pretext of racial difference.’117 Hara affirmed that if the principle that all had the ‘right…to live and progress’ and concomitantly that ‘no nation has the right to compel another national to commit suicide holds good,’ then economically prosperous states had the ‘great duty’ of opening ‘wide…[their]…economic doors’ to the economically weaker states.118 Very importantly, the same principle also entailed a ‘negative responsibility of that state gifted by nature to refrain from placing obstacles in the way of the development of those raw materi-

113  Reply of the Japanese Government to the Memoranda of the American and British Governments, 1929, quoted in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 282. 114  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 282. 115  Ibid., 306. 116  Hara Takashi, ‘Reflections on Lasting Peace,’ Living Age, 312, no. 4044 (1922): 7–11, 8. 117  Ibid. 118  Ibid., 9–10. See also Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 306.

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als by an outside state.’119 Commending to his audience  what Blakeslee described as ‘an unusual interpretation of the Open Door,’ Hara stated the following: By “open door” I do not mean a complete throwing down of national boundary stones. What I have in mind is the removal of the economic insecurity of some peoples by extending to them the opportunity for free access to the world’s resources, eliminating other artificial barriers, and adjusting as much as possible the inequality arising from the earlier discriminations of nature and of history. In short, we must assure all industrious peoples of the world the right to thrive. For the realisation of this happy end, Japan feels that she owes it to herself, and to others who are in a similar position with her, to champion the cause of universal mutual aid and fairness.120

Having discussed the general principle he wished to promote at the Washington Conference, Hara turned to the specific situation of Japan, noting that Japan was finding living increasingly difficult due to its ‘waxing population and…ever waning resources.’  He added  that these were problems which had to be addressed if Japan was to be ‘the keystone to the arc of peace in the Far East, and a faithful supporter of the welfare of the world.’121 If Japan was to fulfil these expectations, Hara continued, then its economic insecurity needed to be removed.122 Hara took care to note that vital to Japan’s ‘mission in the Far East’ and in the world at large was the cooperation and assistance of the people of the United States and that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance ‘had stood the test of twenty stormy years’ and had ‘contributed much to the peace of the world.’123 He also took care to add that internal unrest in China was a domestic affair and that it gave no justification to meddling by an external power. As a country whose ‘life and death’ depended on China’s destiny more than any other, he stated, Japan wished nothing more than to help China to help itself in the hope that it ‘shall come to share with us in peace and prosperity.’124  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 306.  Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ 676, and Hara, ‘Reflections on Lasting Peace,’ 10. 121  Hara, ‘Reflections on Lasting Peace,’ 10. 122  Ibid. 123  Ibid. 124  Ibid., 11. 119 120

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As a further reflection of the aversion of Japanese liberals to expensive territorial expansion, Hara declared that apart from Japan’s sincere desire to restore peace and order in Siberia in order that normal commercial relations with that country could be ‘promptly restored,’ Japan had ‘no ambition in that part of the world.’125 As G. F. Hudson noted, in the area of foreign policy the liberals called for all-round conciliation and a settlement of Japan’s three great conflicts  — with the new Soviet Russia, with China, and with the United States. Their agitation was effective, and their success was reflected in the gradual liquidation of the Siberian adventure, in the restoration of Kiaochow to China in 1922, and the treaties concluded at the Washington Conference in the same year.126

As noted previously, among other agreements, the Washington Conference  had issued in the Nine-Power Treaty ‘relating to principles and policies to be followed in matters concerning China’ which saw the powers formally disavow any claims to spheres of interest in China. As should be clear, the path to such a disavowal had been significantly cleared by the correspondence between the governments of Great Britain, Japan and the United States preparatory to the creation of the International Banking Consortium. It was further cleared by statements at the conference itself.127 For example, on December 12, 1921, at the fifteenth meeting of the Committee of the Whole on Pacific Far Eastern Questions, Wang Ch’ung-hui, just before issuing a plea for the renunciation of all claims to spheres of influence or special interests in China, stated the following: The phrase ‘sphere of interest,’ or ‘sphere of influence’ as it is sometimes called, is a more or less vague term which implies that the powers making such claims in China are entitled within their respective ‘spheres’ to enjoy reserved, preferential, exclusive, or special rights and privileges of trade, investment and for other purpose. Germany was the first to claim a sphere of influence or of interest in its crystallized form over the Province of  Ibid. See also Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 189.  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 194. 127  C. G. Fenwick, ‘The Nine Power Treaty and the Present Crisis in China,’ American Journal of International Law 31, no.4 (1937): 671–4; Willoughby, China at the Conference, 174; and Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 288. 125 126

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Shantung; later the other powers made similar claims over other portions of the territory of China…. That China should have been thus divided into different spheres of interest is a most unfortunate state of affairs. In the first place, these spheres of interest seriously hamper the economic development of China. The powers claiming these spheres seem to take the view that certain portions of China’s territory are reserved for their exclusive exploitation without regard to the economic needs of the Chinese people. There have been instances where a nation is unwilling or unable to finance a particular enterprise and yet refuses to allow it to be financed or carried out by other nations. In the second place, the whole system is contrary to the policy of equal opportunity for the commerce and industry of all nations—a policy which, so far as the common interests of the powers are concerned, is fair and equitable and which has been adopted by this committee. A further objection to the spheres of interest is that there has been a tendency, under cover of economic claims, to further political ends, thus threatening the political integrity of China and giving rise to international jealousy or friction.128

Wang noted that the basis for the claims to spheres of interest or influence was either agreements between the powers themselves to which China was not a party or agreements made with China in conditions that precluded the ‘free exercise of her will.’129 Wang cited as examples of the latter type of agreements, the agreement with Germany in 1898 to lease to Germany Jiaozhou and the agreements and notes of May 25, 1915, in response to Japan’s Twenty-One Demands.130 Wang stated that he welcomed the fact that both the governments of the United States and Great Britain had declared that they were opposed to the continuance of spheres of interest in China.131 He then drew attention to the fact that at the fourteenth meeting of the committee, Balfour, in response to a question by Koo concerning various inter-power agreements which ‘tended to impair China’s integrity and create exclusive privileges for one or another of the foreign powers,’ had bluntly denounced spheres of interest.132 Balfour had indeed issued such a denunciation, having  stated the following  at the meeting:  Wang Ch’ung-hui, 1921, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 174–5.  Ibid., 174. 130  Ibid. 131  Willoughby, China at the Conference, 175. 132  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 290. See also Willoughby, China at the Conference, 175, 177. 128 129

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So far as Great Britain is concerned, spheres of interest are things of the past. The British Government has not the slightest wish to prolong a situation which, so far as they are concerned, has been abandoned. A better way of dealing with the matter is to make clear what had already been implicitly, if not explicitly, indicated, namely, to declare that no one wishes to perpetuate either the system of spheres of interest or the international understandings on which they depend.133

Balfour’s statement was warmly welcomed by Elihu Root, an American delegate at the conference, who proclaimed that it created a ‘new situation in regard to spheres of influence.’134 The Japanese delegation, conforming to the mood of the conference, joined in the general renunciation of spheres of influence or interest: through signing the committee’s preliminary reports and then the Nine-Power Treaty itself, Japan joined the other powers in renouncing all claims to spheres of influence or interest  in China. Indeed, on November 19, 1921, at the second meeting of the Committee of the Whole, Katō Tomosaburō, the Japanese minister for the navy, stated that Japan adhered ‘without question or reservation to the principle of the open door or equal opportunity in China’ and, while ­looking forward to purchasing raw materials and foodstuffs from China, did not ‘claim any special rights or privileges.’135   The  renunciation of spheres of influence in China  was unanimously adopted at the twenty-third meeting of the Committee of the Whole and then approved at a plenary meeting of the conference. It was embodied in Article 4 of the Nine-Power Treaty  which declared the following: ‘The Contracting Powers agree not to support any agreements by their respective nationals with each other designed to create Spheres of Influence or to provide for the enjoyment of mutually exclusive opportunities in desig-

133  Arthur Balfour, 1921, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 177. At the eighteenth meeting of the Committee of the Whole, ‘when the matter of the Open Door was under consideration, Mr. Balfour said: “The British Empire Delegation understood that there was no representative of any Power around the table who thought that the old practice of ‘spheres of influence’ was either advocated by any Government or would be tolerable to this Conference. So far as the British Government was concerned, they had, in the most formal manner, publicly announced that they regarded this practice as utterly inappropriate to the existing situation.”’ Willoughby, China at the Conference, 177n. 134  Willoughby, China at the Conference, 177. 135  Katō Tomosaburō, 1919, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 198. See also Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 293.

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nated parts of Chinese territories.’136 Although the treaty applied only to prospective situations, it seemed evident in 1922 to Westel W. Willoughby, a former legal adviser to the Chinese Republic, that in light of the statements made at the conference and the principles and policies embodied in the treaty, notably its provisions concerning the Open Door, ‘there will be little opportunity in the future for any Power to claim, within any particular region of China, upon the basis of any agreements it already has with that country, such preferential or exclusive rights as will amount to a claim, within that region of what, in the past, has been known as a Sphere of Interest or of Influence.’137 Young agreed with Willoughby’s conclusion that upon ratification of the Nine-Power Treaty all claims to spheres of interest ceased to have any legal standing. It was telling of this development, as Young noted, that almost one year after the Washington Conference, that is, on April 14, 1923, the Lansing-Ishii agreement was abolished through an exchange of notes between the American and Japanese governments.138 Nonetheless Young, commenting on the conference some years after Willoughby, thought it important to draw particular attention to a couple of statements made by the Japanese delegation at Washington that recalled, albeit in a milder form, previous official Japanese statements concerning Japan’s special interests in China. He noted that at the conference, there was ‘a suggestion of Japan’s desire to assert a claim to a right in South Manchuria, presumed to be necessary to secure her national defense and economic livelihood, appeared.’139 In this regard, Young cited a statement made by Hanihara, who at the moment in question was standing in for Shidehara as vice-minister for foreign affairs as the latter had fallen ill on November 30, in response to a Chinese request at the twelfth meeting of the Committee of the Whole on December 3 that the powers give up the territories they had leased in China: ‘The territory in question forms a part of Manchuria—a region where, by reason of its close propinquity to  Nine-Power Treaty, 1922, quoted in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 291.  Willoughby, China at the Conference, 180, 180n. Article 3(a) of the treaty concerned the more effectual application of the principle of the Open Door, specifying that the contracting powers ‘will not seek, nor support their nationals in seeking any arrangement which might purport to establish in favor of their interests any general superiority of rights with respect to commercial or economic development in any designated region of China’ (NinePower Treaty, 1922, quoted ibid., 180n). Emphasis added by Westel W. Willoughby. 138  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 296. 139  Ibid., 288–9, 295, 304. 136

137

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Japan’s territory, more than anything else, she [Japan] has vital interests in that which relates to her economic life and national safety.’140 In the same regard, Young pointed to a statement made by Shidehara at the twentieth meeting of the Committee of the Whole on January 18, 1922: that Japan would welcome a ‘spontaneous declaration’ by China indicating ‘that she would be disposed to extend to foreigners, as far as possible, the opportunity for cooperation in the development and utilization of China’s natural resources.’141 Based on these two statements, Young contended that it appeared that Japan was again seeking ‘to assert the doctrine that a state comparatively poor in natural resources should be entitled, as a matter of equitable privilege at least, to obtain such materials from a state which possessed them in plenitude.’142 He added the qualification that the Japanese delegation had at no stage suggested that access to China’s natural resources ‘could be guaranteed, as a matter of international legal right, by forceful methods or by acts prejudicial to the sovereign rights of China.’143 Nonetheless, he concluded that in certain of the statements made by Japanese delegates at the Washington Conference, as in certain of the statements which accompanied the efforts of the Japanese government to exercise a veto power over the loan operations of the International Banking Consortium, one found ‘the seeds for the formulation of a new “doctrine”’ which in the period following the Washington Conference would be frequently enunciated by Japanese publicists.144 Certainly, the Chinese delegation saw danger in some of the statements made by Japanese delegates at the Washington Conference. At the thirteenth meeting of the Committee of the Whole, Koo responded to Hanihara’s statement at the twelfth meeting  concerning the region of Manchuria in making two key points: first, China had ‘truly vital interests’ in Manchuria concerning the security of its own people to which the interests of any foreign power in that region, ‘however important they may be in themselves,’ bore no comparison and, second, ‘the close propinquity of Manchuria to Korea,’ to the extent that it justified ‘any claim to consideration,’ could ‘equitably be appealed to only on the condition of  Hanihara Masanao, 1922, quoted in Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 304.  Shidehara Kijūrō, 1922, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 200–1. See also Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 305. 142  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 305. 143  Ibid. 144  Ibid., 305–6. 140

141

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reciprocity.’145 At the fourteenth meeting of the committee, Koo took great care to definitively nip in the bud any notion that territorial propinquity was a basis for asserting special interests in China through insisting on the sovereign right of China to determine the existence or not of such interests in Chinese territory. Koo stated: The maintenance of the independence and territorial integrity of China touched the supreme rights of China. As to the recognition of propinquity as creating special interests in China, it was equally obvious that such recognition could not be valid, because special interests on Chinese territory could not be created without the consent of China, and China had always contested the soundness of the doctrine of propinquity.146

As to the statement  issued by Shidehara on January 18, the Chinese delegation responded to it at the thirtieth meeting of the committee on February 2  in the form of the following observation by  Sze: that the Chinese government had no hesitation in declaring that, ‘[c]onsistent with the vital interests of the Chinese nation and the security of its economic life,’ China would ‘continue, on her own accord, to invite cooperation of foreign capital and skill in the development of her natural resources.’147 In a deft move aimed at further puncturing Japanese pretensions, Sze then stated that the Chinese government could make such a declaration precisely because it felt confident that the Japanese delegation was not seeking ‘special consideration for Japan or for the foreign Powers as a whole.’148

145  Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo, 1921, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 199. Koo also addressed another statement by Hanihara, namely, that at the time of the formation of the International Banking Consortium, the British, French and United States governments had assured Japan its ‘vital interests’ in Manchuria would be ‘safeguarded.’ Koo declared that the Chinese government was not ‘in a position, since China was not consulted at the time, to express an opinion as to…[the statement’s] accuracy.’ Koo added, however, that if indeed such an assurance had been given, the Chinese government could ‘not conceal the feeling that it cannot be reconciled with the principle which was adopted by the conference on November 21 of respect for the sovereignty, the independence and the territorial and administrative integrity of China.’ Koo, 1921, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 199. 146  Koo, 1921, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 200. 147  Alfred Sao-ke Sze, 1922, quoted in Willoughby, China at the Conference, 201. 148  Ibid.

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A Pacific Research Programme From the beginning, the IPR understood that the discussions at its meetings must be based in research. A document concerning the IPR’s research programme issued by the ISIPR in 1933 stated that during the discussion in 1925 of the effects of discriminatory immigration laws, it ‘soon became apparent’ that the so-called facts concerning population increase, land utilisation, standards of living and so on, which shaped public attitudes on this question, were either ‘unreliable or unknown.’149 Quoting  the  IPR handbook which had been prepared by Condliffe, this document stated the following: Even a brief discussion of immigration showed that the attitudes taken depended on economic, social and biological conceptions for which little scientific evidence could be adduced, and which in fact were nothing more than prejudices rationalised from limited experience. The very definition of “race” is uncertain, and there is extremely little ascertained and verified fact upon which to base conclusions regarding the biological or social effects of race mixture. Even in regard to economic and political conceptions, there is surprisingly little accurate information of a descriptive character, and less analysis that has borne the test of observation and experiment.150

The IPR’s research activities were at first confined to work undertaken independently by national councils or to a small amount of work ­undertaken in Hawaii. However, in 1928, the IPR launched an international research programme. The United States’ Social Science Research Council aided it in this, sponsoring large research projects important to the IPR.  In addition, the IPR received annual grants, dating from November 1928, from the Rockefeller Foundation (which, in the form of a subvention of $10,000,  had helped facilitate its first meeting) for ‘research in the social sciences.’151 The IPR’s International Research Committee later added to this specification, insisting that the subjects of research should have the character of ‘immediacy’ and concreteness in terms of their impact on international relations in the Pacific region; that  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 2, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.  Ibid. 151  Ibid., 4–5, 9. The American Social Science Research Council agreed to sponsor in 1928 six projects research of interest to the IPR but which the IPR could not afford to undertake. On the initial Rockefeller grant, see Davis, ‘The Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 129. 149 150

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weight must be given to their ‘fundamental importance’ and the likelihood that they would be a source of ‘international controversy;’ and that the projects undertaken must be in most instances capable of completion within two years and that the question studied must be of concern especially to ‘countries on the Pacific and not merely all countries in general.’152 The IPR’s research capacity was enhanced by the organisation of a research secretary in January 1927 and the subsequent organisation of a research department at the ISIPR in that same year. This department was enlarged in January 1929, following the appointment of a New Zealander, namely, Holland, as assistant research secretary, and then again, in early 1933, with the appointment of two other research secretaries, namely, Liu Yu-wan and Saburō (Yoshisaburō) Matsukata, who were from China and Japan respectively. These last two appointments were made ‘in response to formal suggestions received and favourably considered’ by the Pacific Council at the 1931 conference. At the same time, there was never any attempt to establish a large-scale research centre in Honolulu, the IPR’s research policy being one of decentralisation. The work of the members of the research secretariat involved the compilation of documentation and statistical information; the coordination of the IPR’s ‘international research programme’; liaising with field researchers both directly and indirectly; conference preparation; preparing contributions to Pacific Affairs  which was the periodical of the IPR and which was edited by Elizabeth Green in the years 1927 to 1933; and assisting in the preparation of  the  biennial volumes of conference proceedings: Problems of the Pacific.153 152  Although formally constituted before the Kyoto conference, the International Research Committee did not ‘meet for the considered planning of research till that time.’ ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 6, 9,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.  The International Research Committee was composed of members of the national committees, and while constitutionally its role was that of advisor to the Pacific Council, the latter ‘traditionally accepted the recommendations’ of the former ‘without change.’ ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR, 14-26 August, 1933,’ 34, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 153  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program’, 11–2, 44,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.  See also, Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1–2. William L. Holland later reported that on the invitation of Condliffe, his former professor at Canterbury University in New Zealand, he went to Honolulu, arriving there by steamer on December 28, 1928. On the IPR’s decentralisation policy, see Fifth Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations, Milan, 23–27 May 1932, ‘Report of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ prepared by Frederick V.  Field, secretary to the chairman of the International Research Committee, Honolulu, 1931–1932, 1,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.  For Saburō

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The international grants made by the IPR were directed towards individual investigators (who were chosen on the basis on merit regardless of the country being investigated), specialist institutions and to a lesser extent the IPR’s national councils. In line with the IPR’s policy of assisting efforts in countries where research capacity was limited, up until 1931, most of its resources were invested in China and Japan. The IPR sought to foster in those countries ‘direct field investigation’ of what were deemed essential but almost virgin fields of study and to establish ‘stable research centres.’ The result of this investment, the beneficiaries of which included the Universities of Nanjing, Nankai and Tientsin and the Tokyo Imperial University, was the production of a substantial quantity of work concerning the issues of population and food supply, especially as they related to the Manchurian problem. The extent of this research, the ISIPR proclaimed, would ‘astonish researchers in Europe or America.’154 The ISIPR proudly boasted of the international scale of the IPR’s research work, both in terms of its geographical scope and in terms of the collaborative efforts involved.155 It was also proud to proclaim that the IPR was a leader in its field because of the scientifically rigorous nature of its research programme: it involved the ‘continual accumulation of ­information’ and the ‘systematic analysis and interpretation of data.’156 Apart from these considerations, the ISIPR was keen to stress that given the physical and other hardships that IPR investigators faced, such as ‘civil war, the menace of floods and robbers, frostbite and tropical fevers, the opposition of foreign offices and the suspicion of local authorities,’ the very fact that they were able to complete their work was itself astonishing.157 The ‘intimate’ link forged by the IPR between its ongoing research programme and its conference discussions, which the ISIPR claimed distinguished the IPR ‘most sharply’ from other institutions concerned with international affairs, was intended to ensure that the discussions at meetings did not ‘lead away into unprofitable speculation’ on the one hand, or (Yoshisaburō) Matsukata and his involvement with the IPR, see Haru Matsukata Reischauer, Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage (Cambridge, Mass., Belknap, 1986), 299, 306–7.  154  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 1,11, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 155  Ibid., 1. On the collaborative nature of its research, see  ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR, 14–26 August, 1933,’ 28, 31, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 156  ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR, 14–26 August, 1933,’ 28, AG 1-IICIK-VI-2, UA. 157  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 1, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.

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‘degenerate into obstinate argument that grows more heated as it becomes less securely founded on ascertained facts.’158 The method of conferencing centred on round table discussions among individuals with diverse experiences of a particular problem along with individuals with expertise in the area being treated. The conduct of round tables was based in a ‘scientific technique of discussion’ which was composed of three stages. The first stage involved the location of the problem through ‘drawing from members the attitudes and opinions based on the facts’ presented in the conference documentation. The second stage involved the ‘formulation’ of the problem and the ‘comprehension’ by participants of what the problem had been found to be. The third and most time-consuming stage, involved a ‘movement towards synthesis, or solution.’159 The ISIPR claimed that one crucial reason why the Rockefeller Foundation endowed the IPR with large grants was because it recognised the ‘superior quality’ of the international studies it produced, this being the result of its ‘double procedure’ of employing scientific methods in the conduct of its research and conference discussions.160

A Conference in Kyoto The Third Biennial Conference of the IPR took place in Kyoto between October 28 and November 9, 1929. Nitobe, who had recently assumed the role of chairman of the Japanese National Council, gave the welcoming address in his role as chairman of the conference. Therein Nitobe pointed out that he had had the privilege of spending seven years in ‘that world capital, the Mecca of international peace and cooperation, Geneva— the seat of the League of Nations.’161 Apologising to his audience for dwelling on the subject of Geneva, he explained that ‘his thoughts were freely drawn to that centre of World Conferences’ for three reasons. The first reason concerned the fact that the LON had shown itself to be interested in a wide variety of forms of international cooperation and that it had ‘manifested its interest’ in the IPR by sending observers to the Kyoto conference just as it had to the IPR conference of 1927.162 The second 158  Ibid., 21. See also William L. Holland, preface to ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 19 April 1933, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 159  ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR,’ 15, 21-5, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 160  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 22, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 161  Inazo Nitobe, ‘Opening Address at Kyoto,’ Pacific Affairs 2, no. 11 (1929): 685–8, 686. 162  Ibid.

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reason Nitobe gave for mentioning Geneva concerned his presumption that as the LON grew in terms of membership and geographical reach, it would find it necessary to conduct some of its business through regional gatherings. He suggested to his audience that it was not too ambitious to imagine that IPR might ‘prove a model for, or a nucleus of such a regional gathering.’ The third reason why Nitobe mentioned Geneva was because he wished to highlight the IPR’s status as a voluntary body whose purpose was ‘scientific and enlightening.’ By contrast, he noted, the LON was a governmental body whose role was ‘political and jural.’163 Nitobe stated that the world needed both kinds of bodies and that in their work they should complement each other; however, he added that voluntary bodies in his view were more basic. He illustrated his point by observing that the adoption of the LON Covenant was but the culminating point of years of work on the part of groups of individuals in America, England, France, Belgium and various other countries ‘bent on the abolition of war.’164 Further to this, he observed that international organisation ‘is as good as dead, unless the international spirit is breathed into its nostrils’: ­international organisations will have but a ghostly existence unless their participants have adopted the right mental attitude.165 The mental attitude in question, he explained, unsurprisingly given his professional involvement with the OIC, concerned the idea of ‘the international mind,’ an idea which he proceeded to discuss in a way that almost exactly echoed a thesis advanced by Zimmern in Learning and Leadership. In his address, Nitobe explained that an ‘international mind is not the antonym of a national mind. Nor it is a synonym for a cosmopolitan mind, that is, a mind which lacks a national basis. The international mind is the expansion of the national, just as philanthropy or charity—if it is not to be the kind that increases directly with the square of the distance—should begin at home. A truly international mind should include patriotism and vice versa,’ its antithesis being not patriotism ‘but chauvinism and xenophobia.’166 Amidst the extremely tense conditions of the 1931 conference, Nitobe would have cause to reiterate and even further this line of argument, declaring in an address given at that conference the following: that  ‘I believe that  internationalism…is an extension of patriotism—  Ibid., 687.  Ibid. 165  Ibid., 687–8. 166  Ibid., 688. 163 164

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indeed, that in our time no one can be really patriotic without also being an internationalist…. Without belonging to the world, we cannot in the best sense belong to our own small country.’167 At the Kyoto conference, Nitobe stated that he was aware that there were ‘grave questions still awaiting solution between several countries’ and expressed the hope that these questions would not ‘strain our patriotism…[or]…overtax our piety’; he pointedly added that ‘[h]arangues, propaganda, boycott, are not the method of the Institute.’168 By the time of the Third Biennial Conference (a conference at which observers from Mexico, the USSR, France and the Netherlands were present), great changes had taken place in China.169 In an article published early in 1929  in Pacific Affairs entitled ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ Condliffe elaborated on the agenda of the Kyoto Conference, noting therein that after almost two decades of ‘struggle,’ the nationalist cause had triumphed in China.170 China, he added, had now achieved the ‘measure of unified administration’ that the foreign powers present in China had insisted was necessary in order for the ‘Unequal Treaties’ to be revised. As Condliffe further noted, their revision was already ‘well under way’ with China achieving tariff autonomy on February 1, 1929.171 As  indicated  by  the above observations of Condliffe, China’s foreign relations once again featured as one of the main items on the IPR’s conference agenda, the other main item being what was known as the Manchurian question. These two items were crucially interrelated: China’s claim in relation to Manchuria was an essential feature of its wider claim in relation to the ‘restoration of complete territorial sovereignty over Chinese territory.’172 The centrality of the Manchurian question to the 1929 conference, which was later described as being ‘in many respects a preview of the Manchurian Incident’ of September 1931, explains why security was 167  ‘Cultural Impacts Old and New: Summary of an address by Inazo I. Nitobe,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 479. 168  Nitobe, ‘Opening Address at Kyoto,’ 688. 169  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 103. On the attendance at this conference, see Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 285. 170  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 107–8. 171  Ibid., 108. 172  Angus noted that an aspect of the Chinese argument in regard to the restoration of China’s territorial sovereignty was that ‘the treaties purporting to alienate some of China’s sovereign rights were invalid, and therefore required no “change” for their avoidance.’ Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 51.

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so strict and why the conference gained so much publicity in both the Japanese and foreign press.173 The discussion at the conference focussed on Japan’s interests in the south of Manchuria, which encompassed the Southern Manchurian Railway of which Japan was the owner and which it had a treaty right to police. Japanese interests also encompassed the presence of one million Japanese in a region in which banditry was rife, a problem which the government in Nanjing was apparently unwilling or unable to control, such was the distraction and division caused by the civil war.174 Indeed, a Japanese delegate, Tsurumi Yusuke, contended at Kyoto that although Japan’s basic policy in relation to Manchuria merely reflected its desire for an equal opportunity to participate in the region’s economic development, China’s ‘unsettled political condition’ made it ‘difficult to dissociate economic interests from political rights.’175 For Condliffe, the issue of Manchuria, like that of the revision of the Unequal Treaties, was a prime example of a domestic issue giving rise to major international complications. This was because, in his view, the Manchurian question, as with the issue of the Unequal Treaties, concerned the ‘progress and difficulties of China’s political and economic reconstruction.’176 The IPR had addressed from the outset the question of how certain domestic factors (such as food supply, population, land  utilisation  and population policies), can impact on international relations. In a report prepared for the IPR’s Fifth Biennial Conference, the ISIPR proclaimed that the IPR embraced a ‘comprehensive view’ which insisted on the ‘fundamental unity of all human activity.’ The implication of this was that ‘no problem of international relations can be divorced from the domestic situations which gave rise to it’: as Condliffe had contended a few years earlier, ‘international problems are normally facets of the domestic problems of 173  Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 4. On security at the conference and the publicity it generated, see Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 140, 147. 174  Norman Angell, ‘Japan, the League and Us,’ Time & Tide 12, no. 14 (1931): 1302–3. See also Earl of Lytton, ‘The Twelfth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ International Affairs 10, no. 6 (1931): 740–59, 747. 175  Yusuke Tsurumi, ‘Japan’s Internal Problems and her Relationships with China, Russia, America, and the British Commonwealth,’ in Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927, 500. 176  Third Biennial Conference of the IPR, Kyoto, 28 October–9 November 1929, Second Announcement, 1 July 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. See also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 282.

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the countries concerned’ and thus it is ‘impossible to discuss international affairs without taking cognisance of the impingement of domestic upon international situations.’177 Further in respect to its comprehensive point of view, it was the philosophy of the IPR, as stated by Condliffe, that one should ‘endeavour to avoid separating the political, social, economic and cultural aspects’ of a given problem: although adopting the techniques of the social sciences, the IPR had ‘largely discarded the divisions’ of the social sciences.178 It was in light of such considerations, that the report for the fifth biennial conference concluded that while in relation to any particular episode there will always ‘room for theoretical dispute’ as to ‘the relative weight of domestic and international factors in the determination of a given episode’ and in relation to the ‘priority to be assigned the more materialistic and the more cultural factors,’ few would disagree that ‘viewed c­omprehensively, the activities of modern societies originate in several economic and social nuclei.’ To the extent that they are ‘dynamic,’ the report added, these nuclei generate ‘movements of expansion which meet in the external area of international affairs,’ the resultant external contact being of either of a ‘compensatory or a conflicting nature.’179 As evidenced by the frank exchanges in 1925 on the question of racial discrimination, from the outset the IPR had sought to wade into highly charged areas of controversy. Condliffe compared the IPR to such scientific bodies as the Pacific Science Association. However, he understood at the same time that there was an important difference between strictly scientific bodies and the IPR: while the IPR always sought to maintain an ‘objective, fact-finding, scientific, open-minded attitude in its discussions,’ its focus was ‘necessarily centred upon problems’ which carried with them ‘in the popular minds large backgrounds of emotion and prejudice.’ As such problems were the reason for the IPR’s existence, it followed, Condliffe stated, that if the IPR were to ‘live at all, it had to live somewhat dangerously’: it had to be prepared to tackle the ‘hot issues.’ Condliffe cautioned that if the IPR conferences began to assume the ‘appearance of

177   ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR,’ 11,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA, and Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 105. 178  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 110, and ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 531. 179   ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR,’ 11, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.

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a love-feast’ or avoid certain topics of discussion out a sense of diplomatic delicacy, it would lose all value and purpose.180 At the same time, the IPR saw its role in regard to the hot issues that it addressed as that of gradually removing them ‘from the region of emotion as far may humanly be possible’ and moving them ‘into the region of scientific study.’181 This approach was exemplified by the IPR’s handling of the Manchurian ‘tangle’ in 1929. The vaunted technique employed by the IPR in relation to this issue was that of breaking down a complex problem into its component parts and dealing with each part ‘separately’ before considering a ‘general remedy.’ By means of this approach, the IPR tried to ensure that the debate on Manchuria did not descend into a ‘deadlock’ between such emotion-filled and non-negotiable notions as Japan’s ‘sacred “special interests”’ on the one hand, and China’s ‘equally sacred “sovereign rights”’ on the other. At Kyoto in 1929, the IPR sought to dislodge the idea that there was one Manchurian problem: it approached the Manchurian question as a constellation of a dozen or more different problems. Each of these problems, be it railway traffic, food supply, l­ andholdings, movements of people, migration regulation or troop movements, the ISIPR maintained, required different solutions.182 The approach adopted in relation to the Manchurian question was also brought to bear on the Japanese right to live doctrine, which the ISIPR insisted was ‘made up of elements primarily economic.’183 However, a pamphlet issued on the eve of the 1929 conference by the Japanese unit of the  IPR, suggested that in the eyes of the Japanese, the doctrine concerned issues that were more emotionally charged and larger in scope than the ISIPR’s characterisation of it would suggest.184 The author of this pamphlet was Matsuoka Yōsuke, leader of the Japanese delegation at Kyoto, a delegation which also included the Japanese finance minister, namely, Inoue Junnosuke. Holland later recalled that Matsuoka was then a ‘relatively unknown official’ in the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway Company.185  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 103–4.  Ibid., 104. 182  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 26–7, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. See also ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR, 14–26 August, 1933,’ 10, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 183  ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR,  14–26 August, 1933,’ 7,  AG 1-IICIK-VI-2, UA. 184  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 310n. 185  Hooper, ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 4. 180 181

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Matsuoka was  in fact at the time  the  vice-president of the South Manchurian Railway Company, the origins of which lay with the Manchurian territorial spoils gained by Japan as a result of its victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.186 Rana Mitter points out that the South Manchurian Railway Company was ‘[m]uch more than a transport network’: it was a ‘commercial semi-governmental organization modelled in part of the British East India Company’ and as such was the ‘primary instrument of Japanese colonialism in the region.’187 In addition to his close association with Manchurian affairs, Matsuoka was a man with diplomatic experience: he had been a member of the Japanese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and, before long, would enter the Diet, later going on to become minister for foreign affairs.188 Matsuoka’s  statement of the right to live doctrine  in the pamphlet issued by the JCIPR (which was an English-language translation of a pamphlet originally issued under the rubric of the Sino-Japanese Association, a Japanese organisation associated with the railway company,  and which would be published in Pacific Affairs in December 1929), was seen by Young as being in essence the same as that of Hara. At the same time, it should be noted that Young considered Matsuoka’s discussion of it to be ‘more interesting and forceful’ than that of Hara.189 Therein, Matsuoka paid deference to the Wilsonian principles that the IPR sought to embody, commencing with the observation that the post-war world no longer approached international affairs from the perspective of a ‘perverted Darwinism,’ according to which states, conceived as solitary entities, should selfishly pursue their interests. Since the Great War, he observed, an atomistic and egoistic conception of sovereignty had slowly yielded to the idea of the state as a ‘free unit in an essentially co-operative society of nations.’ Importantly, Matsuoka stressed that the new spirit of cooperation and peaceful coexistence that was then taking hold, had manifested itself as a growing ‘consciousness of the rights of other nations.’190 Matsuoka then sought to ground the right to live doctrine in the doctrine of natural rights, stating that if each individual is ‘inalienably endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ then  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 310n.  Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 25. 188  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 309. 189  Ibid., 309, 310n. Emphasis added. 190  Yosuke Matsuoka, ‘Economic Co-operation of Japan and China in Manchuria and Mongolia: Its Motives and Basic Significance,’ Pacific Affairs 2, no. 212 (1929): 786–95, 786. 186 187

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it follows that ‘each nation’s right to exist is no less sacred.’191 Sharpening his point, Matsuoka insisted on the putative principle of ‘racial self-­ determination,’ invoking in relation to it, albeit incorrectly, the authority of Wilson.192 Matsuoka contended that every race is entitled to protection ‘in its right to live’ and that every race has a ‘right to equal opportunity for its enjoyment of civilization,’ adding that the recognition of such rights lay at the ‘root’ of international peace.193 Should a nation ‘attempt to monopolize a superfluity of national resources of which other nations stood in need,’ Matsuoka continued, it would be acting unjustly and thereby endangering the peace of the world; it would be ‘open to condemnation’ by the world for its defiance of what was legislated by ‘reason and right.’194 Turning to the case of Japan and Manchuria, Matsuoka argued that the ‘coming of Japan into Manchuria was a natural consequence of her life and death struggle with an enemy which had cost her two billion gold yen and a hundred thousand lives,’ adding that Japan had assisted in the creation of Manchuria’s railway infrastructure and in the economic development and colonisation by Chinese immigrants of Manchuria.195 Having observed that ‘a due share of responsibility for the world’s peace’ rested upon Japan, Matsuoka stated that Japan had a right to be secure in its ‘national existence’ and to be assured as to its ‘opportunity for progress and growth.’196 China, he declared, would expose itself to justified criticism if it denied ‘other peoples the opportunity of sharing the benefits of her rich resources’ solely on the basis that these resources are located within China’s territorial borders.197 At the same time, Matsuoka took pains to state that the Japanese claims should only be considered to the extent that they were ‘not incompatible with the peace of the world,’ professing that he did not want to be ‘misunderstood’ as arguing that Japan ‘may advance herself materially in Manchuria through her own effort alone.’ Echoing Hara, Matsuoka maintained that Japan’s material advance in that region could only really be achieved through ‘friendly and effective co-operation’ with China.198  Ibid.  Ibid. See also Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 311. 193  Matsuoka, ‘Economic Co-operation of Japan and China in Manchuria and Mongolia: Its Motives and Basic Significance,’ 786, 792. 194  Ibid., 786. 195  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 311. 196  Ibid., 792. 197  Ibid., 786. 198  Ibid., 792. 191 192

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In Honolulu in 1925, Wright had found the Japanese arguments in regard to immigration compelling, discussing the issue along with Hessel Duncan Hall and Jerome Davis Greene (the latter being an investment banker who served as chairman of the Pacific Council from 1927 to 1932 and who was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Relations at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, between 1932 and 1934), ‘not as a domestic political issue, but as a question of international agreements.’199 Continuous with this, Wright, an international law specialist, elsewhere maintained that Article 23 of the covenant, as well as an increasing number of multilateral treaties, gave ‘evidence of  a  growing principle of international legislation, if not of strict international law’: the obligation to respect the needs of others ‘so far as compatible with fulfilment of equally important needs of one’s own.’ Referring ­specifically to Japanese needs in the same context, Wright insisted that Matsuoka had not built a case for military intervention on the basis of the right to live doctrine, but had only called for a ‘spirit of coöperation based on mutual recognition by states of the essential needs of the other.’200 In stating this last, Wright was responding to the interpretation of the right to live doctrine given in Young’s book, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria: Its Assertion, Legal Interpretation and Present Meaning (1931). Therein Young, having turned his attention to the Matsuoka pamphlet, concluded that this doctrine of the right of one state, being comparatively poor in raw materials or food or power resources, but nevertheless possessing ‘vital’ population tending rapidly to increase, to insure the supply of those wants, or to send abroad emigrants, in a state better favored by natural gifts of raw materials and undeveloped land—and to do this on the assumption that reasonability for possible international friction or war attaches to the state which chooses to develop its own resources in the way it sees fit—is not only not supported by any established principles of international law, but contrary to one of its most cherished tenets. That is, the principle of the absolute and exclusive right of any state to exercise political authority and to provide for the development of territory over which it has jurisdiction.201  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 111.  Quincy Wright, review of Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria: Its Assertion, Legal Interpretation and Present Meaning, by C. Walter Young American Journal of International Law 26, no. 21 (1932): 217–20, 218–9. 201  Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria, 323. 199 200

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Young warned that extreme assertions of a right of self-preservation, assertions which  he thought were  present  in  Matsuoka’s pamphlet, whereby the scope of self-preservation is extended beyond a right of self-­ defence in the face of an actual or even imminent attack, were a threat to the ‘all-too-meagre body of universally accepted principles of international law.’202 Young was correct in this assessment and, notably, it would be his understanding of the thinking that lay behind the Matsuoka pamphlet and not that of Wright, that would be borne out by later developments. In  his article published in Foreign Affairs in July 1933, Blakeslee observed that the right to live doctrine, which he also referred to as the  doctrine of the  ‘right to economic expansion,’ for many years had been framed by Japanese statesmen and writers of a liberal persuasion in terms of a desire to participate in China’s economic development on the basis of ‘mutual friendly agreement.’ However, Blakeslee noted that it had more recently transmogrified into an asserted ‘right to share in the development and use of the natural resources of China…whether China gives her consent or not.’ In order to demonstrate his point, Blakeslee cited statements issued by Matsuoka and also General Araki Sadao, the latter being in 1933 the Japanese minister of war and, according to Blakeslee, the ‘intellectual leader of the elements  ...[then] ... in control in Japan.’ Blakeslee recorded that Araki had recently pronounced that ‘since “mankind has a right to live upon the earth”, no country with abundant resources has a right to deny these to another country which is overcrowded and is insufficiently endowed by nature.’203 Another major topic addressed at Kyoto concerned the condition of peoples in Pacific dependences. With input from the LON Secretariat, this issue had been touched on in 1927 in respect to the question of the Pacific mandates. However, the 1929 conference saw a distinct research programme initiated in this area due to the ‘strong feeling’ that an ‘exchange of experience’ would be useful.204 Indeed, the study of the situation of so-­ called  dependent peoples in the Pacific (such as the peoples of British Malaya, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Hong Kong, Java, New Guinea and Samoa—both American and mandated), became a major international research project that extended over a three-year period. The project also expanded in scope: what began as an investigation of comparative colonial  Ibid., 318–9.  Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ 675–6. 204  Angus, Peaceful Change in the Pacific, 155–8. 202 203

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administration and educational methods came to encompass questions of economic development, systems of land tenure and labour conditions, cultural adjustment, migration to colonies and its impact on the local population, movements for self-determination and the treatment of subject peoples in general. Importantly also, investigations of this nature were not confined to colonies only, but were extended to address the condition of ‘indigenous peoples such as the Maoris of New Zealand, the Ainu people of Japan and Saghalien [Sakhalin] and the Indian peoples of Canada and the United States.’205 In terms of the government of Pacific dependencies, Condliffe noted that as the ‘subject races’ were ‘too weak to make effective protest,’ some regarded their problems as of ‘little immediate or urgent importance.’ However, Condliffe maintained that there were several countries in the region which took their ‘responsibilities seriously enough’ to view the problems of subject peoples as a ‘major Pacific problem.’206 Indeed, Condliffe maintained that the question of the treatment of subject peoples ‘clearly’ must have a ‘place in any picture of international relations in the Pacific, if only because the Pacific Ocean’ had been ‘one of the main theatres of imperialism.’207 That the condition of dependent peoples was of interest to Condliffe partly relates to his New Zealand background, as shown by the fact that in elaborating on the agenda concerning such peoples for the 1929 conference, Condliffe called attention to New Zealand’s efforts at solving ‘the Maori problem.’ More specifically, he drew attention to an article entitled ‘Anthropology and the Government of Native Races’ written by Sir Āpirana Turupa Ngata, the minister of Māori affairs and someone who was referred to by Condliffe, as a ‘great Maori leader,’ published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology in 1928.208 The article, which accord205  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 16–8, 32–3,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.  See also Frederick V.  Field,  secretary to the chairman of the International Research Committee, ‘Research Program and Organization of the Institute of Pacific Relations:  Reports on Activities from the IPR,  1932–1933,’ 11,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA, and Hugh Wyndham, The Problem of Imperial Trusteeship: Native Education: Ceylon, Java, Formosa, the Philippines, French Indo-China, and British Malaya: A Report in the Study Group Series of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: Humphrey Milford, 1933). The Problem of Imperial Trusteeship was prepared by the RIIA in connection with the IPR’s research into the question of the condition of peoples in Pacific dependencies. 206  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 113. 207  Ibid. 208  Ibid., 112–3.

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ing to Condliffe ‘only a “native” could have written,’ was reprinted in many contexts, one example being its appearance as a chapter in a volume submitted to the Kyoto conference by the New Zealand branch of the IPR.209 Therein, Ngata urged anthropologists to bear witness to ‘the disintegration of Native cultures in Polynesia, as in other parts of the world,’ cultures overwhelmed by the European civilisation in the form of guns, alcohol, machine-made clothes and the buying and selling of land. Ngata stated in relation to his own people that their greatest loss in cultural terms ‘was that of the old time sanctions, which fortified ­custom and their religious system which supported the mana and prestige of the chiefs and priests, round which the communal system revolved.’210 Condliffe was fascinated by the cultural dimension of international relations, being particularly impressed by the rich cultural diversity on display in the Pacific region. As he stated in the handbook of the IPR, which was distributed to members before the IPR’s Fourth Biennial Conference, the Pacific comprised densely populated countries and relatively under-developed regions, communal island societies, stabilized ancient cultures and new aggressive scientific communities, the lowest living standards confronting the highest, democracies in various stages of development, strong free nations and people in tutelage—a veritable conflict of civilizations and cultures.211

Condliffe drew two related conclusions from what he viewed as scene of stunning contrasts. First, he concluded that when political and economic differences are examined closely, they ‘often proved to be symptoms of older and more deeply rooted cultural and social differences.’ Second, he concluded that in order to have a full appreciation of ‘differences of outlook and conflicts of understanding,’ it is of crucial importance to study, in addition to their political contacts and economic relations, ‘the diverse cultural backgrounds of the Pacific peoples.’212 209  Ibid. See also H. C. Tennnet, review of New Zealand Affairs, by Walter N. Benson, Sir Āpirana T. Ngata, Guy H. Scholefield, et al., Pacific Affairs 2, no. 11 (1929): 731–2, and Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 156–7. 210  Āpirana Turupa Ngata, ‘Anthropology and the government of native races in the Pacific,’ Australian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1928): 1–14, 5. 211  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 523 212  Ibid.

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These ideas had already been sketched by Condliffe in an essay entitled ‘Experiment in Diagnosis.’ Before discussing the contents of this essay, it is worth noting that its title reflected the belief that the main function of the IPR  should be  that of diagnosis rather than prescription: the IPR, Condliffe pointed out, had ‘carefully eschewed the recommendation of remedial courses of action.’ In eschewing this, he added, it had ‘taken to heart a favorite quotation of Sun Yat-sen—“Action is easy; understanding is difficult”.’213 In the context of ‘Experiment in Diagnosis’ and under the heading of ‘Cultural Contacts in the Pacific,’ Condliffe contended that although obscured by the ‘immediacy’ of all the political and economic problems that Kyoto would address, underneath these problems lay a ‘fundamental problem,’ a problem which, he added, was sometimes referred to as the ‘the clash of civilizations.’214 In relation to this putative clash, Condliffe drew attention to that ‘phase of contact’ between the West and the Orient  which he characterised  as involving  ‘the impact of the scientific, industrial and militaristic ideas of the West’ on the ‘stationary’ civilisations of China and Japan.215 Condliffe considered that the ‘first phase of this impact of western culture’ had reached its end in Japan, and he thought that there were indications that it was reaching its end in China.216 Given this background, Condliffe thought it was time that Western scholars got ‘beyond the question of controlling the impact of Western forces on the East’ and began to explore what elements within Chinese and Japanese cultures had allowed them to successfully adapt to certain aspects of Western culture. Indeed, Condliffe hoped that the discussion of cultural contacts at the 1929 conference would see a refocussing of the issue of East-West cultural relations, such that it might begin by considering what ‘values’ in Japanese and Chinese cultures might be adopted by Western societies to their profit and, beyond this, what influence those cultures were ‘going exert on social life’ in the West.217 In fact, studies of this nature were already being explored in the context of the IPR. For example, the Education Committee of the American National Council of the IPR submitted papers to the IPR’s 1929 and 1931 conferences on ‘vari Ibid.  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 113. 215  Ibid. 216  Ibid., 113–4. 217  Ibid., 114. 213 214

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ous aspects of the influence, past and present, of Oriental cultures, especially Chinese culture on American life.’218

The New Geneva In its early years, the IPR was sometimes seen as an attempt to imbue the Pacific with the spirit of Geneva and it is worth noting in relation to this that many of its members were also involved in organisations lending support to the LON.219 There was much justice in viewing the institution of the IPR as an expression of the spirit of Geneva. At the same time however,  it is important to stress that the institution of the IPR reflected a sense that the Pacific  region had special needs which Geneva could not adequately address, recalling here the call for the organisation of a Pan-­ Pacific group of governments and peoples at the first IPR. The view that the region had special needs was in evidence at Kyoto during discussion of the need for ‘diplomatic machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes’ specific to the region.220 Within the framework of the IPR in its early years, it was a matter of note that the two of most significant Pacific powers, namely, the United States and the USSR, did not belong to the LON. In addition, as Condliffe pointed out, a ‘third great power,’ namely, China, 218  ISIPR, ‘A  Pacific Research Program,’  35, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. The Education Committee  of the American National Council of the IPR had conducted and published a survey entitled ‘China and Japan in our University Curriculum,’ which had, according to the ISIPR, ‘done much to awaken the interest of educators and public men. It...[was]...followed by a similar book on China and Japan in American museums, and a series of similar studies for libraries, schools, moving pictures, press etc.,...[was]...being carried out. Its other studies in related educational questions...[had]...dealt with facilities for the study of Oriental civilizations in America with the provision of Fellowships for American Students in the Far East.’ Japanese scholars, at the urging of the Japanese Council  of the IPR, produced a series of essays for the Kyoto conference which, in the event, was the ‘first large piece of work’ in the field of cultural relations produced under the auspices of the IPR. The work was entitled Western Influences in Modern Japan. It was edited by Nitobe Inazō, ‘a man of affairs and a scholar whose writings on the subject of foreign influences in Japan...[had]...become wellknown,’  and  was  published in the United States. At the 1931 IPR conference in China, Chinese scholars drawn from the fields of the arts, natural sciences and social sciences, collaborated in preparing a study called Symposium on Chinese Culture which was edited by Sophia Chen Zen and published by the China Council of the IPR. Field, ‘Research Program and Organization of the Institute of Pacific Relations:  Reports on Activities from the IPR, 1932–1933,’ 12, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 219  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 2–3. 220  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 112.

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had not been able to take up its ‘full share in League responsibilities’ due to its ‘internal disunion.’221 China distrusted the LON because ‘Young China’ did not enjoy equal rights with other powers at the LON and was thus not ‘willing to admit its complete disinterestedness.’222 In relation to this, a Chinese delegate declared at the 1929 conference that China would enthusiastically embrace a league in which every member was placed on an equal and independent footing and where the provisions of its constitution were general in character and applied to all alike: ‘[n]o one country is to be the Sick Man and all the others physicians, but rather all are more or less in the position of patients and all are justified in contributing and entitled to contribute to the prescribing of remedies. No treaties of the Berlin or Versailles character, but rather the spirit of Locarno is to prevail.’223 Chinese IPR delegates expressed dissatisfaction with the Pact of Paris, not only because it lacked machinery of enforcement and thus might not deter a country confident of battlefield success and impervious to criticism,  but because its effect was to ‘“freeze existing situations” without providing the machinery by which adjustments may be made in the light of international justice.’224 In referring to the freezing of existing situations, the Chinese delegation was challenging Japanese assertions concerning Japan’s special rights in Manchuria, as well as objecting to the concessions enjoyed by various other foreign powers in China, which were, it should be noted, sometimes defended as reasonable in the context of the IPR in the face of Chinese complaints.225 That the LON was seen as less relevant to the Pacific than it was to Europe explains the fact, as noted by Condliffe, that the treaties consequent upon the Washington Conference were viewed in ‘many quarters as the real working basis of diplomatic relations in the Pacific,’ although, as also noted by Condliffe, the commissions for consultation and conciliation established by these treaties had ‘met with great difficulty and…[had]… not functioned very smoothly.’226 Yet despite the criticisms of the League system expressed at IPR meetings, there was general opposition to the  Ibid and Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 167–8.  Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927, 170. See also Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 167–8. 223  Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1929, 236. 224  Ibid., 231. See also Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 169–70. 225  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 4. 226  Condliffe, ‘Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 112. 221 222

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idea (although for varying reasons), that a Pacific League of Nations should be established.227 At the same time, there was a sense in which the IPR was itself a Pacific League of Nations: as its constitution specified, its concern lay with ‘the study of the conditions of the Pacific peoples with a view to the improvement of their mutual relations.’228 The word peoples is significant here, as it is indicative of the fact that the IPR did not set out to become an organisation focussed solely or even largely on interstate relations: as stated above, it set out to inquire into the conditions of Pacific peoples. Thus, it is perhaps better characterised, at least in its early incarnation, as a Pacific League of Peoples rather than a Pacific League of Nations. Such a characterisation finds further support if we consider the IPR’s interest in the following subjects in its early years: how to alleviate the human misery caused by the cultural dislocations attendant upon the shift from traditional or agricultural society to a manufacturing society, a shift that had yet to occur in much of the Pacific; the labour conditions and living standards of Pacific peoples; the social and cultural conditions of subject peoples and the Indigenous inhabitants of settler states; and cultural contacts in the Pacific.229 227   At the IPR’s 1929 conference, the Japanese group expressed the view that it would be undesirable to create a rival organisation to the LON and the British Dominions maintained that the notion of an organisation in which Britain did not have a ‘leading place’ was ‘utterly impractical.’ Many Chinese present thought China would only be willing to participate in such a Pacific-based organisation if China were treated ‘on a basis of equality’ in order to ‘ensure its self-respect’ and yet others expressed doubts as to whether the United States and the USSR would be willing to join a ‘Pacific League of Nations’ given their absence from Geneva. Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 171. Akami writes that while some Australian and New Zealand members ‘were impressed by the ability of American IPR members’ in regard to the way they related to non-Westerners and because they were critical of British behaviour in the region, they were also concerned that the British might interpret their IPR involvement as a complete endorsement of American ‘regional leadership.’ Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 91. 228  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 1, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. On the comparison with the LON, see ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 526. 229  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 110, and ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 531. On the standard of living research, see Field, ‘Research Program and Organization of the Institute of Pacific Relations: Reports on Activities from the IPR, 1932–1933,’ 8,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.  For the idea of League of Peoples, see  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Reactions,’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA.

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The foregoing list of subjects also provides ample evidence of the IPR’s strong interest in cultural relations, and this, along with its efforts in the field of international education, would suggest that the IPR might also profitably be viewed as a Pacific Organisation of Intellectual Cooperation. However, in the years after Kyoto, the IPR would become less concerned with cultural relations amongst peoples and more concerned with the political relations among states, much to the disappointment of Davis, Condliffe and others.230 That said, its efforts in entrenching the idea of a Pacific community with its own special needs and interests and which warranted attention on its own terms and not simply because of the presence of European powers in the region cannot be overlooked. That the IPR saw entrenching this idea as part of its role is evidenced by Holland’s lament that, from the British perspective, there was no Pacific community: in the view of the British, the Pacific was simply an ‘extension of British imperial interests.’231 At the same time, it is important to stress that, as reflected in documents issued by the ISIPR in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the IPR did not define itself as a body devoted to the study of regional relations alone. However much its focus was regional (although it should be noted in this regard that the IPR openly declared that it interpreted the word Pacific in a loose sense), it saw itself as engaged in the study of international rela-

230  Akami writes that Davis’s departure from the IPR is partly explained by  a change in direction of the IPR. For example, the IPR’s International Research Committee stipulated at the Kyoto conference in 1929 that ‘priority’ in respect to research should be given to the study of issues that were likely to cause ‘international controversy, especially in the political field.’ Akami records that in July 1930, just before his departure for Geneva, Davis wrote to Jerome Davis Greene, stating that one of the reasons for his resignation was the shift from the IPR’s original focus on ‘cultural and economic topics to political ones.’ She adds that Davis’s concern in this regard ‘was supported by major IPR members in Honolulu, Australia and New Zealand—non-great powers or local groups located within the Pacific.’ Frederick W. Eggleston, a prominent Australian member of the IPR, although thinking, in contrast with Davis, that the real push for  change emanated from New  York rather than London, warned that there was ‘danger in shifting the emphasis from culture to politics. This implied a shift in orientation from the society/public to the state.’  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 136–7, 141. Note that a methodological reason was given for the shift away from cultural questions: the ‘difficulty of formulating scientific research projects’ in this field. See Field, ‘Research Program and Organization of the Institute of Pacific Relations: Reports on activities from the IPR, 1932–1933,’ 12, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 231   ‘Appendix Two: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 209–10.

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tions or what it referred to as the ‘Great Society.’232 While committed to the idea of a ‘Pacific community’ and recognising that this community had special problems, Condliffe nonetheless stressed that the problems of the Pacific were ‘the problems of humanity.’233

Berlin, 1928: Conference of Experts for the Scientific Study of International Relations As Peter Gay points out in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, having endured the acute stress attendant upon foreign military occupation, political uprisings, assassinations and hyperinflation, the period between 1924 and 1929 was one of relative calm for the Weimar Republic. Economic recovery, a reduction in the level of political violence and Germany’s return to international respectability conduced to a more tranquil atmosphere. Gay observes that against this background, there was a retreat from the cultural experimentalism of the early period of the republic. He draws attention to the shift away from the expressionism which had ‘dominated politics as much as painting or the stage’ to the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit): a form of artistic expression characterised by ‘matter-­ of-­factness, sobriety.’234 Yet perhaps Gay somewhat overstates the drift away from experimentation: after all, the evening of August 31, 1928, saw the premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s artistically ground-breaking The Threepenny Opera at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin. This theatrical event, which proved wildly popular with the public, ‘announced a new artistic language, one that had been brewing in disparate parts but was now… centre-stage, in full voice.’235 The Threepenny Opera was not only artistically but also politically ahead of its time: Brecht’s dialogue left ‘no doubt

232  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 1, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. On the broad interpretation of the word Pacific, see ISIPR, ‘Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR, 14–26 August 1933,’ 8–9, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 233  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 105. 234  Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 126. 235  Maryanne Lynch, ‘Brecht and Weill: Stripping the Artifice from the Stage,’ in Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (Sydney Theatre Company and Asteron present a Malthouse Theatre and Victoria Opera Production, 2011).

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the old world of social and political niceties is in for a nasty shock; murderers, thieves, pimps, thugs, sociopaths will get their day in the sun.’236 As the madness to which this last observation alludes was yet to unfold, a general mood of matter-of-factness and sobriety could be sustained for some time yet. Certainly, it was the prevalent mood among a group of scholars and publicists meeting in Berlin under the banner of Meeting of Experts for the Coordination of Higher International Studies between March 22 and 24, 1928. The meeting was held at the German Political Academy  (or German School of Political Science) which, as we saw, enjoyed close relations with official Weimar. It also served as the headquarters of the recently created Coordinating Centre for Higher International Studies in Germany.237 Gracing the academy with their presence on these dates in March, were experts representing seven countries— Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States—as well as representatives of four international institutions: the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment, the Graduate Institute International Studies, the Geneva School of International Studies and The Hague Academy of International Law.238 As only to be expected, Zimmern represented his Geneva School at the meeting, taking on the additional role of meeting rapporteur. In the latter capacity, Zimmern observed that one of the most striking features of the Berlin meeting was the acceptance among participants that politics, ‘in the broad Greek sense of the term,’ constituted a ‘field of scientific study,’ the scientific spirit of those present being evidenced, he added, by the non-­ partisan and objective way they approached the discussion. Zimmern further observed in his capacity as rapporteur that those participating in the meeting described themselves as ‘representatives of scientific institutions for the study of politics’: they recognised that what was called ‘higher 236  Raimondo Cortese, ‘A Note on the Text,’ in Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (Sydney Theatre Company and Asteron present a Malthouse Theatre and Victoria Opera Production, 2011). 237  Zimmern, ‘L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle et les relations universitaires: Report to the Sub-Committee on University Relations on the Meeting of Representatives of Scientific Institutions for the Study of Politics,’ 170–4, 170–1. 238  Ibid. Prince Michael Rostworowski and Whitney Shepardson had been nominated to attend on behalf of the School of Political Science in Kraków and the CFR respectively, but were unable to attend. See also ‘Experts pour la coordination des hautes études internationales: Réunion des 22–24 Mars 1928—Berlin,’  Bulletin de la Section d’Information et de Documentation, no. 19 (1928), 9. The IIIC was represented at this meeting by Picht and Luchaire. The ICIC was represented by its secretary, namely, Oprescu.

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international studies’ could not be ‘artificially separated from political studies in general,’ just as it could not be separated from modern history, geography, economics and sociology, all of which, Zimmern insisted, had become increasingly international in terms of their ‘range and outlook.’239 Zimmern’s report of the meeting underlined the fact that it was representative of the great variety of institutions then undertaking inquiries in the field of international studies. In relation to this, he pointed to the existence of non-teaching centres of study and discussion such as the RIIA and to the existence of institutions which offered special and supplementary courses such as the Academy of International Law at The Hague, the Institute of Politics at Williamstown and the Royal Italian University for Foreigners at Perugia. He also noted the existence of teaching institutions outside the university domain properly so-called, such as the Consular Academy in Vienna, the German Political Academy, the Graduate Institute of International Studies and the École libre des sciences politiques. Finally, Zimmern pointed to the existence of actual faculties engaged in instruction in international relations, these being represented at the meeting by the LSE, the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris and the Faculties of Political Science at the Universities of Rome, Padua, Pavia and Perugia.240 As the principal rationale for the meeting was the development of methods of instruction, it passed a number of resolutions on this subject: it resolved that the representatives of teaching institutions participating in it should communicate national programmes of study to one another; alert each other to forthcoming visits by persons who could teach in the field of international relations; facilitate exchanges of teachers; establish chairs for foreign professors along the lines of the Carnegie Chair at the German Political Academy; encourage students to learn foreign languages; and prepare a list of European centres for the study of politics.241 However, in the course of the meeting, the question of university teaching of inter239  Zimmern, ‘L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle et les relations universitaires,’ 171. 240  Ibid., 172. 241  Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations [hereafter CISSIR], Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Cooperation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, Reports on Activities from the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies, 1930–1934,  AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA.  See also IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 252–3.

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national relations ‘quickly fell into the background’: the focus of the assembled experts shifted to the organisation of scientific investigation into international problems of an economic and political character and establishing a machinery of international intellectual collaboration in order to provide technical assistance to researchers.242 In regard to the organisation of scientific investigations, in one of its other resolutions the meeting expressed approval of the principle that ‘research into problems of special delicacy’ should be conducted ‘simultaneously in different countries on the plan adopted by the IPR in Honolulu.’243 For reasons that will become clear, there can be little doubt that the proposal to conduct research along these lines was advanced by Toynbee. Toynbee represented the RIIA at the meeting, and it is worth recalling  in regard to the proposal described above that the RIIA had become the ‘British unit’ of the IPR in the previous year.244 In relation to machinery of collaboration, the meeting outlined a scheme involving such activities as the collaboration in the compilation of select bibliographies and mutual reporting on research activities. It also called on the IIIC to prepare a list of annual surveys and periodicals as well as ‘non-partisan’ reference centres concerned with international affairs.245 The meeting also recommended the creation of national coordinating centres (such as already existed in Berlin, Paris and Rome and as was being planned in Poland), under which the various national reference centres as well as other institutions consecrated to the study of international relations might be grouped.246 While at the conclusion of the meeting the participants felt it ‘premature to establish a formal association,’ they considered that the conference had ‘laid the basis for some more regular form  IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 252.  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Cooperation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 244  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Royal Institute of International Affairs: Report on Developments, 1929–1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 245  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Cooperation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA, and Zimmern, ‘L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle et les relations universitaires,’ 172–3. 246   Zimmern, ‘L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle et les relations universitaires,’ 172–3. See also CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Cooperation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1. 242 243

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of association’ and that there was sufficient evidence of activity in the field of international studies  at the conference to warrant annual meetings. Thus, an organising committee was appointed to prepare, in association with the IIIC, the next meeting and to determine which institutions ‘engaged in the scientific study of international relations’ should be invited to it.247 That the RIIA took it upon itself to extend an invitation to those assembled in Berlin to hold their next meeting in London was a cause of concern for the ICIC, which addressed the matter at its annual plenary meeting in Geneva in July. It feared that the RIIA might be seeking to substitute itself for the IIIC as the secretariat of the conference and, thus, that the conference might become ‘too independent and too much outside’ the LON. Acting in response to these concerns, the RIIA issued an assurance that it had no such plan to replace the IIIC as the conference’s organiser, agreeing that only the IIIC would send the ‘formal invitations’ to the conference.248

From The Hague to Honolulu: The Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations The 1929 London conference took place between March 11 and 14 under the heading of Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations. On this occasion, conference numbers were augmented by the presence of participants from Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Japan. The IPR was also represented at this conference as it would be at all subsequent conferences held under the auspices of  the CISSIR and  all those, bar one, held under of the auspices  of  its

247  Zimmern, ‘L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle et les relations universitaires,’ 170, 174. The committee members were Earle B.  Babcock, deputy director of the Division of Intercourse and Education, European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Bourdillon, Eisenmann, Pietro de Francisci of the Italian Coordinating Committee of International Studies (and successor to Rocco and Gentile as minister of justice and president of the Fascist Institute of Culture respectively), and Jäckh. See also Moral Disarmament and the International Co-ordination of the Study and Teaching of International Affairs, AG 1-IICI-B-V-9, UA. 248  Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 94–5.

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successor, namely, the ISC.249 An air of ceremony surrounded the conference: in the evening of the first day, a dinner  at Lancaster House  was hosted by Lord Eustace Percy in his role as president of the British Board of Education on behalf of His Majesty’s Government.250 On the evening of the second day, a more modest reception was held at Chatham House, during which James Scorgie Meston, otherwise known as Lord Meston, extended as chairman of RIIA, ‘a welcome to the Delegates of the great nations who have sent them to a Conference on the all-­important subject of the Scientific Study of International Relations.’251 Meston then spoke as follows: Last night you were received by a representative of the Britannic Government in one of their great palaces. You were received on behalf of a Government which has certainly as great and deep an interest in mutual understanding of nations as any Power in the world…Yesterday afternoon you were received in an “upper chamber” in that great School of Economics and Political Science…that School where we of all ages are taught that there is nothing in the study of politics that is incompatible with peace, and, indeed, that the study of the politics of humanity in its wider synthesis is dependently wholly and entirely upon that better understanding among nations which cuts at the root of war. Tonight we, on behalf of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, welcome you in a place which is neither a Government palace nor a University Hall, but which is the home, the comfortable bourgeois home, of a society of private individuals united together for precisely the same purpose, average citizens not only of Great Britain, but of the British Commonwealth, interested in the pursuit of peaceful aims.252

Toynbee spoke after Meston, noting in the course of his speech that at the Berlin conference the delegates had felt there was ‘something important in common’ to them and that they had wondered what name to give it. In the end, he added, they had decided to call themselves ‘Institutions dealing with the  Scientific  Study of International Relations.’ Admitting that the term ‘Scientific’ sounded rather ‘dull,’ Toynbee explained that it was not intended to signify that the conference should confine itself to the 249   Wilhelm Haas, ‘Auslandsarbeit,’ in Jäckh ed., Politik als Wissenschaft, 259, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c. 250  ‘The Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Affairs,’ Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 8 no. 3 (1929): 185–202, 187. 251  Ibid., 187–8. 252  Ibid., 188.

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study of facts. Rather, it meant that members of the conference ‘had certain standards of work’: a scientific attitude simply meant approaching a problem in an open-minded manner and irrespective of whether one’s own ‘vital’ interests were implicated in some way.253 Yet although Toynbee pointed out that the conference did not aim to advance a particular cause, he also made it clear that he thought that those undertaking international studies had an important mission to perform. In this regard, Toynbee declared the following: I do not think we are indifferent to the object which that knowledge serves…During the Conference we have discussed rather dull things, bibliographies, hand-books, lists of institutions, and rather dull technical details of practical co-operation…but I think that while we are doing that there is more than that in our minds…there is a feeling behind which gives more meaning to our work…a feeling in all our work of a great fear and a great hope. The great fear that the forces of disorder which were let loose fifteen years ago may be let loose again…and the great hope is that the terrible and now quite fatal institution of war may be removed from our horizon through fair-minded common study of international questions by masses of men and women in all the countries concerned.254

Bowman, the aforementioned director of the American Geographical Society and member of the board of directors of the CFR, spoke next. Bowman had been asked by the conference to elaborate on the situation in the United States which, as Bowman attested, had seen the development of institutions dedicated to the study of international affairs ‘on a scale one would hardly have believed possible’ before the war. Highlighting the contributions of the CFR and its journal Foreign Policy, of the FPA with its ever-growing membership and of the lectures and roundtable discussions at the Institute of Politics at Williamstown and pointing to the growing number of courses  offered in American universities in the field, Bowman maintained that rapid growth in international studies in the United States had come about for two reasons. The first reason, which he described as partly ‘sentimental,’ concerned the resolution on the part of many Americans ‘never to forget’ the lives lost during the war. The most striking manifestation of this resolution, Bowman claimed, was the ‘desire to understand the international problems of our time in more than a  Ibid., 190–1.  Ibid., 191.

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superficial sense’: they must be ‘scientifically studied by every means at our command.’ The second reason specified by Bowman, related to the fact that the war had taught Americans that ‘most international affairs in the world impinge upon our interests’ and the fact that Americans knew ‘little about them.’ Bowman added that he did not doubt that the current generation, ‘trained in the ‘great political questions of the time and given a liberal outlook,’ would change the direction of world politics.255 Bowman was followed by Jäckh, who elaborated on the efforts at the German Political Academy to bring ‘together both politics and science,’ through encouraging collaboration between noted representatives of parties from across the political spectrum and scholars of high calibre. He highlighted not  only  his academy’s contribution to the German state through providing training for leadership and for the foreign service, but its contribution to improvements in the relations between states: its preliminary work in relation to the Locarno Treaties and the Pact of Paris. Jäckh also highlighted the great public success of the lectures given by the various eminent figures who had occupied the Carnegie Chair at his academy. Near the conclusion of his speech and echoing the explanation he gave of the meaning of the spirit of Locarno in his 1927 lectures at Zimmern’s Geneva School, Jäckh declared that he took policy in the ‘widest and profoundest sense, in the original sense of the ancient politeia,’ adding that understood in this way, policy means ‘synthesis’: a synthesis ‘of all relations between man and man, between individuals and groups, between the group and the Commonwealth, between States and other States, between nations and nations.’ In concluding his speech, Jäckh stated that ‘politics mean a real universitas’ and that the quest for a universitas, this being, according to Jäckh, precisely what the scientific study of politics involves, should prevail over one-sided economic or strategic calculations.256 Zimmern also addressed the conference, acting as a representative of both the IIIC, which, he noted, had organised the conference, and the five international institutions—‘from The Hague to Honolulu’ to borrow Meston’s enthusiastic characterisation of the global reach of the conference—engaged in the teaching and discussion of international affairs that were represented at the conference. Like Bowman, Zimmern dwelt on the issue of education and how the interest in international affairs since the  Ibid., 192–6.  Ibid., 197–9.

255 256

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Armistice had led to a ‘revolution in education’: there had been a revolt against ‘specialisation’ and in favour of the harmonising of studies which had been kept apart for ‘too long.’ Zimmern maintained that the ‘synthesis’ of various studies concerned with public affairs—such as political science, international law, history, sociology, economics and geography—not only was going to have an enormous impact on university education but would facilitate ‘real interchange of fruitful thought’ between statesmen and professional scholars. He insisted that the latter development was well illustrated by the interchanges between members of League committees and even delegations to the LON, on the one hand, and those working in such institutions as Graduate Institute of International Studies and his Geneva School, on the other.257 In terms of its organisation, the conference signalled its intention to establish itself on a permanent basis and, to this end, it appointed a small executive committee of which the head of the LSE, namely, Beveridge, was elected chairman. The conference determined that this committee should meet once a year at what was to be the office of its secretariat: the Section of University Relations at the IIIC.258 Further to a resolution passed in the previous year  in Berlin, it requested that members of the conference organise themselves on a national basis: they should form national coordinating committees so as to more effectively liaise with other conference participants, both at home and abroad, as well as with the IIIC. On the acceptance of this resolution, which was in fact the first resolution of the 1929 conference, the CFR immediately agreed to act as the American coordinating centre, and over the next few years, other national committees would be formed on an ad hoc basis.259 In April 1929, in line with this resolution, three representatives of the RIIA joined with three representatives of the Department of International Studies at the LSE to form the British Coordinating Committee for the Scientific Study of International Relations (which very soon was renamed the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies [BCCIS]), of which Beveridge was elected chairman. On May 28, the BCCIS co-­  Ibid., 200–2.  IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 300, and IIIC, International Studies Conference, 28. 259  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Co-operation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. On the CFR, see Walter H. Mallory to Henri Bonnet, 22 October 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA. 257 258

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opted Charles K.  Webster as a member. Webster was at that time the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Relations at Aberystwyth, although in 1931, he would be appointed Stevenson Professor in International History at the University of London. Zimmern too would be co-opted as member, in his case upon becoming the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford.260 In regard to more substantive matters, the conference reaffirmed the idea that it should examine the possibility of involving itself in joint research projects. A conference resolution on this matter stated that members should look to engaging in ‘simultaneous programmes of research into problems whose range necessitates international cooperation or whose complexity suggests the coordination of various branches of study.’ In resolving this, the conference pointed to a recent recommendation of the Consultative Economic Committee of the Council of the LON: ‘that special attention be devoted in scientific circles to economic tendencies affecting the peace of the world.’261 As we saw, Toynbee had indicated that mere technical collaboration was not really a sufficient means of giving expression to the greater purpose which he felt should animate the conference’s work and it would appear that it was he who prompted this particular resolution. In a letter to Murray soon after the end of conference, Toynbee wrote: ‘I wonder what you think of my idea of a “Survey of Cultural Relations”…? I threw out the idea of a “Survey of International Economic Relations”, including private as well as governmental economic affairs, and it looks as though they [the conference members] would take

260  British Coordinating Committee for International Studies [hereafter BCCIS], Report 1930–31, and, Appendix C: Eighth International Studies Conference, The Royal Institute of International Affairs 1934–1935 and Appendix D: Eighth International Studies Conference, Department of International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1934–1935, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 261  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Co-operation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. The ICIC’s Sub-Committee on University Relations, after having read Zimmern’s report on the Berlin meeting, noted ‘with satisfaction’ the progress made in regard to the coordination of international studies and called on the IIIC to convene another such meeting in light of the invitation of the RIIA.  It also called on the IIIC to consider convening a meeting ‘in order to discuss questions of instruction in international policy’ in the summer of 1929. ‘Rapport sur les travaux de la Sous-Commission des relations universitaires,’ Bulletin des Relations Universitaires 4, no. 3–4 (1928), 204.

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this up, though of course it is a much more formidable affair to tackle than a cultural survey.’262 There was another possible joint project discussed at the 1929 conference: a lexicon of political and politico-philosophical terms. The proposal for a Lexicon of Political Terms, as the project was soon named, was suggested by one of Jäckh’s colleagues at the German Political Academy: the political psychologist Wilhelm Haas, who was also a member of staff at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin.263 Haas pointed out at the conference that some words, because they are peculiar to a particular language, cannot be simply and accurately translated, and in this regard he cited such words as Reich, Volkstum, Rapporteur, Ordonnance, Podestà, Fascio, Commonwealth and Dominion. There are other words, he added, that may mean different things when employed in different languages, and in this regard he cited the words Control, State, Nation, Law and Liberty.264 Haas argued that where translations are insensitive to the precise ‘intellectual and emotional’ content of the terms employed in the context of international intercourse, ‘deep and far-reaching misunderstandings and disappointments’ may result. This was an even more serious issue, he claimed, in the present context given the ‘far-reaching negotiations to which the liquidation of the war has given rise.’ Haas characterised linguistic confusions as ‘fetters’ that impeded the ‘desire for a clear understanding’ and an ‘unambiguous formula.’ The handbook that he proposed was intended to remove these fetters to mutual comprehension through awakening ‘a feeling for the colour that is inherent’ in the differing political and philosophical terminologies employed in different countries.265 262  Morgan, ‘“To Advance the Sciences of International Politics…”: Chatham House’s Early Research,’ 132. 263   Memorandum Concerning a Comparative Handbook of Political and PoliticoPhilosophical Terms, 20 February 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.a, UA. On Haas’s two positions, see Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1A: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICIK-VI-1 UA. On Haas’s area of study, see Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?’, 400. 264  League of Nations, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Proposed Lexicon of Political Terms, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.a, UA. 265   Memorandum Concerning a Comparative Handbook of Political and PoliticoPhilosophical Terms, 20 February 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.a, UA. See also Memorandum Concerning a Comparative Handbook of the Most Important Political Terms which are Liable to Promote Misunderstanding in the International Intercourse of the Great Nations, enlarged version of the memorandum submitted to the London Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations, March 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.a, UA.

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Haas reported that he was not alone in considering such a project. He had been told eighteen months earlier by Max Clauss, a German journalist who was then a correspondent at the LON for Prince Karl Anton Rohan’s Europäische Revue but who would later become a correspondent for the Third Reich, that certain individuals associated with the Revue, which campaigned for a paneuropa, had been exploring the idea.266 Haas’s ­proposal was approved in principle by the conference which asked Haas to draw up a preliminary statement for discussion at the next conference meeting.267 A lexicon committee was formed and charged with inviting the ‘attention in scientific circles’ to the project, its members being Eisenmann, Haas, Mantoux and Zimmern.268

Paris, 1929: A Conference at the Palais Royal The London conference determined that the next international studies conference would address for the first time and in a sustained fashion the teaching of international relations.269 This was no doubt a result of entreaties on the part of Zimmern, who had wanted for some time to hold a teaching conference and who was then in the process of planning such a conference under the auspices of his Geneva School.270 The 1930 conference, which was held in Paris at the offices of the IIIC between June 12 and 14, duly noted the increasing trend towards teaching of international relations. It welcomed the extension of international studies at the 266   Memorandum Concerning a Comparative Handbook of Political and PoliticoPhilosophical Terms, 20 February 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.a, UA. For Max Clauss’s adherence to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), see Guido Müller, ‘France and Germany After the Great War: Businessmen, Intellectuals and Artists in Nongovernmental European Networks,’ in Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher eds., Culture and International History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 105–6. 267  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Co-operation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 268  Proposed Lexicon of Political Terms, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.a, UA. 269  Zimmern ed., University Teaching of International Relations, 1. See also IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 307, and Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Co-operation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 270   J.  David Thompson to Zimmern, April 30, 1929, AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA.  J. David Thompson stated in his letter to Zimmern that it was he who suggested to Zimmern the idea of a teachers’ conference to take place at the Geneva School.

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University of London as well as the inauguration of a course in diplomatic studies at the Jan Kazimierz (Jean Casimir) University at Lwów in Poland and recommended that higher education institutions in other countries to similarly extend their teaching in these fields. The conference also welcomed the increasing collaboration between teaching institutions in respect to the notification of programmes and in relation to student exchanges, noting that the LSE, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and the German Political Academy had entered into arrangements of this nature.271 Most significantly, the conference resolved on June 12, 1930, having expressed its conviction that the ‘maintenance and peace and the development of reciprocal comprehension depends in a very large measure on the diffusion in every degree’ of the spirit and methods of scientific research, its desire to enter into ‘closer relations’ with those involved in public instruction and to assist in any project ‘conceived to this effect under the auspices’ of the LON. The resolution urged those ‘savants who study the contemporary world’ to cooperate with teachers with a view to producing scholarly programmes  and  to  promoting in the field of instruction the adoption of the most modern methods of research. The resolution also emphasised the importance of ‘healthy’ intellectual methods. In order to further the resolution, the conference proposed the formation of a Mixed Committee, comprising members of the CISSIR and members of the League’s Sub-Committee of Experts on the Instruction of Youth in the Aims and Activities of the League. It also proposed that this Mixed Committee should meet and address the question of teaching in depth at the next meeting of the CISSIR, requesting that the secretary of the ICIC transmit this resolution to the subcommittee.272 The 1930 conference saw Haas reprise his proposal for a lexicon of political terms, with Haas stating in that context that the lexicon would 271  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Co-operation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. See also Picht to Bourdillon, 19 July 1930, AG 1-IICI-KI-1.a, UA. The recommendation on university teaching of international relations was subsequently endorsed by a meeting of the International Committee of University Relations in Geneva and submitted to the ICIC for consideration. 272   SDN, Comité de Coopération Intellectuelle Sous-Comité d’Experts pour l’Enseignement à la jeunesse des buts de la Société: Comité Mixte de représentants des Institutions d’études politiques et du Sous-Comité d’Experts, 1931 (avant la Conférence), AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA.

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comprise a list of ‘the commonest and most essential terms for practical and theoretical use, the intellectual and emotional context of which is not equivalent’ in German, Italian, English or French. After having approved the project in principle once more, the conference asked Haas to submit a ‘specimen’ list of words to the 1931 conference.273 While Haas’s proposed lexicon at least had the virtue of drawing attention to differences between the conceptual environments that different linguistic communities inhabit, it was a somewhat curious project for the CISSIR to adopt. Although conceived at a time when it was still possible to believe that enlightened opinion would prevail in Europe, it seemed to reflect an overly sanguine belief that clashes of interests can be overcome or greatly attenuated by means of linguistic clarity. Indeed, it would seem that support for the project stemmed less from its perceived utility than from the opportunity it afforded the conference to collaborate closely with the world of German scholarship on a project put forward in the name of a committee of German scholars. The German Political Academy, for its part, certainly appeared keen to pursue a project that would entail considerable collaborative activity within the framework of the conference and thereby considerable collaboration with the IIIC. In an account he gave of the academy’s international activities published in a volume celebrating its ten years of existence in 1930, Haas highlighted the academy’s association with the conference and, as a consequence of this, its association with such institutions as  The Hague Academy of International Law, the CFR, the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, the RIIA and the Graduate Institute of International Studies, in this last case, in the form of Mantoux. In particular, Haas noted the academy’s cooperation with the Geneva School of International Studies and the IIIC in the form of Zimmern. He also outlined the academy’s collaborative efforts in regard to the lexicon noting that the project had been warmly endorsed by the 1930 conference in the form of the conference’s fifth resolution.274 The 1930 conference reaffirmed past resolutions concerning technical cooperation in the area of research, recommending in that regard that the IIIC compile lists of non-partisan reference centres for information on 273  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1A: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, Quartrième Conférence des Institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales, 1931 (après la Conférence), AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 274  Haas, ‘Auslandsarbeit,’ 259–62, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA.

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international affairs and publish these in the form of a handbook in the lead up to the next conference. A volume entitled Handbook of Reference Centres for International Affairs (1931) was duly published by the IIIC with the assistance of European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment in English, French and German. The Handbook was intended as a reference tool for statesmen, diplomats, journalists, lawyers, university teachers and all those interested in international affairs. As such, it was intended as a companion volume to a volume entitled Handbook of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations which had been published in 1929  in the same three languages and also with aid of the Carnegie Endowment.275 At the same time, the 1930 conference expressed the strong feeling that in terms of technical cooperation, the conference had proceeded as far as it could for the moment and that, in any case, future cooperation of this kind could now be handled directly by institutions themselves with the assistance of the IIIC.276 As the issue of technical cooperation was dispensed with quickly, an extended discussion of teaching was made possible. In addition to this, renewed attention was given to the resolution passed at the 1928 conference: that the conference might consider studying a problem of special delicacy. Indeed, as a result of a 1929 conference resolution on this matter, the conference’s executive committee at its meeting in Paris on December 9 that year had asked itself a question: in light of the fact that national committees were already engaged in joint research, why should not research be undertaken jointly by all conference members? The upshot of this was that Zimmern and Bourdillon, as representatives of the BCCIS, were asked to prepare a paper on this topic with

275  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Cooperation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. On the Carnegie grant see Picht to J. David Thompson, 20 December 1930, Centres de documentation internationale ne dépendant pas de partis politiques, AG 1-IICI-K-II-2.a, UA.  See also League of Nations, International Institute  for  Intellectual Cooperation,  Handbook of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations (Paris:  International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1929) and Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations, Handbook of Reference Centres for International Affairs (Paris:  International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1931). For a description of the Handbook of Reference Centres, see Picht to L. S. Rowe, 18 February 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-II-2.a, UA. 276  IIIC, International Studies Conference, 18.

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reference to the work of the German Political Academy, the RIIA, the CFR and other institutions of a similar character.277 In terms of furnishing a model for joint research, the RIIA was seen as exemplary, it having experimented since its inception with the study group method which it purported to have refined over the years: it proclaimed in a memorandum on its study groups that by 1929, this method had passed from its preliminary phase and had entered into a more mature stage of development. This later  stage consisted in the formation of a ‘group of persons of which the individual members, besides being competent and qualified to examine a given problem, represent all points of view about that problem.’ The RIIA did not claim to have originated the study group method, pointing out in the same memorandum that it had been ‘practised for years in the Royal Commissions of the British Government and more recently …[had]…been extensively used by the League of Nations.’ Nonetheless, the RIIA claimed that it had broken ‘new ground’ in the application of this method because it had been hitherto used largely by ‘official bodies.’ Further to this, the memorandum noted that the Chatham House study groups were renowned for their flexibility in regard to the approach adopted in examining a particular subject and in regard to the subject matter chosen, such that any international issue, leaving aside a bias towards issues of a ‘topical’ nature, could be studied.  Chatham House study groups were encouraged, the memorandum added, to cooperate with other groups with similar concerns whether these groups be of British or foreign origin.278 Despite the importance attached to the RIIA model, it was the IPR, above all, that the CISSIR wanted to imitate: it wanted to transform itself into a truly international organisation that produced credible research in the field of international affairs. As noted, the RIIA became the British 277  Ibid., 18–9 and CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Cooperation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. On the request to Zimmern and Bourdillon, see League of Nations: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Third Conference of Representatives for the Scientific Study of International Relations, Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Reactions,’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. 278  Cleeve to Picht and attached memorandum on study groups, 29 March 1933, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.h, UA. See also Report on the Organisation and Activities of the Members of the ISC, AG 1-IICI-K-IX-1, UA. The study group method was also adopted by the CFR; the Canadian Institute of International Affairs; the Centre d’étude de politique etrangère and the Institut Social Romain.

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branch of the IPR in 1927, and in view of this, it established a special committee to research ‘Pacific problems.’ It was in order to represent the RIIA that Toynbee attended the IPR’s 1929 conference in Kyoto, on the subject of which he presented a paper at the RIIA on February 18, 1930, the same year he became the British member on the IPR’s International Research Committee.279 At the 1930 Paris meeting, the IPR was represented by Condliffe, who would continue in the role of research secretary of the IPR until 1931 when he would depart Honolulu for Geneva in order to prepare, as a member  of the League’s Economic  Intelligence Service (a research unit connected to the Financial Section of the secretariat under the direction of a Briton called Alexander Loveday who was the head of that section), what was the first in an annual series of accounts of recent economic developments: World Economic Survey. In the tradition of Toynbee’s Annual Survey of International Affairs, World Economic Survey was a consequence of resolutions adopted by the assembly in 1930 and 1931 and was, in the words of Loveday, intended to be ‘intelligible to the lay reader’ and in this respect it could be held in contrast  with the ‘more detailed and technical information’ published by the service. 280 In the form of a resolution and in view of its internationalist ambitions, the conference asked Condliffe to prepare a report on the possible participation in the conference of institutions from the Pacific countries of Australia, China, Japan and New Zealand.281 And it was to Condliffe that  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ 16, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. On Toynbee’s lecture, see CISSIR, Paris, 12–14 June 1930, Royal Institute of International Affairs:: Report on Developments 1929–1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1 UA. 280  Anique H. M. van Ginneken, Historical Dictionary of the League of Nations: Historical Dictionaries of International Organizations No. 23 (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 80. Anique H.  M. van Ginneken records that the Economic Intelligence Service served as the secretariat of the Committee of Statistical Experts, the mixed Nutrition Committee, Delegates on Economic Depressions and the Demographic Committee. See also Economic Intelligence Service, World Economic Survey: 1931–32 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1932) and Economic Intelligence Service, World Economic Survey: 1932–33 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1933). Alexander  Loveday’s comments on the target audience of the World Economic Survey appear in the preface to World Economic Survey: 1932–33. The Economic Intelligence Service also published the following: Monthly Bulletin of Statistics; Statistical Year-Book of the League of Nations; World Production and Prices; Review of World Trade; Balances of Payments; International Trade Statistics; and Commercial Banks. On Condliffe’s appointment to the LON and the analogy between the World Economic Survey and the Annual Survey of International Affairs, see Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 155. 281  CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Co-operation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, 2, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1 UA, UA. 279

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Bourdillon and Zimmern transferred the task of preparing a paper that would form the basis of a discussion concerning the conversion of the CISSIR into a study conference, suggesting in relation to this that Condliffe make ‘free use’ of the IPR’s experiments in methods of discussion and cooperative research.282

The Condliffe Paper While derided initially by some as an ‘amateur’ outfit meddling in affairs that were best left to the professional diplomats, the IPR very rapidly acquired a reputation as a ‘fully cooperative international organisation for mutual study.’283 Given its sound reputation and given its close association with the Rockefeller Foundation, it is not surprising that the IPR was the principal model on which the CISSIR decided to base itself. As we saw, Zimmern and Bourdillon had asked Condliffe to prepare a presentation on the IPR’s collaborative work for the CISSIR’s meeting in Paris in 1930, a request to which Condliffe drew attention in the opening section of the presentation he ultimately gave.284 Issued under the rubric of the LON, Condliffe’s paper was entitled ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations’ and therein Condliffe touched on a number of points raised in ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ an original draft of which Condliffe had sent to the IIIC prior to its publication in Pacific Affairs.285 In his presentation, Condliffe endorsed the view outlined by Zimmern in Learning and Leadership: that industrialisation had given rise to ‘[e]asier communications, a greater degree of economic interdependence’ and to ‘the vastly more serious character and consequences of modern warfare.’ Against this background, Condlifffe stated, it was ‘necessary to strengthen and extend the recent beginnings’ of international law and governmental cooperation. Placing international law and cooperation on a secure basis, Condliffe affirmed in agreement with Zimmern, was ‘a task for scholarship

282  Ibid., 5, and Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Reactions,’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. 283  Condliffe, ‘Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 103, and ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 526. 284  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. 285  Ibid., and ‘Experiment in Diagnosis,’ ‘Institutions internationales pour l’études scientifique des international relations (31 May 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-V-1.a, UA.

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as much as statesmanship.’286 Indeed, Condliffe observed that the institutions established in Geneva could not have evolved so rapidly except for the efforts on the part of private individuals in many countries ‘to explain and support their activities and explore the possibilities of their extension.’287 Noting that many institutions for the study of international relations had sprung up since the war, Condliffe stated that the most significant developments in this area of study had emerged out of those institutions, such as the CFR, RIIA and the IPR, that combined discussion of international affairs with ongoing research programmes. Condliffe acknowledged that the IPR had drawn on the experience of the Round Table movement, the CFR, the RIIA and the Williamstown Institute of Politics.288 However, Condliffe insisted, as he had stated in ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ that the IPR ‘held a unique place’ among these bodies and all the other unofficial institutions engaged in research into and discussion of international affairs. The IPR, he told his audience in Paris, ‘is the only unofficial organization in the field of international affairs which is organized on a thoroughly co-operative international basis.’289 Condliffe pointed out that in contrast with the IPR, the membership of the RIIA (which, he noted, formed part of the IPR federation), and the CFR was limited to British and American nationals respectively. For this reason, Condliffe added, these institutions, while scientific in their approach, ‘necessarily concern themselves with a national approach to international problems.’290 As an example of the authentically international character of the IPR’s research programme, Condliffe pointed to the collaborative work undertaken by British, American, Chinese and Japanese researchers on the problems of Manchuria, work, he noted, that had formed part of the preparatory materials for the Kyoto conference.291

 Condliffe, ’International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ 2.  Ibid., 5. 288  Ibid., 8. 289  ‘Appendix 6: Handbook of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 529, and Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. See also Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 105. 290  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Relations,’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. 291  Ibid., 18–9. 286 287

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Condliffe told his audience in Paris that the IPR had ‘broken new ground’ in regard to roundtable discussions. He pointed out that at IPR conferences, no prepared papers were read out and that ‘long speeches’ and oratorical displays were ‘frowned upon.’ The basis for discussions within the framework of the IPR, he explained, were preparatory materials in the form of data-sheets and progress research reports which were circulated among members.292 In this way, he added, the ‘role of lecturer and the technical expert is at its minimum; exchange of ideas and friendly ­discussion is at the maximum.’293 Condliffe noted that in addition to their informality, another crucial feature of the IPR’s roundtable discussions was their privacy: given that the issues addressed were of fundamental importance and, therefore, often controversial, participants needed to feel free to engage in exchanges in the ‘frankest and most downright spirit’ and not feel pressured to adopt national points of view or partisan positions.294 Condliffe observed that as well as being expected to choose conference participants on the basis of their ‘expert ability’ and ‘capacity to represent public opinion,’ the IPR’s national units were expected to send individuals who were ‘in contact with wide circles of opinion’ in their country in order to ensure the widespread dissemination of the results of IPR discussions.295 As an illustration of the practical value of the IPR’s work and its dissemination in the way in which he described it, Condliffe pointed to the role played by Japanese IPR delegates in awakening public opinion in Japan to the possibility of a universal peace pact, following Shotwell’s discussion of the idea of such a pact at the 1927 conference. Condliffe also pointed to the ‘frank interchange’ between Chinese and British delegates at the same conference, noting that this had led to improved relations between those two countries. Finally in this regard, Condliffe insisted that a ‘similar clearance of opinion’ had been progressing between delegates of Japan and the United States in relation to the 1924 Immigration Act, adding that the resultant ‘lessening of the tensions’ between these two countries seemed to ‘offer an opportunity in the near future for the final settlement of the issue.’296  Ibid., 12.  Condliffe, ‘An Experiment in Diagnosis,’ 104. 294  Condliffe, ‘International Collaboration in the Study of International Reactions,’ AG 1-IICI-K-I-3, UA. 295  Ibid., 11. 296  Ibid., 14–5. 292 293

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The discussion that succeeded Condliffe’s presentation turned on the question of whether the CISSIR could apply to the ‘study of international problems of a general character the methods which had been successfully tested in relation to the Pacific area’ by the IPR over some years. Responding to this question in the affirmative, the Paris meeting, expressing a preference for the decentralised approach to research adopted by the IPR as it had been described by Condliffe, asked the CISSIR’s executive committee to give the matter its ‘detailed consideration.’297 Clearly, Condliffe’s talk enthused his audience. A few days after the close of the meeting, Bourdillon wrote to Werner Picht, head of the IIIC’s University Relations Section and in consequence of this the CISSIR’s secretary, congratulating him on the success of the conference and remarking that Condliffe’s paper had been ‘simply admirable.’298 Picht was similarly enthused. In a letter to Toynbee  he referred  to Condliffe’s ‘undoubted success’ and stated in relation to this success the following: ‘as you may know from former talks, it has been my conviction for a long time that the satisfactory development of these conferences will depend very largely on whether we are able to get beyond the discussion of mere questions of organisation.’299 At he  also  told Toynbee, Picht considered the positive response that Condliffe’s paper had received a ‘good symptom’ for a ‘bolder undertaking’ in the following year.300 In a letter to Beveridge written just before a meeting of the CISSIR’s executive committee and after having observed how ‘encouraging’ he had found Condliffe’s paper and the discussion that it had excited, Picht stated that the proposal for a study conference should be the main focus of the conference’s meeting in 1931. He predicted that in the future the CISSIR would become less concerned with technical cooperation and activities like the lexicon (which, tellingly,  he did not think would sustain long-term interest), and would orient itself towards collaborative research. However, while wanting the conference to take a new direction, Picht was also of the view, as he indicated in his letter to 297  IIIC, International Studies Conference, 19. See also CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix E: Resolutions on Methods of Co-operation adopted at the conferences held in Berlin in 1928, London in 1929 and Paris in 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1 UA, UA. 298  Bourdillon to Picht, 17 July 1930. AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.a. 299  Picht to Toynbee, 23 April 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b. 300  Ibid.

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Beveridge and also in a letter to Bourdillon, that the topics of ‘common interest’ chosen for study by the conference should be ‘non-controversial.’ While Picht’s suggestion was in keeping with the ostensibly apolitical character of the OIC, it was completely contrary in spirit to Condliffe’s insistence that bodies such as the IPR had to live somewhat dangerously if they were to live at all.301

301  Picht to Beveridge, 12 December 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.a, UA. In a letter to Bourdillon written on 12 December 1930,  Picht referred to the discussion of ‘non-controversial European subjects’ scheduled to take place at the 1931 conference. Conférence des institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales: 1930, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.a, UA.

CHAPTER 6

International Studies in 1931: From Copenhagen to Shanghai

Fig. 6.1  The Chinese delegation addresses the Council of the League of Nations following the Mukden Incident

© The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part One, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2_6

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Fig. 6.2  Portrait of the attendees of the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Source: UBC Library Digitization Centre

The Copenhagen Conference In January 1931, the Executive Committee of the CISSIR agreed that technical cooperation among the member institutions had proceeded as far as ‘existing resources permitted’ and that the CISSIR should now turn its attention to the ‘study of concrete problems’ of an international character.1 The committee thus invited Toynbee to present a paper on the topic of ‘tendencies in international affairs since the Peace Treaties’ at the 1931 conference.2 Above all, however, the committee wanted Toynbee to put forward some practical suggestions concerning international research collaboration in the field of international affairs. In light of this desire and in accordance with a resolution passed by the BCCIS, Toynbee wrote to Bonnet and Picht, suggesting that a European equivalent of the IPR be established.3 In his reply to Toynbee, Bonnet stated that he thought that this was an excellent idea, noting that Shotwell had been airing the same idea in the course of recent interviews with statesmen in France and Great Britain.4 Picht too endorsed the idea, although, in his reply to Toynbee and reflecting the OIC’s ongoing concern that the conference not stray outside the LON’s orbit, he added the caution that it was not necessary to create a new institution, stating that ‘our Conference is perfectly capable of accomplishing the new tasks.’5  ICIC, International Studies Conference, 19–20.  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix IA: Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 3  Toynbee to Bonnet, 18 March 1931, and Bourdillon to Picht, 7 May 1931, and Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the BCCIS, 29 April 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA. 4  Bonnet to Toynbee, 26 March 1931, and Picht to Toynbee, 23 April and 13 May 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA. 5  Picht to Toynbee, 13 May 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA. 1 2

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The 1931 conference was held in Copenhagen between June 8 and 10 at the invitation of the Danish Institute of Economics and History. Its venue was the Christiansborg Palace and it was presided over by Peter Munch, the Danish foreign minister and chair of the institute, who also hosted a formal dinner for the participants.6 Attending the conference were delegates from Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Switzerland, along with one observer each from Australia and New Zealand. Four international institutions participated: The Hague Academy, the GIIRl, the Graduate Institute of International Studies and the IPR.7 On the morning of June 9, following the precedent set by Condliffe’s presentation in the previous year, the conference listened to a paper prepared by Toynbee after which there was a discussion of the issues it raised.8 Toynbee intended that his paper would be ‘slightly provocative,’ a matter which concerned Picht who had earlier communicated to the principal advisor to the Italian ambassador to Paris that Toynbee had given a ‘complete guarantee’ that any discussion arising from his paper would be conducted in a ‘spirit of impartiality.’9 Toynbee stated in  his address that the ‘great development’ in world affairs since the war had been this: ‘the tendency towards world-unity… in the economic life of mankind,’  which had made such ‘remarkable progress’ before the war, had not only persisted but had ‘asserted itself— rather suddenly and very powerfully—in our political and cultural life as well.’ 10 Toynbee pointed out that before the war, the trend towards political and cultural unity had ‘scarcely  begun,’  indeed, he  claimed  that the pre-war trend towards ­economic unification had coincided with conditions of ‘political anarchy’ and ‘spiritual isolation from one another of the heirs to several great historic cultures which divided the spiritual allegiance of the civilised majority of the human race.’ Toynbee stated that  this contrast betrayed a ‘social disharmony’  which lay  at the basis of  ‘our international troubles’ and which was, in his view, one of the ‘deeper causes’ of the world war. He added, however, that this ‘danger6  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix IA: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid. See also Picht to Toynbee, 23 April 1931, and Toynbee to Picht, 28 April 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA. 9  Picht to Toynbee, 23 April 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA; Toynbee to Picht, 28 April 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA; and Werner Picht to Comte de Vinci, Premier Conseiller de l’Ambassade Royale de l’Italie, 25 February 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.b, UA. 10  Arnold J.  Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ International Affairs 10, no. 6 (1931): 803–26, 805.

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ous contrast’ was now  in the process of being ‘attenuated  and toned down.’ Toynbee claimed that there was a growing realisation, or at least a half-conscious realisation, that the world could no longer ‘indefinitely continue to lead a double existence’: ‘only a fundamental internationalism’ would prevent the collapse of modern civilisation. ‘Is it not evident,’ he asked his audience, ‘that a resolute effort in order to internationalise political and cultural life…is truly the leitmotiv of the post-war era?’11 Toynbee then called attention to what he described as the paradoxical situation in which Western Europe found itself. He observed that Western Europe was the propagator of the ‘new, cosmopolitan world civilisation’ and that as such, it was natural to expect that Western Europe would ‘find itself the mistress of the other continents.’ Yet contrary to this expectation and as a result of the war, Toynbee observed, Western Europe found itself ‘morally belittled and shamed by the exterior world that she had succeeded in making enter her orb.’12 At the same time, Toynbee took comfort in the fact that it appeared that extra-European political movements were adopting Western political methods because this meant that the legacy of the West would live on irrespective of the destiny of Europe. The independence movement in India, Toynbee  noted, had embraced ‘the whole Western political apparatus, of conferences, resolutions, votes, platforms, newspapers and publicity’ in seeking to transform India into a ‘sovereign independent parliamentary state.’13 Indeed, Toynbee maintained that the career of Mahatma Gandhi (along with that of Vladimir Lenin, who, he noted, had equipped himself with Marxist doctrine and mechanisation plans), was a more eloquent testimony to the ‘strength of the movement of cultural internationalism in our time’ than even the careers of those ‘deliberate Westernisers,’ namely, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Sun Yat-sen.14 In regard to the question of the tangible results of political integration, Toynbee listed such developments as the covenant, the Pact of Paris, the General Act  of Arbitration and Conciliation, the Protocol for Financial Assistance to Victims of Aggression and the forthcoming Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments (Disarmament Conference). Toynbee claimed that it could be stated 11  Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 805, and Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘Les Tendances qui se sont manifestées depuis la guerre dans les relations internationales,’ Bulletin de la Coopération Intellectuelle, no. 6 (1931): 331–3. 12  Toynbee, ‘Les Tendances qui se sont manifestées depuis la guerre dans les relations internationales,’ 332. 13  Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 816. 14  Ibid., 814–6.

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without exaggeration that during the last dozen years, we have made more progress in suppressing anarchy in the relation between states that our predecessors made in over four centuries…. In truth, we ourselves would have been astonished by these results with our pre-war mentality. If such projects had been prophesized before the war we would have rejected them without hesitation in treating them as chimerical ideas.15

At the same time, Toynbee noted that there had been failures amidst all this success, insisting that those present at the conference should have the courage, as writers and scholars, to recognise these failures, albeit without letting themselves become discouraged by them.16 In particular, he stressed that the partisans of internationalism should not underestimate the strength of the political force and ‘fetish’ of ‘local sovereignty,’ an ‘idol’ against which, he stated, his confrères were leading the attack: they were struggling to contain its ‘power for evil.’17 Toynbee’s paper was reportedly ‘extraordinarily well received’; however, the focus of the ensuing discussion was not on the topic that formed the major part of his presentation, namely, trends in international affairs. Rather, the focus rested on two matters that Toynbee had raised towards the conclusion of his presentation, the very matters in which he ­himself had hoped to elicit the most interest.18 The first of these matters concerned the conversion of the CISSIR into a ‘permanent instrument for cooperative study’ in the field of international affairs, a field which, he was keen to point out, was no longer ‘esoteric’ but was the ‘concern of ordinary private people’ as demonstrated by the existence of ‘our institution’ and the IPR.19 As he had earlier told Picht, Toynbee, having discussed the issue with the members of the BCCIS, had decided that ‘instead of suggesting a new institute of European Relations…on the model of the I. P. R,’ he would 15  Toynbee, ‘Les Tendances qui se sont manifestées depuis la guerre dans les relations internationales,’ 333. See also Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 806–7. Toynbee was referring  in this context respectively to the  General Act for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes which was concluded in Geneva on September 26, 1928 and the Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes which was approved by the Assembly on  October 2, 1924. 16  Ibid. 17  Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 808. 18  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix IA: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, 3, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 19  Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 822 and Toynbee to Bonnet, 18 March 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA.

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suggest that ‘our Association of Scientific Institutes shall itself undertake co-operative study.’20 Toynbee’s reasoning in relation to this decision was made clear at the conference: he told the conference that the IPR differed from the CISSIR because the former’s scope was ‘confined to one region of the world, albeit a great and very important region,’  whereas  ‘our organisation includes institutions from all parts of the world and has the whole world as its field of study.’ Toynbee maintained that in this respect the CISSIR was better placed than the IPR to undertake cooperative study on an international basis: had not the principal thesis of his address been that ‘the most important and interesting affairs of our time are worldwide in their range and transcend the limits of any one region, however large’?21 Nonetheless, after having noted that the conference once again had the good fortune of having a representative of the IPR present and that several of the national institutions represented at the meeting were affiliated with the IPR, Toynbee insisted that in light of the IPR’s ‘notable success,’ the CISSIR should seek to emulate the methods with which the IPR had been experimenting since its inception.22 That the CISSIR had a worldwide reach as claimed by Toynbee, was far from being the case as certain of its North American members subsequently pointed out. That matter aside, it should be noted that much importance was attached  by those present in Copenhagen  to the fact that  Toynbee’s proposal that ‘at future Conferences discussions of a subject of international importance be the primary feature’ was unanimously adopted. Much importance was also attached to the fact that, as underlined in a report prepared by Bourdillon on behalf of the BCCIS, the proposal was received ‘warmly’ by both the French and the German delegations. The proposal was also warmly welcomed by the IPR’s representative  at  Copenhagen, namely, Edward C. Carter, the dynamic secretary of the New York–based American Council of the IPR and chairman of the IPR’s International Program Committee.23 Indeed, Carter had assisted Toynbee in rallying support for the latter’s proposal concerning a study conference, giving a presentation at Copenhagen on the topic of the cooperative study and discussion of international problems. It is notable that Carter suggested in that c­ ontext,  Toynbee to Picht, 6 May 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA.  Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 822. 22  Ibid., 822–3. 23  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix IA: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 20 21

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that were the CISIRR to become a North Atlantic Conference, concentrating on ‘American-European relations and common interests,’ this would ‘ensure more real participation from the United States and Canada,’ neither of which were represented at Copenhagen.24 Carter was ambitious to further extend the IPR’s reach into Europe and doubtless partly for this reason, Carter, in delivering what one observer described as a ‘most interesting’ report on the Copenhagen conference to the Pacific Council at a meeting in Shanghai some months later, was happy to report that ‘several European leaders were inquiring whether the time has not come to organize an Institute for Europe or an Institute of the Atlantic on lines similar to those of the Institute of Pacific Relations.’25 The second issue on which the discussion following Toynbee’s presentation focussed, concerned the disarmament conference that the LON had decided to hold in the following year. In regard to this, Toynbee called on member institutions to assist in making ‘public opinion in their respective countries familiar with the points of view current in other countries’ on disarmament through organising an exchange of speakers during the autumn and winter months preceding the opening of the  conference. Toynbee stressed that the expositions on national viewpoints on the topic should be of a scientific character. What was not wanted, as Toynbee had declared in a letter to Bonnet written a few months before Copenhagen, was ‘propaganda for and against the ideal of disarmament, still less propaganda for or against the point of view’ of a particular country. In the same letter, Toynbee suggested to Bonnet that an exchange of speakers on disarmament ‘might have an appreciable effect in creating a more intelligent and a more tolerant public opinion throughout Europe,’ adding that while the success of an international conference depends on the degree of prior diplomatic preparation, ‘unofficial preparation of the kind which non-­ government bodies like our Institutes can provide is hardly less important.’26 24  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1B: Fifth Meeting of the BCCIS, 17 June 1931, and Appendix 1A(1): Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Quartrième Conférence des institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales (aprés la Conférence), 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-1, UA. 25  Charles F.  Loomis to Bonnet, 18 February 1932, Conférence des institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales, 1 October 1931–31 March 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.d, UA and Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, x. 26  Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 825–6 and Toynbee to Bonnet, 18 March 1931.

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Toynbee pursued this point at Copenhagen, telling those assembled that it was a welcome development that the idea that there should be diplomatic preparation before a conference was now commonplace, but asking them at the same time to consider whether this was the only form of preparation that is needed. Toynbee observed that people now lived in an age when diplomatists do so much of their work in the full light of publicity—an age when private people, in ever greater numbers, are following, with ever closer interest, the course of international politics, because they have come to realise that this is their intimate concern: that in the statesmen’s work the peoples’ lives and fortunes and happiness are at stake….Surely, nowadays, mere diplomatic preparation, essential though it is, is not enough by itself. It needs to be supplemented by some corresponding preparation of public opinion.27

As Toynbee and Bonnet had expected, the Copenhagen conference fully endorsed the proposal for an exchange of speakers, unanimously supporting a resolution that its members should cooperate, ‘in a spirit of objectivity,’ to inform the ‘public on the facts, as much material as psychological, of international problems of interest currently posed in front of public opinion.’28 The upshot of this resolution was that invitations were extended in the name of the conference to colleagues in Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Poland to visit each other’s countries in order to give, as Toynbee would have it, ‘an accurate and impartial exposition’ devoid of ‘political advocacy’ on what the public in their respective countries was ‘thinking and feeling about Disarmament, and why it is thinking and feeling as it does.’29 Here one might ask why invitations conceived with a view  to the airing of thoughts and feelings about disarmament were framed instead as invitations to speak on international problems of interest. The explanation for this concerns the fact at the conference ‘opinion was divided on the desirability of including the word “disarmament”’ in the draft of the resolution on the proposed exchange speakers. A  drafting committee had included the word in the  Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 825.  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix IA: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 29  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1B: Fifth Meeting of the BCCIS, 17 June 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA, and Toynbee, ‘The Trend of International Affairs Since the War,’ 826. 27 28

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third clause of the original resolution  on the subject; however, on the motion of Eisenmann, the French delegate on the committee, that clause was deleted.30 It is probable that this episode was part of what caused elements on the BCCIS to question the appropriateness of the CISSIR’s link with the ‘official machinery’ of the IIIC in Paris. At a meeting of the BCCIS held in the aftermath of the Copenhagen conference, a discussion arose as to ‘how far it was desirable’ to maintain this link. Doubt was expressed as to whether this link was ultimately compatible with ‘complete freedom of discussion.’ However, other elements pointed out that the conferences  of the CISSIR ‘owed their existence to the part played’ by the IIIC and that it was unlikely that such conferences could be organised without the ‘very substantial help’ of the IIIC. Thus, the BCCIS resolved that there could be ‘no question that for the time the present arrangement was very desirable.’31 Having accepted that the CISSIR should ‘make its annual meetings more like those of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ the delegates at Copenhagen resolved to hold a conference devoted to a special topic the following year, conceiving of it as an experiment in applying ‘scientific method to the complexity of contemporary facts.’32 A subcommittee was charged with drafting a resolution concerning the topic to be addressed at the next conference, which at that stage was expected to take place in Warsaw, on the basis of the proposal of the CISSIR’s executive committee that it be dedicated to current economic issues.33 The origins of this proposal concern a recommendation recorded in the minutes of a meeting of the BCCIS prior to Copenhagen: that the first subject to be studied should be ‘The Tendency towards Economic Nationalism.’34 Several days after the BCCIS issued its recommendation, Toynbee told Picht that he intended 30  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1A: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 31  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1B: Fifth Meeting of the BCCIS, 17 June 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 32  Ware, ed., The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1934, 448 and Bonnet, L’Oeuvre de L’Institut International De Coopération Intellectuelle, 68. 33  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix IA(1): Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference at Copenhagen, June 8–10, 1931, and Appendix 1A: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-KI-1.c, UA. 34  Bourdillon to Picht, 7 May 1931, and the attached Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the BCCIS, 29 April 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA.

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to recommend as one of the first subjects of study ‘the position of Europe in the contemporary world.’35 Although Toynbee was the first to put forward the idea that the conference should undertake a joint study international economic relations, he now favoured a different topic because he considered that the study of the economic relations between states to be a much more formidable affair in 1931 than when he had originally suggested it in January 1929. In any case, it was the recommendation of the BCCIS that the CISSIR decided to adopt, accepting the proposal of a drafting committee (composed of Toynbee, Carter, Eisenmann, Jäckh, Zimmern and Gianni Ferrari dalle Spadeno, this last being rector of the University of Padua and a substitute  for Gentile who was now director of the Centro nazionale Italiano di coordinamento degli istituti di studi scientifici per le questoni di carrattere internationale), that the topic for the CISSIR’s first study conference should be as follows: ‘The State and Economic Life,’ or as the committee referred to it in German, ‘Die Staat und Wirtschaft,’ and in French,’ L’intervention de l’État dans la vie économique’. More specifically, the drafting committee proposed that the conference examine the ‘international implications of the relations between governmental authority and the private economic activities of individuals and groups, with ­particular reference to the new forms of public management, control and supervision, national or international, that have grown up since the War, and to the nature of the motives and policies underlying them.’ The plan of work was as follows: first, the submission to the executive committee of ideas concerning the committee’s proposed topic; second, the drafting by the executive committee of a more detailed programme of study based on these ideas; third, the preparation of reports by members in accordance  with the executive committee’s programme of study; and fourth, the circulation of these reports among members before the conference in order that they could serve as a basis for discussion.36 35  Bourdillon to Picht, 7 May 1931, and the attached Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the BCCIS, 29 April 1933, and Toynbee to Picht, 6 May 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.b, UA. 36  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1A (1): Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations: Fourth Conference at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931 and Appendix 1A: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-KI-1.c, UA.  These same individuals were also nominated by the conference to a standing program committee charged with advising the executive committee of the detailed programme of study. For the French title of the conference, see IICI, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946, 260.

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In a report to the BCCIS, Bourdillon concluded that the Copenhagen conference ‘marked a definite step forward in fulfilling the purpose for which the Conferences were initiated,’ noting that members showed an ‘active interest’ in Toynbee’s concrete proposals regarding a study conference. Bourdillon pointed out in his report that one of the drawbacks in laying the groundwork for a study conference was the lack in some member countries of a local equivalent of RIIA and he welcomed the fact that the French delegation had ‘realised this and was determined to see that the need was met’ as he expected would the RIIA given the desire of its founders that similar organisations be established in other countries.37 Although Bourdillon’s general impressions of the conference were positive, he nonetheless issued a mild criticism. Foreshadowing later and more pointed criticisms of the conference, he observed that the general arrangements for hospitality and sightseeing and for the housing of the Conference were admirable…. As in other countries, the delegates were invited to a meal by the Foreign Minister, and to other meals by other bodies. There was a certain tendency, which may have to be carefully watched, to allow hospitality and sight-seeing to encroach on the time allotted for discussion. It will perhaps be necessary to make it clear to our Polish hosts next year, if we accept their invitation, that side-shows should not interfere with the work of the Conference.38

As had been requested at the previous conference of the CISSIR, Haas submitted to the 1931 conference a memorandum on his proposed lexicon of political terms along with a list of specimen terms with accompanying commentaries. A few of these commentaries are worth highlighting as they well  illustrate  the political concerns of the day. For example, Paul Mantoux, in a commentary on the French Parti radical, explained that in relation to foreign policy, this party represented a cluster of ‘feelings and interests quite peculiar’ to France. The party, he pointed out, embraced the tradition established by the French revolution: a ‘profound care for national defence…combined with the desire for international conciliation,’ a tradition which, according to Mantoux, was exemplified by figures such as Bourgeois. Mantoux claimed that since the Dreyfus affair in particular, the patriotism of the French Radicals ‘had been directed towards 37  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix IA: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 38  Ibid.

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furthering peace,’ even if they still remained very sensitive in relation to national security questions. As ‘peace-lovers without being pacifists,’ he added, the Radical Party was supportive of rapprochement with Germany but at the same time was insistent on ‘guarantees ensuring the security of the country.’39 Reflecting contemporary developments in an even more acute manner was a contribution of Haas to the lexicon project under the heading of ‘Right parties.’ Therein, Haas drew attention to the fact that until recently, right parties in Germany were those reactionary and conservative parties which defined themselves against those parties agitating for changes to existing conditions or against the restoration of past conditions: parties of the Left. Historically, he added, right parties represented the aristocracy, the major landowners, the higher officials, the upper middle class, industrial and financial elites as well as sections of the bourgeoisie and rural population. Such parties, he continued, generally, although not always, were characterised by an ‘emphasis on positive religious principles and invariably by patriotic nationalism.’ Haas then stated that this traditional definition was ‘no longer applicable in consequence of the latest ­developments’ in Germany. He pointed out that the ‘new Right’ parties and groups, while strongly stressing the ‘national and conservatively cultural standpoints’ along with Christianity, also exhibited ‘more or less strong leanings towards the Left’ in terms of their social composition and economic and social policies, adding that this was particularly true of the ‘National Socialistic German Labour Party… NSDAP.’40 In the same context, Haas discussed the meaning of the term ‘Rasse’ in contemporary Germany, noting at the outset of his discussion that whereas science had become ‘much more cautious in the question of uniform and unambiguous racial characteristics’ and had even come to doubt the ‘existence of original and pure races altogether,’ the popular mind ‘operated freely’ with the notion of race. By way of explaining current popular consciousness of the subject, Haas noted that because the merging of the nation and the state occurred in Germany ‘under greater difficulties and 39  Paul Mantoux, ‘Radical,’ Fourth CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931: Comparative handbook of the most important political terms which are liable to provoke misunderstanding in the intercourse of the great nations, English edition, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.b, UA. 40   William Haas, ‘Rechte (German)—The Right (Right parties),’ Fourth CISSIR, Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931: Comparative handbook of the most important political terms which are liable to provoke misunderstanding in the intercourse of the great nations, English edition, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.b, UA.

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very much later’ than it did in other Western countries, the ‘consciousness and the idea of “Volkstum” (primitive stock) as the source’ of the ‘creative’ energies of the nation had gained a ‘special significance’ which, he added, it still possessed in large measure in the present day. It was to this idea of primitive stock, Haas observed, that certain groups had turned in order to regain their confidence in times of material and mental hardship and it was this idea, he continued, that was the soil from which the ‘love of race and racial theories’ sprang. Haas stated that the mistaken conflation of the idea of primitive stock with the notion of race found contemporary expression in Germany in the way certain groups treated ‘with hate and opprobrium everything that is not considered as belonging to their race.’ Of the German political parties, he observed, both the German National People’s Party and the  National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had officially endorsed racial doctrines with the ‘former making it their aim to combat “every disintegrating unGerman influence” whether from Jewish or other sources, and by prohibiting the migration of members of other races’ and the latter ‘by making membership dependent upon belonging to the primitive stock’ and insisting that ‘[o]nly those of German blood can be German citizens.’ Assuming the NSDAP’s racial doctrine prevailed, Haas pointed out in concluding, ‘all Jews would be deprived of the rights of citizenship.’41 Haas’s outline of the lexicon was ‘received with great interest’ by the conference  following  which it  decided to adopt the project. The plan mooted at the conference was that the lexicon would be published in English (unnecessary in the BCCIS’s view), French, German and Italian and would address somewhere in the order of 280 words and their meanings. Different editorial committees were to be appointed in each of the countries involved (the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany) in order to assist Haas who was to be its general editor.42 Although Haas had been assisted since the London conference in 1929 by  Ibid.  CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1A: Report by Mr. Bourdillon, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. The BCCIS resolved that its secretary should consult Edward C.  Carter and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs ‘in regard to the question whether an English edition [of the lexicon] was desirable and practicable. On the whole the view of the Committee was that an English edition was not necessary as far as Great Britain was concerned’ and that a French edition was sufficient for their purposes. See CISSIR: Fourth Conference held at Copenhagen, 8–10 June 1931, Appendix 1B: Fifth Meeting of the BCCIS, 17 June 1931, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.c, UA. 41 42

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an international committee, most of the work up until the time of Copenhagen and for some time after was undertaken by Haas at the German Political Academy with the assistance of those German colleagues who, in Haas’s words, had ‘believed in the project from the very beginning.’43

Otto Hoetzsch: Chairman of the German Coordinating Committee for International Studies In addition to Jäckh, Bruns and Mendelssohn Bartholdy, among the colleagues assisting Haas in the lexicon project was Otto Hoetzsch who had been chairman of the German Coordinating Committee for International Studies (Ausschuss für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten) since its inception in 1928.44 Hoetzsch was a noted expert in Russian history at the University of Berlin where he lectured on foreign policy in addition to Russian and Eastern European history. He was a co-editor of a series entitled Documents in World Politics of the Post-War Period (Dokumente zur Weltpolitik der Nachkreigszeit) and a member of faculty at the German Political Academy where for some years he had been teaching courses in international politics. One such course, bore the following title: ‘The European and World State System.’45 One possible explanation for Hoetzsch’s nomination as chair of the German Coordinating Committee may relate to the fact that from the outset, Jäckh and his academy were the subject of attacks by radical nationalists because of their liberal and cosmopolitan leanings.46 Yet Jäckh, having determined that the academy should be a non-partisan body, had sought to build a faculty that reflected the German Republic in almost 43  Picht wrote that the preparatory work on the lexicon was ‘only made possible’ because of the financial support of the German Coordinating Committee. Picht to Earle B. Babcock, 7 July 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-II-4.a UA. 44  Jäckh (address, Sixth CISSIR, London, 1 June 1933), AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c. For communication between Picht and Otto Hoetzsch on the handbook and reference centres, AG 1-IICI-K-II-3, UA. On the lexicon committee, see Haas to Picht, 9 July 1932, AG 1-IICIK-II-4.a, UA. 45  Welt Politische Gegenwart, in Neuern Buchern des Verlages B. G. Teubner, 1932, 2–3., AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA.  For a sample of international politics courses, see Deutsche Hochschule für Politik: Vorlesungs-Verzeichnis für das Winterhalbjahr Semster 1926/27, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA.  See also Otto Hoetzsch, ‘Außenpolitische Bildung und außenpolitische Erziehung,’ in Politik als Wissenschaft, ed., Jächk, 13–9, AG 1-IICI-K-IV-2.c, UA. 46  Korenblat, ‘A School for the Republic?,’ 400–1.

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all  its political diversity, excluding only, Korenblat points out, ‘communists and extreme völkish nationalists.’47 In terms of the left-right spectrum represented at the academy, Hoetzsch was on the right: he was a representative of the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) at the Reichstag between 1920 and 1930 and served on that party’s foreign policy committee. In the years 1914–1924 and 1926–1928 respectively, he regularly contributed columns on foreign affairs to Kreuzzeitung and to Tag and, in that regard, espoused, according to Charles Paul Vincent, a ‘conservative Prussian outlook.’ Given his activities and disposition, Hoetzsch may have been considered a prudent choice to head a committee which worked in collaboration with an organ of the LON. At the same time, it should be noted that Hoetzsch belonged to the DNVP’s more moderate wing. He accepted the institution of the Weimar Republic and most of the Republic’s foreign policy positions. In fact, in 1929, Hoetzsch left the DNVP out of disapproval of the course it took under Alfred Hugenberg.48 Hoetzsch gave a broad outline of his views on international affairs in a set of lectures he gave on Germany’s domestic and foreign policies at the eighth session of the Institute of Politics at Williamstown in 1928 on the invitation of Harry A.  Garfield, the institute’s founder and president of Williams College. In the course of those lectures, Hoetzsch stated that unlike Jäckh and other German colleagues, he did not employ the expression the New Germany, adding that while the old Germany would not return ‘we are still children of our fathers.’49 During the same course of lectures, he recalled that his party had opposed Germany’s entry into the LON, observing that he himself found the atmosphere in Geneva to be overly ‘enthusiastic, almost mystical.’50 Hoetzsch drew attention to the fact that Germany, alongside Britain, Italy and certain small powers, opposed the idea of placing force at the disposal  Ibid., 400.  Charles Paul Vincent writes that Hoetzsch left the Party ‘when it sponsored a plebiscite on the Young plan’ in 1929. In 1930, he assisted in the founding of the Conservative People’s Party, although as a member of this party he failed to obtain a seat in the Reichstag. ‘Hoetzsch Otto,’ in C. Paul Vincent, A Historical Dictionary of Germany’s Weimar Republic, 1918–1933 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), 211–2. 49  Otto Hoetzsch, Germany’s Domestic and Foreign Policies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 55–6. In the preface to this book, Hoetzsch was described as a professor of history and international relations at the University of Berlin and member of the Reichstag. 50  Ibid., 76. 47 48

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of the LON.51 Yet, he added, even if Germany were a somewhat sceptical member of that organisation, it was nonetheless a loyal member. Hoetzsch told his Williamstown audience that he welcomed the fact that Russia had been taking steps towards adhering to the LON in the form of its participation in the World Economic Conference in 1927 and in the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament.52 Hoetzsch praised the Locarno Treaties  and urged multilateralism in relation to the Pact of Paris or what he preferred to call the Kellogg Pact. In relation to the Pact of Paris, Hoetzsch pointed out that Briand had originally proposed to the United States a bilateral treaty, adding  that France had resisted multilateralism in this context in order that it could retain ‘a free hand in regard to its policy of alliances and sanctions’ and that it was determined that nothing must threaten the sanctity of the Treaty of Versailles.53 In relation to the terms of that treaty, Hoetzsch observed that it had given rise to social problems in Germany: an effect of Germany being deprived of territory and its colonies under the treaty was the overpopulation of German cities, which, in turn, had caused unemployment to rise and with that the proletarianisation of the middle classes.54 However, the principal defect of the Treaty of Versailles, he stated, was that it had left Germany ‘completely disarmed and defenseless’ and it was in this respect above all, Hoetzsch insisted, that it was a fetter on German sovereignty. Hoetzsch contended that the fact that the treaty had been incorporated into the covenant did not make sense: the LON was supposed to be a league of equal states.55 Invoking Sun Yat-sen, he warned that whether in Central Europe or in the Far East, unequal treaties were dangers to the peace and he urged their peaceful revision.56 There would have been many in Hoetzsch’s largely American audience sympathetic to the idea of the revision of the Versailles settlement. One might venture to say the same in relation to many of the members of an audience Hoetzsch addressed in his role as chairman of the German  Ibid., 77.  Although strongly anti-Bolshevik, Hoetzsch was sympathetic towards Russia, stating that despite the terrible events there, Russia was ‘young and strong’. He opposed foreign intervention in Russia arguing that its internal organisation was its own business (ibid., 56, 83, 95–6). 53  Ibid., 81, 83, 102. 54  Ibid., 52. 55  Ibid., 62, 65. 56  Ibid., 75, 77. 51 52

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Coordinating Committee in London several months after the conclusion of the Copenhagen conference. It was in view of the fact that Hoetzsch had participated in German delegations at previous disarmament meetings in Geneva, that this committee nominated him to give a series of talks in front of foreign audiences on German thoughts and feelings about disarmament. Hoetzsch gave the first in this series of talks at Chatham House on November 17, 1931, his talk also being the first in the general series of talks concerning different national views on disarmament for which Toynbee had won approval at Copenhagen and which had subsequently been facilitated by Bonnet and other staff at the IIIC.57

Arbitration, Security and Disarmament The formal basis of the Disarmament Conference concerned Article 8 of the covenant which insisted on the ‘reduction of armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations.’ That this requirement had not been fulfilled in the years since the institution of the covenant was not due to a failure to appreciate the nature of the problem: the Disarmament Commission had some years before the conference communicated its opinion that arbitration, security, disarmament, this being the formula introduced by Herriot at Geneva in October 1924, are but ‘different aspects of the same problem.’58 The arbitration, security, disarmament formula gave expression to the idea, as propounded by France at the LON, that there can be no reduction in armaments unless there are guarantees

57  Hoetzsch to Picht, 16 October 1931, Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales: Répertoire des Institutions pour l’étude scientifique des relations internationales. October 1929–November 1933, AG 1-IICI-K-II-1, UA. See also Harold Rowan on behalf of the RIIA to Chalmers Wright, 13 January 1930, Échanges de conférenciérs sur la question du désarmament, AG 1-IICI-K-I-9, UA. On November 17, 1931, and January 21, 1932, respectively, Professor Ludwik Ehrlich and Professor J.  B. Kozak discussed Polish and Czechoslovakian views on disarmament. Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond spoke in Berlin on December 4, in Warsaw on December 10 and in Prague on December 14, 1931, on British views on the same topic. See also ‘Can War Be Abolished?,’ Signs of the Times 47, no. 22 (1932), 3. 58  Raymond Watt, ‘The League of Nations: Some Current Tendencies,’ Morpeth Review 2, no. 15 (1931): 30–7, 32. On Herriot, see Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 71. For Article 8 see  ‘Appendix I: Covenant of the League of Nations,’ in Russell, Theories of International Relations, 556. 

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that the law will be enforced: the law must be ‘accompanied by arbiters and sanctions’ if it is to be effective and thereby engender confidence.59 Among the commissions created by the French government to examine aspects of and frame French demands in relation to the peace settlement was the Ministerial Commission for the League of Nations which was brought together at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 1917 and which was charged with ‘the working out of a plan for a League of Nations.’60 That this commission was chaired by Bourgeois is noteworthy because of the role of this long-standing advocate of international organisation as chief French delegate to The Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, the workings of which were discussed in detail in his Pour la Société des Nations (1910). It was a role which doubtless greatly contributed to Bourgeois’s influence as ‘the leading French exponent of the League of Nations.’61 The appointment of Bourgeois as chair of what soon became known as the ‘Commission Bourgeois,’ served to highlight  the French view  that  there was  a  strong  thread of  continuity between The Hague conferences and the prospective LON.62 Andrew Williams observes that in his opening speech to the commission on September 28, French Foreign Minister [Alexandre] Ribot acknowledged that Wilson’s call for a League had provoked the setting up of the Commission, but he also laid emphasis on the French belief that his LON proposal was not entirely new, but had been an intended integral future part of the Hague discussions of 1899 and 1907 and the system of bilateral Arbitration Agreements set up before the war as a result of these talks. The Commission therefore based its legitimacy not only on Allied declarations of faith in a post-war LON, but also on French notions of a long established need to codify international law.63

 Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 68.  Ibid. See also Andrew Williams, Failed imagination?, 56. 61  Russell, Theories of International Relations, 338–9 and William Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ International Conciliation, no. 231 (1927): 279–302, 287. 62  Williams, Failed imagination?, 56. 63  Ibid. The Hague Conference of 1899 ‘had made a common form of arbitration treaty possible, and greatly simplified the process of obtaining a decision, by creating a standing judicial machinery of which governments that were so minded might avail themselves at any time.’ Frederick Pollock, The League of Nations, 2nd ed.  (London: Stevens and Sons, Limited, 1922), 18. 59 60

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It should be noted that against the background of the war, Bourgeois had abandoned entirely the position he had entertained in 1910 in respect to sanctions. In the conclusion of Pour la Société des Nations, Bourgeois addressed those critics who objected that the obligations entered into at The Hague conferences, even where they were not purely moral or conditional but were of a truly juridical character, were of limited utility  as they had no military sanction to guarantee them. ‘Where is,’ Bourgeois had the critics asking, ‘the international gendarmerie which will assure the respect for them?’64 In responding to this objection, which he insisted had to be faced, Bourgeois expressed confidence in the progress that had been made at The Hague…. Had not great military states carried out the awards of arbitration tribunals, although the latter had no force with which to back their awards? In view of this fact, Bourgeois was confident that a similar good faith could be relied upon in the case of the multilateral Hague Conventions, in the support of which so many nations were interested. The pressure of universal public opinion, he declared, would hold nations to their contracts.65

However, only four years after Pour la Société des Nations appeared, the multilateral treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium was most gravely violated and France found itself  facing a supreme emergency.  These were developments which could not but lead to the Hobbesian conclusion that covenants must be backed by swords.66 The need for effective sanctions was defended by Ribot in front of the Chamber of Deputies on August 2, 1917, in the context of which he put forward the proposition that ‘law without force’ is little but ‘the humiliation of justice by violence.’67 Accordingly, as stated by Georges Scelle and René Cassin, professors in the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris and members of the French unit of the CISSIR, namely, the  Commission française de coordination des hautes études internationales, the Commission Bourgeois was oriented toward  a ‘super-State construction, controlled and capable of coercive action.’68 As Morley explained, the French Ministerial Commission for the  Bourgeois, Pour la Société des Nations, 278.  Russell, Theories of International Relations, 339. See also Bourgeois, Pour la Société des Nations, 278–84. 66  Russell, Theories of International Relations, 339. 67  Alexandre Ribot, 1917, quoted in Williams, Failed imagination?, 56. 68  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 68. 64 65

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League of Nations, in a statement of principles issued on June 8, 1918, strongly emphasised sanctions and the maintenance of peace by force. Although it expressly stated that ‘La Société des Nations n’a pas pour objet l’établissement d’un état politique international],’ it nevertheless envisaged a standing international army, with commander-in-chief and permanent general staff. Particularly noteworthy is the ruthlessness of the measures proposed to exercise ‘une contrainte efficace sur l’Etat qui aura méconnu le pacte [covenant] social.’ These included not merely such measures as a rigorous blockade, but also a long list of contemplated legal sanctions, to be directed against nationals of the recalcitrant State, among which may be mentioned their exclusion from law courts in countries members of the League, and the suspension of copyright protection in the case of authors…. In other respects this war-time French draft showed a more constructive nature. It advocated a world court for justiciable disputes, the execution of its decisions to be insured, if necessary, by ‘l’application de sanctions diplomatiques, juridiques, économiques, mililtaires.’69

According to Morley, the Commission Bourgeois’s programme (which was, as Rappard described it, ‘much more drastic in its ambitious pacifism’ than was an Anglo-American agreement on which discussion of the constitution of the LON would be based), was hardly likely to ‘commend itself to the Anglo-Saxon mind,’ not least because its ‘mere existence’ would have ‘unpredictable effects on the normal course of peaceful international life.’70 The Commission of the League of Nations was established by the Peace Commission at a plenary session on January 25, 1919, and met on ten occasions, dating from February 3, over a period of eleven days in House’s room on the third floor of the Hôtel de Crillon, the headquarters of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace.71 The Crillon Commission, as it was informally known, was initially composed of fifteen members: two representatives from each of the five major powers and five elected ‘to represent all the Powers with special interests.’ The five individuals elected to represent the latter group of powers came from Belgium, Brazil, China,  Morley, Society of Nations, 13–4.  Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 292 and Morley, Society of Nations, 14. 71  Sami Sarè, The League of Nations and the Debate on Disarmament (1918–1919) (Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2013), 147n. 69 70

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Portugal and Serbia. However, as a result of decision at the second meeting of the Crillon Commission on February 4, by the time of its fourth meeting on February 6, the number of individuals representing the group of states  designated as  all the powers with special interests had been augmented: another four members joined the commission, one representative each of Greece, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.72 The calibre of its membership was impressive: it included President Wilson, who served as its chair; Epitácio Lindolfo da Silva Pessoa, the future president of Brazil; Karel Kramář, Eleftherios Venizelos and Orlando, the prime ministers of Czechoslovakia, Greece and Italy, respectively; Hymans, the Belgian foreign minister; Makino, the former foreign minister of Japan; and Scialoja and Koo, future foreign ministers of Italy and China respectively. Cecil and Smuts represented the British Empire on the commission and Bourgeois, a former prime minister, was one of two French representatives on it.73 As noted, the basis for the commission’s deliberations was an Anglo-­ American agreement or what was informally known as the Hurst-Miller draft, the latter description being derived from the names of its principal architects:  David Hunter Miller, an American expert on international ­treaties, and Cecil Hurst, a legal expert from the British Foreign Office.74 On the morning of February 11, the Crillon Commission convened for the eighth time at a meeting which saw the French delegation insist on an international control of military forces and on an international force with a view to ensuring respect for the covenant. The French delegation maintained, as France would continue to maintain in League forums, that ‘if the League does not absolutely insure the security of its members, those members are not justified in trusting the efficacy of the Covenant as a way of permanent peace,’ in which case, each State must remain ‘the sole judge of its armament requirements.’75 On the same day, the French delegation proposed three amendments to the covenant as a response to, as Bourgeois explained, disquiet on the part of the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate.76 The most important of these amendments was an amendment to  Morley, Society of Nations, 77–8.  Ibid., 78–9. 74  Ibid., 82. 75  Ibid., 108. 76  The first proposed amendment ‘qualified the conditions of membership in the League so as to make “effective guarantees” of its intention to respect the Covenant a prerequisite for the admission of a new State and so as to emphasize the obligation of the new member to 72 73

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Article 8 which was divided into two parts. The first part of the amendment  provided that in developing plans for disarmament, the council should pay ‘due regard, in determining the number of troops, not only to the relative strength of the different States, but also to the risks to which they are exposed by their geographical situation and the nature of their frontiers,’ a provision that found acceptance in a modified form and which was subsequently expressed in Article 8 (2) of the final covenant.77 As Bourgeois later stated, this part of the amendment concerned future dangers that may arise that are not equal for all. There are special dangers for countries like France, Belgium, Serbia, and the new States that are in the stage of formation in Central Europe. It is necessary to give them special guarantees, and this has been recognized by the committee, when it states that special account should be taken of the geographical situation of, and the mode of application to, each State in the scale of armaments. Where the frontiers are more exposed it must be possible to have stronger systems of defense, and possibly also greater armaments.78

This argument was not controversial. As Bourgeois observed, the Crillon Commission had recognised the fact that certain powers happened to be in a ‘difficult position’ and that  for this reason  it had acknowledged  that it might be necessary to allow them ‘stronger systems of defense, and possibly also greater armaments.’ Bourgeois stated that the commission’s response to the special dangers faced by certain countries was ‘all right,’ but added that there was ‘no doubt’ that it would ‘place a special burden’ on them and would ‘hamper them in the peaceful competition that is the life of the world.’79 What followed from this, according to Bourgeois, were the two proposals contained within the second part of the French amendment to Article 8: that the council conform to the League’s regulations on armaments. The essence of this amendment, which strengthened somewhat the super-governmental aspect of the new international association, was accepted in principle by the Commission and now finds place in the second paragraph of Article 1 of the Covenant.’ The third French amendment proposed at the eighth meeting would have applied sanctions to enforce a unanimous opinion of the Council on a dispute submitted to it. This amendment was referred to the drafting committee of the commission but was not incorporated in the final covenant (ibid., 108–9, 111). 77  Léon Bourgeois, 1919 quoted ibid., 109. See also Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 209. 78  ‘Speeches Delivered before the Peace Conference by Members of the Commission of the League of Nations: Speech of M.  Léon Bourgeois,’ International Conciliation, no. 135 (1919): 365–71, 368. 79  Ibid.

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shall institute an international control of military forces troops and armaments of the High Contracting Parties which agree to submit thereto it in all good faith. It shall determine conditions which are necessary for assuring the permanent existence and organization of an international force.80

According to Miller, although the French delegation had insisted on these proposals, they were ‘never acceptable’ to the British or to Wilson.81 Wilson and Cecil explained that their countries would not accept such extensive League controls. Wilson further stated that in the case of the United States, the idea of international control of military forces was unconstitutional, adding that he feared that the effect of the proposals would be to substitute ‘international militarism for national militarism.’82 Bourgeois’s sharp response was that unless the provisions of the covenant were able to be  given practical effect, the LON ‘will be only a dangerous façade.’83 The conflict between the Anglo-Saxon and French conceptions of the LON was thus laid bare at the eighth meeting.84 It should be noted that in President Wilson’s first draft of the covenant, it was envisaged that security would be ‘provided by military and naval sanctions exercised under the aegis of the League of Nations,’ a position that would seem to follow from his understanding that the primary purpose of the LON was to protect against external aggression the territorial integrity and political independence of its members and that the covenant must be more than a mere agreement.85 Indeed, Wilson at first went as far as to ‘envisage the establishment of an international army.’86 Article 4 of his second draft ‘provided for abolition of conscription among the Contracting Powers and agreement “that their future forces of defence and of international action [writer’s italics] shall consist of militia or volunteers”,’ a proposal that was a  Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 207. See also Morley, Society of Nations, 109.  Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 209. 82  Woodrow Wilson, 1919, quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 110 and Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 209. 83  Bourgeois, 1919 quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 110. Bourgeois stressed ‘the importance of establishing each State member of the League in a position of “national security.” He regarded it as most important that there should be expressed in the Covenant some definite provision by which the force of the League would be immediately available for the support of any State which might be attacked.’ Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 210. 84  Ibid. 85  Ibid., 18. See also Russell, Theories of International Relations, 343. 86  Morley, Society of Nations, 35. As Morley pointed out, despite the cleavage that emerged between the French and Anglo-American positions, the French position was ‘very similar to that inherent in the earlier American program for a “league to enforce peace”’ (ibid., 120). 80 81

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source of ‘acute anxiety’ among his advisers and which was later exploited by elements in the United States who opposed American membership of the LON.87 However, at the Peace Conference, Wilson not only rejected the idea of an international force but  made a point  of declaring that although the LON had been equipped with means of enforcement, it did not lay a stress on sanctions. On February 14, in a speech before the conference at the reading of the draft of the LON’s constitution, Wilson stated the following: ‘Armed force is in the background in this program, but it is in the background, and if the moral force of the world will not suffice, the physical force of the world shall. But that is the last resort, because this intended as a constitution of peace, not as a league of war.’88 Cecil equally understood that the LON could not be a mere agreement: in a letter to Colonel House in July 1918, Cecil, responding to House’s proposal that the ‘components of the league make a profession of faith to the effect that they will abide by a code of honour,’ wrote the following: ‘I am convinced that unless some form of coercion can be devised which will work more or less automatically no league of peace will endure.’89 At the same time Cecil, who told House that generally speaking he was ‘not very much impressed’ by the French proposals, saw the primary function of the LON as that of preventing war ‘by resort to a peaceful procedure of conference, discussion, and delay in restraint in war.’90 He emphasised the ‘pacifying virtues of open diplomacy and public opinion’ and downplayed the role of international coercion.91 Cecil stated in one of his addresses that: 87  Ibid. Rappard quoted  the following from an address given to the nation by Wilson  on January 22, 1917: ‘It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so much greater than the force of any nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto formed or projected, that no nation, no probably combination of nations could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organized major forces of mankind.’ Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 282. 88  ‘Speeches Delivered before the Peace Conference by Members of the Commission of the League of Nations: Speech Delivered by President Wilson before the Peace Conference at the reading of the draft of the Constitution of the League of Nations,’ International Conciliation, no. 135 (1919): 355–64, 360. 89  Lord Robert Cecil to Colonel House, 22 July 1918, in Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 4, 40. 90  Cecil to House, 22 July 1918, in Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 4, 39–40 and Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 284. See also Russell, Theories of International Relations, 344. 91  Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 284.

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The most important step we can now take is to devise machinery which, in case of international dispute, will, at the least, delay the outbreak of war, and secure full an open discussion of the causes of the quarrel. For that purpose…all that would be necessary would be a treaty binding the signatories never to wage war themselves or permit others to wage war till a formal conference of nations had been held to enquire into and, if possible, decide upon the dispute. It is probably true, at least in theory, that decisions would be difficult to obtain, for the decisions of such a conference, like all other international proceedings, would have to be unanimous to be binding. But since the important thing is to secure delay and open discussion, that is to say, time to enable public opinion to act and information to instruct it, this is not a serious objection to the proposal. Indeed, from one point of view, it is an advantage, since it avoids any interference with national sovereignty except the interposition of a delay in seeking redress by force of arms. That is the essential thing, and to secure it, the treaty would require each of the signatories to use their whole force, economical as well as military, against any nation that forced on war before a conference had been held. To that extent, and to that extent only, international coercion would be necessary.92

At the eighth meeting of the commission, a reconciliation between the Anglo-American and French positions was attempted by Cecil who suggested that the French demand for international military control might be satisfied by the following provision: ‘A permanent commission shall be established to advise the League of Nations on naval and military questions.’93 After a number of modifications made to it in order to better meet French demands, Cecil’s compromise solution emerged as Article 9 of the final covenant, this article serving as the basis for the creation of the LON’s Permanent Advisory Commission on Disarmament.94 The eighth meeting of the Crillon Commission adjourned on the afternoon of February 11 by which time it had undertaken a first reading of all twenty-two articles of the Hurst-Miller draft. At this point, it appointed a drafting committee, charging it with revising the draft text in line with the changes upon which the members of the commission had reached agreement. The drafting committee met the following day whereupon it adopted the compromise  provision  proposed by Cecil, 92  Robert Cecil, quoted in Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 284–5. See also ‘Speech Delivered before the Peace Conference by Members of the Commission of the League of Nations,’ 372–5. 93  Morley, Society of Nations, 111. 94  Ibid.

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who was a member of this committee, in regard to the constitution of the aforementioned permanent advisory commission. This did not prevent the French delegate on the committee,  namely,  Larnaude, from proposing amendments concerning an international force.95 In his diary, Miller, who was present at the draft committee meeting, described the ensuing debate as follows: The committee considered and went through the draft during the morning but reached difficulties with the French who proposed amendments regarding an international armed force. Finally, Cecil, saying that he was speaking very frankly but in private, said: that America had nothing to gain from the League of Nations; that she could let European affairs go and take care of her own; the offer that was made by America for support was practically a present to France; and that to a certain but to a lesser extent this was the position of Great Britain which, while vitally interested in Continental affairs, yet to a certain extent could stand apart. Accordingly, he wished to say very frankly to the French delegates that in his view they were saying to America, and to a lesser extent Great Britain, that because more was not offered they would not take the gift that was at hand, and he warned them very frankly that the alternative offer which we have made, if the League of Nations was not successful, was an alliance between Great Britain and the United States. He asked them to consider this before they made any final conclusion. At this the meeting adjourned for lunch.96

On the morning of February 13, the ninth meeting of the Peace Conference’s Commission on the LON convened in order to undertake the second reading of the draft covenant, whereupon the French delegation proposed an amendment whereby the ‘beginning of the preamble would have condemned those responsible for the war and characterized the LON as a “development” of the work of The Hague Peace Conferences.’97 The first aspect of the amendment was withdrawn following criticism of it by a Portuguese delegate, namely, Jaime Batalha Reis, as being contrary to the unifying spirit of the LON and unacceptable to states which were neutral during the war. At to the second, it was voted down on the ground that to characterise the ‘the new international orga-

 Ibid., 111–3.  David Hunter Miller, quoted ibid., 113. 97  Morley, Society of Nations, 114. 95 96

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nization as a mere continuation’ of the efforts of The Hague conferences was ‘highly misleading.’98 The tenth meeting of the commission took place on the afternoon of February 13, commencing with a renewed and difficult debate on the French proposal for an international military control commission and for an international force to be placed at the disposal of the LON. The proposal for military control, which, like the proposal concerning international force had been modified since it was first put forward, took the form of an amendment to Article 8 which read as follows: The High Contracting Parties being determined to interchange full and frank information as to the scale of their armaments, their military and naval programmes, and the condition of such of their industries as are adaptable to warlike purposes, will appoint a committee for the purpose of ascertaining the necessary information.99

Although this amendment did not ‘confer powers of official inspection,’ Bourgeois made the intentions behind it clear in stating the following: that ‘by a thorough-going supervision of armaments the LON would discourage any attempt at war. On the other hand, if such verification were not established, every ambitious State, or State of imperialistic leanings, would have plenty of time to organise itself secretly and to proceed with a sudden attack. War would be encouraged by the lack of such verification.’100 The proposed amendment was lost twelve votes to three with only Czechoslovakia supporting the French position, the Czechoslovakian delegate having proposed that military control be exercised in relation to Germany but not in relation to the Allied powers on the basis that Germany was not to be trusted. Although the French delegates distanced themselves from the Czechoslovakian proposal, arguing that all states should be subject to military controls, its mention in this context  no doubt rein98  Ibid., 114–5. Jaime Batalha Reis stated: ‘The League of Nations is a work of union and concord preparing a future of peace between peoples. I would not like to see its organic Act begin with words of condemnation and punishment. How could the nations which remained neutral during the war accept the preamble of the Covenant if it were thus drawn up?’ (ibid., 114). 99  Commission of the LON, 1919, quoted in Frederick Pollock, The League of Nations, 131–2. 100  Pollock, The League of Nations, 125 and Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and his Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 57–8. See also Morley, Society of Nations, 19.

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forced the view that the French demands were greatly motivated by fear and resentment of Germany. 101 In order to conciliate French feelings, Cecil proposed extending the ‘advisory, as contrasted with the supervisory, powers’ of the permanent commission which had by now been accepted. Cecil’s latest amendment, which was approved by the tenth meeting, now read as follows: ‘A permanent Commission shall be constituted to advise the League on the execution of the provisions of Article 8 and on military and naval questions generally.’102 The  British Foreign Office’s official commentary on the final draft of the covenant, having noted that the exchange of information provided for in the last paragraph of Article 8 would very likely be effected through the permanent commission, declared the following: The suggestion that this Commission might be given a general power of inspection and supervision, in order to ensure observance of Article VIII, was rejected for several reasons. In the first place, such a power would not be tolerated by many national States at the present day, but would cause friction and hostility to the idea of the League; nor, in fact, is it in harmony with the assumption of mutual good faith on which the League is founded, seeing that the members agree to exchange full and frank information; nor, finally, would it really be of practical use. Preparations for war on a large scale cannot be concealed, while no inspection could hope to discover such really important secrets as new gases and explosives, and other inventions of details.103

In regard to the second of the two French proposals mentioned above, it should be noted that at the tenth meeting it came in the form of an amendment to Article 9 providing for the creation of international general staff. The French amendment on the means of enforcing the covenant now read as follows:

 Morley, Society of Nations, 119.  Cecil, 1919, quoted ibid. and Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 243. Cecil’s amendment was later modified to read as follows: ‘A permanent commission shall be constituted to advise the Council on the execution of the provisions of Articles 1 and 8 and on military, naval and air questions generally’ (Morley, Society of Nations, 119). 103  ‘Appendix 2: The Covenant of the League of Nations With a  Commentary  [by the British Foreign Office] Thereon,’ in Pollock, The League of Nations, 230. On the representative nature of the British Foreign Office commentary on the covenant, see Pollock, The League of Nations, 91. 101 102

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A permanent body shall be created in order to plan and prepare the military and naval program by which obligations imposed upon the High Contracting Parties by the present Covenant shall be enforced, and in order to give immediate effect to it in any urgent situation that may arise.104

The French delegates maintained that their proposal for an international general staff placed at the service of the LON should be seen ‘“as a happy medium” between their original plan for a levy of national military contingents under League orders and the “extremely vague” Commission advocated by Lord Robert Cecil.’105 However, this proposal was also rejected, with a majority of the commission adopting the view that the permanent commission proposed by Cecil was ‘an adequate substitute for the French effort to create an international army.’106 Although noting that Article 9 ‘purposely stopped short of creating a real General Staff’ and expressing the hope that some formula serving to reinforce the pledges in the covenant would in future be adopted, Frederick Pollock, in an exposition of the covenant dedicated to ‘Roberto’ Cecil, wondered whether it was possible to draw a ‘sharp line…between the functions of a military intelligence department’ which, he contended, the Cecil amendment ‘undoubtedly’ created, ‘and those of a general staff.’107  This  last  point aside, Pollock appeared  somewhat doubtful  about the  strength of the British government’s case against the French proposal. Although he conceded that it might be the case that ‘a cosmopolitan staff could not study beforehand the precise measures to be taken against a hypothetical defiance of the League by a rebellious minority,’ as the British government argued, he could not help but note that aside from national security considerations, the British government’s objection to the French proposal was based on reasons which were ‘patriotic,’  adding that this  was  ‘frankly’ admitted in the Foreign Office’s commentary on the covenant. In Pollock’s 104  Minutes (English), tenth meeting,  1919, quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 120 and Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 260. 105  Morley, Society of Nations, 120. This amendment would be reintroduced at the eleventh meeting of the Crillon Commission on March 22. See also Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 319–20. 106  Article 9 of the final draft of the covenant was worded as follows: ‘A permanent commission shall be constituted to advise the Council on the execution of the provisions of Articles 1 and on military, naval and air questions generally.’ Morley, Society of Nations, 119–20. See also Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 70. 107  Pollock, The League of Nations, 128–9,133.

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view, the British objections  to the French proposal were not  necessarily  insurmountable:  the fact that the  French government, ‘doubtless advised by its own General Staff, thought otherwise…[was]…enough to show that a different opinion is arguable.’  108 In any case, as stated by the Foreign Office, the precise British view of the French amendment to Article 9, which Pollock presumed was also the American view, was as follows: Nor can the Commission fill the rôle of an International General Staff. The function of a General Staff is preparation for war, and the latter requires the envisagement of a definite enemy. It would plainly be impossible for British officers to take part in concerting plans, however, hypothetical against their own country, with any semblance of reality; and all the members of a staff must work together with complete confidence. It is further evident that no State would communicate to the nationals of its potential enemies the information as to its own strategic plans necessary for a concerted scheme of defence. The most that can be done in this direction by the Commission is to collect non-confidential information of military value, and possibly to work out certain transit questions of a special character.109

The  Anglo-American disposition was to be wary of prescribing with great precision  what action the LON ‘should take  in certain events.’ During the drafting, Wilson used his influence to ensure that the document was characterised by simplicity and did not provide for detailed machinery. It was to this end, as Russell noted, that he eliminated from Colonel House’s draft  for a league,  which Wilson  used as a basis of his own proposals, ‘the provision for a world court.’110 Wilson explained to the Peace Conference, immediately after pointing out  that armed force was in the background of the programme, his reasoning as  to why he sought a document characterised by simplicity as follows: I was  unable to see the variety of circumstances with which this League would have to deal. I was unable, therefore, to plan all the machinery that might be necessary to meet the differing and unexpected contingencies.

 Ibid., 129.  ‘Appendix 2:  The Covenant of the League of Nations With a Commentary [by the British Foreign Office] Thereon,’ in Pollock, The League of Nations, 230–1. 110  Ibid., 225, and Russell, Theories of International Relations, 341. 108 109

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Therefore, I should say of this document that it is not a straitjacket, but a vehicle of life.111

The British Foreign Office’s commentary  on the covenant  echoed this view, noting that a number of amendments prescribing what action the LON should take in certain circumstances  and which  ‘tended to greater precision generally,’ had been ‘deliberately rejected.’112 The commentary went on to state that the rejection of such amendments was not due to a lack of sympathy for the proposals in question, but was rather ‘because it was thought better to leave the hands of the statesmen of the future as free as possible;’ it declared in Wilsonian terms that leaving the hands of statesmen largely free was necessary in order to ‘allow the League, as a living organism, to discover its own best lines of development.’113 The French delegation were bitterly disappointed by the refusal of the Crillon Commission to adopt their proposals concerning  the  ‘organisation of an international armed force or even of a simple General Staff placed at the disposal of the League’ and clearly viewed Cecil’s compromise as falling far short of what the international organisation of peace required.114 In a succinct statement of the French position, Larnaude told the tenth meeting of the commission the following: One of the conditions necessary for the League of Nations to be able to impose peace, is that the whole world knows that she has the means to impose it and to impose it at once. There is no other way to enforce peace but by force intelligently placed at the disposal of the League of Nations.115

In an address to the Plenary Inter-Allied Conference on February 14 to which the draft agreement for the LON was presented, Bourgeois, after having declared himself satisfied with the plan for a full and frank exchange of information concerning armaments and their means of production, drew attention to the fact that his proposal for a permanent organisation 111  ‘Speeches Delivered before the Peace Conference by Members of the Commission of the League of Nations: Speech Delivered by President Wilson before the Peace Conference at the reading of the draft of the Constitution of the League of Nations,’ 360. 112  ‘Appendix 2: The Covenant of the League of Nations With a  Commentary [by the British Foreign Office] Thereon,’ in Pollock, The League of Nations, 225. 113  Ibid. 114  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 69–70. 115  Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 256. Emphasis added.

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‘for purposes of inspection’ had not been embodied in the text ‘at this moment.’116 He went on to argue the case for the amendment concerning the organisation of an international force, stating the following: [S]upposing that there is on the part of the aggressor a will to precipitate a situation, then we must provide for the possibility. For this purpose it would be desirable to have all the means of resistance studied and concerted action prepared before the occasion arises. This would be the best check against any ill design. If the would-be aggressor knows that resistance is fully prepared against any action such as he contemplated then he will be restrained. Where, on the other hand, he knows that no such preparation exists and that sudden action on his part would encounter no prepared and well-thought-­ out resistance, perhaps he would not be restrained and it would be extremely dangerous. If you do not wish to see the terrible ordeal through which the world has passed renewed in the future, we ought to have a permanent organization to prepare the military and naval means of execution and make them ready in case of emergency.117

Bourgeois noted that some members of the Crillon Commission had rejected the French amendment to Article 9 on the ground that it posed constitutional difficulties, adding that in light of this the French delegation had agreed to the text without that amendment. Nonetheless, Bourgeois stated that the French delegation thought that the principle embodied in that amendment, as with that embodied in the French amendment to Article 8, should be ‘put before public opinion at the same time as the scheme to which we have agreed.’118 Bourgeois continued to argue the case for his amendments even after the revised form of the covenant was unanimously adopted by the representatives of the Allied and Associated Powers in Plenary Conference at Paris on April 28, 1919.119 Notably, he set forth his views in a special French number of the Times on September 6, 1919, referring therein to two ‘very important’ amendments which embodied conditions that France regarded as ‘indispensable’ and offering there in the following observation: ‘It has been said very justly that the greatest force upon which the League of Nations can rely is that 116  ‘Speeches Delivered before the Peace Conference by Members of the Commission of the League of Nations: Speech of M. Léon Bourgeois,’ 369. 117  Ibid., 370. 118  Ibid. 119  ‘Appendix 2: The Covenant of the League of Nations With a  Commentary [by the British Foreign Office] Thereon,’ in Pollock, The League of Nations, 224.

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of an enlightened public opinion. How can public opinion be informed and how can it act, if no preliminary measures of control and preparation are enacted?’120 Rappard, who was a Swiss delegate to the Peace Conference, claimed that Bourgeois’s influence on the drafting of the covenant was ‘very slight,’ a point which Bourgeois himself acknowledged to the extent that he openly lamented the fact that the French delegates were at a disadvantage because they found themselves confined to proposing amendments to a text that was not their own.121 Rappard’s explanation for Bourgeois’s lack of influence, however, went beyond the fact that debate on the covenant was led by the American and British delegations, encompassing the point that everyone knew that the French government was not ‘fully behind’ the Bourgeois draft.122 Rappard was referring in particular to the fact that the ‘Tiger’ Clemenceau was ‘notoriously sceptical about the possibilities of establishing peace on a permanent basis and openly hostile to any schemes which might tend to deprive France of the spoils of her hard-won victory, and of the advantages of her momentary military superiority.’123 This became apparent in conversations between Wilson and Clemenceau soon after Wilson arrived in Paris in the course of which the latter insisted before all on French security and suggested that the League was a ‘luxury, perhaps even a danger.’124 As we have seen, Bourgeois was a long-standing supporter of legal principles of international organisation and as such was not a cynic in the manner of his chief.125 Nonetheless, like most of his compatriots he embraced a ‘punitive, as opposed to the Wilsonian impartial conception of peace’; this, Rappard observed by way of further explaining Bourgeois’s limited

 Léon Bourgeois, 1919, in Pollock, The League of Nations, 131.  Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 287, 292. See also Morley, Society of Nations, 121. Bourgeois complained about the Anglo-American monopoly of the drafting process at the tenth meeting of the Crillon Commission. 122  Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 292. 123  Ibid., 287. Russell noted that Clemenceau was ‘openly contemptuous of the League,’ was ‘frankly a believer in the balance of power system’  and that he announced on the eve of the Peace Conference in the Chamber of Deputies ‘that if entrusted with the making of peace he would work for a treaty based on the old principle.’ Russell, Theories of International Relations, 339n. 124  Morley, Society of Nations, 30n. 125  Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 287 and Russell, Theories of International Relations, 339. 120 121

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influence, caused him to defend positions that were at their basis ‘inconsistent with the political philosophy underlying his draft.’126 In a speech at the constitutive general assembly of the French League of Nations Association on November 10, 1918, Bourgeois declared: ‘Now the hour of liberation, of reparations, of restitutions has sounded. And now equally comes the hour of punishment.’127 In Bourgeois’s view, the LON was to be established by the Allied and Associated nations only, following which membership might be extended to neutrals who had shown themselves to be trustworthy. As for Germany, Bourgeois did not intend that it should be excluded from the LON permanently, declaring that ‘no one dreams of classing forever the states of the world into two camps.’128 However, he did intend that Germany would be excluded for an indefinite period: until that time it had shown herself to be sufficiently repentant. As he explained to his French League of Nations Association audience, while the prospective League ‘tends towards universality,’ it can only realise its purpose if its membership is limited to ‘free peoples who have proved faithful to their given word, who have observed all the obligations to which their past faults may have committed them, who, in a word, offer all the necessary actual and legal guarantees.’129 Tellingly in regard to suspicions regarding the motivations behind the amendments the French delegation proposed at the Crillon Commission, Bourgeois told the aforementioned meeting that ‘so long as certain great Powers remain outside the Society of Nations, the international force must be maintained at a strength which will insure its triumph.’ 130 According to Rappard, of all the demands that Bourgeois made at the Peace Conference, it was only the demand that the LON be confined to 126  Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 287, 292. Cecil declared at the Crillon Commission that in relation to the French amendment concerning a General Staff, that  the League ‘cannot be considered an alliance against Germany. Nothing would more quickly imperil peace.’ Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 58. 127  Léon Bourgeois, 1918, quoted in Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 288. 128  Léon Bourgeois, 1918, quoted in Russell, Theories of International Relations, 339. 129  Bourgeois, 1918, quoted in Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 288. See also Russell, Theories of International Relations, 339. 130  Bourgeois, 1918, quoted in Russell, Theories of International Relations, 340. Addressing the issue of international force more generally, Bourgeois stated that it must ‘be able to overcome all opposition, unjustified and henceforth criminal, on the part of any covenant-breaking State.’ Bourgeois, 1918, quoted in Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 288.

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the Allied and Associated powers that succeeded in full, this being ‘not a particularly constructive achievement’ as shown by subsequent events in Rappard’s view.131 As the commentary on the covenant by  the  British Foreign Office noted, Article 4 of the covenant effectively allowed that Germany, and for that matter Russia (the latter being a state cited in an earlier Cecil draft of the covenant as an example of a ‘definitely untrustworthy and hostile’ state given its ‘Bolshevist Government’), could only be admitted to the LON  if  they had ‘established themselves as Great Powers that can be trusted to honour their obligations.’132 It should also be noted that another of the French demands at the Crillon Commission was that the headquarters of the LON be located in Brussels on the basis that, in the words of Hymans, ‘the foundation of the League of Nations was intimately connected to the war. We should not therefore seek to blot out its memories, but, on the contrary, to uphold them as an example of value to the cause of right and of humanity.’133 However, the proposal of Orlando that Geneva be selected had the strong support of Wilson and Cecil, both of whom strongly argued in favour of locating the seat of the LON in a centre that had been neutral during the war.134 Disappointment of a similar kind to that experienced by France as a result of the Crillon Commission’s refusal to adopt France’s proposals concerning means to impose peace arose out of the rejection by the Senate of the United States of the Treaty of Guarantee on March 19, 1920, even though it was a move that wholly consistent with its earlier rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and hence United States membership of the LON. An agreement to guarantee the French frontier against unprovoked German  Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 292–3.  ‘Appendix 2: The Covenant of the League of Nations With a  Commentary [by the British Foreign Office] Thereon,’ in Pollock, The League of Nations, 228. For the statement concerning dangerous and hostile states and that concerning Bolshevik Russia, see Document 6: ‘The Cecil Plan, 14 January 1919,’ in Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 2, 61. Russell wrote that ‘[e]xcept for the exclusion of Bolshevist Russia,’ Cecil was not ‘particularly concerned about excluding other states.’ Russell, Theories of International Relations, 344. Miller recorded that at the third meeting of the Crillon Commission, Cecil asked Hymans ‘if it was in his imagination that Germany might come in as a great power.’ Miller  noted that in response to this question ‘there was a general demurrer.’ Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, 156. 133  Minutes, fourteenth meeting, 1919, quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 190–1. See also Rappard, ‘The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,’ 292–3. Brussels was ‘the only serious alternative to Geneva’ as the seat of the League. Pollock, The League of Nations, 116. 134  Morley, Society of Nations, 190. 131 132

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aggression, the Treaty  of Guarantee  had been proposed at the Peace Conference by Lloyd George and Wilson, both of whom signed it on June 28, ‘in exchange for the Foch-Tardieu plan to push back to the Rhine the military frontier of Germany.’135 The treaty was ratified by the British Parliament in July 1919 conditional upon its ratification by the United States. Its rejection by the United States thus carried with it ‘the freeing of England from its undertaking as well,’ making ‘it clear to everyone that the coalition was indeed a thing of the past, and that the tendency of the Anglo-Saxons was and was to remain essentially opposed to automatic security obligations.’136 Despite the French representatives’ limited achievements at the Crillon Commission and the American failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, French opinion remained favourable towards Geneva. It  counted on the idea that French security doctrines ultimately would prevail there.137 Indeed, France would never waver (and in the view of many nonFrench  observers in the LON’s early days was not expected to waver), in  its commitment to the idea of an ‘preventative and punitive international force,’ an idea that would be pursued with renewed vigour in the context of the Disarmament Conference  which commenced in Geneva in February 1932.138 French confidence that France’s views would eventually gain favour was soon shaken: on October 4, 1921, the assembly, showing itself to be hostile, according to Scelle and Cassin, to Article 16 of the covenant, issued its ‘Resolutions Regarding the Economic Weapon.’139 In regard to these resolutions which were adopted unanimously except for the vote of Persia, some background is necessary.140 B. J. C. McKercher points out that on the very day the Treaty of Versailles was signed, that is, on June 28, 1919, 135  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 69. The  Foch-Tardieu  plan was named after Marshal Ferdinand Foch and the French politician and later prime minister, Andrė Tardieu. Tardieu assisted Clemenceau at the Paris Peace Conference. 136  Ibid. 137  Ibid., 70. 138  League of Nations, Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, Proposal of the French Delegation, Conf. D. 56, 1. See also Pollock, The League of Nations, 133; Morley, Society of Nations, 120–1; and Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 69–70. 139  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 70. 140  Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, ‘League of Nations Sanctions,’ Spectator, August 23, 1935, 7.

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the Economic and Financial Section of the secretariat under the director ship of Sir James Arthur Salter, a former British Treasury official, began to explore the means by which the LON could uphold peace via the collective efforts of its members. To this end, he adds, Salter ‘canvassed blockade experts in London about how to give form to the idea of sanctions.’141 As a result of Salter’s efforts, the LON received a number of communications from Great Britain which argued that as ‘economic pressure applied to a modern State is likely to produce decisive effects…naval and military action should only be employed in the last resort.’142 In September of 1919, Salter issued a document in which he insisted that the secretariat needed to address itself to the economic weapon as envisaged in Article 16 of the covenant, thereby initiating a programme of action which saw Drummond, with the approval of the council, push in the following year for the creation of an International Blockade Commission charged with the organisation of ‘the more permanent [blockade] machinery required and the principles on which it should work.’143 Drummond notably stated in this context that ‘the responsibility for enforcing economic pressure shall be decentralized, i.e. a primary responsibility rests on upon each Government to take action so far as its own nationals and national machinery are concerned, arrangements being made by them each separately and not by a single international authority.’144 In September 1920, the assembly accepted the secretariat’s proposals, calling on the council to create a subcommittee charged with establishing an International Blockade Commission. This subcommittee was presided over by Cecil, who had been Britain’s minister of blockade during the war, and according to McKercher, it was Cecil’s experience in that role that explained why the subcommittee’s recommendations bore ‘a decided British imprint.’145 In relation to this McKercher notes that the recommendations stipulated

141  B. J. C. McKercher, ‘The League of Nations and the Problem of Collective Security,’ in United Nations Library at Geneva: The League of Nations Archives, The League of Nations, 1920–1946, 68. See also Morley, Society of Nations, 280. 142  Farrer, 1919, quoted in McKercher, ‘The League of Nations and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 68. No given name or initials are recorded. 143  Sir Eric Drummond, 1919, quoted in McKercher, ‘The League of Nations and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 68. 144  Ibid. 145  McKercher, ‘The League of Nations and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 68.

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that to be legal, League economic sanctions had to be effective; that to be effective, they had to be vigorously enforced on sea, air, and land; that they had to be based on defined lists of contraband; and that they had to include the breaking of financial as well as trading links.146

McKercher also makes the following important observation: [T]he Council would control the Commission by selecting its members and accepting its reports for transmission to the Assembly; a breath of realpolitik since the burden of imposing sanctions would fall largely upon the great Powers. And, of course, this burden was doubled because, as the Secretariat, the Blockade Commission, and the League membership as a whole understood, if economic sanctions failed to contain aggressive Powers, armed sanctions would have to follow. The great Powers on the Council would do most of the fighting.147

The subcommittee issued its recommendations in November 1920 and by early 1921, the Blockade Commission had been established with Cecil as its chairman. The commission then set about preparing proposals on the economic weapon for consideration by the Second Assembly, proposals that, McKercher insists, ‘only sharpened the original promoted by Salter’s section and Cecil’s subcommittee,’ adding that with the adoption of these proposals by the Second Assembly, the LON ‘had in place a structure and principles for enforcing peace.’148 Not all observers at the time entertained a sanguine view of the endeavours of the Blockade Commission and, as indicated  above, the resultant ‘Resolutions Regarding the Economic Weapon’ of October 4, 1921, these being the form given to the Blockade Commission’s proposals by the assembly. Arthur Sweetser, an American national who was deputy director of the LON Secretariat’s Information Section, stated in relation to the ‘formidable-sounding’ Blockade Commission, that its existence was secured by those who ‘wished greater precision, in the case of wanton attack’ and who, in relation to this, wished to ‘explore the possibilities of Article 16 for the economic isolation of an aggressor State.’149 He con Ibid.  Ibid., 68–9. 148  Ibid., 69. 149  Arthur Sweetser, ‘The First Ten Years of the League of Nations,’ International Conciliation, no. 256 (1930): 5–59, 35. 146 147

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trasts this approach with that of ‘certain States, headed by Canada [who] wished to secure a limitation…of the responsibilities of the Covenant,’ a matter which I discuss below.150 Sweetser was no doubt correct that the intentions of those who secured the existence of the commission were as he described them. Yet, at the same time, it should be noted that in the context of the Blockade Commission, efforts were also made to limit the responsibilities of the covenant. Article 16 provided the following: Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard of its covenants under Articles XII, XIII, or XV, it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of War against all other Members of the League, which hereby undertake immediately to subject it to the severance of all trade or financial relations.

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Second Assembly, David Jayne Hill observed that it was the ‘evident inconvenience of fulfilling this obligation,’ the possibility that the sanctioning state would incur costs as a result of the severance of economic relations with the delinquent state and the ‘impossibility’ of making an economic blockade effective when used against a powerful state, that gave rise to a ‘general disposition to modify this article.’151 Hence, in the context of the Blockade Commission it was argued that ‘an “act of war” is not necessarily a “state of war” and that therefore the obligation would not automatically go into effect unless a member of the League chose to consider it a “state of war.”’152 Such an argument relied on the fact that the term state of war tended to be accorded a strict meaning in legal and diplomatic contexts. Yet attempts to exploit the narrow meaning often accorded the term were bound to prove problematic within the framework of discussions concerning the aforementioned obligation imposed on member states by Article 16: under Article 16 ‘it is explicitly an act of war which brings the obligation into operation, and not a state of war,’ a consideration which, according to Hill, rendered any attempt to draw a distinction between ‘an act and state of war wholly beside the mark’ and which, the

 Ibid.  David Jayne Hill, ‘The Second Assembly of the League of Nations,’ American Journal of International Law 16, no. 1 (1922): 59–65, 63. 152  Ibid. 150 151

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moment it was taken into account,  made  clear  the  ‘transparency’ of this ‘subterfuge.’153 A further attempt to limit the responsibilities entailed by the covenant can be seen in the ‘proposal to interpellate between an act of war and an economic blockade a decision by the Council that the obligation had come into effect as a necessary preliminary to action.’154 As Hill pointed out, such a requirement  probably  would have been  a contravention of Article 16 as there was no reference to the council in respect to an economic blockade in that article. Such a requirement was also unnecessary in that in the event of an act of war, the article called on states to immediately sever economic relations with the defaulting state. It was only when it came to the deployment of military, naval or air force that the council was brought into the frame under Article 16.155 Hill noted that with these interpretative tactics having ‘utterly failed to soften the obligation’ to immediately deploy the economic weapon against a state which had resorted to an act of war, a set of resolutions was adopted by the assembly without dissent: ‘Resolutions Regarding the Economic Weapon.’156 These resolutions were intended as amendments to the covenant ‘subject to the prescribed ratification of all the members of the Council and half the states represented in the Assembly. Pending that ratification, it was agreed that the amendments should constitute rules for guidance, which the Assembly recommends as a provisional measure to the Council and the members of the League as regards the application of Article 16.’157 In terms of limiting the responsibilities entailed by the covenant, what is most notable about these resolutions is resolution number four, which stated in part the following: ‘It is the duty of each member of the League to decide for itself whether a breach of the Covenant has been 153  Ibid. Brownlie points out that the term war  ‘as a term of art had acquired a technical and restrictive meaning in the nineteenth century and the influence of this doctrine continued in the life of the League.’  He further notes that the ‘importance [of this doctrine] diminished in the period since 1920 as a result of a realization by governments that obligations, the observance of which was related to the existence of “war” in its formal aspect, could be evaded too easily.’ Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States, 220, 394. 154  Hill, ‘The Second Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 64. 155  Ibid. 156  Ibid. 157  Charles H. Levermore ed., Second Year Book of the League of Nations, January 1, 1921– February 6, 1922; including the complete story of the Washington Conference, with the complete texts of treaties and governments (Brooklyn, New York: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1922), 162. See also Hill, ‘The Second Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 64.

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committed.’158 Also noteworthy in this context are the following: resolution number five which stated that ‘all cases of breach of Covenant under Article 16 shall be referred to the Council as a matter of urgency’; resolution number six which stated that ‘if the Council is of the opinion that a State has been guilty of a breach…the minutes of the meeting at which that opinion is arrived at shall be immediately sent to all members of the League’; resolution number eight which, with a view to ensuring collective rather than unilateral action  and  thereby  the  maximisation of  the degree of economic pressure exerted, declared that the Council ‘shall recommend the date on which the enforcement of economic pressure…is to begin’; and resolution number ten which charged the council with recommending a ‘plan for joint action.’159 In relation to the role newly accorded to the council under these resolutions, Hill wrote the following: ‘Thus, the economic blockade which was imposed automatically and imperatively upon all members of the League in case of violation of the Covenant, is to occur, if at all, only when the Council, in which one single vote can prevent action, recommends it and fixes a date.’160 Phillips Bradley offered a contrasting assessment of the import of these resolutions, observing that ‘[w]hether or not this is to be considered in effect a form of amendment of the Covenant by extra-constitutional procedure, the practice of the Member States in following the “rules of guidance” rather than the strict (and probably impracticable) wording of paragraph 1’ of Article 16, in addition to constituting ‘a significant interpretation’ of the covenant, actually ‘facilitated the application of sanctions.’161 Bradley’s  assessment  was  made against the background of the experiment in sanctions in 1935 following the resort to war by Italy against  Ethiopia (Abyssinia), the constitutional grounds for which was  Levermore ed., Second Year Book of the League of Nations, 162.  Levermore ed., Second Year Book of the League of Nations, 163–4 and Cecil, ‘League of Nations Sanctions,’ 7. Hill pointed to the imperative of ‘identity of action’ in regard to the council’s role in fixing the date for action. Hill, ‘The Second Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 64. 160  Hill, ‘The Second Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 64.   Brownlie observes that ‘[r]eliance on individual members for decision avoided the unanimity rule which applied to Council decisions under the article but this interpretation affected the immediacy implicit in Article 16 and its direct imposition of obligations. States gave express recognition and support to the interpretation.’ Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States, 60. 161  Phillips Bradley, ‘Some Legislative and Administrative Aspects of the Application of Article XVI of the Covenant,’ Transactions of the Grotius Society, 22 (1936): 13–29, 15. 158 159

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precisely the Second Assembly’s resolutions on the economic weapon. Bradley noted that among the principles guiding this experiment was the principle that ‘the application [of sanctions] should be as universal as possible—that is to say they should be really effective.’162 Bradley contended that the resolutions facilitated action in that they answered questions that Article 16 left unanswered, such as the following: ‘To what extent and in what manner is co-ordination of the action of individual States Members of the League to be achieved?’ and ‘How “immediate” must the action by the individual Members be?’163 It should also be noted that the practical intent behind the resolutions encompassed recognition of the varying situations of individual members:  resolution number nine, as Cecil noted, ‘indicated that where it could be done without imperilling the ­effectiveness of the economic pressure; certain states might be permitted to postpone action in special cases.’164 It was not the role accorded the council under the resolutions that was the major concern in relation to them. Indeed, Bradley seemed to consider it to be a plus that the council was now charged with recommending the application of  economic as of  military sanctions against a covenant-­ breaking state. The real concern in terms of the softening of obligations, as Scelle and Cassin lamented, related to resolution number four which, effectively, left it to each government ‘to decide whether or not the Covenant had been violated,’ a development that gave rise to the belief in France that the obligations under provision one in Article 16 were ‘thenceforth relegated to the position of what the jurists called “purely potestative” obligations’: obligations that were not enforceable.165 In a similar vein, Jean Ray contended that the ‘result that we are at risk of having obtained, is that of having ruined the strength of the original

 Ibid., 16.  Ibid., 15. 164  Cecil, ‘League of Nations Sanctions,’ 7. 165  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 70. According to Brownlie, the ‘obligation to enforce sanctions had been interpreted almost out of existence’. Ian Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States, 219. Bradley noted that among the ‘constitutional principles  or “understandings”’ that appeared to have been accepted  was that the council ‘should recommend the invocation of  economic as of military sanctions before municipal action’ and that it ‘should define the scope and nature of sanctions and the time of their taking effect’. Bradley, ‘Some Legislative and Administrative Aspects of the Application of Article XVI of the Covenant,’ 16. 162 163

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Article 16 without putting anything in its place.’166 Cecil confirmed these views to some degree, writing in  an  article appearing in  the  Spectator against the background of the unfolding Ethiopian (Abyssinian) crisis, ‘that there is no question, as is sometimes suggested, of a member of the League being compelled to put force sanctions when in its judgement no breach of Covenant has occurred,’ adding that not only the Second Assembly but also the framers of the covenant were ‘careful to leave to each Government the duty to decide when the obligation to act—the casus foederis—had arisen.’167 Notably, however, Cecil took care to highlight the second part of resolution number four, namely, that ‘the fulfilment of their duties under Article 16 is required from members of the League by the express terms of the Covenant, and they cannot neglect them without breach of their Treaty obligations.’168 Cecil tellingly stated in relation to this provision that ‘it is well that this was put on record, though even without it the terms of Article 16 seem in this respect clear enough.’169 These last two points gain a more particular significance when viewed in the light of Cecil’s concluding observation in his Spectator article: ‘There can be no question that in the controversy between Italy and Abyssinia…[the League]…can enforce peace if it chooses to do so, and if any of its members refuse or neglect to take appropriate action they will incur the condemnation so well expressed in the recent letter of the Archbishop of York in The Times.’170 In relation to the ‘Resolutions Regarding the Economic Weapon,’ there is one last feature of them that is worth noting, a feature which even though not of direct relevance here, will be of direct relevance to the later discussion of the Sino-Japanese dispute as it unfolded in the years 1931 to 1933: resolution number seventeen which stated that ‘efforts should be made to arrive at arrangements would insure the co-­operation of States

166  Jean Ray, Commentaire du pacte de la Société des Nations: La politique et jurisprudence des organes de la Société (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1930), 519. 167  Cecil, ‘League of Nations Sanctions,’ 7. 168  Levermore ed., Second Year Book of the League of Nations, 164. 169  Cecil, ‘League of Nations Sanctions,’ 7. Cecil also stated the following: ‘I do not quote these resolutions [concerning the economic weapon] as being necessarily and always the best method of putting Article 16 in force. But they do afford an illustration of how it could be practically operated’ (Ibid.). 170  Ibid.

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non-members of the League in measures to be taken.’171 This resolution was an acknowledgement of the fact that the United States would not be joining the LON and of ‘the importance, nonetheless, of acting in concert with her if possible in steps taken to keep the peace of the World.’172 The belief that Scelle and Cassin declared had arisen in France in light of the ‘Resolutions Regarding the Economic Weapon’ was reinforced when at the Fourth Assembly in 1923, Canada proposed an interpretive resolution in relation to Article 10, according to which, analogously to the economic weapon resolutions, members would be given ‘freedom of decision…in the matter of taking measures to implement the guarantee it contained’ in regard to the preservation of the territorial integrity and political independence of members.173 The background to this, as alluded to above, was a Canadian proposal in 1920 to eliminate Article 10, a proposal that the Canadian delegation revisited in 1922, in declaring that ‘no Member shall be under the obligation to engage in any sort of war without the consent of its parliament, its legislature, or other representative body.’174 Although the Canadian resolution of 1923 was not carried as it was  Levermore ed., Second Year Book of the League of Nations, 162.  Cecil, ‘League of Nations Sanctions,’ 7. 173  Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States, 65. The interpretive resolution proposed by Canada at the Fourth Assembly stated the following: ‘It is for the constitutional authorities of each Member to decide, in reference to the obligation of preserving the independence and integrity of Members, in what degree the Member is bound to assure the execution of this obligation by employment of its military forces.’ Resolution Proposed by the Canadian Delegation, 1923, quoted in G.  M. Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs 1920–1939, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1950) 66. See also Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 70. 174  Canadian delegation to the LON, 1922, quoted in Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 66. Brownlie  also notes that the  Canadian resolution  of 1923 concerning Article 10 was not carried because it was opposed by Persia, however,  he too observes that the  majority vote in favour of it had  an impact, stating that it ‘greatly diminished’ the article’s ‘potential practical importance.’ At the same time,  Brownlie  points out that ‘the article was invoked on a considerable number of occasions in the life of the League and seems to have been regarded as a general principle to which appeal could be made whenever a serious threat to the personality of a state was apprehended….The fact that the Council and member states preferred to use the machinery of Article 11 and other articles may create an impression that Article 10 was unimportant. Nevertheless, although it was not used for the procedural purpose of seising the League of a dispute, the article remained as a clear expression of an obligation of members of the League. The powers of the Council under the article were vague, the principle it stated was not, at least when its text was considered in isolation. In time it was utilized as the basis for the doctrine of non-recognition and as such it represented the one part of the Covenant which was dynamic. A breach of the obligation in that 171 172

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opposed by Persia and thus did not formally change the obligations of members under the covenant, it nonetheless came to be regarded as giving expression to ‘the accepted interpretation’ of Article 10 and ‘the principle which it laid down was also applied in many quarters to the sanctions imposed under Article 16.’175 Scelle and Cassin, the latter of whom occupied the role of deputy-delegate to the assembly from 1924 to 1935, observed that in light of the Fourth Assembly’s interpretative resolution and the resolutions of the Second Assembly, what was viewed by French public opinion as the centre of the Covenant seemed to be thoroughly shaken; and the feeling began to grow that an international organisation was of no great efficacy when its essential organs were stripped of the right to make organic decisions, and were reduced to the rôle of offering opinions, even if these opinions were ‘of the highest moral importance.’ It appeared to many Frenchmen that the Governments represented at Geneva were endeavouring systematically to diminish the significance of the signature that they had placed at the end of the Covenant, and to transform this solemn, this constitutional Treaty into a mere optional Agreement. This was, indeed, the theory officially held by some Governments.176

G. M. (Geoffrey Malcolm) Gathorne-Hardy, another participant in the meeting at the Hôtel Majestic in 1919 and the founding editor of the RIIA’s journal International Affairs, confirmed and to an extent clarified this last point in observing that a view was developing, most particularly in Great Britain and its Dominions, which  held that  the value of the LON lay solely with the ‘opportunities it afforded for consultation and the development of an international public opinion, and [which] regarded the machinery of the Covenant designed to guarantee its signatories against aggression as not only of minor importance but positively dangerous.’177 article was not merely a breach of the Covenant, it had more general legal consequences.’ Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States, 65–6. 175  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 67. ‘The efforts to amend Art. XVI have proved abortive; the interpretations—notably the resolutions of 1921—have in no way altered obligations assumed by Member States. But as Sir John Fischer Williams has pointed out, “it is difficult not to treat them [Members of the League] as bound by their own declaration” in adopting by formal resolution, “rules of guidance” for the application of the “immediate” measures of coercion prescribed by paragraph 1 of Art. XVI (d).’ Bradley, ‘Some Legislative and Administrative Aspects of the Application of Article XVI of the Covenant,’ 15. 176  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 70. 177  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 67.

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Against this background, French delegates at Geneva set about working assiduously to restore to the covenant’s provisions ‘their original meaning,’ while at home, support for those opposed to disarmament grew.178 Of pertinence here is an observation by Morley based on Madariaga’s recollection of the situation he faced as the incoming head of the Disarmament Section: ‘there were for a time “two independent units” in the Disarmament Section and one of these units, ‘the fruit of the French effort to establish an international police authority, was at one period actually known as the “armaments section.”’179 French opposition to disarmament was placated at the Third Assembly when the French delegation, backed by a ‘united majority, secured the necessary admission of the necessary connection between security and disarmament.’180 That disarmament is a function of security and can be expected only in the degree to which security has been obtained became the official approach to the question at the LON, at least in the 1920s, and this construction was reflected in both the Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes which was adopted by the assembly on October 2, 1924, and the Locarno Treaties of October 1925. There was disappointment in France when, on March 2 1925, the newly elected British government led by Stanley Baldwin doomed the former agreement, which initially had been proposed by both Herriot and MacDonald, in deciding not to ratify it. However, the adoption of the Locarno Treaties greatly compensated for this and for France’s earlier disappointments, setting in train, according to  Scelle  and Cassin, a ‘movement of veritable enthusiasm’ for the LON.181 According to Scelle and Cassin, such was the new-found French enthusiasm for the LON that France sought to reinvigorate the ‘cooling zeal’ for disarmament negotiations, the most urgent calls for which had previously emanated from Great Britain and the neutral countries. The upshot of this was the creation by the assembly in 1925 of the Preparatory Commission for the Geneva Disarmament Conference.182  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 70.  Morley, Society of Nations, 157. See also  Salvador de Madariaga, Disarmament (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 78–81. 180   Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 71. Emphasis in original. 181  Ibid., 71. 182  Scelle and Cassin observed that the zeal  of England and the neutrals for disarmament had cooled because the ‘Anglo-Saxons wished to complete the Washington agreements 178 179

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The French public supported Briand in his efforts to fill in a number of lacunae in the covenant, above all, the lacuna resulting from the fact that while the covenant strongly presumed against private war, it did not explicitly prohibit it.183 For this reason, the Pact of Paris elicited a very favourable response in France, with many hoping it signalled the ‘dawn of a new era.’ Nonetheless, it is important to note that the French response was qualified: French opinion did not fail to see that ‘once again, and more clearly than ever, it had to do with another bare Pact’—the Pact was not ‘accompanied by any constructive machinery calculated to ensure its effectiveness…provided no means of settling conflicts or of defining and designating the aggressor.’184 Also qualifying the French reception of the pact according to  Scelle and Cassin, were  aspects  of the American and British contributions to the preliminary correspondence on it. Scelle and Cassin stated that the contributions of Great Britain and the United States to the preliminary correspondence on the Pact of Paris indicated that they ‘accepted it subject to certain reservations which constituted a sort of reserved police domain;’  if this  were the case,  according to Scelle and Cassin, what should have been a clear distinction between an ‘offensive operation’ and ‘legitimate defence,’ had turned out to be blurred.185 While majority opinion in France continued to remain loyal to the policy of Briand in the years between 1928 and 1931, even though during this period Briand no longer enjoyed the full support of the Chamber of Deputies, there emerged a ‘growth of scepticism in public opinion in regard to “pactomania”’ as symbolised by the Pact of Paris.186 This scepticism was greatly reinforced by certain events involving Germany such as the reprisals which followed the final evacuation on June 30 of the Rhineland and the speech delivered by Gottfried Treviranus, the Reich minister of the occupied regions, on August 10, 1930, in the Reichstag.187 of 1921 and to achieve agreements about naval armaments independently of land disarmament and before it.’ By contrast, the French wanted the disarmament negotiations to be ‘stimulated’ by Germany’s entry into the LON and urged the study of the ‘problem as a whole’ within the framework of the LON (ibid., 72). 183  Watt, ‘The League of Nations: Some Current Tendencies,’ 33–4. Cecil and Murray also laboured to fill this gap in the covenant. 184  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 72. See also Watt, ‘The League of Nations: Some Current Tendencies,’ 34. 185  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 72. 186  Ibid., 67–8, 73. 187  Ibid., 74.

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In regard to the latter event, it should be noted that in his speech, which was made with a view to the September 14 elections, Treviranus declared that Germany’s eastern boundary was an ‘unnatural’ and ‘unjust frontier under foreign sovereignty’ and referred to Germany’s ‘“unfreed brothers” in the west.’188 Further to this, Treviranus stated that German ‘eyes see with joy the regions that have been restored to us, but with grief the German land which to-day is lost to us, but which one day will be recaptured.’189 The Berlin Associated Press dispatches which quoted Treviranus also reported that the German Foreign Office had declared that the policy of Julius Curtius would ‘continue along the same lines laid down by the late Dr. Gustav Stresemann, especially in regard to the Polish Corridor and other frontier questions’ and denied reports that Germany planned to introduce the question of the revision of the Treaty of Versailles at the LON in September.190 Nonetheless, the speech aroused considerable anger in Poland, as the Polish foreign minister made clear to the German ambassador at Warsaw, and elicited a fierce response in French newspapers. The Parisian newspaper  Le Temps, regarded as the ‘official organ’ of the French Foreign Office, stated that German newspapers assure us that Mr. Treviranus was only expressing his personal opinion speech and that he [deliberately]did not submit his speech, before delivering it, to Chancellor Brüning and to the minister of foreign affairs, Dr. Curtius. This does not lessen in the least the deplorable impression produced by this public demonstration on the part of a minister in charge.191

The British too registered their concern in regard to Treviranus’s remarks, despite there being a tendency in Britain to partly blame French military strength for the swelling ranks of the Hitlerian movement and to accuse France of trying to convert the LON into a security arm of the

188  ‘Speech by German May Arouse Poles,’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 11, 1930 and ‘The German Grudge Against France and Poland,’ Literary Digest, September 6, 1930, 12. 189  Literary Digest, September 6, 1930, 12. See also ‘Germany’s Position: Eastern Frontier: Demand for Revision,’ Sydney Morning Herald, September 2, 1930. 190  H. Wilson Harris, Geneva, 1930: Being an Account of the Eleventh Assembly of the League of Nations (London: League of Nations Union, 1931), 3. 191  ‘Bulletin du jour: le discours de M. Treviranus,’ Le Temps, August 12, 1930. See also Literary Digest, September 6, 1930, 12.

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French state.192 The Economist reflected the view of British officialdom in editorialising that few sensible persons would pretend that the frontiers of the Reich, as drawn by the Peace Treaty, are likely to be regarded as indefinitely sacrosanct; but the reception in Paris…[of Treviranus’s speech]…is a clear indication of the damage which can be done to the promising rapprochement between France and Germany by hasty talk of this nature.193

Treviranus’s speech also ‘attracted sharp attention’ in Italy,  although for a reason vastly different from the reasons it attracted such attention elsewhere: in a speech given in Milan on May 24, Mussolini had called for revision of the Treaty of Versailles.194 Rome’s La Tribuna chastised France for its failure to recognise the fact that Germany, ‘altho [sic] far from being of a war-like spirit, shows in every way its intention not to submit to the fetters of the treaties until such time as it regains full parity.’195 The German demand for equality of rights (Gleichberechtigung), which would become more and more insistent, lay at the heart of the Franco-German tensions. Scelle and Cassin explained the cause of this tension from the French perspective in noting that when French policymakers had contemplated recognising the equal rights of Germany, those rights had always been thought of…as a legal equality, an equality in principle, capable of being realised in fact, but progressively and at a date not yet determined…. But French opinion soon received the impression that the German claim was ambiguous, and that what the German Government was aiming at in this quest for equality was not only the satisfaction of the ‘point of honour’ and the restoration of a legal situation, but also the re-establishment of a situation of fact, which, through the possession of an imposing and even menacing military force, should make it possible for that Government to…make use of that ‘potential’ which is implicit in the diplomatic attitude of the

192  Michael Pugh writes that Briand’s plan for a European Federal Union, which was first aired in 1929 and was addressed in Geneva in May 1930, ‘although primarily economic in thrust’ was seen in Britain, like its plans to militarise the League, ‘as yet another artifice to buttress French security’. Michael Pugh, ‘Policing the World: Lord Davies and the Quest for Order in the 1930s,’ International Relations: 16, no. 1 (2002): 97–115, 103. 193  Literary Digest, September 6, 1930, 12. 194  Ibid. 195  La Tribuna, 1930, quoted ibid.

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Great Powers, and, by this means, to discuss matters on a footing of real equality of fact with its partners, whoever they might be.196

The tension to which Scelle and Cassin referred burst forth at the final meeting of the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament, which took place between November 6 and December 9, 1930, in the shadow of the large Nazi electoral gains in the Reichstag elections. In that context, the French insisted on rigid adherence to the military provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, thus ruling out German parity in armaments. In their turn, the German delegation, as Cecil described it in a letter to Murray on November 29, gave ‘more or less dishonest, demagogic speeches, explaining how badly they are being treated.’197 Michael Pugh notes in relation to Cecil’s description of the behaviour of the German delegation that it was the increasingly aggressive foreign policy tone of Germany, in conjunction with the political developments within the country, that caused the British to review the French position. In this connection, he points out that during the first phase of the Disarmament Conference, the British joined with the French in admonishing the Germans for their ‘untimely…demands for equal military status.’198 By 1931, Briand’s policy had entered its ‘twilight,’ one of its last manifestations being a visit to Berlin, by the French prime minister, Pierre Laval, on September 27 at the invitation of the German government. Laval was accompanied on this visit by Briand, who, although failing in his presidential bid on March 13, 1931, continued to work doggedly at the Quai d’Orsay.199 Many in France doubted the utility of this visit in light of the line adopted in a speech given by Curtius in Geneva just two weeks before the scheduled visit, in which he made references to disarmament that were widely held to be ‘aggressive and challenging’ and seemingly designed to ‘estrange French opinion.’200

196   Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 74–5. Emphasis in original. 197  Robert Cecil, 1930, quoted in Pugh, ‘Policing the World,’ 103–4. 198  Pugh, ‘Policing the World,’ 104. 199  Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 74; French Ministers Visit Berlin: Reparations Question Not To Be Touched?,’ The Straits Times, September 28, 1931; and ‘Dr Curtius Criticised: Geneva Speech Resented,’ West Australian, September 15, 1931. 200  West Australian, September 15, 1931.

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The ostensible purpose of the visit was to discuss with the German government a plan for a Franco-German economic pact, although it appeared that many Berliners had greater expectations of it than this. According to newspaper reports, at the Friedrichstrasse Station where they were met by the German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and Curtius, Laval and Briand were welcomed by thousands of locals who wildly cheered the French visitors, shouting ‘Peace, Peace! No more war.’ A large crowd behaved similarly after silently watching Briand lay a wreath on the tomb of Stresemann. The Berlin newspapers also ‘warmly welcomed the guests,’  leaving aside, as a contemporary observer put it, the ‘irreconcilable mouth-pieces of the extremists of the Right, which reiterate[d] their refusal, in advance, to accept any Franco-German agreement which might be reached.’201 In the event, the Franco-German conference issued in an agreement, in ­principle, to establish a ‘non-political’ Franco-German consultative committee comprised of senior civil servants and representatives of employer and labour groups with a view to improving the economic relations between the two countries.202 Yet according to Scelle and Cassin, irrespective of the ‘delirious welcome’ given by the crowds, which was characterised at the time as ‘beyond the expectation of the most ardent advocate of reconciliation,’ the official visit of Laval and Briand proved to be a sterile experience and did nothing to improve French confidence in the forthcoming disarmament conference.203 French national sentiment was not entirely negative at that time, an important reason for this being the fact that France had not been affected by the Great Depression too severely as yet, certainly not anywhere near as severely as  Germany and Great Britain. The level of unemployment in France was dramatically lower than it was in those two countries where the numbers registered as unemployed were in the millions. Indeed, the years between 1929 and 1931 were relatively economically prosperous years for France and it was thus well able to stage the Exposition coloniale internationale between May and November 1931. Just as the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924 had sought to promote British colo201  ‘French Ministers Visit Berlin: Reparations Question Not To Be Touched?,’ Pittsburgh Chronicle (a), September 28, 1931, and ‘Paris, Berlin Leaders Plan Economic Pact: Briand, Laval Wildly Cheered On Visit To Berlin,’  Pittsburgh Chronicle (b), September 28, 1931. 202  Pittsburgh Chronicle (a), September 28, 1931. 203  Pittsburgh Chronicle (b), September 28, 1931, and Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 73–4.

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nial policy in front of the British public, the Exposition coloniale internationale  sought  to promote French colonial policy in front of the French public.204 Bertrand Lemoine points out that while certain ‘friendly and allied countries’ were represented at the exposition, most of its pavilions were consecrated to a celebration of the ‘supremacy of France over its overseas possessions,’ the most breathtaking evocation of which was the reproduction of the Temple of Angkor Wat, which was as meticulous in its detail as it was monumental in size. Lemoine observes that the exposition was imbued with an air of ‘exoticism,’ even if somewhat ‘forced,’ as exemplified by the numerous pavilions animated by artisans plying their craft under the gaze of the visiting public. The exposition was a popular triumph: over thirty-three million visitors passed through its gates.205 ­ Doubtless, however, the staging of the exhibition would have caused a degree rancour among those elements in Germany still smarting over the insult to German honour which was the stripping of Germany of its colonies. In a lecture at the GIIR  in 1927, Arnold Wolfers stated that although the majority of the parties of the Left in Germany did not want colonies, for the parties of the Right, albeit with one notable exception at this point  in time,  colonial revision  was an  important issue for reasons  of ‘prestige and equality.’  Yet Wolfers also wanted to make it plain that the clamour in some quarters for colonial revision, as with the calls for unity with Austria issued by certain groups, did not warrant fears of a ‘new German imperialism.’206

A Conference in Shanghai On the night of September 18–19, 1931, troops belonging to the Japanese Kwantung Army advanced beyond the zone of the South Manchuria Railway, which Japan had the treaty right to police, following a bomb 204  Volker Barth, ‘Paris 1931: Exposition coloniale internationale,’ in Paris et ses expositions universelles: Architectures, 1855–1937 (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine, 2008), 63. 205  Bertrand Lemoine, ‘Paris 1931: Exposition coloniale internationale,’ in Paris et ses expositions universelles: Architectures, 1855–1937, 63. 206  Arnold Wolfers maintained that expressions of desire for colonial mandates in Germany did not justify talk of a ‘new German imperialism’ in the form of ‘expansion and aggression’. Arnold Wolfers, ‘Germany in the League: A Survey and a Forecast’ in Problems of Peace: Lectures Delivered at the Geneva Institute of International Relations, August, 1927 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 248–9.

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explosion on a portion of the railway near the town of Mukden (Shenyang). On the pretext that the Manchurian Incident or Mukden Incident, as the explosion was quickly named, was the work of Chinese soldiers (although it was actually the work of two Japanese staff officers), the Kwantung Army attacked Mukden and other strategic locations in Southern Manchuria.207 It was a remarkably smooth operation: as the League of Nations’ Commission of Enquiry to the Far East which investigated the so-called incident in the following year stated, ‘all the forces [Japanese] in Manchuria, and some of those in Korea, were brought into action almost simultaneously on the night of 18 September over the whole area of the South Manchuria Railway from Changchun to Port Arthur.’208 While it had been hoped up until the end of September that Japanese troops would withdraw into the railway zone, the Japanese army and military clique signalled in early October that they had a different agenda: that of furthering the Japanese incursion into Manchuria.209 Against this background, there was ‘up to the very last minute…much uncertainty’ as to whether the Fourth Biennial Conference of the IPR, which was scheduled to take place in Hangzhou (Hangchow) between October 21 and November 4, would be held. While the economic depression, flood devastation without parallel in central China (a plan of action in relation to which was devised with the assistance of Chinese investigators associated with the IPR), and China’s ongoing civil war made the mounting of the conference difficult, the Manchurian situation rendered ‘well-nigh impossible.’210 Loomis, the IPR’s acting general secretary at the time, pointed out that when the Pacific Council met in Shanghai a week before the conference was due to begin, tensions in China and Japan were running so high that the council considered it unwise to hold a regular 207  Angell, ‘Japan, the League and Us,’ 1302. See also Sandra Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals: the Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ Modern Asian Studies 26, no. 3 (1992): 507–44, 508 and James Weland, ‘Misguided Intelligence: Japanese Military Intelligence Officers in the Manchurian Incident, September 1931,’ Journal of Military History: 5, no. 3 (1994): 445–60, 445. The Japanese officers, according to James Weland, involved in the incident were Colonel Ishiwara Kanji and Lieutenant Colonel Itagaki Seishirō. 208  Lytton Report, 1932, quoted in Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 314. 209  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 314–5. See also Angell, ‘Japan, the League and Us,’ 1302. 210  Institute of Pacific Relations: Summary of Activities: 1931–1932, Honolulu, 11 April 1932, and ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.

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conference. Instead, it decided to hold a ‘modified Conference’ that would be limited to meetings of the IPR’s organisational committees: the Pacific Council, the International Research Committee and the International Program Committee. However, it soon became apparent that,  as  Loomis later recalled, ‘after a week of working together in the business meetings,’ the conference members, the majority of whom were already in Shanghai, were ready to participate in a full conference. Hence, on October 21, the conference president, the philosopher and writer Hu Shih, inaugurated the conference in declaring: ‘This is the Fourth Biennial Conference.’211 Although Hangzhou had been advertised as the venue for the conference, its location had to be changed. The tensions caused in China by the Japanese army’s behaviour meant that the Japanese delegates were simply too ‘afraid’ to go to there. Thus, nearly all the conference activities took place at the International Recreation Club at the International Settlement in Shanghai, the city in which the IPR’s China Council was based, its offices being located at 22 Museum Road.212 However, for the sake of appearances, a weekend visit to Hangzhou was organised and it was there on the evening of the twenty-fourth that conference members were offered a reception and banquet by the city’s provincial and municipal authorities. It was also in Hangzhou that the Pacific Council met the following day.213 While Japanese delegates attended neither of these events, they were nonetheless commended, as were their Chinese counterparts, for their participation in the discussions at Shanghai: the Japanese and Chinese delegations were applauded for demonstrating ‘personal courage’ and ‘devotion’ to the IPR in braving the ‘opposition in their own countries.’214 The conference was attended by one hundred and fifty-six delegates: Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Japan, New Zealand, Philippines and the United States were all represented as was the LON, the ILO and the  Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, v, 512n.  ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 10 and Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 512. 213  ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 10, and Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 513. 214  IPR: Summary of Activities: 1931–1932, Honolulu, 11 April 1932, and ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. On the absence of the Japanese from Hangzhou, see ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 10. 211 212

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Netherlands East Indies in the form of observers.215 At the opening meeting, the numerous official greetings the conference had received were read out. Greetings had been issued by the president of the national government of China; the prime ministers of Great Britain, Canada and Australia; two ‘eminent’ Japanese statesmen, namely, Viscount Shibusawa and Baron Sakatami; the president of the Philippine Senate; and the president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. Hoover stated in his message that he hoped the conference would ‘make a new contribution to the cause of harmony in international relations.’216 The major topics addressed at the conference were economic relations in the Pacific, China’s economic development, political relations in the Pacific, China’s international relations and cultural relations in the Pacific. In connection with the topic of economic relations in the Pacific, Lewis L.  Lorwin, a member of the American Council of the IPR and of the Institute of Economics of the Brookings Institution, submitted a paper to the conference entitled ‘The Need for World Economic Planning’ in which he offered the following view: [T]he dynamic quality of modern life, if left unregulated, is likely to become more pronounced. New technical processes, geographical shifts in industry, changes in habits of consumption, in the relative economic power of nations, in the distributions of population, and in the character and growth of national and world markets loom ahead as increasingly complex forces less and less likely to work out an automatic and stable equilibrium….[F]or that large part of the world which stretches from the Vistula to the Pacific, the question is not of negative revolution, but of positive construction. Having gone through the stages of clearing the ground from the obstacles of the past, they are confronted by the more difficult and complex tasks of laying the foundations of a new and better economic and social order, and that again can be done only in a spirit of careful deliberation and cooperation. It is in this spirit that this conference has met and is carrying on its deliberations. It is in this spirit that it is ready to consider an idea which has been discussed recently as holding out a promise for economic recovery and for world peace…. What is essential to economic planning, is its twofold promise to maintain a balance within each country between the growth of productive powers and the consumption needs of the people, and secondly to provide a basis for cooperative action which would make possible a peaceful 215  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 285. See also IPR: Summary of Activities: 1931–1932, Honolulu, 11 April 1932, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 216  Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, vi–viii.

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exploitation of the world’s resources in the common interests of all groups and nations.217

This not the first time Lorwin had promoted the idea world economic planning in the context of an international forum: he had urged it in an address given at the World Social Economic Congress which had been held under the auspices of the International Industrial Relations Institute in Amsterdam between August 24 and 28,  1931.218 This congress was a ­non-­government gathering called in the belief that the world’s ‘inevitable trend towards unity’ urgently demanded world planning.219 The congress organisers deliberately chose the word world as opposed to the word international as the title of the conference in order to emphasise the intensity of this trend.220 At the congress, speaker after speaker condemned the national egotism of governments and their adherence to the outdated principle of economic self-sufficiency, complaining of how little the LON and its economic and financial instruments had done to realise the goal of a world economic centre. Yet despite the repeated avowals of the necessity and inevitability of world planning at the Amsterdam congress, national planning, its organisers later observed, had been ‘more clearly envisaged’ there than world planning; the latter, the congress organisers concluded, ‘hovered like a will-o’-the-wisp before the Congress, eluding concrete expression.’221 In regard to cultural relations in the Pacific and demonstrating the IPR’s conception of itself as being, in certain respects, a Pacific version of the OIC, a special round table was organised in order to consider ‘suggestions received as to ways in which the Institute might more fully contribute to international understanding in the Pacific area through the use of its own and other available educational resources.’222 In his opening address at this round table, the 217  Lewis L. Lorwin, The Need for World Economic Planning (New York: American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1931), 4, 6–7. See also Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 40, and Morley, Society of Nations, 254n, 610n, 622n. 218   Lewis L.  Lorwin, ‘Addendum: The Problem of Economic Planning,’ in Mary Lambertine Fleddérus, ed., World Social Economic Planning: The Necessity for Planned Adjustment of Productive Capacity and Standards of Living (The Hague: International Industrial relations Institute, 1932), 773–98. See also Karl W. Papp, ‘Economic Regulation and Economic Planning,’ American Economic Review 29, no. 4 (1939): 760–73, 761. 219  Fleddérus, ed., World Social Economic Planning, xxxv. 220  Ibid., xvii–xviii. On the World Social Economic Congress, see also Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 30. 221  Fleddérus, ed., World Social Economic Planning, 68. 222  Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 469.

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chairman of the Pacific Council, namely, Greene, touched on this issue, highlighting the ‘profoundly humiliating fact’ which was the ‘gross discrepancy between Western scholarship in the culture of the Orient and Oriental scholarship in the culture of the West.’223 Cultural questions were also discussed in the context of a  round table entitled ‘Dependencies and Native Peoples’: specifically, this round table discussed the relative merits of a ‘museum policy’ on the one hand and ‘assimilation’ on the other.224 The first policy was advocated by those who favoured the ‘preservation of native cultures’ and their protection from the contaminating and disintegrating influence of Western culture.225 Others, however, questioned whether the former policy was possible given the ‘intrusive influences that…[had]…already penetrated’ such cultures.226 Indeed, some suggested that by breaking with the traditional culture and ‘taking a great leap’ into modernity, Indigenous peoples, while appearing at first to have plunged into ‘the ocean of oblivion,’ would actually be ‘swept into the current of life.’227 At the same time, there emerged from a discussion of what was referred to as ‘race mixtures’ a third alternative: the possibility of the ‘creation of a new race and a new culture’ through a process of ‘cultural fusion.’228 In relation to this third possibility, it was asked whether Hawaii should be viewed as a ‘horrible example’ of an  Indigenous culture  being ‘sacrificed to economic development,’ or whether it could be viewed as an area where ‘differing racial and cultural groups’ had been welded into a ‘satisfactory co-operative life—perhaps blazing a trail which, sooner or later, all must follow.’229 It was later decided that the discussion entitled  ‘Dependencies and Native Peoples,’ had  revealed the need for ‘intensive regional studies’ on such issues as ‘biological and cultural factors in the adaptation of racial groups to modern conditions’; ‘native customary law as a basis for administration’; ‘administrative control of cultural change’; and, in particular, ‘specific local studies of tribes and communities as integrated social units.’230  Ibid.  Ibid., 388. 225  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 159 and Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 387. 226  Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 388. 227  Ibid., 390. 228  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 159. 229  Lasker and Holland eds, Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 405. 230  Ibid., 408. 223 224

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In regard to political relations in the region, the ‘need for better peace machinery’ in the Pacific was once more addressed, and in that context, Manchuria was discussed as a powerful illustration of that need.231 Indeed, an advertisement for the published proceedings of the conference, namely, Problems of the Pacific, 1931, claimed that the Manchurian crisis, which the same advertisement reported was ‘experienced at the time as a severe shock,’ reverberated ‘through the whole proceedings [of the conference] as a sort of obligato on the drum.’232 The IPR’s then research secretary, namely, Holland, later observed that the exchanges on the issue at Shanghai were ‘bitter,’ adding that it appeared at times that the Japanese delegation, which was led by Nitobe who had become director of the Japanese Council of the IPR (JCIPR) in 1929, ‘might walk out.’233 In an address given during the evening of October 27 entitled ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ Takayanagi, who was a devotee of Nitobe, discussed what he described as the first complicating factor in relation to the Manchurian question: Japan’s special interests in the region. The first of these special interests that Takayanagi highlighted was Japan’s ‘sentimental’ attachment to Manchuria: Manchuria had been ‘obtained for China,’ he stated, echoing observations made by Matsuoka in his submission to the 1927 IPR conference, ‘by the sacrifice of the precious blood’ of Japanese soldiers and an ‘immense amount of money and property.’234 Takayanagi then identified three other interests that the Japan had in Manchuria. Calling attention to a ‘world situation in which Japanese emigration finds every door closed’ at a time when Japan was feeling the effects of overpopulation and in which Japan’s exports were being excluded from other countries, Takayanagi gave voice to the Japanese conviction that Japan’s existing economic interests in Manchuria should be ‘well protected’ and that Japan had a ‘vital interest’ in Manchuria’s economic  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 56.  Advertisement, Bruno Lasker and William L. Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Hangchow and Shanghai, China, October 21 to November 2, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. One reviewer described the 1931 volume of Problems of the Pacific as ‘imposing.’ ‘Comptes Rendus,’ Bulletin de la Coopération Intellectuelle, no. 20–1 (1932): 1165–9, 1167. 233  ‘Appendix 2: Holland-Hooper Interviews,’ in Hooper ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 10. 234  Kenzō Takayanagi, ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ in Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 235. On Takayanagi’s discipleship of Nitobe, see Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 519. 231 232

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development. Takayanagi then pointed to Japan’s ‘proletarian interests’ in Manchuria, by which he meant the presence in Manchuria of a large Korean population. Lastly, and while professing to admire aspects of the USSR’s ‘interesting experiment,’ he noted that the world was ‘still in the dark as to the future of Soviet Russia.’235 Of all these putative special interests in Manchuria, it was Japan’s economic and strategic interests in the region that featured most prominently in Japanese rhetoric on the subject. By way of amplifying the nature of the first of these two sets of interests, it should be noted that in the context of Japanese propaganda on the subject, Manchuria was commonly referred to as Japan’s ‘life-line’: Japan needed the agricultural resources and raw materials of Manchuria ‘for the economic life of their country.’236 As Blakeslee pointed out in an article on the Japanese Monroe Doctrine, the life-line doctrine was simply the right to live doctrine when applied to Manchuria. Japan’s pressing need for such a life-line had been discussed in an article published in Foreign Affairs in January 1931 by a former member of the Diet and a noted author and lecturer who was active in the JCIPR.237 Tsurumi,  who was  also a devotee of Nitobe, explained Japan’s  need  for a life-line  in arguing that Japan was ‘caught unawares within three unsurmountable walls: the tariff wall, the emigration wall, and the peace wall.’ By peace wall, Tsurumi was referring to the prohibition of ‘the readjustment of the unequal distribution of territories among nations with different density of population,’ which arose out of the peace settlement and which come to be regarded in Japan as all the more oppressive in light of the increased height of the other two walls.238 Tsurumi urged the leading nations to adopt ‘more liberal policies…in tariff and emigration matters,’ adding that if this were not possible, there should be ‘serious consideration by the leading Powers of the world of a peaceful readjustment of territories so that nations with orderly governments and a high state of civilization can be given a chance to pursue the  Takayanagi, ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ 235.  Earl of Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ International Affairs 11, no. 6 (1932): 737–56, 745–6. 237   Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ 675. For Tsurumi Yusuke’s background, see ISIPR, ‘Institute Notes,’ Pacific Affairs, 4 (1931): 951–5, 954. 238  Tsurumi Yusuke, ‘Japan in the Modern World,’ Foreign Affairs 9, no. 2 (1931): 254–65, 261–2. See also Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 519. 235 236

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course of normal development along liberal lines.’ Tsurumi maintained that if neither of these two policy alternatives were given serious consideration, then the ‘economically harassed nations’ will begin to ‘seriously’ question the motives of the ‘so-called peace movement’ and will develop a ‘psychology which will challenge the present status quo of the world.’ As a result, he warned, the world ‘will gradually split into two camps of “haves” and “have-nots”, the former ‘highly capitalistic’ and the latter ‘more and more socialistic.’239 In suggesting that the peace wall instituted by the liberal nations of the West at the end of war might come to be viewed as merely a device for keeping the have-nots in their place and that Japan, as a have-not state, would not remain content to be so constrained, Tsurumi’s Foreign Affairs article can be seen as an attempt to add moral ballast to the gathering campaign for so-called peaceful change. This was not to be his last such moral appeal. Several months later, in another article published in English, Tsurumi, specifically addressing the Japanese  situation, stated the following: Japan looked around and saw around her huge tracts of unoccupied land, unused yet closed to Japanese exploitation. Siberia, Manchuria, Mongolia, French Indo-China, Dutch East Indies and New Guinea, to say nothing of Australia. Japan began to wonder the justification of this situation existing in the world, that one nation which was left outside in 1919 when the door of territorial expansion was suddenly closed should suffer permanently and see the other nations for no reason closing these unused territories from peaceful and just exploitation.240

In referring to Japan’s strategic interests in the region, Takayanagi was doubtless referring to the fact that the Japanese army believed that Japan’s most likely adversary in a future armed struggle would be the USSR. In a study of the role of Japanese military intelligence officers in the Manchuria Incident, James Weland points out that the Imperial Defence Policy of 1923 incorporated this belief and that the ‘army’s operation plan identified northern Manchuria as the expected battleground.’ Thus, from the perspective of Japan’s military clique, in addition to a powerful and technologically sophisticated army, Japanese security demanded that the  Tsurumi, ‘Japan in the Modern World,’ 265.  Tsurumi Yusuke, 1931, quoted in Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 541. 239 240

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Japanese armed forces had ‘free access’ to Manchuria. By contrast, in the decade preceding the army’s act of insubordination, many in the civilian government viewed Japanese security as lying instead with expanding the sphere of Japan’s peaceful relations with the liberal Western nations and this meant, in the view of the civilian government, less need for military expenditure and a general respect for the peace wall in relation to Manchuria.241 The civilian government’s view of Japanese security was shared by those intellectuals involved in the JCIPR.  Members of the JCIPR  traditionally  were  partisans of the LON and the post-war international legal order  and  they sought to promote  these institutions  in front of Japanese audiences. However, as Sandra Wilson points out, by the end of 1931 many among them were expressing support for Japan’s move into Manchuria and mounting defences of it in the face of the remonstrations concerning that move issuing from the LON and the United States. As she suggests, such advocacy exacted a psychological price precisely because many members of the JCIPR, Nitobe being a prime example, ‘had built their careers and their considerable prestige at least partly on the basis of support for and from the USA, Europe and the League’ and saw their role in terms of bringing into harmony the philosophies of the East and West.242 Akami suggests that one should not overstate the shift in the position of the intellectuals involved in the JCIPR: the notion that Manchurian Incident saw them move decisively away from their earlier internationalism in the direction of nationalism. To the contrary, she maintains that the incident ‘did not prompt dramatic departure from the past, because the nation-state/empire had always been an integral part of their internationalism.’ As Akami notes, while JCIPR members were advocates of international law and the resolution of disputes in a way consistent with the law, this had not prevented them from ‘arguing the legitimacy of Japanese national/imperial interests in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia well before the incident.’243 However, defending the legitimacy of Japanese national interests in Manchuria was a rather different thing than defending Japanese military incursion into that region, an action which could not even be reconciled with the bare letter of the law. To pretend that these actions were in conformity with international law, as many members of the JCIPR  Weland, ‘Misguided Intelligence,’ 447–8.  Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 520. 243  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 159. 241 242

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did, was a betrayal of their internationalism and must have involved a degree of self-deception. In his address at Shanghai, Takayanagi sought  to reconcile, as other JCIPR members would seek to do,  events  in  Manchuria with Japan’s international legal obligations. Takayanagi recalled the fact that the origins of the Pact of Paris concerned a plan that Shotwell had presented at the 1927 IPR conference and that on the acceptability of which Shotwell had ‘sounded the opinion’ of the Japanese delegates. Takayanagi then offered praise of the pact, noting that it was the mechanism by which the United States and the USSR had been enlisted ‘in the movement for peace’ and that it compensated for the defect in the covenant in respect to the abolition of war.244 Takayanagi observed that in place of the distinction between just and unjust wars that Hugo Grotius had earlier drawn, the Pact of Paris substituted the distinction between a war of self-defence and war as an instrument of national policy. Takayanagi added that contrary to the view of some jurists, he considered that this new form of classification differed from the old as it went further in circumscribing the ‘sphere in which justification for warlike operations may be allowed’ and that as such it was an improvement. At the same time, Takayanagi suggested that the sphere of self-redress should be permitted some flexibility. He noted that historically this sphere narrowed or widened according to whether or not ‘the social order is such that legal methods can easily be resorted to,’ adding that this same consideration should apply to the Pact of Paris.245 The significance of this last point was explained by Takaki Yasaka, who, as we saw, was professor of American studies, indeed, the inaugural professor of American studies, at the Imperial University of Tokyo. In an article appearing in Pacific Affairs in November 1932, Takaki drew attention to Shotwell’s pronouncement in regard to the adoption of the Pact of Paris: that the world had ‘turned that corner, in history when civilized societies need peace for their continued existence and find the instrument of war no longer pertinent.’ Against this background and citing the authority of Shotwell, Takaki stated that the first question to ask concerning the peace machinery of the world was whether all nations in the world fulfil the conditions of a civilised society.246 As a prelude to his response to this ques Takayanagi, ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ 231.  Ibid., 231–2. 246  Takaki Yasaka, ‘World Peace Machinery and the Asia Monroe Doctrine,’ Pacific Affairs 5, no. 11 (1932): 941–53, 946, 950. On Takaki’s position, see Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 513. 244 245

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tion, Takaki observed that since the last war Japanese liberals had been seeking to ‘let their fellow countrymen imbibe as much as possible the new spirit of internationalism,’ while simultaneously trying make foreigners comprehend the ‘legitimate national aspirations of the Japanese people.’ He noted that the efforts of Japanese liberals had not always been adequate, although he also pointed out that they had been confronted by many unexpected difficulties, above all, the passing of the United States’ Immigration Act of 1924. Such difficulties aside, Takaki lamented the fact that Japanese liberals advocating on behalf of the ‘Anti-War Pact’ had not ‘called the attention of the world to the peculiar situation’ of Manchuria, where Japan was forced to endure the ‘systematic and ruthless policy of anti-Japanese nationalists’ and which he described as ‘bandit-infested and under the actual control of war-lords.’247 Liberal advocates of the pact, he declared, should have urged the incorporation in the Japanese note of May 26, 1928, which was issued in response to the circulation of a draft of the pact by Kellogg on April 13, a reservation concerning Manchuria. This would have been especially apt, he suggested, given that the British note of May 19 had questioned the pact’s applicability to ‘some states whose Governments have not yet been universally recognized, and some which are scarcely in a position to insure the maintenance of good order and security within their territories.’248 Takaki might have also usefully exploited in this context the statement in the British note that the  British government accepted the pact ‘on the distinct understanding’ that Britain’s ‘freedom of action’ in respect to ‘certain regions of the world the welfare and integrity of which constitute a special and vital interest for our peace and safety’ would not be prejudiced.249 In any case, Takaki stated that the ‘vital’ question that the Manchurian crisis posed for the international community was whether ‘the  Yasaka, ‘World Peace Machinery and the Asia Monroe Doctrine,’ 945.  The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, Sir Austen Chamberlain, to the American Ambassador in London, Alanson, B.  Houghton, 1928, quoted in Myers, Origin and Conclusion of the Paris Pact, 127 and. Yasaka, ‘World Peace Machinery and the Asia Monroe Doctrine,’ 950. See also Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 182. 249  Chamberlain to Houghton, 1928, quoted in Myers, Origin and Conclusion of the Paris Pact, 126. See also Bryce Marian Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 22 and Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 183. Some commentators considered that the statement in the British note mainly concerned Egypt. 247 248

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absolute negation of armed intervention, in connection with a country where disorder actually prevails is really possible.’250 Without directly answering this question, Takaki insisted on the need for the ‘amplification of the world peace machinery…in the Orient’ with a view to addressing situations in which, Takaki stated, quoting an unnamed authority, ‘chronic wrongdoing or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society’ disturbs the peaceful relations of states.251 Having suggested that the Japanese action in Manchurian was a form of self-redress necessitated by an inability to access legal methods and thus did not violate Pact of Paris, Takayanagi, in his address at Shanghai, then went on to discuss the second major complicating factor in relation to the Manchurian crisis: rising Chinese nationalism. He observed that Chinese nationalism had manifested itself in such forms as anti-Japanese and anti-­ foreign school textbooks and boycotts of Japanese and other foreign goods. Takayanagi further observed that Chinese nationalism had seen the concept of sovereignty take centre stage in Chinese thinking, adding that in ‘all the arguments for the solution of the various problems relating to China, the Chinese advocates in the last analysis go back upon the concept of sovereignty.’ Anticipating a rhetorical tactic that would later be pursued by the Japanese government in its dealings with the Council of the LON in relation to Manchuria, Takayanagi then raised the question as to whether China was in fact  a sovereign state.252 In addressing this question, Takayanagi touched on the debate concerning the constitutive and declaratory theories of statehood, doubtless aware of the shift, under the banner of the new doctrine of recognition, towards the declaratory approach and the tendency in line with this shift to insist on an obligation to recognise, in most but not necessarily all cases, ‘stable situations of fact.’253 Takayanagi stated that one of the most compelling questions in jurisprudence is whether ‘corporate personality comes into existence’ because it is recognised by some other entities, or because ‘it actually exists.’254 He then observed that a ‘very well-known’ international jurist, whom he  Yasaka, ‘World Peace Machinery and the Asia Monroe Doctrine,’ 952.  Ibid., 945, 951. 252  Takayanagi, ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ 231–2. See also Takayanagi Kenzō, ‘On the Legality of the Chinese Boycott,’ Pacific Affairs 5, no. 10 (1932): 855–62. 253  John Fischer Williams, ‘Recognition,’ Transactions of the Grotius Society 15 (1929): 53–81, 63–5, and John Fischer Williams, ‘The New Doctrine of “Recognition,”’ Transactions of the Grotius Society, 18 (1932): 109–29, 115. 254  Takayanagi, ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ 231–2. 250 251

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claimed was a friend but whom he insisted was not Japanese, had asserted that corporate personality must be ‘based on reality.’ This same jurist, he added, had applied this theory to China and had concluded that ‘there is no such thing as a Chinese State because state personality must be based on the existence of government’: in China, the ‘sovereign state in the Occidental sense with its concomitant governmental appurtenances exists rather as an aspiration than as a reality.’ In relation to this, Takayanagi contended that China’s problems in regard to governance needed to be acknowledged, noting that it was this which accounted for the ‘great difficulties that the Powers encounter in their dealings with China.’ ­ Takayanagi then sought to distance himself from the argument that China did not warrant the description sovereign state, stating that to the extent that China was recognised by other states ‘it may be considered a sovereign state.’255 Nonetheless, Takayanagi insisted that because of political conditions in China, Chinese nationalists were asking too much in declaring that in the name of sovereignty that Japan simply ‘pack up her baggage and get out of Manchuria.’256 Takayanagi maintained in his Shanghai address that Japan, despite what had been written in newspaper reports and said in various forums, was not acting in defiance of the LON.  Rather, he insisted, Japan had simply expressed the view, albeit ‘in no uncertain terms,’ that the LON Council could not adequately deal with the Manchurian situation. As Geneva was ‘so far away from the Oriental stage,’ he explained, it could not appreciate the ‘complex conditions obtaining in the Far East.’ It was for this reason, Takayanagi added, that Japan was seeking to convince the council to adopt a course centred on ‘direct diplomatic negotiations’ between the governments of Japan and China.257 Takayanagi sought to reinforce his point in noting that at the Kyoto conference two years earlier, in a discussion of the relative merits of LON universalism—the idea of the LON as a ‘universal organ’—Chinese ‘friends’ had leant towards regionalism, based on the view that the LON was ‘too far away, that the League could not know the actual situation in China, and that China was therefore rather indifferent to the League.’258  Ibid., 233–4.  Ibid., 235. See also Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 173. 257  Takayanagi, ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ 232, 236. See also Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 173. 258  Takayanagi, ‘Manchuria—A Case Problem,’ 233. 255 256

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In an address to the conference the next evening, Xu  Shuxi (Hsu Shuhsi), professor political science at Yenching University in Beijing and a specialist in international law, insisted on the simplicity of the Manchurian question, in contrast to Takayanagi who had insisted on its complexity. He noted that of one of the two complexities that Takayanagi had cited, namely, Japanese special interests, little needed to be said. Xu observed that ‘the vagueness of the term which was once used to bring havoc upon international relations has ceased to possess any more magic power since its public repudiation’ by the states which had participated in the Washington Conference. Japanese economic interests, Xu  continued, were the effect of treaties and thus they were ‘no more special’ than any other foreign treaty-based economic interests in China. As to Japan’s so-­ called strategic and historical interests, he pointed out that neither of these supplied Japan with a legal basis for its claims in relation to Manchuria. While Japan was entitled to seek security, Xu stated, this entitlement extended only as far as its own boundaries. In regard to Japan’s historical claim stemming from the Russo-Japanese War, Xu declared that ‘pride’ in Japan’s victory and ‘remorse for the losses,’ included among which, he reminded his audience, were ‘poor innocent Chinese peasants’—victims of a ‘devastating war not of the creation of themselves or of their nation’—did not merit consideration as a basis on which to claim title.259 As to the second complexity mentioned by Takayanagi, namely, the Chinese ‘aspiration to sovereignty,’ Xu pointedly stated that despite being careful to ‘shelter himself under the authority’ of another jurist, Takayanagi had in fact questioned the sovereignty of the Chinese state. This, he added, was a matter of surprise given that, aside from the fact of the formal recognition of Chinese sovereignty, China had exercised ‘effective control over her territory and people from time immemorial.’ He then suggested with deliberate irony that in referring to this aspiration, perhaps Takayanagi had in mind China’s ‘recovery of lost rights.’ If this were so, Xu added, then Takayanagi was simply calling attention to a ‘normal, healthy and legitimate phenomenon.’ There was no reason why, he insisted, this phenomenon should so ‘complicate the situation’ that it was rendered unsuitable for council consideration.260 259  Shuhsi Hsu  (Xu Shuxi), ‘The Pending Cases and their Adjustment,’ in Lasker and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 237–8. 260  Ibid., 238–9.

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In relation to this last point, Xu  recalled that Takayanagi had disapproved of the idea at the Kyoto conference of a specifically Pacific machinery of peace, adding that he was glad that Japanese and Chinese colleagues now shared the view that ‘chronic problems occurring in a region far removed from the seat of Geneva can be better handled by machinery other than though subsidiary to the League.’ At the same time, he pointed out that this position was very different from maintaining that the council was not ‘competent’ to address questions relating to the Asia-Pacific region. Reinforcing his point, Xu, echoing an observation made by the chairman of the conference the previous day, questioned why if Yoshizawa Kenichi as the Japanese representative on the council, was able to ‘efficiently handle minority problems in Europe should we suspect that the foremost statesmen of the world would fail to understand Far Eastern situations.’261 Xu Shuxi suggested that in questioning whether the LON was competent to deal with the Manchurian crisis, Takayanagi was effectively casting doubt on whether it was a ‘useful agency for dealing with matters of world-­concern,’ clearly implying in suggesting this that the Manchurian situation was indeed a matter of world concern. What was ‘at stake,’ pronounced, was ‘whether a signatory of the League Covenant and the Antiwar Pact has a right to resort to forceful measures to settle her differences with another signatory.’ That Japan had not complied with the council resolution of October 24 which called on Japan to withdraw its troops into the railway zone before commencing negotiations with China on outstanding issues, compelled one to conclude,  Xu  contended, that Japan must either possess ‘a psychology that is not entirely normal’ or is ‘unwilling to terminate her act of aggression.’ He added, with some prescience, that there was ‘perhaps no other time in the history of international relations since the last European War as critical as the coming few weeks.’262 The four round tables which simultaneously discussed the diplomatic machinery of the Pacific at the conference all treated of the Manchurian situation as the prime ‘case’ before the conference and, indeed, attempts to steer the discussion away from this issue to questions of a more general nature failed.263 In response to the question of how such an ‘acute a situation’ could have arisen between two states which were members of the LON and which had been ‘co-operators’ in many LON activities, such as  Ibid., 236–7.  Ibid., 236–7, 239. 263  Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 240. 261 262

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on the question of European minorities, a consensus emerged that the creation of an effective machinery of diplomacy should be accompanied, or indeed preceded, by ‘[i]ntellectual disarmament.’264 Many thought that the Manchurian case was illustrative of the ‘acute danger’ of public opinion as a determining influence when that opinion ‘is ill informed or actually misled by propaganda.’265 An American delegate suggested that while the Chinese should be taught the importance of respecting treaties no matter what their origin, Japan’s ‘sentimental attachment’ to Manchuria should be ‘educated away.’266  Angus  later wryly noted that the same American delegate did not suggest for a moment that the Americans might be taught by their government to accept the LON or ‘be conciliatory in its immigration or tariff policies.’267 Indeed, Angus noted that some were of the view that United States and certain other states were indirectly responsible for the Manchurian situation because they had closed their doors to Japanese immigration and goods.268 These considerations aside, the ‘general  feeling’ seemed to be ‘that, though theoretically—and increasingly in fact also—the League of Nations is an organization with universal concern in every part of the world, it is nevertheless still too close to its European origins to serve in its present form all the particular needs for new methods of international transaction in the Pacific area’ and thus the discussion of diplomatic machinery in the Pacific ‘closed with the practically unanimous agreement that some regional, in the sense of Pacific, addition to the world diplomatic machinery is needed.’269 The conference proceedings  underlined the point that this agreement arose precisely out of a consideration of all the particular needs for new methods of international transaction in the Pacific region rather than in view of the crisis in Manchuria which, as the proceedings acknowledged, although of a narrow regional scope in certain informal respects, was in a formal sense a matter of universal concern in light of China’s appeal to the LON. Further  Ibid., 245, 257.  Ibid., 245, 257. 266  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 174. 267  Ibid., 175. 268  Angus pointed out that the Japanese claims in relation to Manchuria could be viewed as a ‘logical result of the lack of response by English-speaking countries to the suggestions for greater opportunities for migration, better assurance of access to the raw materials of industry, and better access to markets….[This] created both the material incentive and the necessary atmosphere of fear and resentment’ which conduced to Japanese aggression (ibid., 51). 269  Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 249. 264 265

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to this, it should be noted that many participants were acutely aware that even though it ‘could not have been more—geographically and culturally remote from Geneva,’ the LON’s future was bound up with events in Manchuria.270 Statements to the effect that ‘[t]he present crisis is the greatest test of the League,’ or that ‘[i]f it fails in settling this issue in co-operation with China and Japan, the moral power of the League will be seriously weakened’ were frequently heard.271 Opinion was divided as to whether the LON Council by its action on the Manchurian issue had ‘itself created a situation in which, whatever the outcome, its influence was threatened in the Far East.’272 However, no one was able to offer any practical suggestions as to how the LON could have avoided responding to China’s appeal. It was recognised that the LON could not allow action to be undertaken by a member state ‘that might endanger its authority’ within its prescribed limits and thus ‘was practically forced…to respond’ even though this was ‘at the risk of alienating the most powerful nation in the Far East.’273

270  Morley, Society of Nations, 434–6.  See also  Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 249. 271  Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 245. 272  Ibid. 273  Ibid., 245.

CHAPTER 7

The Lessons of Manchuria

An Exacting Trial for the League The Society of Nations: Its Organization and Constitutional development, the author of which was the first director of the GRC, namely, Morley, was published by the Brookings Institution in June 1932. At the time of its publication, it was the one of the most comprehensive studies of the machinery of the LON and its constitutional development yet to appear. The research for The Society of Nations was mainly conducted in Geneva with the assistance of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, from which Morley had graduated as a research student, and many of those involved in various aspects of the League’s work. Among the League employees assisting Morley, albeit often in a private capacity, was Sweetser, the person to whom The Society of Nations was dedicated.1 An American national who was deputy director of the Secretariat’s Information Section and member of the governing body of the GIIR (along with Rappard and Zimmern among others), Sweetser was ‘informally responsible’ for relations between the LON and the United States.2 In the foreword to The Society of Nations, Drummond, writing in his capacity as secretary-general, suggested that Morley, who had previously directed the Geneva office of the League of Nations Association of the United States, 1  Harold G. Moulton, preface to Morley, The Society of Nations, xii and Morley, The Society of Nations, xvi. 2  Frank Moorhouse, Grand Days (Sydney: Macmillan, 1993), 568.

© The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part One, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2_7

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Fig. 7.1  Lytton Commission in Shanghai, 1932. Source: Japanese book 満州帝 国, Kawade Shobo Shinsha

exercised a similar responsibility: he stated that Morley was among those increasingly numerous ‘unofficial [American] envoys who had been welcomed in Geneva in recent years.’3 It was doubtless partly in light of this role that Morley’s examination of the LON’s constitutional evolution was extended to include, as highlighted by Harold G. Moulton, the president of the Brookings Institution, a forensic and painstakingly documented account of ‘the first searching test of the League as provided by the Sino-­ Japanese crisis.’4 At the time of the so-called Manchurian or Mukden  Incident, the League machinery was in full swing. The Twelfth Assembly was midway through its proceedings, and the council had commenced its sixty-fifth session. In the afternoon of September 19, the first day of that session, Yoshizawa and Sze, the latter being present because China had joined the council as a non-permanent member on September 14, delivered brief 3 4

 Sir Eric Drummond, foreword to Morley, The Society of Nations, ix.  Moulton, preface to Morley, The Society of Nations, xii.

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reports on the events of the night before.5 Yoshizawa, a future foreign minister, assured the council that the Japanese government would take all necessary measures to ensure that, as recorded in the stenographic report of the proceedings, ‘this local incident did not lead to any more serious complications,’ while Sze insisted that the incident had not been ‘occasioned by any act on the part of the Chinese.’6 Two days later, in view of the Japanese military occupation of cities and public buildings and the seizure of lines of communication, China sent a message to the secretary-general requesting that he summon a meeting of the council with a view to it taking ‘immediate steps to prevent the further development of a situation endangering the peace of nations; to re-­ establish the status quo ante; and to determine the amounts and character of such reparations as may be found due to the Republic of China.’7 China’s request was based on Article 11 of the covenant which provided that it was the ‘friendly right of each Member of the League bring to the attention of the Assembly or of the Council any circumstance whatever affecting international relations which threatens to disturb international peace or the good understanding between nations upon which peace depends.’8 As was stated at the IPR’s Shanghai conference, quite apart from the formalities entailed by the Chinese appeal, the LON was ‘practically forced’ to respond out of consideration of its position, although at the same time, this was ‘at the risk of alienating the most powerful nation in the Far East.’9 At a special council meeting convened on the morning of September 22, lengthy testimony on the Manchurian situation was delivered by Yoshizawa and Sze, the former seated at one end of the council’s famed horse-shoe table and the latter at the other.10 At this meeting, Yoshizawa insisted on direct negotiations between the two parties, whereas Sze, responding to Yoshizawa, contended  that such an approach was ­unacceptable as long as the Japanese military occupied Chinese territory.11  Morley, The Society of Nations, 435.  Yoshizawa Kenichi and Alfred Sze, 1932, quoted ibid., 435n–6n. 7  LON, OJ 12, no. 12, 1931, 2453–4. 8  ‘Appendix I: Covenant of the League of Nations,’ in Russell, Theories of International Relations, 557. 9  Lasker and Holland, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 245. 10  Morley, The Society of Nations, 434 and Lytton ‘The Twelfth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 747. 11  Morley, The Society of Nations, 434. 5 6

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In relation to this, it is worth noting the account of an exchange between Yoshizawa and Sze at the council given by Victor Alexander Bulwer-­ Lytton, the 2nd earl of Lytton. Lytton was born in Shimla as the son of the British viceroy of India. He would later serve as under-secretary at the India Office, governor of Bengal and, briefly, as viceroy of India. Ian Nish records that in the years 1927 to 1928, after having returned to Britain, Lytton represented India at the LON.  On the urging of Cecil, whom Lytton had joined as a member of the executive committee of the LNU, Lytton was invited by the British foreign secretary to represent Britain at the Twelfth Assembly, thus enabling him to bear witness to the council’s deliberations on Manchuria.12 In an address concerning the work of the Twelfth Assembly delivered at Chatham House on October 13, 1931, Lytton described the aforementioned exchange between Yoshizawa and Sze as follows: [T]he Japanese Delegate would say, ‘We are quite willing to withdraw; we are anxious to withdraw from the territory we have occupied’—which he admitted they had no business to occupy—‘but there is the safety of our nationals to be considered.’ The Chinese Delegate very magnanimously said, ‘I will make myself responsible, in the name of my Government, for the safety of all the Japanese subjects in Manchuria.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Japanese, ‘that is very kind of you, but I am not satisfied it is in your power to do anything of the sort.’13

On the same day as the special council meeting of September 22, a cable was sent to the Chinese and Japanese governments by the council’s president, namely, Alejandro Lerroux, the foreign minister of Spain, outlining a resolution that the council had unanimously adopted. This resolution authorised the president of council, to appeal to the two governments to ‘refrain from any act which might aggravate the situation…[and]…to endeavour in consultation with the Chinese and Japanese representatives to find adequate means of enabling the two countries to withdraw their troops forthwith without the safety of their nationals and their property being endangered.’ Communicated in the same cable was the decision of the council, on the urging of Cecil, to send the ‘Minutes of all the m ­ eetings

 Ian Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism Japan, 58.  Lytton ‘The Twelfth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 747.

12 13

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of the Council and documents relating to this question’ to the government of the United States ‘for its information.’14 Morley observed that in transmitting these materials to the government of the United States, the council was issuing a ‘thinly veiled’ plea for American solidarity and assistance and that as such it elicited an immediate response from the American secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson.15 In a note sent to the president of the council on September 23, Stimson declared that his government was ‘in whole-hearted sympathy’ with the council’s stance and that it would send a note to China and Japan expressing a similar attitude to that of the council. Stimson reported that he had ‘already urged cessation of hostilities and a withdrawal from the present situation of danger.’16 Despite these efforts, elements within the Twelfth Assembly were worried that the council might not fully carry out its obligations and in order to reassure those sharing this worry, Lerroux, whom Lytton described as being ‘inexperienced in these matters and [as someone who]  felt the responsibility of the task far too much for him,’ addressed the assembly on September 24 and 29.17 On the latter date, Lerroux, in summing up the situation in Manchuria, underlined the statement by the Japanese government that ‘there never has been, and never will be, any question of the military occupation of Manchuria’ and noted that the same government on several occasions had declared in front of the council that Japan, to the extent that the security of its nationals and property was guaranteed, had undertaken to return its forces to within the railway zone.18 Having accepted these assurances and in the belief that the council would continue its ‘pacific mission,’ as the assembly’s president Romania’s Titulescu put it in closing the meeting, the assembly did not at this stage open a discussion on the Manchurian controversy.19 Based on the precedent set by the Greco-Bulgarian dispute of 1925 which had also been addressed under Article 11, Sze, at private sessions of the council’s ‘inner circle,’ called for a commission of inquiry to be conducted under the auspices of the council. Meanwhile, Yoshizawa ­continued  LON, OJ 12, no. 12, 1931, 2454. See also Morley, The Society of Nations, 438.  Morley, The Society of Nations, 439. 16  Henry L. Stimson, 1932, quoted ibid. 17  Lytton ‘The Twelfth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 747. 18  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 93 (1931), 163. 19  Ibid. 14 15

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to push for direct Sino-Japanese negotiations.20 The Chinese proposal for a commission of inquiry was backed by Cecil and seemingly by the representatives of the  other major powers. However, the council, which, as indicated, keenly wanted American backing for its efforts, sought Washington’s opinion in regard to the Chinese proposal, inquiring also as to whether the United States would be willing to be represented on the proposed commission.21 On September 24, news reached Geneva that Stimson had informed the Japanese ambassador at Washington that the United States preferred direct negotiations and that Stimson ‘would not favor American participation in the work of the proposed commission of inquiry.’22 It was in light of the American stance that Cecil declared in a speech on September 25 that the British government too favoured direct negotiations. Cecil contended in this regard that under Article 11 ‘it is the responsibility of the parties themselves, rather than the council, to settle their controversy,’ a position that was subsequently adopted by the council as a whole.23 Writing in 1935, Wright explained that the preference of the United States was for the LON to act and for the United States to cooperate with it rather than directly associate itself with the League’s efforts. According to Wright, this would not have been a problem in itself except for the fact that the United States and the members of the LON were not in complete accord at this point on how to respond to the Sino-Japanese dispute. Elaborating on this point, Wright observed that the difficulties of qualified cooperation were clearly manifested when in the crisis of 1931 we tried to develop an ad hoc cooperation with the League of Nations for the preservation of our principles in the Far East. Japan was able to profit by the fact that there was not complete solidarity between the United States and the members of the League. The Japanese Ambassador at Washington was persuading Mr. Stimson that the best policy was to do nothing. Mr. Shidehara was a friend of the United States and, if nothing was done to lower his prestige in Japan, eventually everything would be all right. Mr. Stimson was apparently “sold” on that doctrine for a time and declined to give support to the suggestion which was being discussed in the League of Nations—that a Commission should immediately be organised in  Morley, The Society of Nations, 441–2.  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 17. 22  Morley, The Society of Nations, 442. 23  Ibid. 20 21

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Manchuria to report on whether Japan’s claim was justified that troops were beyond the railroad zone in Manchuria owing to a defensive necessity. At any rate, the Commission was not established until much later, long after Japan had occupied the whole of the territory. I think this incident illustrates that ad hoc cooperation with the League of Nations is a very unsatisfactory kind of relationship for the maintenance of peace.24

Reginald Bassett is at one with Wright in maintaining that the American pursuit of an ‘“independent” policy in “cooperation” with the League’ was an unsatisfactory approach.25 In his case history of the dispute as it unfolded in the years 1931 to 1933, Bassett  cites Morley’s observation that the disclosure of the divergent views on the question of a commission of inquiry immediately saw, as Morley put it, a ‘hardening’ of the Japanese position on direct negotiations.26 Bassett notes that some regarded this as ‘the crucial point in the affair.’27 Yet he also contends that Stimson had ‘strong grounds’ for resisting a commission of inquiry at that stage, noting also that in Great Britain Stimson’s policy of trying to assist the Japanese civilian government and, above all, foreign minister Shidehara in their struggle with the military class was generally favoured. He also notes that criticism of Stimson’s approach to the crisis was not ‘conspicuous’ during the early months of the Manchurian crisis.28 Stimson himself remained unapologetic in this regard, writing in The Far Eastern Crisis: Recollections and Observations (1936) that my action was based upon my former experience with the Far East and I think my judgement has been confirmed by the subsequent events. I believe that the imposition of such an inquiry at that moment upon Japan would have accelerated the outbreak of nationalistic feeling which subsequently occurred; that it would have hastened the downfall of the Minseito Cabinet which at that time was doing its best to check the army; that whereas Shidehara was able to remain in office until December l0th and eventually to consent on behalf of Japan to the sending of the Lytton Commission of Inquiry, if we had overridden Japan at that early stage of the proceedings,

24  Quincy Wright, ‘An American View of Far Eastern Problems,’ International Affairs 14, no. 1 (1935): 69–88, 75. 25  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 92. 26  Morley, The Society of Nations, 442, and Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 92. 27  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 92. 28  Ibid., 18, 92.

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we probably should have lost the invaluable results which came from the work of that commission.29

In regard to Cecil’s interpretation of Article 11, it should be noted that although the article left the question of how a dispute might be settled to the discretion of the council, it did not specify which parties had the main responsibility for settling a dispute. Madariaga, who later likened the council’s decision to that of a police force allowing ‘housebreaker’ to directly negotiate with his ‘unwilling host,’ insisted that the idea of direct negotiations was a ‘flat denial’ of the covenant. Article 11 provided that ‘any war or threat of war, whether immediately affecting any of the Members of the League or not, is hereby declared a matter of concern to the whole League.’30 It was on the basis of this provision that the council had intervened promptly in the Greco-Bulgarian dispute, notably with the support of the Japanese representative at the council. On that occasion, when war loomed between Greece and Bulgaria, the council did not hesitate to take action under Article 11, employing ‘dictatorial methods to secure cessation of military operations.’31 As Shotwell explained it in War as an Instrument of National Policy (1929), the council, presided over forcefully by Briand and with the assent of Athens and Sofia, established a commission of inquiry in order to inquire into the dispute between the two countries. As a result of its work, Shotwell noted in the same work, the ‘frontier posts were drawn back on each side of the hilltops which constituted the frontier, and a few Swedish gendarmes watched over peace in the Balkans.’32 Zimmern later observed that Cecil’s intervention was ‘the crucial moment’ in what was the ‘crucial period’ of the crisis, namely, its first week, precisely because it signified a retreat from the ‘Greco-Bulgarian 29  Henry L.  Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis: Recollections and Observations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), 44–5. 30  Madariaga, The World’s Design, 155 and ‘Appendix I: Covenant of the League of Nations,’ in Russell, Theories of International Relations, 557. 31  Morley, The Society of Nations, 467–9. Stimson offered the following view of the contrast between the Manchurian and Greco-Bulgarian situations: ‘[T]he Manchurian situation differed widely from the Greek-Bulgarian boundary controversy in which such an investigating commission had been sent by the League. In that case the issue was over the determination of a geographical fact and the commission’s duties were virtually to determine a geographical line; while here [in Manchuria] the investigation would involve an inquiry into a large number of deep and complicated political differences.’ Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 45n. 32  Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy, 210–2.

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precedent.’33 It was in response to Cecil’s intervention that the Chinese delegation suggested that it might invoke Article 15 under which the council’s responsibility for settling a dispute was clearly outlined. However, in the end, China accepted the council resolution of September 30 that requested that ‘both parties do all in their power to hasten the restoration of normal relations between them’ and keep the council informed of their progress in restoring those relations.34 In the course of his address concerning the Twelfth Assembly at Chatham House, Lytton pointed to the difficulties that the council faced in dealing with the Manchurian situation, the greatest of these being the fact, Lytton stated, that neither the Chinese nor the Japanese government ‘seemed capable of exercising authority on the spot.’ Lytton observed that there was a ‘feeling’ in Geneva ‘that the incident itself had broken out because the Japanese army on the spot had got out of hand, rather than because they had been ordered to do anything by the Japanese government.’ At the same time, Lytton added, the Chinese government was so ‘distracted and divided by their civil war’ that it was ‘unable to exercise any control.’ The Manchurian crisis, he then told his Chatham House audience, was not only the most difficult crisis that the  LON  had yet to face, but was the ‘most serious.’ Lytton declared that in view of this, the LON was ‘really on its trial,’ adding that this was ‘felt by everybody’ at the council. If it succeeded in this trial, Lytton advised his audience, the resolution of the Manchurian crisis would be seen as the LON’s greatest accomplishment to date. However, he added, failure to resolve it would ‘undoubtedly be a great blow to the prestige of the League.’35 As Lytton’s observations suggest, council members immediately understood that what was unfolding in Manchuria concerned more than ‘the acts of minor and irresponsible officials’ on the ground.36 Pointing out  Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 420.  LON, OJ 12, no. 12, 1931, 2307–8. See also Morley, The Society of Nations, 443. 35  Lytton, ‘The Twelfth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 747–8. See also Scelle and Cassin, ‘French Opinion and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 73. 36  In a telegram sent to the secretary of state on September 22, 1931, at 8 p.m., the United States minister in China, Nelson Trusler Johnson, advised the following: ‘According to all information available to me here; I am driven to the conclusion that the forceful occupation of all strategic points in South Manchuria, including the taking over and operation of public utilities, banks, and in Mukden at least the functions of civil government, is an aggressive act by Japan apparently long planned and when decided upon most carefully and systematically put into effect. I find no evidence that these events were the result of accident nor were they the acts of minor and irresponsible officials….It seems to me necessary that the powers signa33 34

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that the staging of the Mukden incident ‘was an obvious pretext to start an aggression long-premeditated and according to plan,’ Madariaga, who had been a Spanish delegate to the Twelfth Assembly, claimed that even though they pretended not to prejudge the matter, ‘everybody [at the council] knew what was going on and there were no illusions.’37 The events of the night of 18–19 September was only the beginning of a chain of acts of insubordination by a Japanese army which appeared determined to pursue its own agenda in Manchuria and which, even before Mukden, was engaged in a contest of authority with the civilian government, a contest involving political assassinations.38 In an article appearing on November 14, Norman Angell pointed to the ‘defiance’ of the Japanese government by its military class in the form of army’s northward push in Manchuria in early October 1931, observing that ‘the men on the spot’ took the bit between their teeth and the issue became not so much an issue of China versus Japan, or even Japan versus the League, as an issue of the military class in Japan versus the civilian government. It is true that the Japanese government has fought as far as possible for a free hand in dealing with what they regard as a situation of anarchy where a million Japanese subjects and great material interests are involved, but Japan’s resistance to the League has been measured by the degree to which, in the internal conflict, the military have gained the upper hand over the civil power.39

Gathorne-Hardy, having noted that on September 9 leaflets had been dropped from army aircraft which warned the Japanese people of the threat to Japanese ‘rights’ in Manchuria, pointed out that in their tory to the Kellogg Treaty owe it to themselves and to the world to pronounce themselves in regard to this Japanese act of aggression which I consider to have been deliberately accomplished in utter and cynical disregard of obligations which Japan as a nation shares with the other signatories of that pact.’ The minister in China (Johnson) to the secretary of state, in United States, Department of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 155–6. 37  Madariaga, The World’s Design, 155. 38  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 313–5. James Weland states that the Kwantung Army in Manchuria ‘had to have at least the tacit approval of much of the army’s leadership. Equally important they had to have allies within the army who could assist their efforts.’ Weland, ‘Misguided Intelligence: Japanese Military Intelligence Officers in the Manchurian Incident, September 1931,’ 445. 39  Angell, ‘Japan, the League and Us,’ 1302–3.

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encroachments on the civil power, the military class enjoyed the support of public opinion. The Japanese public, already driven to the brink by the economic depression, had been infuriated by the instigation in China in June 1931 of the ninth anti-Japanese boycott. As indicated earlier, such boycotts were part of a more general anti-foreign boycott movement that had periodically flared in China in the opening decades of the twentieth century largely as an expression of an awakened Chinese nationalism.40 At the IPR’s 1929 conference, Odagiri Masunosuke, a Japanese delegate and director of the Yokohama Specie Bank, observed that the anti-­ Japanese boycott movement had stirred ‘deep resentment’ in Japan, adding that China had ‘renounced open warfare as an instrument of national policy in favour of the more silent but equally disastrous method of inflicting damage upon those nations who from time to time incur her ill-will.’41 The representation of the anti-Japanese boycott as akin to an act of war was reiterated by Nitobe and other JCIPR members, in arguing that the Japanese military intervention in Manchuria was an act of self-defence. As Nitobe expressed it in November 1932, ‘Boycott, when it assumes the form, or attains the proportion that it does in China, is practically and not rhetorically, warfare…Boycott is war in its incipient stage.’42 Against the backdrop of growing militarism and nationalism at home, Japanese delegates in Geneva employed tactics intended to delay any action by the LON. As Madariaga described it, during council deliberations the Japanese ‘small-craft’ diplomats buzzed around Yoshizawa, a statesman he depicted as a cigar-puffing, ‘bulky dreadnought.’ Madariaga noted how the Japanese diplomats played for time, ‘dodging the Articles of the Covenant and the blatant faits accomplis of their army’ and highlighting the ‘advantages’ of direct negotiations. Japanese delegates pleaded at the council that if the 40  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 313–4 and Gian Galeazzo Ciano, ‘First Report,’ in  Miscellaneous No. 4 (1932): Reports to the League of Nations by Representatives at Shanghai of certain States Members of the League Council appointed to report on events in Shanghai and Neighbourhood, Shanghai, February 6 and, 12 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1932), 3. Sandra Wilson notes that the July boycott commenced in Shanghai and that it was the ninth anti-Japanese boycott since 1919. Sandra Wilson, The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society (London: Routledge, 2002), 173. 41  Odagiri Masunosuke, ‘The Boycott in China,’ in Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1929, 377–9. 42  Nitobe, Inazō , 1932, quoted in Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 513.

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LON interfered in the Manchurian situation, the Japanese public would become ‘restive’ and the government’s opponents would then ‘feel encouraged to resist and we shall get into trouble.’ This plea, Madariaga suggested, reverberated in the souls of other statesmen seated at the horse-­shoe table: they could not help but think on hearing  of the Japanese  government’s fear that it would get into trouble should the LON interfere, ‘and we also.’43 In light of this, one might reasonably conclude that the advice being dispensed by Japanese diplomats, which, it should be noted, was echoed by members of the JCIPR, that the LON and the United States ‘ought to refrain from interference and allow time for Japanese moderates to regain control over the Kwantung Army,’ fell on somewhat receptive ears.44 On October 12, 1931, the day before the second phase of the sixty-fifth session was due to commence, the Japanese government communicated to the council its offer to commence direct negotiations with Chinese representatives, now making it plain that Japan would not evacuate its forces as a prelude to such negotiations.45 As worrying as was  the latter piece of news, comfort could seemingly be found in a message sent by Stimson to the American consulate at Geneva for delivery to the secretary-­ general. Circulated at the council on October 11, Stimson’s message stated the following: [I]t is most desirable that the League in no way relax its vigilance and in no way fail to assert all the pressure and authority within its competence….On its part, the American government, acting independently through its diplomatic representatives, will endeavour to reinforce what the League does and will make clear that it has a keen interest in the matter and is not oblivious to the duties which the disputants have assumed to their fellow-signatories of the Pact of Paris as well as the Nine-Power Pact….By this course we avoid any danger of embarrassing the League in the course to which it is now committed.46

In assuring the council that the positions of Washington and Geneva were now in alignment, Stimson appeared to close any ‘gaps through which Japanese diplomacy could effect unnecessary delays.’47 As a result of  Madariaga, The World’s Design, 155–6.  Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 532–3. 45  Morley, The Society of Nations, 445. 46  Henry L. Stimson, 1932, quoted ibid., 446. 47  Morley, The Society of Nations, 449. 43 44

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Stimson’s assurances, on October 15, all the council members bar Japan voted to invite the United States to participate in the council’s deliberations. While Japan had argued that an invitation to a non-member state to sit the council was of ‘far-reaching constitutional importance’ and therefore required a unanimous vote, the majority of the council members determined that it was a matter of procedure. Considered as such, unanimity on the question of the invitation was not required. Due to some deft handiwork on the part of the secretariat, Briand had assumed the presidency of the council for the duration of its October meeting, much to the relief of observers such as Lytton.48 It was thus Briand who composed the invitation to the United States, an invitation in which he recalled that he had had the ‘honour’  in 1928  of joining with the then secretary of state, namely, Kellogg, in the authoring of the Pact of Paris.49 The question of inviting American participation had been raised at the council as early as September 24 and  had been  the subject of frequent telephone discussions between the State Department and the American consulate in Geneva. In the course of one of those discussions, Prentiss B. Gilbert,  the American consul  general  in Geneva and the United States’ observer at the LON, was  specially  authorised  by Stimson  to assist at council meetings between October 16 and 24 in a ‘consultative capacity.’50 However, despite Stimson’s earlier call for the council to exercise vigilance in asserting all the pressure and authority within its competence, a degree of ambiguity in regard to the American stance revealed itself. Having been instructed by Stimson to participate only in those discussions which related to the ‘possible application of the Kellogg-Briand Pact,’ Gilbert informed the council on October 16 that in ‘your deliberations as to the application of the machinery of the Covenant, I repeat, we can of course, take no part.’51 That Japan agreed to the American presence a few days later was viewed by some observers as signifying an understanding that American

 Ibid., 447–9 and Lytton, ‘The Twelfth Assembly,’ 748.  LON, OJ 12, no. 12, 2322. 50  Morley, The Society of Nations, 447, 451. Headway noted that Prentiss B. Gilbert had been appointed to Geneva in 1930 ‘to maintain touch’ with the LON.  ‘The League’s Toughest Task: How the Manchurian Affair was Handled,’ Headway, November  1931, 208–9. 51  Stimson, 1932, quoted in Morley, The Society of Nations, 451 and LON, OJ 12, no. 12, 1931, 2336. 48 49

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involvement in the council’s deliberations was for ‘practical purposes… unimportant.’52 The second phase of the sixty-fifth session, which concluded on the night of October 24, issued in a resolution which, in addition to noting the invocation of Article 11 by China, pointed out that a number of governments had invoked Article 2 of the Pact of Paris. It recalled the Japanese statement  which  declared that Japan had no ‘territorial designs in Manchuria,’ noting that this declaration was in accordance with the terms of the covenant and the Nine-Power Treaty, the parties to the latter accord having pledged ‘to respect the sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial and administrative integrity of China.’ In light of Japan’s obligations under all the legal instruments just mentioned, the resolution called on Japan ‘to begin immediately and to proceed progressively with the withdrawal of troops into the railway zone’ in order that the ‘total withdrawal may be effected’ before the commencement of the third phase of the sixty-fifth session which the resolution scheduled for November 16.53 The November 16 deadline explains Angell’s expression of foreboding in his article appearing on November 14: that in the course of the next week it might be revealed that the LON was ‘impotent to do the thing for which it was established.’ In an echo of the French complaint about the futility of bare pacts, Angell warned that a mere will to peace is not enough to preserve it. Gloomily observing that the many ‘enemies’ of the LON would certainly ‘crow’ if it lost its authority and collapsed, Angell urged Britain and the United States to join together to impose sanctions.54 The October 24 resolution was supported by representatives of China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Guatemala, the Irish Free State, Italy, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Spain and Yugoslavia: by every member of the council except Japan. In light of the view that Article 11 required unanimity as discussed below, observers at the time contended that the resolution, although ‘strongly worded,’ only ‘possessed moral force.’55 Indeed, the Japanese government communicated to the council and Nanjing on October 28 and 31 respectively, that, given the unanimity requirement, for legal purposes there in fact had been no resolution on October 24, stating this in ‘tactful language’ in its communication  Morley, The Society of Nations, 451–2.  LON, OJ 12, no. 12, 931, 2340–1. 54  Angell, ‘Japan, the League and Us,’ 1302. 55  Morley, The Society of Nations, 455–7. 52 53

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to the council and ‘brusquely’ in its communication with Nanjing.56 It was against this background that on November 5, the United States, the representative of which had not participated in or spoken during the vote in Geneva, officially endorsed the resolution, although not the November 16 deadline for Japanese withdrawal.57 This endorsement was in the form of memorandum given to Shidehara by William Cameron Forbes, the American ambassador at Tokyo, on November 5. According to Morley, the American government had held back its endorsement of the resolution because the State Department believed that the council had ‘erred in judgement by yielding to Chinese insistence in setting an immediate date for the “total withdrawal”’ of the Japanese troops.58 Instead of the November 16 deadline, the United States recommended the ‘withdrawal of the troops as soon as this can be safely accomplished in the present emergency.’59 Stimson observed the following in a telegram sent to Forbes: the League resolution had not ‘received unqualified endorsement on my part, and as for the date, I have deliberately refrained from mentioning one.’60 In order to understand why Stimson had thought the council was mistaken in setting the November 16 deadline, it needs to be taken into account that Stimson had reached the conclusion that the Japanese moderates in the government were no longer in control. [E]ach new report of Japanese advances in Manchuria, and each new evidence of a stiff tone in official Foreign Office papers, showed that they were fighting a losing battle. The harrowing fact remained that there was nothing their friends in other countries could do to help them. Any attack by foreigners—and particularly by Americans—on Japanese militarism would merely ‘play into the hands of any nationalist agitators.’61

The concern to not play into the hands of nationalist agitators, as well as to not offend that section of American opinion which was suspicious of Geneva, explains the delay in endorsing the resolution of October 24  Ibid., 459–60. See also Cong. S. doc. 55, 30–2, quoted ibid., 460.  Morley, The Society of Nations, 460. 58  Ibid. 59  W. Cameron Forbes, 1932, quoted ibid., 460. 60  Henry L. Stimson, 1931, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 141n. 61  Henry L. Stimson with McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 228–9. 56 57

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along with the refusal to countenance a date for the Japanese withdrawal. According to Bassett,  these considerations  also explain why the United States hesitated to participate in the council’s October deliberations in the first place and its ‘prompt termination of that participation as soon as the invocation of the Pact of Paris was concluded.’62 Doubtless, the same considerations explain a press statement issued by Stimson in which he stressed that while the United States would continue to cooperate with other nations, American policy in regard to Manchuria was not bound to that of other nations. By implication,  Stimson’s press statement was signalling that American policy was not bound to that of the LON. The secretary of state declared that the policy of the government of the United States remains unchanged, namely, by acting independently through diplomatic channels and reserving complete independence of judgement as to each step, to co-operate with and support the other nations of the world in their objective of peace in Manchuria.63

That the third phase of the council’s sixty-fifth session, which took place between November 16 and December 10, was held not in Geneva but in the French foreign ministry’s Salle de l’Horloge, the same room in which the Pact of Paris had been signed by Secretary of State Kellogg on August, 27, 1928, suggests that the council entertained the hope that in terms of American cooperation with the LON, this phase would prove to be historic. That no less than General Charles G.  Dawes, the American ambassador at London, a diplomatic role of much greater seniority than that of American consul general in Geneva, was sent to Paris to meet with council members would seem to have augured well.64 Yet even if the council felt flattered that someone of Dawes’s stature was singled out for this mission, this would have been of little compensation for the fact that his instructions were to ‘confer with, but not to sit with’ council members at their meeting.65 Indeed, according to Morley, the main reason why Dawes was sent to Paris rather than Consul Gilbert, who remained in Geneva, was in order to ‘diminish potential hostility’ in the Senate of which Dawes  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 141.  Department of State, Press Release, 6 November 1931, quoted in Morley, The Society of Nations, 461. 64  Morley, The Society of Nations, 462. 65  Ibid. 62

63

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had formerly been vice-president and presiding officer: Ambassador Dawes was a much more familiar figure to American senators than was Consul Gilbert.66 That the American policy was now one of ‘carefully’ abstaining from ‘associating itself with the League because of its fear of being drawn into complications,’ as Sir Edward Grey, the Liberal politician and former foreign secretary, described the American stance at the Royal Albert Hall on March 7, 1932, was made plain in an official communiqué issued by Dawes upon his arrival in Paris on November 13.67 The communiqué read as follows: The Council of the League in the Manchurian situation is considering matters which presumably affect not only the treaty rights and general interests of the United States under the nine-power pact, but relate to the Kellogg pact as well. I am here therefore, to confer with members of the Council individually with regard to a problem which is of common concern and involves mutual treaty interests. I shall hope to make every contact which is essential to the exercise of any influence we may have in properly supporting the League’s effort to avert war and to make effective the Kellogg pact. The United States is not a member of the League, and the methods which have been followed on occasions when a matter of concern and interest to the League and to ourselves is under consideration have varied. On this occasion there is no anticipation on the part of my government or myself that it will be found necessary for me to attend the meetings of the Council.68

In an article appearing in Geneva Special Studies, a publication which covered the Manchurian crisis extensively, Malcolm W. Davis, an American national who was then the director of the GRC, noted that Dawes stayed away completely from the Quai d’Orsay.69 Throughout its entire session in Paris as Morley noted, Dawes maintained a posture of ‘aloofness towards the Council as a body.’70 Malcolm Davis observed that the fact that Dawes remained the whole time in his hotel at the place Vendôme, ‘and only saw some of its members personally and separately,’ was seen as marking a

 Ibid.  Sir Edward Grey, 1932, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 132. 68  ‘Dawes will Confer with Individuals: Our Recent Link with the League is Broken by New Attitude,’ New York Times, November 14, 1931. 69  Malcolm W.  Davis, ‘Councils Against War: A Comparison of Cases in Third-Party Dealing with Disputes between Nations,’ Geneva Special Studies 3, no. 11 (1932), 15. 70  Morley, The Society of Nations, 462. Emphasis added. 66 67

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‘change in principle if not in method’ on the part of Washington.71 In referring to a change in principle, Davis had in mind a point made by Morley, Davis’s predecessor at the GRC: that Washington had effectively renounced its right, conferred on it by the council over the protest of Japan, to participate in council deliberations.72 This development, Malcolm Davis stated, ‘chilled the League representatives.’73 The final phase of the sixty-fifth session took place against a background of further faits accomplis in Manchuria on the part of the Japanese army, which had succeeded in wresting the region almost completely from Chinese control. It was at this point that Yoshizawa proposed the very commission of inquiry that he had refused to countenance at previous council meetings.74 On November 25, Dawes issued a public statement which signalled that the United States approved of the idea of a commission of inquiry, and on December 10, a resolution was passed unanimously which authorised the appointment of a commission of ‘five members to study on the spot and to report to the council on any circumstance which, affecting international relations, threatens to disturb peace between China and Japan, or the good understanding between them, upon which peace depends.’75 The Chinese observations and reservations in relation to the resolution, which were expressed at the council by Sze, began by underlining the rights in the matter to which China was entitled under the provisions of the covenant, under existing international treaties and under accepted principles of international law and practice. The Japanese representative, that is, Yoshizawa, observed that the resolution did not prevent the Japanese forces from undertaking action in order to protect ‘the lives and property of Japanese subjects against the activities of bandits and lawless elements rampant in various parts of Manchuria,’ although  he was careful to add that such measures were ‘exceptional’ and would ‘naturally be obviated when normal conditions shall have been restored in that region.’76 These  observations and  reservations aside, the resolution was 71  Davis, ‘Councils Against War: A Comparison of Cases in Third-Party Dealing with Disputes between Nations,’ 15. 72  Morley, The Society of Nations, 462. 73  Davis, ‘Councils Against War: A Comparison of Cases in Third-Party Dealing with Disputes between Nations,’ 15. 74  Morley, The Society of Nations, 470. 75  LON OJ, 12, no. 12, 1931, 2374. For Dawe’s statement of November 25, see Morley, The Society of Nations, 470–1. 76  LON, OJ 12, no. 12 1931, 2376–7.

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effectively a retreat from two positions earlier upheld by the council: first, ‘the policy adopted at an early stage by the League Council of opposing any discussion of the substance of the dispute until the Japanese troops had withdrawn’ and second, in light of this policy and as specified in its resolution of October 24, that a total withdrawal of Japanese troops into the railway zone must be effected before direct negotiations between the parties could take place. 77 The council’s earlier position on the question of withdrawal had attracted much criticism. Bassett notes that [t]he view strongly expressed was that, by insisting upon total withdrawal of the Japanese troops as a condition precedent to any negotiations for the settlement of the dispute, the Council was not only ignoring the realities of the Manchurian situation but prejudging the whole Japanese case; and that, by fixing a ‘time limit’ for such a withdrawal, was only adding fuel to the flames of Japanese resentment, and uniting the Japanese Government and people behind the aggressive military party.78

Contentions  of this nature caused Zimmern, on the occasion of his fourth Carpenter Memorial Lecture at Manchester College, Oxford, on November 10, to express the concern that  in  the  workings of the LON ‘an elementary truth’ was being obscured. He noted in relation to this that in the case of the Manchurian question, ‘counsel was being darkened by discussions on the merits of the case in dispute, whereas the real issue was the use of military force as an instrument of national policy.’79 After the  December 10  resolution was passed and in protest at the Japanese  position, the representatives of Guatemala, Panama and Peru made declarations to the effect that it was intolerable for one state to compel another state to enter into negotiations on an area of dispute through the ‘military occupation of territory.’ Resenting the Japanese assumption of a right to undertake police operations in response to the alleged banditry in Manchuria, they asserted in common that the ‘right of a State to safeguard the lives and property of its nationals abroad must be limited by respect for the sovereign rights of other nations.’80 In another ‘thinly veiled’ rebuke of the Japanese position, Briand, in his role as presi Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 29, 620. See also Morley, The Society of Nations, 442.  Ibid., 33, 620. 79  ‘The New World Order: “Real Issue in Manchurian Question,”  Elimination of War,’ Manchester Guardian, November 11, 1931. See also Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 30. 80  Morley, The Society of Nations, 475. See also LON, OJ 12, no. 12 1931, 2380–3. 77

78

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dent  of  the  closing meeting of  the  council’s  sixty-fifth session, the last council meeting he would attend,  stated the following:  ‘[e]xcept in the case of  an  express stipulation  in treaties in force,’ the covenant does not ‘authorise a State, however, well founded its grievances against another State, to seek redress by methods other than the pacific methods set forth in Article XII.’  As with ‘the scrupulous respect for all  treaty obligations,’ the council’s president declared, this was a fundamental principle, one which had been reaffirmed and reinforced by the Pact of Paris.81 On December 11, the day after the council resolution, the liberal Rikken Minseitō cabinet under the premiership of Wakatsuki Reijirō resigned, one of its last acts being the approval of the proposed commission of inquiry.82 Less moderately inclined than its predecessor, the incoming Japanese government countenanced an increase in Japan’s military presence in Manchuria. Within weeks, Japanese troops were advancing on Jinzhou (Chinchow), the threat of which had loomed in late November but which had been ‘temporarily postponed by strong representations from Geneva and from Washington’ to which the previous government was ‘disposed to defer.’83 The last remaining administrative authority of the Chinese Republic in the Three Eastern Provinces of Manchuria, Jinzhou was occupied by Japanese forces on January 3, the Chinese troops having withdrawn. The pretext for the expansion of the field of operation of Japanese forces  was increased incidents of  banditry and Chinese troop concentrations at Jinzhou. On November 28, the Japanese government had communicated to the council that it wished to see all Chinese troops withdrawn from Jinzhou. It informed the council that it was ‘prepared to undertake in principle that Japanese troops would not enter the zone thus evacuated except in the unexpected case of serious and urgent circumstances threatening the safety of the lives and property of Japanese nationals in Northern  China and the safety of the Japanese troops stationed therein.’84 In light of reports transmitted by observers on the ground, including British, French and American observers, the Japanese claims concerning banditry and troop concentrations were regarded scep Ibid, and LON, OJ 12, no. 12 1931, 2378.  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 315, and Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 141. 83  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 315. 84  Morley, The Society of Nations, 471; Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 314–5; and League Document C. 940. M. 505. 1931. VII, quoted in Morley, The Society of Nations, 471. 81 82

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tically. However, irrespective of the veracity of the Japanese allegations, the crucial point,  was that it was not  within  Japan’s  power  as an individual member of the LON  to demand the evacuation of Chinese troops; Japan  was  ‘taking upon itself  a function which…[belonged]…to the authoritative League organs, and which…[was]…in no sense a prerogative of a single League member.’85 On January 7, against the background of the Japanese occupation of Jinzhou, Secretary Stimson issued a note, identical copies of which were sent to the Chinese and Japanese governments and to diplomats in Washington representing the other parties to the Nine-Power Treaty. In his note, Stimson articulated what came to be known as the Stimson doctrine of non-recognition.86 The Stimson note stated the following: With the recent military operations about Chinchow, the last remaining administrative authority of the government of the Chinese Republic in South Manchuria, as it existed prior to September 18, 1931, has been destroyed. The American government continues confident that the work of the neutral commission recently authorized by the Council of the League of Nations will facilitate an ultimate solution of the difficulties now existing between China and Japan. But in view of the present situation and of its own rights and obligations therein, the American government deems it to be its duty to notify both the government of the Chinese Republic and the Imperial Japanese government that it cannot admit the legality of any situation de facto, nor does it intend to recognize any treaty or agreement entered into between those governments or agents thereof, which may impair the treaty rights of the United States or its citizens in China, including those which relate to the sovereignty, the independence, or the territorial and administrative integrity of the Republic of China, or to the international policy relative to China, ­commonly known as the Open Door policy; and that it does not intend to recognize any situation, treaty or agreement which may be brought about by means contrary to the covenants and obligations of the Pact of Paris of

85  Morley, The Society of Nations, 471. Gathorne-Hardy stated that the claim concerning an increase in banditry was ‘possibly true, though, if so, probably attributable to the withdrawal of Chinese authority’. Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 314. 86  Morley, The Society of Nations, 478. On Stimson’s view of Japan’s right to protect its interests, see Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals: The Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations,’ 543. On Stimson’s failure to consult the other parties to the Nine-Power Treaty prior to issuing his note of January 7, see Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 76, 90.

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August 27, 1928, to which treaty both China and Japan, as well as the United States, are parties.87

In a press interview on the following day, Stimson explained what he called the substance of the American position, declaring that in the first place, we have not desired to question Japan’s legitimate treaty rights in Manchuria. We do not intend to interfere with them in the slightest degree. In the second place, we have not desired to intrude ourselves into any settlement which Japan may make of the present unhappy difficulties except that: 1. Nothing in that settlement must impair our rights or our citizens’ rights in China, such as the condition of an open-door policy and the Nine-Power Treaty which embodies the open-door policy; 2. That settlement should not be achieved by violation of the methods agreed upon in the Kellogg Pact.88

On January 11, the British press published a British Foreign Office communiqué, which, according to Sir John T. Pratt, the office’s advisor on Far Eastern affairs, had been ‘drafted and approved in haste by the permanent officials at 1 o’clock on Saturday’ on January 9.89 The communiqué declared that in light of assurances given by the Japanese delegates to the council on October 13 and the Japanese prime minister on December 28, it would not be addressing ‘any formal Note to the Japanese Government on the lines of the American Government’s Note, but the Japanese Ambassador in London has been requested to obtain confirmation of these assurances from his Government.’90 Anthony Eden,  the under-secretary for foreign affairs, responding to a question in the House of Commons on February 24 concerning the British government’s intentions in respect to the issue of non-recognition, stated the following: I do not think that a further Note on this subject would, even if it were addressed to both parties as suggested by my hon. Friend, serve any useful purpose. His Majesty’s Government have already made their position suffi  Stimson, 1932, quoted in Morley, The Society of Nations, 479.  Walter Lippmann, with the assistance of the research staff of the Council on Foreign Relations, United States in World Affairs, An Account of American Foreign Relations, 1932 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932), 196. For Stimson’s expression of sympathy for Japan, see Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals.’ 543. 89  J. T. Pratt, letter to the editor, Times, November 30, 1938. 90  British Foreign Office, 1932, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 83. 87 88

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ciently clear and the Japanese Government have given definite assurances that they have no territorial ambitions and that they will uphold the principle of the Open Door.91

Although Stimson complained of the communiqué, the composition of which the Foreign Office came to regret when it realised that it ‘read like a rebuff to America,’ he did not complain of the British refusal to write a note similar to his own. Stimson himself stated that the Americans had no reason to think the British government viewed the American action with anything but ‘sympathetic understanding, even if for any reason it felt unable to follow us’ or that it would not ‘cooperate in the subsequent steps that might make our policy more effective.’92 Nonetheless, the Foreign Office’s communiqué of January 11 was interpreted by some journalists and commentators in the United States and Great Britain as a rejection of the Stimson doctrine. Writing in 1932, Lippmann observed that Great Britain had ‘declined at this time to associate itself with the Stimson doctrine of non-recognition for any treaty or arrangement brought about by means contrary to the covenants and obligations of the Pact of Paris.’ Having observed that the Dutch, French and Italian governments had ‘followed suit,’ Lippmann declared that the ‘the United States alone stood formally committed at this time to a refusal to recognize the consequences of a violation of the Pact of Paris.’93 Bassett notes that this interpretation of the British communiqué, along with the belief often associated with this interpretation, namely, that Washington would have been willing to explore the option of sanctions against Japan if London had been equally willing, took on legendary status over the next couple of years. He observes that ‘even statesmen of the calibre’ of Lytton and Lord Lothian appeared to fall prey to it: they lamented the alleged failure of their government to respond to what Lytton referred to as United States’ overtures’ and Lothian as Stimson’s offer.94 Speaking at the University of Manchester on May 17, 1934, Lytton stated that ‘the United States have made overtures which have not been reciprocated, and the failure of our Government to back up Mr.  262 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), 24 February 1924, 360.  Pratt, letter to the editor, Times, November 30, 1938 and Henry L.  Stimson, 1936, quoted ibid. 93  Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 196. On the Japanese assurances, see Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 82. 94  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 131–34. 91 92

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Stimson is perhaps the most regrettable of all its shortcomings.’95 In a similar vein, Lothian stated at Chatham House in December of the same year that it was to be regretted that the British government had rejected the Stimson ‘offer to reverse the isolationist decision of 1920 and to act with us in support of the collective system in the Pacific. The failure on our part to live up to the spirit and the letter of the Washington Treaties early in 1932, drove the United States back into isolation.’96 These views were often echoed in later years. Speaking in August 1937 at the GIIR, NoelBaker maintained that the British government had repudiated the Stimson doctrine because its ‘only interest in the matter lay in…[Britain’s]…trade with Manchuria,’ adding that the  repudiation of it had the undesirable effect of seriously imperilling Britain’s interest in working with the United States on the issue.97 It should be noted that the British government sent an official reply to Stimson on January 9 which, Stimson later recorded, reached him via the State Department on January 12.98 In a footnote appearing in the Far Eastern Crisis, Stimson called attention to a ‘courteous memorandum’ which presented ‘substantially the same information’ as the communiqué published on January 11.99 Pratt later pointed out that the memorandum sent to Stimson had explained, unlike the communiqué, that ‘her position as a member of the League precluded Great Britain from sending a Note on the lines suggested’ by Stimson: while it was ‘reasonable and proper’ for the United States to ‘serve final notice of America’s rights on the model of the non-recognition warning….it was not an attitude that a League Power could take up at a time when the League was still actively engaged in trying to promote conciliation.’100 Stimson observed in relation to the British communiqué that its ‘contents…were such as to be taken by most readers, including—what was most important—the Japanese Government, as a rebuff to the United States.’101 As Bassett observes, although  Stimson did not declare that he was among those who viewed the communiqué as a rebuff, it is very likely that  Lord Lytton, 1934, quoted ibid., 131.  Lord Lothian, 1934, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 132. 97  Philip Noel-Baker, ‘The Future of the Collective System,’ The Problems of Peace: Tenth Series: Anarchy or World Order (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), 183. 98  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 87, and Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 101n. 99  Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 101n. 100  Pratt, letter to the editor, Times, November 30, 1938. 101  Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 101. See also Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 88. 95 96

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he was. Stimson later stated that its ‘most important feature’ was its ‘omissions’: he expressed disappointment with the fact that the communiqué ‘dealt solely with the single problem of continuing trade relations with Manchuria’ and was ‘entirely silent as to the preservation of the sovereignty, independence and integrity of China, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the assertion of the principle of the non-recognition of the fruits of unlawful aggression.’102 The reason why the British government did not touch on these other issues in its communiqué, according to Bassett, is the same as  the explanation as to why the British government felt precluded from sending to Japan a note of the nature of Stimson’s note. As editorialised by the  Daily Telegraph on January 9, after having pointed out that the Stimson note was ‘in no sense an American “intervention”’ nor even a ‘formal protest’ since Stimson had not charged, either ‘directly or indirectly,’ the Japanese with any breach of America’s treaty rights, whatever steps the British Government might be inclined to take were ‘hampered by the fact that Great Britain is already committed to procedure through the League of Nations.’103  Commitment to  such  procedure  meant precisely  a  commitment to addressing any  questions relating to  the sovereignty, independence and integrity of a member of the  within the framework of that institution rather than independently of it.104 Another key point to note is that the Stimson note was interpreted by some in Britain as being, above all, a ‘pointed reaffirmation’ of American rights in China ‘and a declaration in advance, formal and precise, that the United States will not acknowledge their impairment by the events which

 Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 101–2. See also Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 88.  ‘America Enters a Caveat,’ Daily Telegraph, January 9, 1932. The Manchester Guardian reported that Reuter’s Paris correspondent had said that the invocation of the Nine-Power Treaty in the Stimson note had aroused great interest in France. However, the correspondent had added that reports that the French government would associate itself with the American action were incorrect. The dispute over Manchuria had been submitted to the LON, and ‘it would be through the intermediary of this body that France could best exercise her influence of moderation.’ ‘Official French Attitude,’ Manchester Guardian, January 9, 1932.  The Manchester Guardian observed that ‘[e]ven if the British felt compelled to act in concert with the United States her action would not necessarily conform to that of America.’ The reason for this was that the Great Britain, as a member of the LON Council, had received solemn assurances from Japan that it did not intend to depart in any degree from the policy of the Open Door. The United States, ‘not being members of the League, had received no such assurances.’ ‘The Nine Powers and Manchuria,’ Manchester Guardian, January 9, 1932. 104  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 62.  102

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are now taking place in Manchuria.’105 This  view was expressed in  the Daily Telegraph and the same thinking was reflected in the Morning Post which observed in relation to the Open Door that the situation of Great Britain was different to that of the United States: Great Britain ‘and the other League Powers had already received assurances on the subject from the Japanese delegate at the League Council, whereas the United States, being absent, had not, “which explains their individual protest.”’106 The view that the note was mainly concerned with the maintenance of the Open Door and, more specifically, the rights of the United States and its citizens was shared by the Foreign Office, a point which further explains the omissions in the Foreign Office communiqué and its focus on trading relations. Pratt wrote in a letter to the Times in 1938 that at the Foreign Office, the identic note sent to the governments of China and Japan was ‘interpreted as an attempt to circumscribe any advantage that Japan might gain by a breach of the treaties named, but only in so far as those advantages might trespass on America’s interests.’107 As noted above, the Daily Telegraph had observed on January 9 that the  Stimson  note laid no charge  ‘of any actual violation of American rights.’108 The following day, the Observer commented that the Stimson note had enunciated a new and very important principle in respect to the future development of international law in stating that ‘the principle that territorial aggrandisement as the result of arbitrary force employed by any single nation in disregard of the rest cannot be recognised by the United States.’ However, the newspaper went on to point out that the note contained ‘no threat of active intervention by America in the Far East,’ adding that no such threat was ‘necessary or advisable.’109 Several days later, the New Statesman pointed out that the note had annoyed rather than alarmed the Japanese government precisely because ‘the Japanese do not suppose, any more than anyone else, that the United States is threatening war.’110 The same conclusion was reached in China: a report sent from Beijing published in the Times on January 11, noted that the Chinese press comments on the note were ‘marked by scepticism’ and that the ‘local  Daily Telegraph, January 9, 1932.  Morning Post, January 9, 1932, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 82. 107  Pratt, letter to the editor, Times, November 30, 1938. 108  Daily Telegraph, January 9, 1932. 109  ‘Japan and Manchuria: American and Treaty Rights; Clearing up Confusion,’ Observer, January 10, 1932. 110  New Statesman, January 16, 1932 quoted in Bassett Democracy and Foreign Policy, 79. 105 106

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Kuomintang organs’ had expressed ‘a widely held opinion when it describes Mr. Stimson’s action as tantamount to “locking the door after the thief walked off with the jewels.”’111 Bassett maintains that the belief that the United States had been prepared to employ ‘coercive measures against Japan’ but had felt compelled to return to a policy of isolationism because of Britain’s alleged refusal to join with it in enforcing the Washington Treaties was a delusion: the United States could not have been ‘driven back into “isolationism”’ because ‘it had never got out of it.’112 The overtures and offer to which Lytton and Lothian respectively referred, he points out, solely concerned the policy of non-recognition. In fact, in terms of cooperation with other powers, Stimson never proposed anything more than a joint policy of non-recognition and nor could he given that it was not ‘possible…for an American Secretary of State or even an American President to reverse an isolationist…policy without the backing of the United States Congress and people,’ both of which at the time were decidedly in favour of isolationism.113 That the British government did not initially attach the same significance to the policy of non-recognition as did Stimson may explain why it was generally neglected by the British press. It is also important to recall that Britain at that time was involved in a process of conciliating between Japan and China within the context of the LON.114 The policy of nonrecognition could only be considered by Britain with reference to the LON and the conciliation process then underway. It was thus that in Geneva on the evening of January 28, delegates to the council, with the exception of the Chinese and Japanese delegates, drafted a declaration on Manchuria which followed in certain respects the Stimson note of January 7. On the afternoon of the following day, Secretary-General Drummond read at  the council  an appeal by the Chinese government.  In brief, the appeal stated that a dispute had arisen between Japan and China as a result of the former’s aggression against the latter and that it had reached a point where a rupture between the two countries appeared imminent and that in light of this China wished to invoke the application of Articles 10 and 15 of the covenant to the dispute.  Following the reading of the  ‘Chinese Comment from our Correspondent,’ Times, January 11, 1932.  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 132. 113  Ibid., 132. 114  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 89. 111 112

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Chinese government’s appeal and before inviting members to speak on it, Paul-Boncour, in his role of acting president of the council, made it known that following conversations among members of the council not directly involved in the dispute, a declaration had been prepared which its authors had hoped at the time of its drafting might put an end, at least for the rest of the current session, to the difficulty on which the council’s attention had been recently focussed. Paul-Boncour then proceeded to summarise the declaration, pointing out that it had warned that should the present situation continue, it would prove disastrous for the parties involved and for the rest of the world. He observed that the declaration recognised that the situation on the ground had not improved and,  indeed, that it had deteriorated. However, Paul-­Boncour continued, the authors of the declaration felt justified in claiming that advances had been made in the direction of conciliation since the creation of the Commission of Enquiry, the proposal for which, he added, had been accepted by both parties to the dispute. Paul-­Boncour stated that the declaration welcomed as a sign of hope the assurance given to the council by the Japanese representative: that Japan harboured no territorial ambitions within the region of Manchuria and intended to uphold its international obligations there. Paul-Boncour then pointed out that the declaration also welcomed the expression of confidence in the work of the commission that had featured in the Stimson note, adding that the declaration was cognisant of the fact that the same note had reminded Japan and China of the treaties to which they were bound. It was in keeping with this reminder, that the draft declaration affirmed, as Paul-Boncour reported to the council and as was reported in the Times on January 29, that ‘from the League standpoint’ it  was impossible  to accept a settlement of the dispute between Japan and China which involved ‘arrangements inconsistent with international obligations, more especially those arising out of Article 10’. It had been the intention of the drafters of the declaration that it  would be formally discussed by the council on January 29. However, aside from the speech of Paul-Boncour which made its existence and terms public, any further consideration of the declaration had to be deferred in light of the action taken by the Chinese representative  at  the council in reaction to what  Morley  described as the ‘anticipated explosion’ in Shanghai which had occurred not long after midnight on the morning of January 29.115  LON, OJ 13, no. 3 (1932), 335-7; ‘League and Manchuria: Declaration by Council,’ Times, January 29, 1932; Morley, The Society of Nations, 481–2;  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 96. 115

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The Shanghai Incident The anti-Japanese boycott initiated in July was in response to what was later called the Wanbaoshan Incident: a conflict between Chinese farmers and immigrant Korean peasants over rights to land and water which took place near Changchun and which saw Japanese police intervene on behalf of Japan’s Korean subjects.116 After the occupation of Manchuria, the boycott intensified, fostered by the National Anti-Japanese Associations which had been  established on September 21  in Hankou  (Hankow), Nanjing, Shanghai and other centres.117 According to a LON report, the boycott was ‘stringently enforced and caused enormous damage to Japanese businesses,’ China then being the largest export market for Japanese goods outside the United States. It involved picketing shops selling Japanese goods, the seizure of Japanese manufactures and the looting of Japanese businesses. In Shanghai, Chinese citizens using or trading in such goods were fined and imprisoned at the request of the Shanghai Anti-Japanese Association for the Defence of the Country.118 Against the background of the boycott (which was ‘extended so as to prevent the transportation of Japanese goods, the use of Japanese currency; the patronizing of Japanese banks and shipping, the sale of food to Japanese, and work by Chinese for Japanese employers’), there were ­frequent ‘incidents of violence.’119 The most noted of these incidents occurred on January 18 when five Japanese Buddhists were attacked outside the Sanye Towel Factory in Zhabei (Chapei). According to a LON inquiry into this and other incidents in Shanghai and its neighbourhood, the assailants probably included ‘members of organised anti-Japanese Volunteer Corps.’120 According to a LON investigation, two of the victims were seriously injured, one of them, a Buddhist monk, later dying from his injuries.121 The feelings of local Japanese had already been inflamed on January 9, 1932: the CFR noted that the Japanese colony in Shanghai 116  Bill Sewell, ‘Railway Outpost and Puppet Capital: Urban Expressions of Japanese Imperialism,’ in Gregory Blue, Martin P. Bunton and Ralph Crozier, eds., Colonialism and the Modern World: Selected Studies (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 295. 117  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 316. See also Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 3. 118  Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 3. See also Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 316. 119  Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 199 and Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 3. 120  Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 3. 121  Ibid., and Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 200.

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became bitterly indignant when the ‘Min Kuo Daily News (Min Kuo Jih Pao), the official organ of the Kuomintang…published an account of an attack on the Emperor of Japan by a Korean and expressed regret that another carriage than the Emperor’s had been damaged.’122 Kuramatsu Murai, the Japanese consul general in Shanghai, demanded an apology from the local authorities for the newspaper’s disparaging remark, and, in fact, an apology for this was issued on January 21.123 On January 20, the same day that around fifty members of the Japanese Youth Protection Society set fire to the towel factory and attacked Chinese police, the incensed members of the Japanese colony held a mass protest meeting at the Japanese Club where they adopted a resolution demanding that the Japanese government send war vessels and military units to suppress the anti-Japanese activities.124 It was on the afternoon of that day that the Japanese consul general sent a list of five demands to the mayor of Greater Shanghai, General Wu Tiecheng (Wu Tieh-cheng), in relation to the events of January 18, including a demand for a formal apology by the mayor, the arrest of those culpable, payment of hospital bills, ‘adequate control of the anti-Japanese movement’ and the ‘immediate dissolution’ of the anti-Japanese organisations. Wu’s response of January 21, was that while he would consider the first three demands, addressing the last two presented difficulties. On  January 24, Japanese naval reinforcements arrived in Shanghai. On that same day, the Japanese consul general informed the mayor that the Japanese government ‘reserved [the] right to take action as required by circumstances’ until that time when it had received a satisfactory response. This communication was followed on January 27 by a demand for a response by 6 p.m. on January 28. At 7:30 in the morning of the latter date, the Japanese senior officer in Shanghai, Rear Admiral Shiozawa Kō ichi, moved to protect ‘Imperial rights [and] interests’ as he had openly vowed he would a week before. Admiral Shiozawa, who was in command of the Japanese naval forces and was keen to show that the navy’s prowess equalled that of the Kwantung Army, informed the commanders of the other national defence forces he would take action the next morning unless a satisfactory response was received by the appointed hour. Early in the afternoon of January 28, the mayor of Greater Shanghai, keen to avoid  Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 200.  Ibid. 124  Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 3 and Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 201. 122 123

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a conflict, informed the Japanese consul general that his council accepted all the Japanese demands. The consul general pronounced himself satisfied at 4 p.m. that same day, the mayor having already taken steps to end the boycott and having  instructed Chinese police to close down the Anti-­ Japanese Association.125 On the morning of  January 28, in the expectation of a clash, the Municipal Council of the International Settlement decided to institute in the settlement a state of emergency at 4 p.m. that day. This decision saw American and British troops immediately commence to occupy their respective sections in preparation for their defence. Italian troops would occupy the Italian section the following day.126 In regard to this action, we might note the statement of a former officer of the Chinese City of Shanghai at the IPR’s Shanghai conference  in 1931  in discussing the Chinese demand for the rendition of Shanghai: after having insisted on the ‘evils of divided jurisdiction,’ he stated that ‘[u]ntil the National Government is able to defend (Shanghai) against any foreign Power motivated by aggression, a friendly partnership between China and the foreign Powers is the only possible modus vivendi.’127 As Angus later noted, ‘events were destined to emphasize this reservation,’ which, it should be added, was potentially somewhat controversial for reason of its use of the word partnership.128 Although it appeared that the diplomatic impasse had been resolved in the afternoon of January 28, the International Settlement’s Municipal Council decided to enforce the state of emergency, its foremost consideration in this regard being the belief that the Japanese naval command were ‘determined to take direct action in any event.’ At 11  p.m., Admiral Shiozawa proclaimed that in light of the state of emergency, the Imperial Navy was sending Japanese troops to ‘enforce law and order’ in the district of Zhabei where many Japanese nationals lived and which bordered upon the Japanese naval headquarters in the Japanese section of the International Settlement. He expressed the hope that the Chinese military authorities would withdraw the Chinese troops stationed there and ‘remove all hos125  Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 4–5. See also Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 316. Mitter notes that the Japanese navy was ‘jealous of the success of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria.’ Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937–1945, 57. 126  Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 4–5. 127  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 33–4 and Lasker and Holland eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1931, 330. 128  Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 34.

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tile defence in that area.’ In the event, the Chinese military authorities did not comply with the withdrawal request. The LON’s committee of inquiry into the events in Shanghai and its vicinity suggested  in its first interim report, which was transmitted to the council on February 6, that it was highly doubtful that they had sufficient time to arrange a withdrawal. The same report also observed that even if there had been sufficient time, it was unlikely that the Chinese troops would have been withdrawn given the suspicion that the Japanese authorities might be planning a wider military operation.129 On the morning of January 29, in the face of a stubborn show of force by the Chinese Nineteenth Route Army, Japanese forces commenced aerial bombardment of Zhabei and also  of  the Wusong area, burning and destroying buildings with incendiary bombs.130 The fighting continued throughout the major part of the day, resulting in, according to the committee of inquiry, a ‘considerable loss of life;’ there would be considerably more lives lost in the war which ensued over the next few weeks.131 On January 25, the first day of the sixty-sixth session of the council, the Chinese representative Yan Huiqing (Weiching Williams Yen) indicated that in light of the worsening situation, China intended to invoke the application of additional articles in the covenant ‘since procedure under Article 11 was bringing no solution to the Sino-Japanese  dispute.’132 Abandoning the usual rhetorical protocols governing such meetings, he told his Japanese counterpart, Satō Naotake, the latter having taken the place of Yoshizawa who had been appointed foreign minister that month, that the Japanese actions were ‘cynical’ and ‘ruthless.’133 Remarkably however, the two men then proceeded to cordially work together on ‘questions concerning the protection of minorities in Upper Silesia.’134 In any case, on the  afternoon  of January 29, in view of the turn of events in 129  Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 5–7. Mitter states that Chiang Kai-shek, while publicly offering a compromise, privately `encouraged the Chinese 19th Route Army, under the command of Cai Tingkai, to fight back.’ Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937–1945, 57. 130  Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 6–7; Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 204; and Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 317. 131  Ciano, ‘First Report,’ 6–7. See also Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937–1945, 57. Mitter notes that in a period of three weeks, there were 14,000 Chinese casualties and more than 3000 Japanese. He adds that the number of civilian deaths was at least 10,000. 132  Morley, The Society of Nations, 481. 133  Ohashi Chuichi, 1932, quoted ibid. 134  Morley, The Society of Nations, 481.

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Shanghai, Yan executed the intention that he had foreshadowed a few days earlier, a move which, as indicated above, caused the deferral of the council’s discussion of  its  declaration in support of the Stimson doctrine.135 In  the  letter forwarded to the secretary-general  and  which  was read  by Drummond at the council meeting of January 29, Yan declared on behalf of his government the following: A dispute between two members of the League of Nations, to wit: China and Japan, arising from the aggression of the latter against the territorial and administrative integrity and political independence of the former in violation of the provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations, exists….The said dispute has now reached a stage when it is likely to lead to an immediate rupture between China and Japan. China hereby invokes the application (not in derogation of the measures taken, or which may be taken by the League in the exercise of its functions under Article 11, but in addition thereto) both of Article 10 and of 15 of the Covenant to the said dispute and formally submits the said matter to the Council for all appropriate and necessary action under both said articles.136

Article 10 insisted that states ‘respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League’ and that in case of such aggression or threat thereof, the council ‘shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.’ In regard to Article 15, a violation of its terms concerning the settlement of disputes ‘likely to lead to a rupture,’ brought into play sanctions under Article 16: a state resorting to war ‘in disregard of its covenants’ under Article 16, ‘shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League.’137 Willoughby, who was a technical adviser to the Chinese delegation to the council during its sessions in Geneva and then Paris, claimed, with evident consternation, that ‘“persons of high standing in League circles” and members of the Secretariat told the Chinese delegation that no action whatever, even by way of advice, could be taken by the council’ under

 Morley, 481–2.  LON, OJ 13, no. 3, 1932, 335–6. 137  ‘Appendix: Covenant of the League of Nations,’ in Russell, Theories of International Relations, 558. 135 136

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Article 10, ‘unless there were a unanimous vote, including Japan’s.’138 The reason for insisting that  action under that  article required unanimous support was that it contained ‘no provision to the contrary,’ thereby potentially  enabling  an aggressor state to simply veto council action by denying that its ‘policy either  constitutes or threatens “aggression,”’ a denial that was all the more possible due to the lack of an authoritative definition of aggression.139 The precedent for claiming that Article 10 required unanimity was the earlier admission that Japan ‘possessed a veto on all that was proposed, outside the realm of procedure, under Article 11.’140 This admission had its basis in Article 5 which provided that ‘except where otherwise expressly provided in this Covenant…decisions at any meeting of the Assembly or the Council, shall require the agreement of all the Members of the League represented at the meeting.’ According to Zimmern, from the moment the Japanese were conscious of their veto power, they ‘used this means of pressure to the full,’ and thus, he added, an article which had been used to good effect during the Greco-Bulgarian case, in the course of which  the Greek representative on the council, as Zimmern put it, was ‘either too loyal to the Covenant or too much embarrassed to make use of his voting power,’ had been rendered mute.141 The view that Article 11 required unanimity explains Lytton’s observation at Chatham House in October 1931 that because the Chinese delegation had first raised the matter of the Sino-Japanese dispute under Article 11, the scope of the council in dealing with the situation had been restricted: Japan’s veto power meant that council action under this article was limited to conciliation between the disputants.142 However, it is important to call attention here to certain observations made by Stimson in late autumn 1931: having noted the fact that action under Article 11 did not ‘automatically’ lead to military or economic sanctions against an aggressor state, he stated that China had made ‘[n]o effort thus far…to invoke any such action, and, so far as I know, no suggestion of the invocation of sanctions has thus far been made by anyone, at least to us.’ Indeed, Stimson declared that ‘on the contrary, as early as September 26, 138  William Arnold-Forster, review of The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of Nations, by Westel W. Willoughby, Political Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1936): 305–6. 139  Morley, The Society of Nations, 482–3. 140  Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 423. 141  Ibid. 142  Lytton, ‘The Twelfth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 747.

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it had been reported to us informally that Geneva is opposed to using sanctions.’143 Stimson’s observations  aside, others considered the effective acceptance that an aggressor possessed a right of veto in regard to council action against them, where there was no provision to the contrary, as ludicrous. A contemporary observer, William Arnold-Forster, contended with reference to Article 10 that such an admission ‘made a nonsense of the Council’s quasi-judicial functions.’144 Zimmern wholly concurred with this position, stating in relation to the same article the following: Thus, juridical reasoning arrived at the absurd conclusion that the League could take no action to ‘preserve the territorial integrity’ of any of its members except with the agreement of the member who was engaged in violating it. Such doctrines, of course, brought the League to a condition of complete impotence…In these circumstances the term ‘collective system’ ceased to have a meaning. The Concert of Europe with all its defects, was a far superior body to the League of Nations bound hand and foot in red tape by the attorneys of unscrupulous governments. What had been devised as a firm union between Force and Law had become a shifty alliance between Force and Casuistry.145

A LON legal sub-committee later conceded that in light of the council’s duty to preserve peace and on ‘grounds of common sense,’ the council might ‘refuse to count the vote’ of a state which endangered peace through engaging in external aggression. Although according to Zimmern legal arguments of this nature could have been conjured if so desired, on January 29, 1932, it was the orthodox interpretation of Article 10 which prevailed. Article 15, however, was an entirely different matter because it did contain provisions that allowed the council to refuse the vote of disputants.146 It was precisely because Article 15 had ‘greater potentialities’ in respect to council action that Satō immediately challenged the constitutionality of the council taking action under Article 15 while simultaneously taking action under Article 11. This challenge, however, met with  Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 58. Emphasis added.   Arnold-Forster, review of The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of Nations, by Westel W. Willoughby, 306. 145  Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 423–4. 146  Zimmern noted that in 1934, Hersch Lauterpacht had maintained that based on the precedent set by the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Mosul case, ‘the disputants are not entitled to a vote under Article XI’ (ibid., 424n). 143 144

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resistance by Paul-Boncour and the other council members and was ultimately overridden based on precedent and on a council resolution of September 26, 1927.147 Acting on the advice of the secretary-general, the council then established the following committee: ‘Committee of Representatives at Shanghai of certain States Members of the League Council appointed to report on events in Shanghai and neighbourhood.’ The Consular Commission, as the committee was informally known, was composed of diplomats representing France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Norway and Spain then present in Shanghai. Robert Haas, a French national who was director of the Transit and Communications Section in the secretariat and who had been working in Shanghai as a technical adviser on ‘projects of road-building and river conservancy, as part of an extensive program of League assistance requested by the Nanking government for its newly established National Economic Council,’ was appointed its secretary.148 Due to popular and congressional opinion which favoured the United States remaining at a distance from the LON, the United States refused on February 1 to formally associate itself with the commission. However, at the direction of Washington, Edwin S. Cunningham, the American consul general in Shanghai, cooperated with the commission.149 Cunningham had already been collaborating with his British counterpart in Shanghai, helping to organise a truce, which commenced at 8 p.m. on January 29 and which, as the aforementioned commission noted, ‘amounted only to an agreement to refrain from further firing,’ and s­ eeking to organise on January 31 a ‘neutral zone’ between the Chinese and Japanese forces.150 The pacification of the situation as a result of these efforts, however, proved to be temporary. In the commission’s second interim report, which was transmitted to the council on February 12, Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and then the Italian consul general in Shanghai, advised that ‘since 3rd February [a] state of open war exists, any  Morley, The Society of Nations, 483–5.  Morley, The Society of Nations, 318, 487. 149  Morley noted that the Department of State asserted that ‘such action would be ultra vires.’ Morley, The Society of Nations, 487. 150  Gian Galeazzo Ciano, ‘Second Report,’ in Miscellaneous No. 4 (1932): Reports to the League of Nations by Representatives at Shanghai of certain States Members of the League Council appointed to report on events in Shanghai and Neighbourhood, Shanghai, February 6 and 12 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1932), 7–9. 147 148

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pretence [of a] truce being abandoned,’ adding that it was ‘impossible to establish which side should be held responsible for breaking [the] truce.’ Ciano, who was chairman of the commission and whose reports bore his imprimatur, further noted that ‘firing continues intermittently in Woosung [Wusong] and Chapei area, with the use of artillery and, on [the] side of Japanese, by aerial bombardment. Offensive is entirely in the hands of the Japanese, whose declared object is to capture Woosung forts and drive all Chinese troops [a] considerable distance from Shanghai.’151 This report flatly contradicted the statement of the Japanese consul general in Shanghai as quoted by Satō at the council on January 30: that the ‘wild story about the Japanese attack on the Woosung forts is groundless.’152 The same day as this report arrived in Geneva, the Chinese government exercised its right under Article 15(9) to refer the Sino-Japanese dispute to the assembly, although it stated that it would withdraw its request should the council ‘refer the said dispute at its own initiative,’ the course of action which the Chinese government preferred, and summon a special meeting of the assembly.153 The Japanese delegate once more sought to hinder the LON’s efforts, citing legal technicalities. However, on February 18, the council was informed by a committee of jurists it had appointed that the Japanese objections were legally groundless.154 It was also on this day that an ultimatum was served by the Japanese War Office, demanding that Chinese troops retire ‘for a distance of twenty kilometres from the boundary of the International Settlement.’155 On the evening of the following day, the council acceded to the Chinese request to transfer the dispute to the assembly and intimated that a special assembly would be called together on March 3.156 Although the council made it clear in referring the dispute to the assembly that it was not relinquishing its oversight of the situation, the referral, in the view of some observers, was effectively an admission of failure by the council in regard to its pacific mission.157 151  Ibid., 8–9. See also Morley, The Society of Nations, 487, and ‘Japanese Excesses: Consular Commission’s Report,’ Sydney Morning Herald, February 16, 1932. 152  LON, OJ 13, no. 3, 345. 153  Morley, The Society of Nations, 488. 154  Ibid., 489. 155  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 317. 156  Morley, The Society of Nations, 488–9 and Reports to the League of Nations by Representatives at Shanghai of certain States Members of the League Council appointed to report on events in Shanghai and Neighbourhood, Shanghai, February 6 and 12, 2. 157  Morley, The Society of Nations, 488–9.

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On February 16, before submitting the Sino-Japanese dispute to the assembly, the twelve members of the council which were not parties to the dispute communicated a note of warning to Japan.158 The note, the impetus for which arose in the secretariat, advised Japan that the clashes in Shanghai had ‘intensified public anxiety,’ endangered the ‘lives and interests of the nationals of numerous countries’ and thrown ‘new and serious obstacles in the path’ of the forthcoming Disarmament Conference  in Geneva. While it was stated that the twelve neutral members were mindful of the grievances articulated by Japan, they regretted that Japan had not fully availed itself of the peace machinery provided in the covenant and recalled once more its ‘solemn’ undertaking under the Pact of Paris. The statement noted that China, by contrast, had from the outset of a conflict occurring inside its territory, ‘put her case in the hands’ of the LON and had ‘agreed to accept its proposals for a peaceful settlement.’ The note also recalled the provisions of Article 10 and the Nine-Power Treaty, noting that the contracting parties to the latter had ‘expressly agreed to respect the sovereignty, the independence and the territorial and administrative integrity’ of China. The note concluded with an appeal to Japan’s ‘high sense of honor to recognize the obligations of her special position’ and the ‘confidence which the nations have placed in her as partner in the organisation and maintenance of peace.’159 According to Lippmann, the Japanese action in Shanghai, although taking the focus off the Japanese advance in Manchuria, had hardened the Western resolve to resist to Japan and ‘brought a much larger measure of support for the Stimson doctrine.’160 As he explained it, the LON’s involvement in the effort to check the Japanese advance on Shanghai caused the lesser League powers to become more determined ‘to uphold the peace system in the Far East,’ and thus they began to ‘exert pressure on the great powers of the League, upon Great Britain and France, to align themselves with the United States.’161 Yet before accepting Lippmann’s account as the whole story, it should be recalled that the council had been set to consider  the declaration  which referenced  the Stimson doctrine drafted by the council’s twelve neutral members as early as January 29. As noted above, consideration of it had to be postponed in  Ibid., 489.  LON, OJ 13, no. 3 1932, 383–4. 160  Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 198. 161  Ibid. 158 159

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order to address the Chinese invocations of Articles 10 and 15 in light of the fighting that had erupted in Shanghai on the morning of the same day. It is also important to point out that a note annexed to the council’s appeal to the Japanese government on February 16, declared that it appeared to follow from the terms of Article 10 that ‘no infringement of the territorial integrity and no change in the political independence of any member of the League brought about in disregard of this article ought to be recognized as valid and effectual by the members of the League of Nations.’162 The inclusion of this declaration concerning non-recognition was on the initiative of the British government.163 Two days after this note was issued, Japan unilaterally announced the secession of Manchuria from China.164 On February 19, a conference sponsored by Japan that was held in Mukden decided to found a new and independent republic which was to be called Manchukuo (or Manchu State), over which Henry Puyi, the last Manchu emperor, would preside.165 Although the so-called republic of Manchukuo would be inaugurated on March 9 at a ceremony in Changchun, which, according to a report in the New York Times, was ‘arranged and paid for by Japanese agents,’ the Inukai cabinet, concerned as to how China and more ­especially the Western powers might react, succeeded in delaying recognition of it.166 On February 23, 1932, the Japanese government responded to the note sent to it by the twelve neutral members of the council, releasing a statement which declared that the ‘measures of Japan, strictly defensive, do not infringe the provisions’ of Article 10. The declaration concerning the nature of Japan’s measures  was consistent with the  rhetorical  tactic that Japan had pursued in relation to Article 11 in the context of the council but it was bolder for the fact that Japan now had around 100,000 soldiers on the ground in China.167 Equally audacious was the new line of argument that the Japanese government introduced in the context of the  LON OJ, 13, no. 3, 1932, 383–4.  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 109, 115. 164  Morley, The Society of Nations, 490. 165  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 318 and Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 740. 166  ‘Pu Yi Becomes Head of New Manchuria: Regent Proclaims “Manchoukuo” an Independent State, All Ties with China Severed,’ New York Times, March 10, 1932. On the attitude of the Inukai cabinet, see Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 533. 167  LON, OJ 13, no. 3, 1932, 385. 162 163

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same statement: drawing on the wording of one of the paragraphs in the covenant’s preamble, the Japanese government stated that it did not and could not ‘consider that China is an “organized people” within the meaning of the Covenant League of Nations.’168 In explaining the significance of this contention, the Japanese government stated that China has, it is true, been treated in the past by common consent, as if the expression connoted an organized people. But fictions cannot last forever, nor can they be tolerated when they become grave sources of practical danger. Time has inevitably come when realities, rather than fictions, must be reckoned with. The general desire to see China happy, prosperous and united, has led the world to treat her as united in a way which, in sober fact, she was not. Its population is not organized except in patches. If Japan had no interests there it might be possible to go on indefinitely respecting the fiction that the region is occupied by an “organized people”. Japan, however, has enormous interests there. It is impossible any longer to treat the chaos in China as if it were order. The authorities which subsist in various parts of China derive their title simply from the fact that they do exercise control within limited areas. But they can have no title nor extend their control beyond them. This anomalous state of things cannot but profoundly modify the application to Chinese affairs of the Covenant of the League. Instead of a single organized people, we have there various rudimentary nuclei or organizations.169

As we have seen, an intimation of this line of argument, the clear implication of which was that China was not ‘entitled to the protection of the League Covenant,’ had been given by Takayanagi at the IPR’s conference in Shanghai in 1931, and it was a line of argument that certain other members of the JCIPR had pursued prior to its official expression in the context of the council.170 For example, in an editorial published on January 7, 1932, Nitobe suggested that the members of China’s new government were not educated and mature enough ‘to get together and attend to the rudimentary duties of keeping promises to other nations and of maintaining order and security within their territory.’171 It is pertinent to note here that in the course of renegotiating China’s relations with the treaty powers  Ibid., 386.  Ibid. 170  Morley, The Society of Nations, 492. 171  Nitobe Inazō, 1932, quoted in Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 525. 168 169

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in the period between 1928 and 1931, the powers cited disorder in China and its lack of administrative capacity in order to justify the continuance of their privileges. Two very important manifestations of these privileges were the International Settlement and the French Concession in Shanghai, the rendition of both of which China was urging at the time. From the perspective of the Chinese, such arrangements were objectionable as they were, as a Chinese delegate maintained at the 1927 IPR, ‘more or less derogatory to Chinese sovereignty’ even if the territory on which they were located remained ‘unsurrendered.’172 Yet even though the concerns raised in the Japanese statement in relation to China’s international situation echoed those raised by the other treaty powers in defending the continuation of their privileges, the Japanese statement denying that China was an organised people could only be seen as ‘extraordinary.’ As Morley observed, the statement ‘inferentially declared that Japan alone would determine whether or not to respect treaty obligations with a fellow Council member’ and, as such, it was a clear challenge to the authority of the council.173 By way of responding to the Japanese statement,  Yan  turned Japan’s rhetorical fire back on Japan. He pointed out that the Japanese army and navy were ‘running amok’ and that the Japanese government appeared to be unable to bring them under control. Citing these points and the fact that Japanese diplomats had come to the council time and again and made promises apparently in ‘sincerity and good faith’ only for these promises to be ‘violated the next day,’ the Chinese delegate contended that it was open to question whether Japan itself was an ‘organised State’ and had a ‘well-organised Government.’174 Of greater political impact was the response of Washington where the effect of recent Japanese actions was to revive earlier American concerns 172  For the discussion of the Chinese rendition demands, see Angus, The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area, 27–34. At the 1927 IPR, a Chinese delegate, Mingchien Joshua Bau, argued that the foreign power exercised in the settlements and concessions was a ‘delegated power of municipal home rule subject….That is to say, they do not enjoy any inherent right of local self-government, but derive their privileges from the Chinese government through the proper authorities of the powers concerned…subject…to the negotiation and modification of China and the foreign Power concerned.’ M.  J. Bau, ‘Concessions and Settlements and their Transference to Chinese Rule,’ in Condliffe ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1927, 258. 173  Morley, The Society of Nations, 493n. 174  LON, OJ 13, no. 3, 1932, 366.

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about the preservation of the policy of the Open Door in China. On February 23, in a public letter sent by Stimson to the head of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, namely, Senator Borah, the former recalled that John Hay as secretary of state had given voice to this policy in 1899. Stimson pointed out that Hay’s intention was to end the competition for ‘so-called spheres of interest’ in China, which, Stimson added, not only ‘threatened the future development and sovereignty of that great Asiatic people’ but ‘threatened to create dangerous and constantly increasing rivalries between the other nations of the world.’175 In promoting the Open Door, Stimson pointed out, Hay had insisted on two essential principles: first, ‘equality of commercial opportunity’ on the part of all those nations dealing with China, and, second, as a means of ensuring such equality, the ‘preservation of China’s territorial and administrative integrity,’ principles which, Stimson noted, were enshrined in the Nine-Power Treaty.176 Stimson warned that should that treaty be modified, either in a way that affected access to trade in the Far East or through interference with the integrity of China, the expression integrity of China being in part code for the Open Door, then a modification of the naval agreements in the Pacific might be set in train.177 In a statement that was understood to be aimed not only at Japan but also at Great Britain and all the other powers then assembled in Geneva for the Disarmament Conference, Stimson stated the following: It must be remembered also that this Treaty was one of several treaties and agreements entered into at the Washington Conference by the various powers concerned, all of which were interrelated and interdependent….The willingness of the American government to surrender its then commanding lead in battleship construction and to leave its positions at Guam and in the Philippines without further fortification was predicated upon, among other things, the self-denying covenants contained in the Nine-Power Treaty, which assured the nations of the world not only of equal opportunity for their eastern trade but also against the military aggrandisement of any other 175  Secretary of State to the Committee on Foreign Relations (Borah), United States Senate, February 1932, in United States, Department of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941, 167–73. See also Morley, Society of Nations, 493–4. 176  The Secretary of State to the Committee on Foreign Relations (Borah),  February 1932, in United States, Department of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941, 167–73. 177  Lippmann et  al., United States in World Affairs, 213–4. See also Morley, Society of Nations, 494.

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power at the expense of China. One cannot discuss the possibility of modifying or abrogating those provisions of the Nine-Power Treaty without considering at the same time the other promises upon which they were really dependent.178

Addressing Japan specifically, Stimson declared that the hostilities in Manchuria which had recently been extended to Shanghai, ‘regardless of cause or responsibility,’ were in clear violation of the Nine-Power Treaty and the treaty that reinforced it, namely, the Pact of Paris or  Kellogg-­ Briand Pact.179 Recalling his intervention of January 7, Stimson called on all governments to adopt the policy of non-recognition, stating that should a similar position [be] taken by the other governments of the world, a caveat will be placed upon such action which we believe will effectively bar the legality hereafter of any title or right sought to be obtained by pressure or treaty violation, and which, as has been shown by history in the past, will eventually lead to the restoration to China of rights and titles of which she may have been deprived.180

A Special Session of the Assembly The Special Session of the LON Assembly concerning the Sino-Japanese dispute was convened as planned on March 3, by which time the Japanese military objective had been achieved: following ‘unexpectedly stubborn resistance,’ the Chinese forces had retired and were now at a distance of twenty kilometres from the boundary of the International Settlement.181 This was only the second extraordinary session of the assembly in its history, the first being the special session of March 1926, which was convened in order to consider Germany’s application for membership of the LON.  On the latter occasion  however, due to Brazilian objections to Germany being accorded a permanent seat on the council without consideration being given to Brazil’s desire for such a seat, German admission was delayed until the next ordinary session, that is, the Seventh Assembly, 178  Department of State Press Release, 24 February 1933, quoted in Lippmann et  al., United States in World Affairs, 494. 179  Morley, Society of Nations, 494 and the Secretary of State to the Committee on Foreign Relations (Borah), 167–73. See also Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 195–6. 180  Cong. Rec. (daily ed. 24 February 1932), quoted in Morley, Society of Nations, 494. 181  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 317.

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in September 1926. As embarrassing as was the failure of the first extraordinary session to achieve its aim, the postponement of German admission was not generally seen as potentially fatal for the LON.  By contrast, in March 1932, a widely held view was that the LON was facing an ‘emergency in which action could not be postponed without risking incurable injury to the prestige of the LON.’182 An appreciation of the dimensions of the crisis was reflected in the election of Belgium’s Hymans, as president of the assembly. One of the principal drafters of the covenant, Hymans represented a country that was not militarily powerful and which had been subject in 1914 to an attack by a militarily powerful state in violation of a treaty: the Treaty of London of 1839. In any case, Hymans, in cooperation with the assembly’s eight vice-­ presidents, namely, the representatives of France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Persia, Sweden and Switzerland, proceeded to draft a resolution concerning the conflict in Shanghai. The text of the resolution, which was presented to the assembly on March 4, called on the governments of China and Japan with the assistance of the ‘military, naval and civilian authorities’ of the other powers with ‘special interests in the Shanghai Settlements,’ to ‘render definite the cessation of hostilities and regulate the withdrawal of the Japanese forces.’183 Before its adoption, Satō had attempted to water down the resolution, requesting that the phrase ‘les conditions et les modalitiés du retrait’ be inserted after the word regulate.184 While this move was not resisted by any of the representatives of the other permanent members of the council, there was vigorous resistance on the part of Switzerland’s Motta. Similarly to Hymans, who had noted that the word conditions might imply political and not merely technical conditions, Motta insisted that what the resolution expressed was that the ‘principle of the withdrawal of the Japanese forces must not be questioned’: Japan had ‘promised that withdrawal’ and China had demanded ‘it as a natural right.’185 To insert the word conditions in the resolution, Motta contended, was to reopen the question of principle. Motta’s statement of the legal position was immediately endorsed by the representative of another small nation, namely, Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia, who stressed that it would be ‘highly dangerous’  Morley, The Society of Nations, 545–6.  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 101 (1932), 38, 42–3. 184  Ibid., 41. 185  Ibid., 42–3. 182 183

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in a document of this nature ‘to leave anything uncertain, unclear or ambiguous’: it was essential for the LON and for ‘world public opinion, and particularly for public opinion in the Far East, to know exactly where we stand.’186 At this point in the discussion, Satō signalled Japan’s acceptance of the resolution as it stood, stating that Japan was ‘anxious to have a clearer text’ and was ‘satisfied with the interpretation’ of it offered by President Hymans.187 For both constitutional and political reasons, the blocking tactics that had served Japan so well in the council did not work in the assembly. The constitutional reason, as Motta advised Satō , was to be found in Article 15(10). Although providing that the adoption of a resolution concerning a dispute referred to the assembly by the council required the endorsement of the members of the council as well as a majority of other members of the LON, the article also provided that this requirement was exclusive of the vote of parties to the dispute.188 The political reason, as Satō sensed, was that the many smaller nations represented in the assembly, unsurprisingly,  had no sympathy for the methods adopted by  a  militarily powerful Japan. It is telling of this, as Morley recorded, that in the course of the discussion of the Shanghai conflict in the days that followed, the lesser powers ‘vigorously maintained…[the]…lead’ they had established on the very first day of the special session with contributions being made by twenty-nine of these powers.189 The representatives of the lesser powers all condemned Japan’s behaviour and were united in the belief that where the council had failed the assembly must succeed. In particular, some of the representatives of these powers insisted that the assembly must not allow Japan to exploit the gaps in the covenant so as to represent its behaviour as being in conformity with the letter of its terms while making a mockery of the principles on which it was based.190 That Japan continued to pursue such a strategy was evidenced by a statement made by Satō at the close of the fifth meeting of  Ibid., 43.  Ibid. 188  Ibid., 42. 189  Morley, The Society of Nations, 549–50. The lesser powers who addressed the assembly were as follows: Norway, Colombia, Mexico, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Spain, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Persia, Uruguay, Portugal, Romania, Poland, Panama, the Irish Free State, Salvador, Hungary, Haiti, Canada, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Latvia and Bolivia. 190  Ibid., 550. 186 187

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the General Commission of the Special Session of Assembly on March 8: Japan ‘has accepted the Covenant in its entirety, and we wish to see it applied without derogation or exception, but with that due regard for facts which was in the minds of its framers and was embodied in the texts themselves.’191 The mounting of such arguments had led Titulescu and others to urge the necessity of expanding the LON’s constitutional charter: if the LON ‘exhausts all the possibilities offered by the covenant without achieving the desired result,...[it will]...show a vitality which will necessitate an expansion of its constitutional charter, since only the defects of that charter have prevented its success as a peacemaker.’192 As a further sign of the determination of the lesser powers to take charge of the situation, Beneš proposed that ‘any delegate submitting a resolution should automatically become a member of the drafting committee.’ As this proposal was carried, the larger powers were prevented from capturing the drafting process and thereby, according to Morley, precluding ‘consideration of a strongly worded resolution.’ In fact, with the exception of Great Britain, the members of the drafting committee were all delegates of lesser powers: Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Norway, El Salvador, Spain and Switzerland.193 The text of the resolution on the Sino-Japanese dispute was considered by the General Commission of the assembly on the morning of March 11, against the background of which Satō reiterated the official line that the Japanese government believed that it had ‘faithfully observed’ the provisions of the covenant and of the Pact of Paris and that it was ‘resolutely determined always to act according to their principles.’194 Japan, he reiterated, had no territorial designs on China but had been forced to take military action in order to ‘protect against serious and imminent danger the life and property of her nationals.’195 Having stated that the Japanese delegation was pleased to note that the resolution proclaimed the duty on the part of states to scrupulously adhere to treaty obligations, Satō informed the assembly that although the Japanese delegation could not vote in favour of the resolution, it would  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 101 (1932), 79.  Ibid., 59. See also Morley, The Society of Nations, 550–1. 193  Morley, The Society of Nations, 551–2. 194  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 101 (1932), 86. 195  Ibid., 86. 191 192

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not resist its passing and so would refrain from voting. The General Commission, after making a number of alterations to the text, adopted the resolution.196 On the evening of March 11, at a plenary session of the assembly, Sir John Simon, the British  secretary of state for foreign affairs, proposed the resolution. That he was the representative who proposed it was fitting as it  was  Simon  who  was  largely responsible for its drafting, basing his efforts in this regard on the wording of Stimson’s declaration of January 7.197 That same evening, representatives of forty-four member states voted in favour of the resolution. No delegation opposed it; however, there was one other abstention aside from that of Japan: the Chinese delegation failed to vote apparently due to a delay in telegraphic instructions arriving from Nanjing.198 The resolution commenced by affirming that the provisions of the covenant were ‘entirely applicable’ to the dispute, which, as we saw, Japan had denied on the basis that, among other things,  the name China did not denote an organised people. Most especially in this regard, the resolution highlighted the covenant’s insistence on ‘a scrupulous respect for treaties,’ the need to ‘respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all the members of the League’ and the obligation to submit disputes between states ‘to procedures for peaceful settlement.’ The resolution recalled the fact that these principles were invoked by the twelve neutral members of the council in their appeal to the Japanese government of February 16, 1932, an appeal which, as has been indicated, the Japanese vehemently insisted had no authoritative legal basis. Further to this, the resolution noted that these neutral members had declared that no ‘infringement of the territorial integrity and no change in the political independence’ of any member of the LON brought about in defiance of the covenant ‘ought to be recognized as valid and effectual by Members of the League of Nations.’199 In respect to  Titulescu’s urging that the omissions in the covenant should be supplied, it should be noted that the resolution stated that the ‘principles governing international relations and the peaceful settlement of disputes between Members of the League…are in full harmony with the  Ibid., 86–9.  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 109–10, 130 and Morley, The Society of Nations, 553–4. 198  Morley, The Society of Nations, 554. 199  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 101 (1932), 87. 196 197

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Pact of Paris’ which it described as ‘one of the corner-stones of the peace organisation of the world.’ In this way, the 1932 extraordinary session of the assembly furthered the process of amalgamating the Pact of Paris to the Covenant of the LON, a process that had been commenced by the council in the context of its deliberations on the Sino-Japanese dispute. Having yoked the Pact of Paris to the covenant and having stressed their ‘binding nature,’ the resolution declared that ‘it is incumbent upon the Members of the League of Nations not to recognize any situation, treaty or agreement which may be brought about by means contrary’ to their principles and provisions.200 It should be pointed out that of all the changes to the text made by the General Commission, the most noted change, made on the suggestion of Simon, was that the Pact of Paris should be named along with the covenant as an instrument ‘in contravention of which no “situation, treaty or agreement” would be recognized as binding by League members.’201 In light of this, Stimson, who recognised the resemblance between the resolution and his own declaration of January 7, after having conferred with President Hoover, released a statement on March 11 in which he commended the action of the assembly.202 Therein Stimson declared that the nations of the League at Geneva have united in a common attitude and purpose towards the perilous disturbances in the Far East. The action of the Assembly expresses the purpose for peace which is found both in the Pact of Paris and the Covenant of the League of Nations. In this expression all the nations of the world can speak with the same voice. This action will go far toward developing into terms of international law the principles of order and justice which underlie those treaties and the government of the United States has been glad to cooperate in this effort.203

On August 8, in a speech in New York at the home of the CFR, Stimson offered further praise of the assembly’s action.  After having noted  that should the United States alone refuse to recognise the fruits of aggression’ it might be of relatively little import to an aggressor, he stated the following:   Ibid., 88 and Morley, The Society of Nations, 553.  Morley, The Society of Nations, 553 and Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 109. 202  Morley, The Society of Nations, 561 and Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 110. 203  Department of State: Press release, Mar. 11, 1932, quoted in Morley, The Society of Nations, 561. 200 201

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But when the entire group of civilised nations took their stand beside the position of the American Government, the situation was revealed in its true sense. Moral disapproval, when it becomes the disapproval of the whole world, takes on a significance hitherto unknown in international law. For never before has international opinion so organised and mobilised.204

In terms of the LON’s constitutional development, the resolution of March 11 was significant for a number of reasons.  As noted above, the resolution had furthered the amalgamation of the Pact of Paris with the covenant. It should also be pointed out that in the third and final section of the resolution, the assembly declared that it considered that the council’s referral of the Sino-Japanese dispute to it concerned the ‘whole of the dispute which forms the subject of the Chinese Government’s request.’205 In declaring this, the assembly overruled ‘the Japanese contention that the jurisdiction of the larger organ should be limited to the difficulties in Shanghai’ and asserted its ‘right…to take from the Council complete ­control of a dispute’ before the council but not yet settled by it.206 In effect, the assembly was asserting itself as the LON’s primary organ, and this assertion was reinforced by its decision, as expressed in the same resolution, to establish a committee of nineteen members composed of the president of the assembly, who was named as this new committee’s chairman, the members of the council other than the parties to the dispute and six other members to be elected by secret ballot. The Committee of Nineteen as this committee became known, ‘exercising its functions on behalf of and under the supervision of the assembly,’ was charged with taking control of Sino-Japanese dispute in its entirety, one of its notable functions being that of proposing ‘any urgent measure which may appear necessary.’207 As Morley observed, in effect, the Committee of Nineteen was a reconstituted council and it is noteworthy in this regard that its first official session, which took place on March 17, was held in the council chamber, its members seated around the aforementioned horse-shoe table. This was the first time a body other than the council itself had sat in the chamber around this table in order to deliberate on League affairs. Yet because its president was the representative of a smaller power, because the weight of  Stimson, 1932, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 110.  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 101 (1932), 88. 206  Morley, The Society of Nations, 559. 207  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 101 (1932), 88. 204 205

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the influence of the council’s permanent members on it  was  limited by virtue of its composition and because it was answerable to the assembly alone, the Committee of Nineteen was not as fettered as the council. In relation to this last point, one might note the relative efficiency with which the assembly dealt with the Shanghai dispute. Admittedly, the case of Shanghai was a less intractable case than that of Manchuria. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the assembly’s success in dealing with Shanghai dispute  can be attributed in some measure to its firm resistance to the blocking tactic  which was  the  insistence on the unanimity principle. According to Morley, that the assembly was able to further the development of international law in respect to the outlawry of war and the nonrecognition of situations or treaties brought about by violations of the Pact of Paris and the covenant in this context was because it had acted ‘in a manner which was more than conferential in character’: the action of this ‘organ was at least of quasi-legislative type.’208 The impact of the extraordinary session was apparent soon after its adjournment on April 30. On May 5, representatives of the Chinese and Japanese governments concluded an armistice in which was reflected the March 11 resolution’s stipulation that the dispute ought not be settled ‘under the stress of military pressure.’209 The armistice, the signing of which was witnessed by those American, British, French and Italian officials who had assisted in the negotiations, provided in its third article that Japanese troops would ‘withdraw to the International Settlement and the extra-settlement roads in the Hongkow [sic] district as before the incident of January 28, 1932.’210 Thus, by the end of May, the status quo ante was restored in Shanghai, a development which many considered to be a direct result of the pressure applied by the assembly. As we saw, Japan had sought to incorporate into the assembly’s resolution a clause which would have rendered the withdrawal of their forces conditional. However, as Morley noted, by the time of the special session’s adjournment, the ‘unconditional evacuation of the invaded area had been agreed to and all plans for the extension of Japanese hegemony at that Chinese port were…laid aside.’211 The significance of  Morley, The Society of Nations, 559–62.  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 101 (1932), 88. 210  Armistice Agreement between the government of China and Japan, 1932, quoted in Morley, The Society of Nations, 562. 211  Morley, The Society of Nations, 562–3. The district referred to as Hongkow was actually Hongkew (Hongkou).  208 209

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the assembly’s action is underlined by a statement released by the Japanese Foreign Office on May 11 which asserted that the Japanese evacuation of Shanghai ‘was due to a desire conform with world opinion and to end the world-wide odium which has fallen on us.’212

The Commission of Enquiry to the Far East Although the assembly’s resolution of March 11 noted that the council had referred the whole of the Sino-Japanese dispute to it and not just its Shanghai aspects, it had not sought to settle the Manchurian conflict. Probably conveniently for many of the powers at the assembly, Japan was insistent that the Manchurian dimension of the dispute should not be considered by it. Thus, the assembly decided that it would consider the Manchurian question only after its members had seen the report of the League of Nations’ Commission of Enquiry to the Far East.213 On January 14, the council approved the membership of the commission: it approved the nominations submitted by the five major powers to a commission which, in principle, represented the LON  alone and which was officially neutral. The Italian commissioner was Count Luigi Aldrovandi Marescotti, a senior Italian diplomat who had been ambassador to Germany between 1926 and 1929. The French commissioner was General Henri Édouard Claudel who, in 1927, had visited Indochina and China in his role as inspector general of French colonial troops. The American commissioner was General Frank Ross McCoy, who had served as a civil administrator in Germany at the end of the Great War and as an administrator of earthquake aid in Japan in 1923 and who had spent many years in military service in the Philippines.214 The German commissioner was Heinrich Schnee who had served as deputy governor of German New Guinea in 1898, deputy governor of Samoa in 1900 and governor of German East Africa between 1912 and 1918. It will be recalled that in the 1920s, Schnee, in his role as representative of the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei) in the Reichstag, had founded the Reichstag’s Inter-Party Colonial Union. The British commissioner was Lytton, who,  like most of the other commissioners according to Ian Nish, was ‘hesitant about accepting the task because of the uncertainty and sheer  Ibid., 463.  Ibid. On the Japanese stance see Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 216. 214  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 57. 212 213

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inconvenience which the absence from home would cause.’ Nish adds that Lytton only accepted the role out of ‘loyalty to the League.’215 The sixty-sixth council session opened on January 25 and, in that context, objections were immediately raised concerning the fact that the members of the commission were nationals of the major powers.216 That this was the case was at the insistence of the Japanese government which had been  able to persuade the other  permanent members  of the following: given that according to Article 11 the council ‘works as an agent of conciliation’ and as ‘conciliation implies unanimity[,]…nothing should be done under this Article against the wishes of either of the two parties’ to a dispute.217 Madariaga, who represented Spain at this session, later noted that critics of the composition of the commission at the council were told that Japan ‘was too proud to accept being “judged” by lesser nations.’ However, in Madariaga’s view, the invocation of Japanese pride was simply another tactical ploy on the Japanese government’s part: the real reason was that all of the great powers had, or had once had in the case of Germany, political interests in China and these interests, ‘if reconcilable with the letter of the covenant, could with difficulty be harmonized with its spirit.’218 In addition to the criticisms of the composition of the commission, criticisms were also aired at the council to the effect that the organisation and departure of the commission had been unduly delayed. The membership of the Commission of Enquiry was only announced in early January, almost at the same time as the Japanese took control of Jinzhou. The members of the commission  met for the first time on January 21. This meeting, which took place in Geneva and at which Consul Gilbert stood in for General McCoy, saw Lytton and Aldrovandi Marescotti elected as the commission’s chairman and deputy chairman respectively.219 On February 3, the European members of the Commission set sail from France en route to New York, the faster option of the Trans-Siberian Railway being ruled out as, according to the Japanese government, ‘the line east of Manchouli [Manzhouli] had been cut by “bandits” and was impassable.’220  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 58. Jinzhou was taken on January 2.  Morley, The Society of Nations, 480. 217  Madariaga, The World’s Design, 152. 218  Ibid., 153, 156 See also Morley, The Society of Nations, 478, 480. 219  Morley, The Society of Nations, 478–80. 220  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 60 and Morley, The Society of Nations, 480. 215 216

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From New York, where they were joined by McCoy, the commissioners journeyed by rail to San Francisco. In San Francisco, they boarded the steamship SS President Coolidge which took them to Yokohama from where they travelled to Tokyo, arriving there on February 29, almost three months after the council resolved to establish the commission.221 Morley suggested that the departure of the commission had been delayed in order to permit, as Stimson expressed it on December 10, 1931, ‘the heat of the controversy to subside.’222  While  accepting that the delay perhaps allowed this to occur, Morley thought it important to point out: that ‘League commissions under Article 11 had previously been supposed to investigate an emergency as it arose rather than when it was over.’223 That aside, and consistent with the position he adopted when the commission was first proposed, Stimson’s fundamental reason for wanting a delay was that had the Commission of Enquiry been sent immediately, ‘it would have hastened the downfall of the Minseito Cabinet; whereas the latter were able eventually to agree to the sending of a Commission of Inquiry just before its resignation on December 11th, 1931.’224 The commission was confronted by difficulties from the beginning, a major difficulty being the determined efforts of the Manchukuo ‘government’ to prevent the entry of the former Chinese foreign minister Koo, ‘undoubtedly,’ a report stated at the time, ‘at the instigation of Japan.’225 Koo was one of two assessors participating in the work of the commission, the other being Yoshida Isaburō , the Japanese ambassador at Ankara and someone who had extensive experience at the LON.226 The reason given for denying Koo entry was the ‘alleged danger that he would be assassinated by hot-headed supporters of the Manchukuo administration.’ However, as was widely acknowledged at the time, the ‘real reason was his friendly relations with Marshal Zhang Xueliang [Chang Hsueh-liang] the deposed head of the former Government’ of Manchuria to whom Koo had been an adviser and who was notorious in Japanese eyes

 Ibid.  Morley, The Society of Nations, 480. 223  Ibid., 480. 224  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 141. 225  ‘China and Japan,’ Sydney Morning Herald, April 12, 1932 and ‘China: League Commission in Manchuria,’ Sydney Morning Herald, August 11, 1932. 226  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 59. 221 222

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for ‘hoisting…the Nationalist flag’ at Mukden in December 1928.227 It should also be noted that among Koo’s party was ‘the well-known Australian’ William Henry Donald, who, according to  one  newspaper report, was one of the ‘most trusted advisers’ of the Young Marshal, as Zhang was widely known.228 It was due to his allegedly close association with Donald that Japan sought, although unsuccessfully as it turned out, to block the appointment of  Young as one of the commission’s seven expert advisors. As we have seen, Young, who had attended the 1929 and 1931 meetings of the IPR, had authored a book under the heading of Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria.229 Therein Young, who was also the author of an earlier study in which he examined all the legal agreements pertaining to Manchuria, cast doubt on the legal basis of  Japan’s claims  concerning  its special interests in the region. He raised concerns about the expansionist logic which he considered to be inherent to Japan’s Asiatic Monroe Doctrine and the closely associated right to live doctrine. These were factors that would have hardly endeared Young to elements in Japan, although Nish suggests that he ‘may have impressed the Commissioners to whom he wrote voluminously.’230 There was one other appointment to the commission that Japan sought to block: that of Robert Haas.  Robert  Haas was still working in Shanghai when he was appointed secretary of the commission by Drummond, the latter  being in a position to ignore the Japanese protests: under Article 15(1) of the covenant the secretary-general was empowered to ‘make all necessary arrangements for a full investigation’ of a dispute, after having been notified of its existence by any party to it.231 Responding to the efforts to bar Koo’s entry, Lytton stated that he would ‘not allow Manchukuo or any other political organisation to dictate to the commission regarding its personnel,’ adding that the ‘Commission was prepared to turn back’ unless the ‘complete personnel’ was permitted 227  Sydney Morning Herald, April 12, 1932, and Sydney Morning Herald, August 11, 1932. See also Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 59. On the flag incident, see Takaki Yasaka, ‘World Peace Machinery and the Asia Monroe Doctrine,’ Pacific Affairs 5, no. 11 (1932): 941–53, 945. 228  Sydney Morning Herald, August 11, 1932 and Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 59. 229  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 61–2. 230  Ibid., 62. See also Carl Walter Young, The International Relations of Manchuria (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1929). 231  Morley, The Society of Nations, 318–9.

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entry. The response of the Manchukuo administration to this announcement was ‘silence.’232 Indeed, Nish points out that  the administration resisted any compromise on the question of Koo’s entry, adding that it was eventually overruled by Tokyo in light of the Nanjing government’s agreement to reduce the number of secretaries in Koo’s party.233 Thus, on April 20, Koo and five of his assistants entered Manchuria, among the assistants being Donald who, with his ‘exceptional knowledge of the Manchurian situation,’ was of ‘great assistance not only to Dr. Koo, but also to the Commission.’234 In journeying to Manchuria, the commission divided into three groups. Koo, who was clad in a bullet-proof vest because of the danger of assassination, travelled with his staff on the Chinese cruiser Haichi in the company of Lytton. Of the other two groups, Nish points out that one travelled by rail via Shanhaiguan (Shan-hai-kwan) escorted by Aldrovandi Marescotti and the other by a Japanese destroyer in the company of Schnee and Claudel.235 After arriving in Mukden, where the commission received ‘messages of welcome’ from various local dignitaries, including from General Baron Honjō Shigeru, the commander-in-chief of the Kwantung Army, and Uchida Yasuya, the then president of the South Manchurian Railway, it commenced its investigations, first in Mukden and then elsewhere.236 Although the members of the commission were generally well treated while in Manchuria, aspects of the behaviour of their hosts gave rise to resentment. For example, while the feared ‘unfortunate incident’ did not eventuate, that is, neither Koo nor any of his staff were assassinated, they were forced to ‘endure a series of rather contemptible pinpricks,’ as one reporter put it at the time. Local officials, the same reporter observed, displayed ‘an almost undisguised desire to make them as uncomfortable as possible,’ something which was achieved by allotting to them the ‘meanest accommodation on train and hotel.’ While the Chinese delegation found this pettiness somewhat amusing, it left the commissioners with an unfavourable impression. Another source of irritation was the ‘persistent espio232  ‘The Far East: Soviet May be Embroiled: Japanese Build Barracks,’ Sydney Morning Herald, April 9, 1932; Sydney Morning Herald, April 12, 1932; and Sydney Morning Herald, August 11, 1932. 233  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 125. 234  ‘Sydney Morning Herald, August 11, 1932. 235  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 125. 236  Ibid.

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nage’ conducted by Japanese spies on both the Chinese delegation and the members of the commission. This espionage, which garnered much publicity in ‘Far Eastern’ newspapers, was all the more resented because the ‘Japanese spies made themselves so conspicuous and officious.’237 However, what most infuriated the commission was the assumption that it lacked the intelligence that might be expected of a 10-year-old child, and would accept without question the carefully prepared ‘evidence’ that was presented. The Commission was actually fully aware of the fact that much of the evidence was obviously tainted, and they speedily became aware of the fact that Chinese were being arrested wholesale for no greater crime than the desire to see members of the Chinese Assessor’s staff. These men were, in many instances, held in prison until the Commission had returned to China.238

Nish writes that faced with these obstacles to their work, the commissioners ‘increasingly relied on the junior members of their party…who were less bound by protocol than themselves’ and who had the necessary expertise either in technical areas such as railways and the military or who had ‘formidable local knowledge.’239 Among the latter category of experts was Blakeslee who had recently spent six months working for the State Department where he had prepared documentary materials on the Manchurian incident. Blakeslee was posted to the American legation in Beijing ‘with instructions to accompany and advise General McCoy.’240 In view of this posting, Blakeslee had visited Tokyo in the company of the commission where he was welcomed at the Imperial Hotel on March 10 by members of JCIPR: as noted earlier, Blakeslee was a founding member of the IPR.241 The commission began drafting its report in Beijing in July just after its second visit to Tokyo, a visit in which Koo did not participate as a result of ‘unmistakable hints that his presence would not be welcome.’242 Nish notes that Lytton’s desire to be the principal author of the report did not please the other commissioners: they felt an affront to their dignity to  Sydney Morning Herald, August 11, 1932.  Ibid. See also Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 127. 239  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 127. 240  Ibid., 61. 241  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 165. 242  Sydney Morning Herald, August 11, 1932. 237 238

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‘accept the lesser role allotted to them.’ They also considered the idea impractical given that Lytton was then laid up at the German Hospital in Beijing, where he was being treated for ‘pain and fever.’ In the end, it was agreed that the preparation of the report should be a collective undertaking that would be overseen by Lytton, Blakeslee and Robert Haas in the form of a drafting committee.243 According to Nish, of all the expert advisers, it was Blakeslee who was closest to the drafting process. However, he qualifies this point in adding that the other advisers also played an important role, writing those sections of the report which required their specialist knowledge. For example, Nish suggests that Arnold Dirk Adriaan de Kat Angelino, who was deputy director of Chinese Affairs in the Netherlands East Indies and who had travelled from Java to join the commission, wrote a large part of the historical section of the report.244 Kat Angelino had an overlapping professional and academic interest in the region. While employed at the Dutch Colonial Ministry at The Hague, he had observed on behalf of the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies at the Shanghai meeting of the IPR in 1931. Passing through Honolulu en route to China aboard the SS President Jackson, Kat Angelino was guest of honour at a luncheon hosted by the IPR at the Oahu Country Club.245 In that same year, an English translation of his Colonial Policy, which was published in Dutch in 1930, appeared. Colonial Policy, although having as its focus the principles and practices of Dutch colonial policy, also discussed a much broader range of topics. For example, in a chapter entitled ‘The Synthesis of Cultures,’ Kat Angelino urged that Eastern and Western cultures should be ‘companions in the upward march of humanity.’246 In a chapter entitled ‘The Modernization of Eastern States,’ Kat Angelino examined in detail the modernisation of Japan following the fall of the Shogunate in 1868 as well as the traumatic social upheaval then underway in China as a result of its modernising efforts. In that same chapter, Kat Angelino concluded that ‘no state on earth, apart from the colonial world, has ever borne such a burden as now rests on the shoulders of China’s

 Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 164.  Ibid., 61, 164, 170–1. 245  ISIPR, ‘Institute Notes,’ 954. 246  E. S. C. Handy, review of. Colonial Policy by A. D. E. A. de Kat Angelino, Pacific Affairs, 5, no. 7 (1932), 630–6, 633. 243 244

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leaders.’247 Kat Angelino would later be accused by a spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry of being one of the two ‘prejudiced’ experts largely responsible for the commission’s final report, the other target of the accusation being Young.248 The sharpest division of opinion in regard to the drafting of the commission’s report concerned the conflicting sympathies of Lytton and Claudel.249 Lytton, an unwavering partisan of the League system and the principles on which it was based, took an extremely dim view of the Japanese conduct in Manchuria and was unmoved by the arguments in defence of it. All this was made clear in an address Lytton gave at Chatham House soon after the conclusion of the commission’s work. In that ­context, Lytton recalled an argument he had addressed to Yoshizawa in the course of the commission’s final interview with him. In the midst of this interview, Yoshizawa had spoken of his country’s indissoluble ties to Manchuria, calling attention to the fact that Japan had fought two wars there and insisting that Manchuria was Japan’s ‘life-line.’250 Responding to Yoshizawa, a clearly irritated Lytton stated the following: [w]e know of your treaties, we accept what you have told us about your economic interests, we know from history of the wars you have fought, and we respect your sensitiveness on this subject. Will you allow me to tell you that there are some things about which other nations are also sensitive, some things in which they take a pride, some things which they feel as strongly about as you do about Manchuria? There are some States who fought to the very death in the Great War, States that staked and lost everything. You say you have spent a billion yen in Manchuria; well, these States spent much more than that in the Great War and incurred debts which will cripple them for generations. You lost 200,000 lives; these people lost many millions. And they got nothing out of it except one thing. The only thing which these nations have saved from all their sacrifices in the War is their collective machinery for maintaining peace and preventing a repetition of such horrors. They are proud of it and sensitive about it. It is to them a life-line, the life-line of their civilisation, and it counts for them as much as Manchuria counts to you.251 247  A. D. E. A. de Kat Angelino, Colonial Policy, trans., G. J. Renier and A. D. E. A. de Kat Angelino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 286. 248  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 166. 249  Ibid., 164. 250  Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 745–6. 251  Ibid., 746.

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In light of this perspective, Lytton wanted the report to make it plain that the Japanese defence of their conduct was unacceptable. Claudel, by contrast, was sympathetic towards aspects of the Japanese case and, according to John E. Dreifort, ‘wanted to soften any harsh wording that smacked of condemnation of Japan.’ For this reason, Dreifort adds, the other commissioners and those assisting ‘incorrectly came to believe that Claudel was under orders from Paris to prevent any condemnation of Japan.’252 The conflict between Lytton and Claudel concerning their different outlooks in regard to the Manchurian situation came to a head in the context of addressing the report’s recommendations.253 Nish points out that Claudel, although agreeing with his colleagues on the point that Manchukuo had been created and was being sustained by the Japanese, issued ‘an ultimatum’ in which he ‘suggested that it be recognized provided constitutional amendments were introduced to ensure that it was based on the will of the people.’ Nish observes that this suggestion amounted to a ‘wrecking proposal,’ adding that it ‘required all the firmness of Lytton, the tact of McCoy and the drafting skills of Aldrovandi’ to overcome the impasse and thereby produce, as was considered essential, a report that all the commissioners could endorse.254 The report was signed on the morning of September 4  in Lytton’s room at the German Hospital. By the end of that day, all the commissioners had departed Beijing in order to make their way to Geneva.255 Bearing a copy of the report, Schnee and Claudel travelled to Manzhouli, returning to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Aldrovandi Marescotti, Lytton, McCoy and others in their party departed for Shanghai from where they sailed to Europe. Joining them on their journey was Koo, who

252  John E. Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur: The Ambivalence of French Foreign Policy in the Far East, 1919–1945 (Ohio: Kent State University Press, Kent, 1991), 80. Reginald Bassett notes that there were ‘widespread rumours of a secret understanding between France and Japan,’ adding that these were ‘given some credence in the American State Department.’ Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 587.  Wilson notes  that ‘the sympathy for Japan shown by both officials and businessmen [in France]  was apparently so great that reports of secret Franco-Japanese collusion were widely believed.’  Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 543. 253  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 80. 254  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 164, 166, 170. See also Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 80. 255  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 164–5.

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had recently been named as China’s ambassador at Paris and its representative at the council.256 On September 15, just over a week before the Lytton Report was presented to the League secretariat, the cabinet of Saitō Makoto formally recognised Manchukuo, declaring in its statement of recognition that Manchuria had ‘an inescapable bearing upon our national defence and the very existence of our people.’257 On that same day, Ohashi Chuichi, the Japanese viceminister for foreign affairs in Manchukuo, announced that ‘Manchukuo will be an open country for Japanese subjects of the Japanese Empire only, and will be to all intents and purposes closed to other countries.’258 For JCIPR members, Japan’s recognition of Manchukuo was bound to have been a source of anxiety. As Wilson points out, ‘with their Western contacts and sensitivity to Western opinion, they were doubtless aware, that the creation and recognition of Manchukuo were more offensive to the USA and the League than was de facto Japanese control of the region.’ That they were less inclined to speak out on this issue than they had been on such matters as Manchuria’s status as Japan’s life-line, she suggests, was partly because they were less sure of their ground.259 Nitobe was a very public exception to this. Following the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, Nitobe, who had studied in the United States and was a respected figure there, had vowed that he would not return to that country until that time Congress voted to repeal it.260 However, in April 1932, for no other reason than that of loyalty to his country, he embarked on a journey to the United States from where he would launch himself on a lecture tour which would endure for almost a year. Nitobe’s purpose in undertaking this tour was that of explaining the Japanese point of view in regard to the Manchurian and Shanghai incidents in the hope of checking the anti-Japanese sentiment that had intensified in America of late due, in particular, to recent events in Shanghai.261 On August 20, in a radio transmission, Nitobe advised against the Stimson policy of non-­recognition, warning his American listeners that should recognition be withheld from Manchukuo,  Ibid., 165.  Japanese Government, 1932, quoted in Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 535. 258  Satō Naotake, 1932, quoted in Noel-Baker, ‘The Future of the Collective System,’ 183. 259  Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 533–4. 260  Ibid., 526, 528. 261  Ibid., 527–8 and Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 193. 256 257

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Manchuria will then become a province of China, and between the provinces of China any sort of war is tolerated, be it the most bloody and devastating, by the League and by the United States. Manchuria will fall into the hands of a war-lord and he can indulge in warfare with impunity…[If such an undesirable situation comes about,] Manchuria will fall an easy prey to Bolshevist Russia. I very much fear that Mr Stimson’s policy [of non-­ recognition of Manchukuo] will end in making a present of Manchuria to Russia and creating in the Far East a perpetual storm centre.262

While some among his audience might have swallowed the anti-­ Bolshevik bait, Akami suggests that it is open to serious doubt as to whether Nitobe’s mission, which was supported by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as was a like tour conducted by Tsurumi in America and Europe in 1932, achieved its aim. Akami observes  that while in North America (he visited Canada as well), Nitobe was criticised on the basis that he was propagandising on behalf of his government, adding that a similar charge was laid at the door of Tsurumi.263 This would suggest that instead of causing American opinion to adopt a more sympathetic view of Japan’s activities in China, Nitobe only managed to demonstrate, as Wilson states in relation to his repetition of the official line on Shanghai while in the United States, the ‘extent to which…[he]…was prepared to subordinate personal feeling to the “national interest.”’264 Takaki, a former student of Nitobe, also spoke out on the question of Manchukuo, although unlike Nitobe, he deviated from the official position. In an article appearing in Pacific Affairs in November 1932, he stated the following: I am not at all in favor of the policy adhered to by our government in recognizing Manchukuo without waiting for the report of the Commission of the League. For, even apart from the duty implicit in the League’s resolution of December 10, it would imply a lack of confidence…either in the ability of the League to appreciate the real situation in the Far East, or in the ability of Japan to persuade and convince the League of the essential justness of her position.265

262  Nitobe Inazō, 1932, quoted in Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 535. 263  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 193. 264  Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 542. 265  Takaki, ‘World Peace Machinery and the Asia Monroe Doctrine,’ 952–3.

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Like Nitobe and other JCIPR members, Takaki clung to the hope that once the Japanese position was properly clarified and appraised, then the leading nations and ‘enlightened public opinion’ would realise that Japan’s cause was essentially just. According to Takaki, the justice of Japan’s cause related not only to Japan’s vital needs but to the general good: what Japan sought, he stated, was ‘first, to make Manchuria a land of peace and prosperity for all residents of every nationality, under a stable government, and, secondly, to solve finally the complicated problems involved and safeguard her own very existence and her future development.’266 Takaki insisted that the Sino-Japanese dispute arising from the Japanese pursuit of these objectives, the imperialistic manner of which, he ­suggested, was counter-productive in that it only served to further inflame the already ‘ultranationalistic’ feelings of the Chinese, must be resolved by conciliation and not by ‘force of arms.’267 He contended that for both ‘idealistic and realistic reasons,’ whatever political and economic gains Japan might obtain from the current situation, these should not be ‘tainted by the lasting ill will of the Chinese people.’ Thus, Takaki proposed that an international conference be held, at which would be represented not only China, Japan and Manchukuo but all the other interested parties. If Japan embraced such an approach, Takaki suggested, Japan would not only demonstrate its unwavering allegiance to ‘the new international idea of “from conflict to conference,”’ it would demonstrate its respect for the legitimate aspirations of Chinese nationalism, thereby leading China to ‘recognize the disappearance of those causes which associate the matter with national humiliation.’268 In a further, albeit cautious, departure from the official line, Takaki stated that should the ‘problem of sovereignty… prove to be blocking the way to lasting peace,’ he would be ‘personally in favor’ of China retaining ‘suzerainty’ over Manchukuo.  He added that retention of suzerainty would be conditional upon the joint recognition by all those nations represented ‘at the proposed conference…[of]… Japan’s special interests in political, economic as well as military matters with that autonomous, or free, state.’269 On October 1, the Lytton Report, as the report of the commission became known, was published in Geneva. It received a ‘very favourable  Ibid., 951–2.  Ibid., 947, 951. 268  Ibid., 951–2. 269  Ibid., 952. 266 267

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press throughout the world,’ it being commended for being ‘expert, conscientious and thorough.’270 Yet alongside the plaudits, as Lytton noted in the course of discussing the report at Chatham House on October 19, a report of which he was widely, although wrongly as he himself noted, seen as the sole author, there was a ‘tendency in some quarters…to say it has come too late’: what might have been of value six or even three months earlier was no longer of any practical use in light of Japan’s recognition of Manchukuo.271 Lytton told his Chatham House audience that he rejected the view that the report was impaired in any way by the Japanese action, stating in its defence that this development had been foreseen by the commission from the outset: the commission considered it to be the ‘inevitable conclusion’ of a policy which had seen Japan create the state of Manchukuo, support it with its troops and fill it with officials, both civil and military. Indeed, the report was written, Lytton declared, in the ‘certain knowledge’ that Japan would go down the path of recognition. Lytton then pointed out that Uchida, who succeeded Yoshizawa as foreign minister after the fall of the Inukai cabinet on May 15, had informed the commission that it was the firm intention of the Japanese government to recognise the existence of Manchukuo as it was only then that they could ‘make a treaty with it to secure recognition of their own interests in Manchuria.’272 In relation to the name Manchukuo, Lytton informed his audience that in their report, the commissioners had ‘been obliged throughout to use the word in inverted commas, because we ourselves never recognised the existence of any such State’ and, indeed, the report consistently referred to ‘Manchukuo’ and to the ‘Government’ of ‘Manchukuo.’273

270  Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 744 and Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 224. On the quality of the report, see G. P. Gooch ‘The Breakdown of the System of Collective Security,’ Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series: Geneva and the Drift to War Order (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), 67. See also LON, Appeal by the Chinese Government: Report of the Commission of Enquiry (Geneva: LON, 1 October 1932), C. 663 M. 320. 1932. VII. 271  Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 744–5. On the view of Lytton as the report’s sole author see Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 170. 272  Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 744–5. On Uchida’s hard-line stance, see also Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 533. 273  Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 744, and Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Lytton Commission,’ Memorandum (Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council) 1, no. 19 (1932): 1–6, 3. doi:10.2307/3024765.

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Reflecting the fact that the commissioners had found that the Japanese complaints relating to governance in China had merit, the Lytton Report noted that China was a ‘nation in evolution,’ grappling with the problem of modernisation, that it had difficulties in ensuring internal order and security and that these difficulties were a barrier to friendly Sino-Japanese relations.274 In addition, the report acknowledged that Japan was ‘quite entitled to demand a government in Manchuria that could maintain law and order, make life and property safe, and fulfil treaties it had entered.’275 The report also accepted that Japanese ‘interests’ in Manchuria ­encompassed the region’s vital importance to Japan’s future economic development and it urged a Sino-Japanese treaty guaranteeing Japan’s ‘free participation in the economic development’ of Manchuria and ‘an extension to the whole of Manchuria of the right to settle and lease land, coupled with some modification of the principle of extraterritoriality.’276 Such a recommendation reflected the IPR’s approach to the issue and it should be noted that the commission’s staff drew on the research work undertaken for the 1929 and 1931 IPR conferences in relation to the Manchurian problem.  In this way, the  research work of the  IPR  in the area formed part of the ‘factual background’ of the commission’s report. Indeed, the IPR’s secretariat was pleased to observe ‘how closely the topics of the special studies’ made by the expert staff of the Commission of Enquiry paralleled ‘the categories under which the Institute’ had been examining the same problems.277 Recalling the point that the IPR sought to avoid framing the Manchurian question in all or nothing terms, it is worth noting that the Lytton Report even recommended that Manchuria be granted a ‘large measure of autonomy,’ albeit  an autonomy that was  consistent with the ‘sovereignty and administrative integrity’ of China.278 A similar proposal had been the subject of discussions held by Chinese officials and a representative of Japan in late December 1931 and very early in 1932 on the initiative of the then 274  Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Lytton Commission,’ 2, 5. The report  recommended that there should be international cooperation to aid in China’s reconstruction. 275  Lytton, ‘The Manchurian Problem,’ 756. 276  Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Lytton Commission,’ 4, 6. 277  ISIPR, ‘A Pacific Research Program,’ AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA and ISIPR, Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA. 278  IPR, American Council, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Lytton Commission,’ 4.

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Japanese prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi. However, Inukai’s plan to negotiate a settlement of the question of Manchuria was soon undermined by forces in the government which were close to the army, the army having already decided on the course of removing Manchuria from China’s jurisdiction.279 In regard to the alleged incident at Mukden, the report stated the following:  an ‘explosion undoubtedly occurred on or near the railroad between 10 and 10:30 p.m. September 18, but the damage, if any, to the railroad did not in fact prevent the punctual arrival of the south-bound train from Changchun and was not in itself sufficient to justify military action.’ Although the Lytton Report did not name Japan as an aggressor and did not discount the ‘hypothesis that the officers on the spot may have thought they were acting in self defense,’ it concluded that the ‘military operations of the Japanese troops during this night…cannot be regarded as measures of legitimate self-defence.’280 Indeed, not only did the report indicate that the Japanese military action was an overreaction to the ‘provocations’ of the Chinese, it suggested, in remarking on the smoothness of Japan’s military operations on the night of September 18, that the Kwantung Army’s action had been organised in advance.281 Lytton later explained at Chatham House that as far as he was aware, the report ‘never referred to the “Incident”’ of September 18 because in the opinion of the commission it was ‘very doubtful whether it ever occurred.’282 While the Lytton Report recognised as a fact that Japan controlled a railway and ‘a strip of territory running from the sea right up into the heart of Manchuria,’ and maintained a force of around 10,000 soldiers in order to protect that property, it also stated that the following was a fact: ‘without declaration of war, a large area of what was indisputably Chinese territory has been forcibly seized and occupied by the armed forces of Japan and has, in consequence of this operation, been separated from and declared independent of China.’283 In respect to the question of internal order, this being the pretext for Japan’s continuing military occupation, the report recommended that it should be secured by an ‘effective local gendarmerie force’ and that this was to be the sole means of securing such  Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism, 65–6.  LON, Appeal by the Chinese Government: Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 71 and IPR, American Council, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Lytton Commission,’ 1–2. 281  McKercher, ‘The League of Nations and the Problem of Collective Security,’ 71. 282  On the Mukden incident, see Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 740. 283  LON, Appeal by the Chinese Government: Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 127. 279 280

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order.284 The report suggested that ‘anxiety for her own security’ may have had a greater influence in determining Japan’s actions in Manchuria than its developmental needs.285 However, the report urged that because of the ‘heavy financial burden’ involved in occupying Manchuria and because ‘Japanese troops might be seriously embarrassed if they were surrounded by a restive and rebellious local population backed by a hostile China,’ it was in Japan’s interest to seek solutions to the problem of security ‘which would be more in keeping with the principles on which rests the present peace organization of the world, and analogous to arrangements concluded by other Great Powers in various parts of the world.’286 In line with this, it recommended that ‘security against external aggression should be provided by the withdrawal of all armed forces…and by the conclusion of a treaty of non-aggression between the countries interested.’ By the expression countries interested, the report meant in this context not only China and Japan but also Russia, and in fact, the report insisted that any solution to the Manchurian problem which overlooked the interests of Russia, which in April had massed troops along its Manchurian border with a view to protecting its interests along the Chinese Eastern Railway (which ran from Vladivostok to Port Arthur), would ‘risk a future breach of the peace and would not be permanent.’287 At the same time, the report was clear in its implication that there was an important sense in which the expression countries interested encompassed the world at large. This is evidenced by its repeated insistence that the conflict must be resolved in keeping with the principles on which rests the present peace organisation of the world. Further to this, and echoing an argument that Lytton had addressed to Yoshizawa in Tokyo, the report warned that ‘[a]ny loss of confidence in the application of the principles of the Covenant and the Pact of Paris in any part of the world, diminished the value and efficiency of those principles everywhere.’288 It was evidently

284  Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Lytton Commission,’ 5. 285  Ibid., 4. 286  Ibid. 287  Ibid., 4, 6 and ‘The Far East: Soviet May be Embroiled: Japanese Build Barracks,’ Sydney Morning Herald, April 9, 1932, 13. 288  Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Lytton Commission,’ 4.

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with this consideration in view that the report urged international cooperation in Chinese reconstruction, stating that since the present political instability in China is an obstacle to friendship with Japan and an anxiety to the rest of the world, as the maintenance of peace in the Far East is a matter of international concern; and since the conditions enumerated above cannot be fulfilled without a strong central government in China, the final requisite for a satisfactory solution is temporary international co-operation in the internal reconstruction of China, as suggested by the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen.289

In respect to the implementation of its recommendations, the report suggested that the council, in association with China and Japan, summon an advisory conference to ‘discuss and recommend detailed proposals for the constitution of a special regime for the administration of the Three Eastern Provinces.’ This conference, the report suggested, would be composed of representatives of the Chinese and Japanese governments and two delegations representing the local population,  that is,  a delegation selected as determined by the Chinese government and a delegation selected as determined by the Japanese government. Further to this, the report suggested that should both China and Japan agree, neutral observers could be included in the advisory conference.290 These suggestions concerning international oversight of a quasi-­ autonomous Manchuria help explain why Akami sees some overlap between the Lytton Report and proposals put forward in a booklet authored by five members of the JCIPR,  representatives of  which, it should be noted, met with the Lytton Commission at the Tokyo Club on March 5. Published in Japan in June 1932 under the heading of ‘Proposals for the solution of the Manchurian problem,’ the booklet was later submitted, it having been rendered into English, to the Lytton Commission.291 Akami writes that this booklet contained ‘two plans for a solution, both of  Ibid., 5.  Ibid., 5. 291  Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 165. The authors of the booklet were Rōyama Masamichi, Yokota Kisaburo, Matsukata Yoshisaburō (Saburō), Matsumoto Shigeharu and Yamanaka Atsutarō. Akami notes that Yokota remained opposed to the recognition of Manchukuo.  Hara Matsukata Reicschauer points out that when the Japanese ‘overran Manchuria in 1931, Saburo was among the relatively few Japanese who dared to criticize its acts in print.’ Matsukata Reicschauer, Samurai and Silk, 307. 289 290

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which were designed to gain the powers’ recognition of Manchukuo.’ However, she adds that while the second of these plans advocated that Manchuria be formally recognised as a sovereign state in its own right, the first plan, which was endorsed by the majority of the authors, argued in favour of ‘the creation of a transitional state of self-rule, with the agreement of the Council of the League of Nations and the United States. Although it was virtual recognition of Manchukuo by the great powers, it emphasized the significance of an international body.’292 The Lytton Report, perhaps mindful of the advice concerning the hostility within Japan to external interference in the matter, was careful not to overly stress the supervisory role of the council in relation to the creation of the special regime to administer the disputed region that it proposed. The report recommended that once the ‘broad principles’ in respect to the administration of the three provinces had been agreed upon by the two parties with the assistance of the council, ‘full discretion as regards details should be left to the Advisory Conference. Further reference to the Council of the League of Nations would only take place in the event of failure to agree.’293 After receiving the report, the LON spent the rest of the year seeking to negotiate an end to the Manchurian aspect of the Sino-Japanese dispute. Tokyo, desirous of delaying its prospective withdrawal from the LON, requested a period of several weeks in order to examine the report, a request to which the council acceded.294 Almost two months after the Lytton Report was published, the Japanese government issued its response. As a reporter noted at the time, it amounted to a ‘flat refusal to accept… [the report’s]…recommendations.’295 Takaki observed in his aforementioned Pacific Affairs article that the prevalent mood in Japan meant that the proposition of an international conference to deal with the question of Manchuria would have been ‘extremely hard…for them to “swallow,”’ appending to this observation a rhetorical question: ‘would an American entertain even for a moment the idea of letting an international conference define the Monroe Doctrine and review Mexican relations?’ In any case, as Takaki gloomily concluded in relation to his own proposed solution to the Manchurian prob Ibid.  Ibid., 5–6. 294  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 82. 295  ‘Japan’s Reply to Lytton Report,’ Canberra Times, November 22, 1932. 292 293

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lem, a solution which also overlapped with the one outlined in the Lytton Report, the dominant outlook in Japan, and certainly amongst the members of a government under the thumb of its military, ‘overwhelmingly’ favoured recognition of Manchukuo as it was ‘believed that…[n]othing short of an independent state…would be adequate to prevent the return of the same old difficulties and to guarantee our interests.’296 Although Takaki himself appeared sceptical, he observed that the ‘idea of an economic bloc uniting Japan and Manchukuo,’ the calls for which, he pointed out, had ‘sounded like “rain in the great drought” in the ears of the suffering Japanese public,’ was now considered ‘a sine qua non of the “Japanese Monroe Doctrine.”’297 The council reunited on November 21 in order to examine the Lytton Report. However, as Dreifort observes, an ‘impasse quickly developed’ and so the council returned the dispute to the special session of the assembly. The special session reconvened on the morning of December 6 whereupon its members heard speeches by  Yan and Matsuoka.298 On the afternoon of December 6, the first to speak  on the Lytton Report  was Joseph Connolly, delegate of the Irish Free State, who stated that he wished to call attention to certain  ‘symptoms’ indicated in the Lytton Report one of these being, it seemed to him, ‘an endeavour to secure the interests of Japan by methods of imperialistic expansion, irrespective of how such expansions cuts across the territorial rights of another sovereign state.’299 He went on to call attention to that part of the report which was definite about the fact that a large part of what was ‘indisputably’ Chinese territory had been ‘forcibly seized  and occupied by the armed forces of Japan’ and its request that Japan live up to its international obligations by conforming, in the pursuit of a solution to the crisis, to the covenant, the Nine-Power Treaty and the Pact of Paris.300 Beneš, Östen Undén and Christian Lange then spoke in succession on behalf of Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Norway respectively. In what was a very lengthy speech, Beneš dismissed as a total misapprehension of the nature of the provisions of the covenant  the following  Japanese claims  in relation to its dispute with China concerning boycotting: that recourse to the LON in the case  Takaki, ‘World Peace Machinery and the Asia Monroe Doctrine,’ 951–2.  Ibid., 945, 949. 298  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 82. 299  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 111 (1933), 33. See also Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 290. 300  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 111 (1933), 33–4. 296 297

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of this  dispute was not feasible because  firstly,  Japanese public opinion would not have tolerated external interference in it; because secondly, ‘the mentality’ of peoples living in the disputed area was very different to that of Western Europeans; and because thirdly, ‘the population of the territory in question  would have suffered serious harm’ due to the LON’s inability to act promptly. The covenant, Beneš advised having noted these claims, provided that any  matter  of controversy  that fell under any of its  articles must be brought before the LON.301 Beneš  observed of the Japanese actions in Manchuria the following: [W]hen, in a dispute of this kind, a Member of the League decides to take the law into its own hands and, in doing so, engages in military operations on a large scale, which result in the detaching from the territory of another League Member of several provinces having an area of some hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. Such results are obviously out of all proportion to the original dispute on the question of boycotting, and themselves create a new and most serious dispute, which has brought us to the present position, so dangerous as it is to peace.302

Undén agreed with the two speakers who had preceded him that the report had been unequivocal on the point that the Japanese actions on September 1931 were not an exercise in self-defence and that the so-called new state was not a result of a spontaneous act of self-determination on the part of the local population. Although he accepted the argument that appropriate consideration should be given to cases where internal disorder in one country creates problems for another state, Undén insisted that ‘the thesis that the internal difficulties of one country justify, on the part of another country, warlike measures and the annexation of vast regions cannot be recognised.’303 As to Lange, he commenced his speech by echoing another key concern expressed by the other speakers, namely, that the dispute then before the assembly was the most grave that had emerged in the LON’s history. As with the other speakers, he drew attention to the report’s conclusion that there was ‘something wholly artificial about the establishment of the new regime in Manchuria’ and condemned Japan, although less explicitly than the other speakers mentioned, for resorting to the method of force, thereby disregarding its fundamental obligations.304  Ibid., 36.  Ibid. 303  Ibid., 38–9. 304  Ibid., 39–40. 301 302

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In the context of a general discussion on the morning of December 7, Madariaga, who was the first to speak, emphasised, like Beneš, Connolly and Lange before him, that the Sino-Japanese dispute was of an exceptional, complicated and delicate nature. Beyond this, Madariaga characterised the dispute as a conflict between two different attitudes of mind: between ‘the national attitude of mind, which sees everything from the angle of national interest, understood in the widest sense and felt with the utmost acuteness, and the international attitude, that newcomer in history, the new moral force which before our eyes is toiling to create a better world.’305 Taking great care to not cause Japan deep offence, Madariaga observed that the Japanese nation had been led to believe that the Japanese national attitude was at one with the ‘true international attitude,’ which was why, he noted, Matsuoka had contended on the previous day that Japan was ‘not only respecting but upholding the principles of the Covenant.’306 However, Madariaga stated that he and the other members of the LON could not let Japan persist with this belief.  He warned  that  the LON would soon find its covenant perishing of ‘mortal disease’ should it, ‘by default,’ waive the principles enshrined in Article 10 and 12 respectively: territorial integrity and political independence in the case of the former and the undertaking to submit all disputes to a procedure of pacific settlement in the case of the latter. The notion that the principles of the covenant ‘must be waived in exceptional cases’ was unacceptable because ‘in fact, all cases are and always will be exceptional cases.’ Madariaga added that out of respect for Japan itself, that is, out of respect for ‘the permanent and historic Japan,’ the LON had a duty to let it know that it did not support its  current methods:  it  viewed them as entirely contrary to the true interests of the LON and, therefore, to the true interests of Japan.307 The Swiss delegate Motta spoke next, opening with the declaration that like his friend Beneš, he did not want to take sides with either party and that his only interest was to plead the cause of the covenant. In regard to that cause, Motta argued similarly to Madariaga: that should the assembly accept the Japanese plea of exceptionalism in the case of Manchuria, then the essential principles embodied in Articles 10 and 12 would be robbed of all meaning. It would mean, Motta stated,  that the members of the  Ibid., 41.  Ibid., 42. 307  Ibid. 305 306

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LON had ‘ceased to admit the maxim that none may take the law into their own hands.’ Having stated this, he observed that ‘the very justification’ of the LON was its ‘categorical condemnation of violence in international relations.’308 In the course of a speech given on the same morning, the second last to be given on the morning of December 7, Nicolas Politis, a Greek diplomat and an expert in international law, noted that in the present state of international law, it was almost impossible to specify to a satisfactory degree the marks of self-defence and aggression. Indeed, he added, after signing the Pact of Paris, Kellogg had suggested that it was important not to formally define self-defence on the ground that ‘an unscrupulous ­country might deliberately arrange in advance that events should fall out in accordance with the definition,’ a point later echoed in the context of a debate concerning the definition of aggression at the Conference on the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments.309 Nonetheless, Politis went on to point out, the question of self-defence was already subject to certain rules. One of those rules was brought to light by the First Committee of the assembly in its deliberations on bringing the covenant into alignment with the Pact of Paris and was adopted by the assembly in 1931: ‘that a State which adopts measures of self-defence cannot evade discussion of its actions by other States, and that, as regards States Members of the League, it is subject to the sovereign appreciation of the Council or of the Assembly.’310 Politis further noted that this sovereign appreciation was itself subject to two important rules, both of which had been drawn up unanimously by the council in 1926 subsequent to their application in 1925 as a preemptive measure against Greece in the case of the Greco-Bulgarian dispute. The first of these rules was that ‘every act of violence does not necessarily justify its victim in resorting to war’ nor release it  from the obligations specified in Article 12. The second of these rules was that ‘legitimate defence implies the adoption of measures proportionate to the seriousness of the attack and the use of which is justified by the imminence of the danger.’311 Having addressed the relevant jurisprudence, Politis turned to the facts established by the Lytton Commission. He observed that Japan  Ibid., 42–3.  Ibid., 44. 310  Ibid. 311  Ibid., 45. 308 309

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had very good reason to complain of  provocations  on the part of China, however, he questioned whether the facts were such as to justify the Japanese claim of self-defence and with that Japan’s claim to be released from its obligations under Article 12.312 Politis then stated that although he did not doubt the sincerity of the plea that Japan believed that it faced an ‘imminent danger,’ he thought Japan to be in error and that it was the duty of the assembly to ‘denounce her errors’ so as not to establish a precedent for the future.313 The last person to speak on the morning of December 7 was José Matos, the permanent delegate of Guatemala, who recalled that it was about a year ago that he had made some remarks giving expression to the ‘anxiety felt by the small-states’ in relation to the Sino-Japanese conflict. He added that he had sought to draw the council’s attention to what he feared might be its consequences in the future, especially in light of some of the arguments presented in the context of formal debates on the subject. The arguments which concerned Matos he described as being antithetical to certain essential principles upheld by Latin American countries. Matos concluded his speech by stating that he found it ‘absolutely necessary’ to proclaim before all ‘the compulsory and sacrosanct character’ of the principles of the covenant, ‘including, above all, the clause which insists treaties must be respected.’314 The afternoon session of the assembly on December 7 was dominated by the speeches given by Paul-Boncour and Simon. The former observed in his speech that it was unfortunate that the first great conflict that the LON was called on to solve was characterised by ‘a whole host of complexities such as could not be matched in any other part of the globe.’315 In saying this,  Paul-Boncour was not simply referring to  ‘distance and geographical conditions’ but was thinking  also of rights conferred on Japan by treaties, ‘rights amounting,’ he  noted,  ‘almost to sovereignty since they embodied on characteristic of sovereignty—namely, the right to maintain armed forces.’316 It was also unfortunate, declared Paul-Boncour, that the conflict had landed on the table of the LON at a time when that body was still constitutionally weak.317 Having spelt out some of the dif Ibid.  Ibid. 314  Ibid., 46. 315  Ibid., 48. 316  Ibid. 317  Ibid. 312 313

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ficulties involved  in the matter, Paul-Boncour endorsed the Lytton Report’s depreciation of the idea that there could be a return to the status quo ante in Manchuria. He noted that according to the commission, such a return would lead to  ‘a hotbed of possible disputes.’  Equally  however,  Paul-Boncour endorsed the report’s conclusion that ‘the  future regime’ in Manchuria should not be ‘a continuance of the present situation.’ 318 He declared that based on the findings of and suggestions made by the Lytton Commission, the LON should first seek a conciliated outcome and second, in the event that a settlement could not be reached, ‘publish a report containing a statement of the facts of the dispute and the recommendations which are deemed just and proper’  in accordance with paragraph 4 of Article 15 of the covenant.319 In a speech which followed, Simon too applauded the Lytton Report for highlighting the ‘really complicated character’ of the problem.320 He drew attention to the report’s observation that in the ten years since the Washington Conference,  where  a ‘striking effort was made to start China on the road of international co-operation, a deterioration… [had]…taken place.’321 In respect to this deterioration, Simon quoted the report’s references to the ‘use made of the economic boycott,’ the ‘virulence of the anti-foreign propaganda’ and the ‘introduction of anti-foreign propaganda into the schools.’322 Simon then called attention to the report’s observations concerning the ‘deplorable condition’ of Manchuria, pointing out  in relation to this  that ‘contrary to the impression which exists in many quarters, this Report does not give a one-sided account, painting everything black on the one side, and presenting it in spotless raiments of white on the other.’323 Nonetheless, and after having acknowledged that the great powers ‘may have upon their shoulders the greatest responsibilities and the largest risks,’ Simon declared that324

 Ibid., 49.  Ibid. 320  ‘Appendix: Sir John Simon’s Speech at the Twelfth Plenary Meeting of the League Assembly, 7 December 1932,’ in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 627. 321  Ibid., 629. 322  Lytton Report, 1932, quoted ibid., 629. 323  ‘Appendix: Sir John Simon’s Speech at the Twelfth Plenary Meeting of the League Assembly, 7 December 1932,’ in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 628–9. 324  Ibid., 631. 318 319

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the serious fact for us is this: That when this unhappy dispute reached its climax, the methods of the League were not employed. That is the central fact for us, and it is therefore…our duty as Members of the League to defend its Covenant…[T]he Covenant of the League is our constitutional law. It is the reason why we are here; it is the fundamental law; it cannot be set aside by some light or thoughtless gesture, because it is the very basis upon which international co-operation is founded. We are not at liberty to disregard it. We are bound to sustain it.325

Having urged the need to ‘see as far as we can that League methods are employed in future cases,’ Simon quoted the report’s declaration that a ‘mere restoration of the status quo ante would be no solution’ since this would ‘merely be to invite a repetition of the trouble.’326 He then asserted that the members of the assembly must ‘draw from…[the report’s]… pages the inference of conciliation’ and must assist in the work of conciliation ‘with firmness but with complete friendliness to both sides.’327 In marked contrast to the speeches of Paul-Boncour and Simon, were the speeches of the Italian and German representatives which were delivered later in the day and which reflected currents of thought which were then dominant in Italy and rapidly gaining ground in Germany: the paramountcy of political as opposed to legal considerations in respect to international affairs and the need for a less rigid international order in order to accommodate the free development of states.328 The Italian representative, namely, Pompeo Aloisi, stated the following: There is no point speaking of our fidelity to the Covenant, for all the States are bound thereto….Wherever the responsibilities for the dispute may lie, the fact remains that it has put the elasticity of the clauses of the Covenant to a severe test. That flexibility, was intended and I may say wisely, by the founders of the League. Their object was to allow the free development of the activities of States without resort to those extreme measures which the League is called upon to take in the event of a violation of the Covenant. This flexibility, I repeat, has been put to a very severe test; but that does not justify our proceeding to conclusions not based on a sense of realities or the responsibility of Government representatives. The latter are called upon,  Ibid., 629, 631.  Ibid., 629, and Lytton Report, 1932, quoted ibid., 630. 327  ’Appendix: ‘Sir John Simon’s Speech at the Twelfth Plenary Meeting of the League Assembly, 7 December 1932,’ in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 630. 328  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 295. 325 326

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not to establish academic principles, but to discover a solution based on realities….[W]e are not here to establish a gospel version of events in China or to pass judgement….Our task to-day is to help to bring about…[a Sino-­ Japanese]…agreement, and, in my view, our action must be based on the fact that we are to facilitate this rapprochement between China and Japan rather than concern ourselves with more or less theoretical considerations regarding our own responsibility. That responsibility is clear vis-à-vis the Covenant, but we cannot acquit ourselves of it by mere rigid and abstract statements.329

Like his Italian counterpart, the German delegate, namely, Konstantin von Neurath, was dismissive of the idea that the LON should ‘approach the question on the basis of more or less abstract principles,’ and he too suggested that part of the difficulty lay with the inflexibility of the existing legal order.330 In an echo of the right to live doctrine or some such equivalent, Neurath declared that in cases where national interests clash, such as had occurred in Manchuria in recent decades, the LON should begin by acknowledging and developing an appreciation of the ‘true value’ of ‘the vital forces which inspire nations and the natural trend of their development’ and seek to ‘divert them into peaceful channels.’331 Of all the speeches given at the assembly on December 6 and 7, it was Simon’s speech that gave rise to ‘bitterly hostile’ reactions because of its supposedly generous concessions to the Japanese case and because of unverified reports that the speech had delighted Matsuoka.332 ArnoldForster later observed that in his speech, ‘the famous lawyer spent his art on whitewash for the Japanese.’333 Willoughby, the aforementioned technical advisor to the Chinese government, stated of the same speech that it was ‘hardly a respectable one.’334 Bassett finds such reactions hard to fathom given that Simon had made it, in Simon’s words, ‘entirely plain,’ that  the  difficulties confronting Japan in Manchuria and the provocations it had had to endure in no way  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 111 (1933), 52–3.  Ibid., 54. 331  Ibid. 332  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 281, 284–6, 289. 333  Arnold-Forster, review of The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of Nations, by Westel W. Willoughby, 306. 334  Westel W.  Willoughby, 1935, quoted in Arnold-Forster, review of The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of Nations, by Westel W. Willoughby, 306. 329 330

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obviated Japan’s obligations under the covenant.335 Nor does Bassett understand why Simon was singled out for criticism given that the position he articulated was wholly in line with the bulk of British opinion at the time.336 It was also generally in line with the views expressed at the assembly by Paul-­Boncour.337 More significant in this context however, is the fact that although going further than the representatives France and Great Britain in that they openly condemned Japan’s actions, the representatives of the lesser powers, that is, the representatives of Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Irish Free State, Norway and Spain, had similarly stressed the highly complicated nature of the problem.338 Indeed, Beneš went as far as to censure China for engaging in actions which he characterised as egregious violations of international law and a danger to international peace.  In this regard, he made the following two statements:  According to the report of the Commission and to the statements of the two parties before the Council, there were two categories of acts of that nature— namely, anti-foreign propaganda, which extended even to Chinese schools and school text-books, thus sowing the seeds of hatred against a neighbouring people; and, above all, economic boycotting—systematic, prolonged, organised, supported and, it would appear, fomented officially. Such acts, in my opinion, should be condemned.339 I venture to say quite frankly that, in the present case, I should have no hesitation in categorically condemning active xenophobia, which is illegal from an international point of view, and officially organised economic boycotting, as acts which are prejudicial to world peace and should be unsparingly punished. In the general solution of the dispute, proper consideration will have to be given to the complaints submitted in this connection.340 335  ‘Appendix: Sir John Simon’s Speech at the Twelfth Plenary Meeting of the League Assembly, 7 December 1932,’ in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 628. See also Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 287. 336  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 289. 337  John E. Dreifort writes that ‘the larger members, as typified by Paul-Boncour’s opening remarks to the Assembly, emphasized the complexities of the problem and sought to promote conciliation.’ Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 82. 338  Bassett notes that in ‘one respect only, but an important one, was there a contrast’ between the stance of the larger members and the lesser powers: ‘The French delegate uttered no word of condemnation of either party to the dispute, while Sir John Simon refrained from any direct condemnation.’ Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 294–5. 339  LON, special supplement, OJ, no. 111 (1933), 35. 340  Ibid., 36.

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As we saw, Politis considered that the facts on the ground in Manchuria as confirmed by the Lytton Commission did not constitute the imminent danger for Japan that would justify its claim of self-­defence. Nonetheless and on the same grounds as Beneš, he too felt compelled to voice condemnation of China in the assembly. In this regard, he stated the following: Japan had serious cause to complain of China’s attitude, which was characterised by the two-fold fact of the unilateral denunciation of treaties and the anti-foreign agitation which found expression in the systematic boycotting organised or abetted by the Government. Those facts attested by the Commission of Enquiry, are, I think, uncontested and incontestable. They constitute a kind of aggression and a flagrant violation of international law.341

Despite the  reservations  expressed  by the lesser powers, elements  in the British press indicated that there was a sharp cleavage between their stance and that of France and Great Britain. This was true both of press commentary critical of Simon’s intervention at the assembly on December 7 and of press commentary that applauded it. One example of the latter type of commentary can be found in the Daily Telegraph which offered the following observation on December 8: Not before it was time, Sir John Simon and M. Paul-Boncour intervened yesterday in the debate on Manchuria in the League of Nations Assembly. Before they did so, the Assembly had listened to a series of speeches in which the opinions of the Irish Free State—whose delegate opened the ball— Norway, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Switzerland and Greece had been expressed with considerable warmth. All of them were in the nature of diatribes against Japan. All of them were, as Sir John Simon hinted with all due delicacy in one sentence of his address, authorised by Governments whose ‘risks and responsibilities’ in a matter of this kind are somewhat less serious than those of the Great Powers. The burden of most of these disinterested counsels offered to the League was that the Lytton Report should be ‘accepted’. By this was meant, as the context of the speeches made clear, that the Assembly should associate itself with certain selected passages of that Report which are unfavourable to Japan’s justification of certain of her activities in Manchuria since the latest phase of an old dispute began. The tone of all these strictures suggests, in

 Ibid., 45.

341

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fact, that they were founded upon carefully chosen extracts from the Report circulated for purposes of propaganda.342

  Despite the imputation  above concerning the attitude of the  lesser powers, the preferred path of these powers was also that of conciliation. Beneš, for example, urged that a resolution of the dispute satisfactory to both parties be attempted before any action be considered under Article 15.343 Hence, on December 9, the assembly accepted Simon’s proposal that the Committee of Nineteen should be charged with conciliating the dispute in line with the recommendations of the Lytton Report.344 Over the next couple of months, this committee sought to negotiate an outcome,  although  to no avail. This was hardly surprising: Matsuoka had declared at the assembly that ‘nothing would force the Japanese out of Manchuria’ and ‘hinted they would be willing to quit the League.’345 As Takaki reported at the time, the attitude among Japanese nationalists was that Japan would ‘not have much to lose if she broke away from the League.’ Indeed, the ‘unfortunate fact,’ according to Takaki, was that in the view of these nationalists, the League was ‘primarily the creation of the dominant races of the earth, of those who are the greatest beneficiaries from the maintenance of the status quo.’346 On January 1, 1933, the Japanese, having ‘abandoned all pretence,’ attacked Shanhaiguan, the gateway of the Great Wall, entering the city on January 3. Nine days later, the Japanese War Office declared that Jehol, a province wedged between Manchuria and the Great Wall, formed a vital part of the territory of Manchukuo. In mid-February, Japan demanded the withdrawal of all Chinese forces from the province and, on  February 25,  launched a military campaign which  saw Marshal Zhang, three days after he had been ‘ordered’ on March 5 by Chiang Kai-shek ‘to resist at all costs,’ resign his post. In just over two weeks, as Gathorne-Hardy pointed out, Japan and its ‘protégé were in control of all the passes in the Great Wall.’ 347 In reaction to these developments, Blakeslee declared the following: 342  ‘Commonsense and Manchuria,’ Daily Telegraph, December 8, 1932. See also Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 290, 294. 343  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 292. 344  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 82, and Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 320. 345  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 82. See also Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 320. 346  Takaki, ‘World Peace Machinery and the Asia Monroe Doctrine,’ 947. 347  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 320–2.

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A Monroe Doctrine for Eastern Asia, such as a liberal Japanese Government would probably formulate, one in harmony with the spirit of Japan as revealed in the period following the Washington Conference, might well receive the recognition of other Powers. The happiest solution of the Far Eastern problem, as the Lytton Report has pointed out, would be cordial cooperation between China and Japan, based on mutual agreement and good will. But a Japanese Monroe Doctrine exemplified by the military advance through Manchuria and Jehol, in the face of a hostile China, ­without regard to the position of other Powers, and in violation of international treaties, is difficult to justify. In fact, the present issue between Japan and the other states of the world boils down in large measure to Japan’s demand that she be granted a free hand in Manchuria and to the refusal of the League of Nations and the United States to accept the full consequences of what the Japanese call their Monroe Doctrine.348

The LON’s Special Session of the Assembly, which had concluded its resolution of March 11, 1932, with the affirmation that it would remain in session, was convened for what would be its last session by President Hymans on February 21, 1933, in order to consider a draft report submitted to it under Article 15 by an assembly subcommittee which had been charged with examining the report of the Lytton Commission.349 The subcommittee’s report, which was completed on February 11, approved by the Committee of Nineteen on February 12 and published on February 17, largely adopted the findings and recommendations of that Lytton Commission. Most importantly in terms of subsequent events, the subcommittee’s draft report insisted that Manchuria was the sovereign property of China  and  that the state of Manchukuo, as the Lytton Report expressed it, was not the result of a ‘spontaneous desire for independence among the people or a genuine case of self-determination, but was in fact a Japanese creation,’ and thus should be denied recognition.350 On February 24, after two days of adjournment during which delegates considered the subcommittee report, the assembly met once more, adopting the report by forty-two votes to one with one abstention: Siam.351 Hymans declared that the vote denouncing Japan’s actions was unanimous in light of Article 15(10): Japan’s vote was in the negative but it was  Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ 681.  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 320–1. 350  Ibid., 320, and Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 740. 351  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 321. 348 349

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excluded from the count as Japan was an interested party. According to a news report transmitted from Geneva that day, the ‘stunned international conclave…sat in silence’ as the Japanese delegation led by Matsuoka, who, according to the same report, shouted from the rostrum during the vote that Manchuria was a ‘matter of life and death’ for Japan and that it belonged to Japan ‘by right,’ rose and left the hall to the mixed sounds of ‘hisses and applause’ from the packed public galleries. Matsuoka, described as a ‘dapper’ figure attired in black, declared in leaving that ‘we are not coming back.’352 The Japanese government announced on March 27 that Japan would formally withdraw from the LON, although this did not prevent the Japanese branch of the IPR from later seeking admission to the CISSIR or continuing Japanese membership of the ICIC as far as 1938.353 Indeed, in regard to the latter body, it should be noted that the expectation of its membership was that no less a figure than Nitobe would join them in July 1934 at the ICIC’s annual meeting in Geneva as the new Japanese member. However, this was not to be. Nitobe died in Canada in October 1933 at the age of seventy-one, Nitobe after having attended the biennial conference of the IPR in Banff. ’s place on the ICIC was taken by Anesaki who in his role as professor of the science and history of religion at the Imperial University of Tokyo  had shown an interest in the comparative study of Eastern and Western civilisations. It was also in that role, that Anesaki had helped found the JCIPR.354 As a participant in the annual meeting of the ICIC in 1934, Anesaki would have heard Murray pay tribute to Nitobe, in stating the following:  [B]orn to Samurai, in old Japan, with the proud privilege of wearing two swords, trained almost exclusively in the use of sword, lance and ju-jitsu, he had become a philosopher, an internationalist, Quaker, abjuring all force as evil. Nitobé had seemed to him [Murray], more perhaps than any other single man, to incarnate the spirit of the League of Nations.355 352  Stewart Brown, ‘Japan Leaves the League of Nations: Japan Stuns World, Withdraws from the League,’ 24 February 1933, United Press International, http://www.johndclare. net/league_of_nations6_news.htm. 353  Toynbee to Bonnet, 27 June 1934, AG 1-IICI-K-I-1.n, UA. 354  For Anesaki Masaharu, see Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 73, 103. 355   ‘Sixteenth Session of the International Committee of Intellectual Co-operation (Geneva, July 16–21, 1934),’ Intellectual Cooperation: Monthly Bulletin, 11, no. 8–9 (1934): 263–91, 264.

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There is no doubting Murray’s sincerity in uttering these words. Some decades later, in an account of his experiences as a member of the ICIC, Murray again saluted the memory of the first secretary of the ICIC.  Accompanying his salutation in this instance,  was  the  following reflection: ‘our beloved Nitobe… died later of a broken heart.’ These words were  issued perhaps in  acknowledgement of what Murray presumed or knew to be the psychological cost to this former servant of the LON  of witnessing the  Manchurian  crisis and its bitter denouement.356 On February 25, 1933, the Times published a letter penned by Murray in which, without naming Japan, he called on the British government to do all it could to secure a collective arms embargo on covenant-breaking states. For Murray, the issues at stake were as follows: The intense feeling which has been roused in all parts of the country upon the subject of the export of arms to a Covenant-breaking State makes clear thinking all the more necessary….First, it is incompatible with the undertakings of the Covenant and the spirit of the Kellogg Pact for signatories of those instruments to furnish a recalcitrant State with the means of making war contrary to its engagements. Secondly, it is obvious that a refusal by one country alone to the treaty-breaker would be quite ineffective; what is needed is a collective embargo by all the nations concerned….Is it sufficient for the British Government to undertake to ‘exchange views’ with the other Powers, while in the meantime allowing the export of arms from this country to continue and—according to published statements—to be furiously speeded up? Cannot our Government undertake to do its very best to secure a general embargo on the export of arms to Covenant-breaking States, and in the meantime—until the efforts have definitely failed—to issue no licenses itself? Is that too much to ask? I leave aside for the present the further question, whether, even if a general embargo proves to be impossible and some nations insist on breaking faith for the sake of blood-money, it is well for Great Britain to do the same.357

Murray’s proposal concerning the issuing of licences for the export of arms to covenant-breaking states was interpreted in a Times editorial which adjoined his letter as meaning that no export licences should be issued for the export of arms to Japan. Although urging the desirability of continuing Japanese involvement in the Disarmament Conference  which had 356 357

 Smith, ‘The Committee for Intellectual Co-operation in Gilbert Murray’s Papers,’ 201.  Gilbert Murray, letter to the editor, Times, February 25, 1933.

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commenced on February 2, the newspaper argued in favour of Murray’s position in declaring the following: The practical result of a mere embargo might not be great. Japan, as our Tokyo correspondent indicated yesterday, might be in more need of oil, cotton and nitrates than of manufactured weapons. Nevertheless it would be abhorrent to the public conscience that arms should be freely exported to a Covenant-breaking State. Under the Arms Export Prohibition Order of 1931 arms can be exported from this country only by Government license. Such licenses should at least be withheld, during the period of the present dispute, from all consignments of arms or munitions destined for Japan.358

Two days later, in the House of Commons, Simon, responding to the embargo campaign in which Murray was obviously a participant and which had the support of the Labour Opposition, declared that the general sense of the country at this time would be opposed to a decision which, by freely admitting the dispatch of arms—and it involves a positive authority from a Government Department—would undoubtedly help to foment the struggle and increase the slaughter…. [W]e have decided that as from to-day, and pending the opportunity international consultation and decision such as I hope for, the Government will not authorise the issue of licences for export to either China or Japan of any article mentioned in the Arms Export Prohibition Order, 1931.359

That the arms embargo was applied to both China and Japan was because, Simon stated, it was impracticable for a single country like ourselves acting alone to differentiate between one combatant and another….It would be the height of absurdity for a cargo designed to go to the port of ‘X’ at a time when we had decreed that in no circumstances it shall go to the port of ‘Y,’ to find itself in the China Seas and in danger of being interfered with, because the authority of ‘Y’ have plenty of powers in those seas and ‘X’ have no power. I think that I am myself enough of a pacifist to take this view, that, however we handle this matter, I do not intend my own country to get into trouble about it.360

 ‘Japan and the League,’ Times, February 25, 1933.  Sir John Simon, 1933, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 434. 360  Ibid. 358 359

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The embargo, which had always been a provisional measure, lasted a little over two weeks, it being brought to an end by the government on March 13, against a background in which Japanese forces were succeeding in realising Japan’s strategic objectives in the province of Jehol.361 On the same day that the embargo was terminated. Baldwin told the House of Commons that it had become clear based on talks with ­‘representatives of various other countries,’ that there was ‘no prospect of any international agreement’ on an arms embargo ‘in the near future.’ Baldwin added that  ‘[in] these circumstances, no useful purpose  would be served by maintaining an embargo observed by this country alone.’362 Bassett notes that even before the embargo had been lifted, interest in events in the Far East had begun to decline. He points out that this was due to the course of events in the Far East, that is, the apparently successful attainment by Japan of its military objectives, but also, and even more so, due to the worsening political situation in Europe. The Reichstag fire which occurred on the night of February 27, the menacing emergency decrees that followed in its wake and then the German elections of March 5 which confirmed the Nazi hold over the country, Bassett notes, brought the German scene back dramatically to the forefront….The German problem thrust the Far Eastern problem right into the background. Fear of large-sale warfare in the East was replaced by the danger of war in Europe. And the British ‘peace movement’ concentrated its attention once again upon the Disarmament Conference.363

The Lessons of Manchuria? Toynbee gave expression to the view of many in declaring that the Manchurian crisis was ‘“an acid test”—to borrow Wilson’s famous phrase—of the whole system of collective security.’364 As Gooch observed in a lecture at the GIIR in August 1937, the founders of the LON were aware that the ‘real test’ of the collective security system would ‘come if and when a Great Power aggressed.’365 Accepting this, one would have to  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 457.  275, Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series.), 1592. 363  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 457–8. 364  Arnold J. Toynbee, assisted by V. M. Boulter ed., Survey of International Affairs, 1931 (London: RIIA 1932), 432. 365  Gooch, ‘The Breakdown of the System of Collective Security,’ 67. 361 362

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say that the Manchurian crisis flared amidst an extremely unfortunate set of circumstances from the perspective of this still maturing organisation.366 As Gooch pointed out  in the same lecture, Japan had ‘chosen her time well’: war-weariness and the fact that the world was languishing under an economic depression meant that ‘no state had the stomach for a fight.’ While the LON had managed to rein in lesser nations, dealing with a ‘powerful offender at the other end of the world, armed to the teeth, and flushed by the memory of recent victories on land and sea’ was another matter altogether.367 At the time when the Manchurian crisis first erupted, Britain was presided over by a government intent on contracting rather than expanding the country’s international commitments; the German government was being threatened by sinister forces within Germany which held the LON in contempt; and the French government was consumed by its increasingly fraught relationship with Germany.368 Indeed, it was with a view to repairing this relationship that Briand had undertaken a visit to Germany on September 28, 1931, where he was greeted by Curtius his German counterpart. Lytton later observed that the timing of this attempt at Franco-German rapprochement was unfortunate in light of the trial the LON now faced: the principal delegates of France and Germany, that is, their foreign ministers, had departed Geneva at exactly the time when the Manchurian crisis had become acute and required effective intervention.369 Effective intervention was also prevented by the fact that American cooperation with the LON during the first phase of the Manchurian crisis was,  in  Morley’s terms,  ‘fitful and uncertain.’370 Noting that the British considered the attitude of the United States as ‘the most important factor in any world question which may lead to war’ and ‘overwhelmingly so’ in relation to a conflict between Japan and China, Madariaga similarly  Morley, The Society of Nations, 434.  Gooch, ‘The Breakdown of the System of Collective Security,’ 67. G.  P. Gooch was among those in Britain who later thought that the note signalled that Stimson was ‘willing to go a little further’ than his British counterpart Sir John Simon, although Gooch also understood that the ‘the Washington Government never suggested the application of economic sanctions’ (ibid.). See also G. H. Scholefield, ‘Peace in the Far East and the Collective System,’ in Problem of Peace: Tenth Series: Anarchy or World Order (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), 89. 368  Morley, The Society of Nations, 434. 369  Lytton, ‘The Twelfth Assembly of the League of Nations,’ 746. 370  Felix Morley, 1932, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 72. Bassett quotes Toynbee as stating that the American cooperation was ‘fitful and precarious’ (ibid.). 366 367

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pointed to the shifting stance of the United States. He observed that Stimson ‘now said that he would go as far as the League, now that he did not contemplate sanctions, now that he hoped for the best, and now that he would wait and see.’ Madariaga added that all this left Simon, who had become foreign secretary almost two months into the crisis, ‘wondering’.371 Indeed, Stimson himself acknowledged that there was, in Morley’s terms  once more, a ‘certain elusiveness’ concerning the American position.372 In On Active Service in Peace and War (1947), Stimson noted in brief ‘the complex and fluctuating course of American co-operation with the League during the autumn of 1931,’ adding by way of explanation that neither the United States nor the members of the LON were experienced in collaboration on ‘so touchy a subject a threat to world peace.’373 According to Madariaga, whom Simon described, ‘half-ironically, half-­ seriously as “the conscience of the League,”’ during the early phases of the Manchurian crisis, the powers at the LON were watching each other.374 Each feared being ‘left in the open fighting the League’s battle in a diplomatic no-man’s land’ while all the others remained under the shelter of ‘diplomatic caution.’ It was this, Madariaga insisted, that made the absence of the United States so ‘deplorable’: no power was willing to risk incurring the ‘displeasure’ of Japan while the United States ‘remained out of trouble,’ and Japan, aware that the governments were watching each other, gained a growing sense that the great powers at the LON would not hold ‘firmly together on a policy of outspoken and definite condemnation.’ 375 There is another reason that Madariaga offered in order to explain the hesitation on the part of the great powers at the LON when it came to severely censuring Japan during the early phases of the crisis. It is a reason which goes to his understanding as to why Japan insisted that the Lytton Commission should be composed solely of the representatives of France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and the United States: the great powers at 371  Madariaga observed that ‘when Sir John Simon wonders, the world may expect great words, but not prompt deeds.’ Madariaga, The World’s Design, 157. See also ‘Appendix 3: John Condliffe’s Reminiscences,’ in Hooper ed., Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations,  452. Condliffe felt that if the Americans had remained firm in 1931 when the Japanese opened the offensive at Mukden, the Kuomintang might have become an effective government. 372  Morley, The Society of Nations, 451. 373  Stimson with Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 230. 374  Wadlow, ‘Salvador Madariaga: Conscience of the League of Nations,’ 1. 375  Madariaga, The World’s Design, 174.

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the LON  were not ‘quite certain of their own ground.’ Madariaga observed that it was difficult for these powers to condemn Japan when the ‘tendency to carve, roast and serve slices of China had been the honoured practice of all of them for quite a long-time.’ Indeed, as Madariaga noted, the acquisition of territory and concessions in China had become such a mark of great power status that when Italy emerged as a major power, it immediately set about acquiring interests in China.376 Madariaga well understood that history is replete with ‘forcible acquisitions’ and indeed ‘almost made of them.’377 Nonetheless, he contended that Japan’s occupation of Manchuria was in a different category to the pre-League instances of the forcible acquisition of territory because it had violated its ‘word, solemnly given in the Covenant,’ as well as in the Pact of Paris and Nine-Power Treaty.378 A number of Japanese scholars in the legal and political field publicly expressed the same view, although in arguing this they became increasingly lonely voices.379 Indeed, Lytton reported that by the time he visited Japan in 1932, all dissenting opinion had been ‘suppressed by a terrorist movement.’380 That the outcome of the collective measures adopted by the LON on February 24 was the break with it for the first time of a major power meant that the assembly meeting of that day was seen as being of historic importance. Yet as devastating as the day’s events were for most of those gathered in Geneva and for League partisans observing from other parts, they could not have known, even if some feared, that the Manchurian crisis not only sounded the ‘death-knell of collective security in the Far East’ but was a step on the way to the breakdown of the LON’s collective security system altogether.381 Certainly, this was how the crisis came to be viewed in  Ibid., 156.  Madariaga considered that a ‘sincere internationalist’ would have to concede that the renunciation of force as an instrument of policy entailed the renunciation of those territories which had been ‘acquired by active force’ and which were ‘kept by potential force,’ noting that this point was ‘bound to be particularly painful to Britons’ as Great Britain possessed numerous domains acquired and kept in this manner (ibid., 195, 236). 378  Ibid., 236. See also Henry Wickham Steed, summary of discussion, in Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 750. Gooch stated that in ‘building an empire by forces Japan is merely following the footsteps of other Powers’; however, he added that in doing so it breached three recent treaties. Gooch, ‘The Breakdown of the System of Collective Security,’ 66. 379  Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 513. 380  Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 754. 381  Scholefield, ‘Peace in the Far East and the Collective System,’ 89. 376 377

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later years against the background of the conquest of Ethiopia and German revisionism. For example, Gooch observed in his aforementioned lecture that the ‘first staggering blow’ to the system ‘came from the Far East’ in the form of the ‘rape of Manchuria,’ a criminal act that, having gone unpunished, ‘invited imitation…by other dissatisfied States.’382 It is the same background that partly explains why criticism of the way in which the Manchurian crisis was handled by the LON and, more particularly, by Great Britain, became more vociferous in as time went on than it had been at first. Treating it as an appropriate barometer of public opinion, Bassett notes that during the initial phase of the crisis, the LNU was ‘silent and apparently inactive’  and  that ‘its organ, Headway, said little, and said it very discreetly.’383 In fact, the LNU at the very outset appeared  Gooch, ‘The Breakdown of the System of Collective Security,’ 66–7.  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 26. In November 1931, Headway showed itself to be somewhat  uncertain as to the rights and wrongs of the matter. It noted that the ‘real difficulty’ that Geneva faced was that of getting ‘accurate information as to what actually was happening on the ground.’ It observed that although the dispute as of October 20, ‘remained unsettled … it was regarded as a good omen that Japan had on the previous day withdrawn her objection to the presence of an American observer at the Council table.’ It also observed that Yoshizawa had ‘expressed himself, with some reason, as being sceptical of the ability of the Nanking Government to provide any … protection in the region of Mudken.’ ‘The League’s Toughest Task: How the Manchurian Affair Was Handled,’ Headway, November 1931, 208–9. By December 1931, the attitude of the publication towards Japan’s behaviour appeared to have hardened. It noted that ‘it is often observed with some justice that the Nanking Government is no more than a shadow, incapable of enforcing its will outside the city walls.’ However, Headway added that it was not in fact by ‘any means as bad as that. The Nanking Government has, at any rate, remained in office longer than most European Governments and it is managing to pay most of its external debts.’ The publication expressed concern as to whether, should Japan be found to have ‘definitely violated’ Article 12 and the Pact of Paris, the LON could ‘remain inactive and still retain influence in the world.’ It also expressed concern as to ‘what effect the successful defiance of a mainly European Council by an Asiatic Power would have in Asia.’ ‘Manchuria,’ Headway, December 1931, 231. In the month of December, Headway republished a letter which had been sent to the Times by Anthony Buxton. Buxton, who had spent the previous twelve years working in the LON Secretariat, observed that there were ‘signs’ that the council at its last two sessions had been ‘funking its duties.’ He stated that it appeared to many, as it ‘must... have looked to the Japanese representative,’ that the council was like a ‘weak side with a very long tail, and only one man, Senor Madariaga, who really went for the bowling.’ Notably, Buxton challenged the notion that the Manchurian situation was an especially ‘complicated case,’ asking whether it was really more complicated than a similar case in Europe would likely be. Continuing in this vein, he posed the following questions: if a state member of the LON is allowed to send an armed force ‘in the territory of its neighbour and then decide its willingness to negotiate, where are we? Can Poland occupy Danzig or Germany the Corridor?’ Headway, December 1931, 236.  382 383

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unsure as to the meaning of the events in Manchuria. In a letter to the  Times on October 14, 1931, Murray refused to characterise the Japanese action as ‘a simple case of military aggression,’ preferring instead to characterise the situation in Manchuria as ‘one of those complicated tangles of mutual exasperation which are apt to arise on the borders of disturbed or anarchical societies.’ Although he described the Manchurian situation ‘as a threat to the peace of the world’ and as the sharpest test yet facing the LON, he nonetheless seemed hopeful that the situation, if handled with courage and skill, could be peacefully resolved. In this regard he stated the following: ‘The League, supported by the United States, is an authority whose will even the most powerful and remote national must hesitate to cross. The peace party in Japan is vigorous and intelligent; the Japanese League of Nations Society is the second strongest in the world.’384 At a meeting on December 10–11, the General Council of the LNU issued a resolution deploring the Japanese actions and expressing support for the council in its effort to resolve the dispute. However, the resolution did not call for sanctions.385 In January 1932, in an article appearing in Headway under the heading of ‘Manchuria; The Moral,’ Murray appeared to reject the idea of imposing sanctions on Japan, declaring that if it is uncertain how far the settlement initiated by the Council may ultimately prove satisfactory, it is certain that without the  League the whole situation would have been infinitely worse....[W]e ought all to realise that, though the League does contemplate, and must contemplate in the last resort, the forcible coercion of the refractory war-maker, such use of force, whether economic or military is always deeply regrettable. Morally, it is an admission that reason and co-operation have failed, and that force still rules the world. Materially, it is likely to produce widespread misery, and it almost inevitably transforms an unsatisfactory colleague into an avowed enemy. For an individual nation under the pre-League system that was a very serious thing; for the League, it would be disastrous.386

 Gilbert Murray, ‘Manchuria and the League: A Sharp Test,’ Times, October 14, 1931.  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 27. 386  Gilbert Murray, ‘Manchuria: The Moral,’ Headway, January 1932, 11. Murray observed that public opinion had weakened the hand of the LON when it came to dealing with the Manchurian crisis. He also noted that elements in the press had expressed support for Japan. ‘Had public support for the Covenant been clear, strong and unmistakable, as it ought to have been, there would have been no difficulty convincing the Japanese Government’ (ibid). See also Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 57. 384 385

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On February 11, the executive committee of the LNU issued a resolution which urged, in the case where either party to the dispute in Shanghai continued to reject the proposals for its resolution put forward by the various governments, that the British government ‘take steps to convene a special meeting of the Assembly, and in concert with the Government of the United States and Members of the League, should apply (on the lines of Article XVI of the covenant) whatever pressure of a diplomatic and economic character might be necessary to re-establish peace.’387 A week after this resolution was passed, a letter signed by six men, among them Cecil, Murray and Salter,  this last having now  relinquished his position as  director of the Economic and Financial Section of the secretariat, appeared in the Times. The letter declared that it was ‘time that British opinion faced the fact that the Japanese Government has committed itself to a course which seems to be directed towards the military domination of China as a whole’ and called on the British government to ‘secure cooperation of the United States with the League as a whole in order to exert all the diplomatic and economic pressure which may be necessary to secure from Japan respect for the collective system and the sanctity of treaties.’388 Like the resolution of February 11, there was no suggestion in this letter, as Cecil observed in responding to a letter penned by Admiral Sir Sydney Fremantle warning of the grave implications  of  the proposals issued by Cecil, Murray, Salter and their fellow correspondents, ‘that the League—still less that this country—should take action independently of America.’389 As Bassett notes, in addition to ‘resolute opposition to any unilateral British action of a coercive nature’ on all sides in Great Britain, there was a ‘general refusal to take the risks of a Far Eastern war.’ To the extent that there were any suggestions that the LON might apply ‘coercive measures’ in the form of economic sanctions, these were ‘almost always made conditional upon the participation of the United States. At no time, throughout the dispute was there any clear demand for the application of economic sanctions by the League alone.’390 387  Executive Committee of the LNU, 1932, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 163. 388  Robert Cecil, Arthur Salter, Charles Addis, Arthur Haworth, A.  D. Lindsay, Gilbert Murray, letter to the editor, Times, February 18, 1932. 389  Robert Cecil, letter to the editor, Times, February 23, 1932. See also Rennell Rodd, letter to the editor, Times, February 23, 1932. 390  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, xx–i. Bassett points out that ‘[o]nly at the height of the fighting at Shanghai in the early part of 1932 did conditional advocacy of sanctions assume any notable proportions, and it rapidly petered out with the cessation of hostilities’ (ibid., xxi).

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If the LON and the United States were accused of doing too little to check Japan, they were also criticised by some for doing in certain respect too much. For example, Lippmann suggested the Western world had been in error in treating of the Japanese action in Manchuria as an act of war as in his view, it was in fact an intervention in response to violations of Japanese treaty rights. He contended that it would have been better from the point of view of peace and security both in the Asian region and in Europe, if the powers had concentrated their efforts on facilitating negotiations between China and Japan with a view to conciliating some sort of working arrangement. His reasoning was as follows: It is only fair to the Japanese to say that by ordinary international standards they have been extremely patient under great provocation….The Japanese civilian government has, in fact, been a conspicuously loyal supporter of the whole post-war effort to organise peace. But in the face of increasing Chinese provocation, it was not strong enough to control the army and the patriotic sentiment of the Japanese people….The Japanese military policy has been, it appears, to occupy, up to the Russian sphere of influence in Northern Manchuria all the railroads built by Japanese capital. By controlling the railroads Japan has control of commerce and of the centres of government; it has been employing this power to set up local Chinese governments which are dependent upon Japan. The procedure is a familiar one, and all the Powers have in the past followed it at one place and another, ourselves included….The Japanese army is, in a word, carrying on not ‘a war’ but ‘an intervention.’ The problem which confronts the League and us is whether in outlawing war we intend to outlaw not merely formally declared wars but any use of armed force to settle political questions….Tired, confused, and not well informed, conscious of the fact that the Western World sorely needed the assurance that peace would be preserved by common action, they plumped for an interpretation which brought Japan’s intervention within the scope of the Kellogg-Briand pact renouncing war. Once this was done, the Manchurian affair assumed world-wide significance. It was made the test of whether the new institutions of peace were strong enough to control the actions of a great Power, and the outcome of that test may very well decide how far the nations of Europe and the Western World will be willing in this coming winter to stabilise their relations and substitute faith in treaties for competitive armaments.391

 Walter Lippmann, Interpretations 1931–1932 (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 196–7.

391

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The ISPRS similarly suggested that the Manchurian conflict had been exacerbated by the legalistic attitude adopted towards it, observing that ‘qualified persons had eloquently pleaded’ with the LON’s deliberative bodies to ‘approach the Manchurian conflict by the same method’ as the Lytton Commission and ‘in the way developed over several years’ by the IPR. It should be recalled here that the ISPRS was impressed by the fact that the special studies issued by the staff associated with the commission employed categories that closely paralleled those under which the IPR had been studying the Manchurian question for some time. According to the ISPRS, it was regrettable that the council and the assembly, rather than breaking the Manchurian conflict down into ‘real categories,’ had ‘persisted in entering into the controversy by way of the concepts of sovereignty and “face,”’ thereby exaggerating the ‘emotional prejudices’ of the parties involved.392 In response to Lippmann’s  argument, one can only concur with Gathorne-Hardy and others that as well as breaching its solemn commitments under the Nine-Power Treaty and the Pact of Paris, on any commonsense interpretation it was clear that Japan had violated Articles 12 and 15 of the covenant in resorting to war. As Gathorne-Hardy also stated, ‘if Japan’s actions were not a “resort to war”, it only escaped the charge through an open conspiracy not to define it so.’393 In regard to the question of sovereignty, one need only underline the point that Article 10, which provided for mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity, was considered by many, among them Wilson, to be the ‘heart’ of the covenant and the key foundation on which the peace and security of the world rested.394 This view of Article 10 had never been a universal view and it is one that would be increasingly challenged in the wake of the Manchurian crisis by those who maintained that an effect of Article 10 was to preserve unjust or untenable situations and that, in the absence of mechanisms for peaceful change, this article itself posed a danger to the peace and security of the world. That said, it is inconceivable that the LON’s two primary organs could have in the end  minimised the gravity of a situation which had seen the flagrant violation of the sov ISIPR, Fifth Biennial Conference of the IPR, AG 1-IICI-K-VI-2, UA.  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 324. 394   Ibid., 16n.  Gathorne-Hardy quoted President Wilson as stating the following: ‘Anybody who proposes to cut out Article 10, proposes to cut out all the supports from under the peace and security of the world .... Do not let anybody persuade you that you can take that article out and have a peaceful world’ (ibid.). 392 393

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ereignty of a state member. In the form of its recognition that Manchuria had never existed in a condition  of independent sovereignty in relation to China and observation that the covenant, the Nine-Power Treaty and the Pact of Paris, had been designed to prevent the very steps by which a major part of Chinese territory had been forcibly seized by Japan, the Lytton Commission, irrespective of its criticisms of China and proposals for economic  cooperation between China and Japan in the development of Manchuria,  effectively  acknowledged that such a violation had taken place. That China, as Gooch argued, exercised little or ‘no effective control over her northern provinces could not alter the fact that in international law Manchuria was her property, as it had been for centuries.’395 Gooch’s point is reinforced by the explanation that Lytton offered as to why there was ‘no justification whatever’ for Japan to say ‘it is true we have violated two or three treaties, but we could not help ourselves, there is no settled Government in China.’396 In relation to the latter argument, Lytton observed that very chaotic condition was precisely the basis of the Nine Power Treaty of Washington, in which the parties signed a self-denying undertaking that they would not fish in those troubled waters and seek their own national advantage at the expense of China, when she was not in a position to defend herself…[and]…would consult with each other in any circumstances which might arise.397

In relation to the issue of face, it is true that the LON’s deliberative bodies in the context of the Sino-Japanese sought to shame Japan, and indeed, in the case of Shanghai this evidently had some impact. In the case of Manchuria, however, it is no doubt true that the shame sanction only served to exaggerate emotional prejudices. Gathorne-Hardy observed 395  Gooch, ‘The Breakdown of the System of Collective Security,’ 67. See also Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Lytton Commission,’ 2;  LON, Appeal by the Chinese Government: Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 127; and Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 15–6. The assembly report of February 24, 1933, on the Sino-Japanese dispute, formally recognised ‘the sovereignty of China over Manchuria’’ and went on ‘to state that the presence of Japanese troops outside the area of the South Manchuran Railway, where they are entitled to be, is “incompatible with the principles of law and conformity with which the dispute must ultimately be settled.’ W. Horsfall Carter, ‘Naming the Aggressor,’ The New Commonwealth 2, no. 10 (1934):142–4, 143. 396  Ibid., 755. 397  Lytton, ‘The Problem of Manchuria,’ 754.

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that the ‘intervention of the League and its expression of…disapproval was worse than useless, since it tended to consolidate public opinion in Japan,’ liberal opinion there included, ‘behind the militarist aggressor,’ a development that figures such as Nitobe and Tsurumi had flagged in advising against interference in the situation by third parties.398 As indicated, criticism along these lines had been raised in relation to the council’s resolution of October 24. Passed during Lord Reading’s short tenure as foreign secretary,  it insisted, as noted above,  on troop withdrawal as a precondition of negotiations. Bassett observes that given that the council’s ‘objective was an agreed settlement of the dispute, such a policy was bound to impede rather than assist its accomplishment.’ He adds that ‘[i]nevitably, the Council was obliged tacitly to abandon a policy so inappropriate to the end it had in view’ and that ‘with Sir John Simon as British Foreign Secretary, mistakes of that particular kind were not repeated.’399 It should also be recalled that at the assembly meeting of December 6 and 7, all the neutral states speaking on the question took care, to a greater or lesser degree, to temper their criticism of Japan and, in an echo of the Lytton Report, to voice criticism of China. As to the assembly’s definitive expression of disapproval of Japan’s actions on March 24, it was of little consequence in terms of Japanese opinion. The United States ambassador at Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, reported on February 23, 1933, that there will be no surrender to moral or other pressure from the West. The military clique and, as a result of military propaganda, the public, are fully prepared to fight rather than given in. At present the moral obloquy of the world is a negligible force in Japan.400

The real problem lay not with LON intervention and disapproval per se but with the fact that, as Gathorne-Hardy correctly observed, these proved ‘impotent.’401 Willoughby blamed this impotence on the British and 398  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 325. See also Wilson, ‘The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals,’ 533. 399  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 621. One of Lord Reading’s alternative titles was Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1st marquess of Reading. 400  Gooch, ‘The Breakdown of the System of Collective Security,’ 67. 401  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 325. The British government imposed an ‘isolated, undiscriminating arms embargo upon certain arms (not including those already contracted for)’ on both Japan and China for two weeks from February 27.

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French governments as did Rappard whose view of the behaviour of the British government Willoughby endorsed. Rappard stated that at ‘no time had one the impression that British policy was determined essentially by the will to uphold the Covenant and to protect China,’ adding that the question of the security of Britain’s possessions and dominions in the Far East and its political and economic interests in the region were at the forefront of Britain’s calculations. At no time, Rappard continued, had the British made an earnest attempt to seek American and Russian cooperation.402 Rappard went on to state that the French attitude did not differ fundamentally from that of the British: France too was mindful of its interests in the Far East. In addition to this, Rappard observed, France was ‘far from indifferent to Japanese diplomatic support in Europe,’ especially in the context of the Disarmament Conference. Like Madariaga, he considered it rather strange that France’s understanding of the LON as the supreme guarantor of security and supreme enforcer of treaties seemed confined to Europe.403 Bassett considers the above  charge against the British government unfair, stating that although the British government ‘considered it impracticable to urge the application of coercive measures against Japan it was clearly practicable to attempt to apply the mediatory and conciliatory procedure of the Covenant. That course was therefore followed and followed with consistency and perseverance.’404 Coercive measures were impractical because they involved a serious risk of war and to the extent that the LON proved impotent, it was because of the nature of this risk and the fact that the LON simply did not have available to it means of coercion that would justify taking such a risk. It was for these reasons that the British g ­ overnment chose the path of mediation and conciliation. As to France, although it reached the conclusion that the maintenance of the world’s peace machinery left no choice but that of siding with the LON and taking a stand against Japan, it  showed scant interest in anything beyond moral pressure.405 In his memoirs, Sir Herbert Samuel pointed out that although he Arnold-Forster, review of The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of Nations, by Westel W. Willoughby, 305. 402  William E. Rappard, ‘Nationalism and the League of Nations Today, American Political Science Review 27, no. 5 (1933): 721–37, 73—1. See also Arnold-Forster, review of The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of Nations, by Westel W. Willoughby, 306. 403  Rappard, ‘Nationalism and the League of Nations Today,’ 731. 404  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 622. 405  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 86.

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had left the British cabinet before the Manchurian crisis came to a head, he knew enough of the facts of the matter to reject the accusations levelled at the government. Having conceded that much of the criticism of Simon’s handling of questions at Geneva was well-founded, he explained the British government’s thinking as follows: The writ of the League of Nations did not run in the Far East. Of the Powers concerned, Russia was not then a member of the League and kept aloof. France showed little interest, and in any case could be of small practical assistance. China was in a state of political confusion and military weakness. The United States was also not a member of the League, and there could be no assurance that, if the test came, she would see the matter through to the end. Her Secretary of State, Mr. Stimson, favoured a firm policy; but what certainty was there—or even probability—that the Senate and House of Representatives, with whom the decision rested, would in the last resort sanction war? The return of the United States to isolationism in 1919 was fresh in all our minds. There remained only Great Britain. If war came—and our information was that Japan would be more likely to fight than to yield—we could hardly risk transferring our main fleets for an indefinite time to the Far East; the European situation was too precarious. Besides, our isolated bases... [at Hong Kong and Singapore]... might be lost at the outset, and effective naval action thereby made impossible. For any forward policy in the Pacific the concurrence of Australia and New Zealand would be essential, and it was more than doubtful if it would be given, for the very lives of those Dominions would be put to the hazard. As an old English writer has said: ‘Let not thy Will roar when thy Power can but whisper.’406

G. F. Hudson also pointed to the grave obstacles to the mounting of an effective naval campaign against Japan. In regard to economic forms of coercion, Hudson noted that the application of economic sanctions would have likely led to an even more predatory invasion of China and that a drawn-out struggle involving such sanctions  would have imposed c­onsiderable economic strain on the sanctionist nations. Hudson stated the following: The American fleet in 1932 would have been by itself quite incapable of coping with the Japanese in the Western Pacific. It had any case no base for capital ships west of Hawaii. The British navy had no battle-fleet base east of Malta at that time; the Singapore base, on which work had been more than once held up owing to hopes of general disarmament, was not yet ready.  Sir Herbert Samuel, Memoirs (London: Cresset, 1945), 271–2.

406

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These strategic considerations gave Japan…a definite supremacy in Asiatic waters from Kamchatka to Luzon, and would have enabled her in case of need, not only to assure her own communications with the mainland, but also to impose a blockade on the entire coastline of China. The British and American navies, even if combined, were not in a position to offer battle in the China Seas, and could only make war on Japan by long-distance blockade from Hawaii…. League sanctions would have put Japan in a state of siege, and it is very unlikely that she would have either surrendered at the outset or passively awaited defeat by slow economic attrition. She would probably have replied to sanctions by formally declaring war on China and imposing a strict blockade on Chinese ports; this would mean that the sanctionist Powers during a period of intense trade depression…would cut themselves off from virtually all their trade with both Japan and China—unless they could break the blockade of China by force, and that, for reasons already given, they had little hope of being able to do.407

In a letter to Murray on February 16, Toynbee, who professed himself to be scandalised by Simon’s Far Eastern policy, declared that the failure of Britain to go down the path of sanctions was an ‘abdication of any attempt at organized law and order.’408 Two days later, he communicated to Murray that he had ‘the impression that the British public are inclined to let not only the LON but the China trade and even the Commonwealth go hang—not seeing in their blindness, that this is “finis Britanniae,”’ soon after this proposing to Murray that the LNU should arrange an economic boycott of Japanese products.409 Toynbee was as well aware as the supporters of government policy of the strategic situation in the Far East, observing that the leaders of the armed services were naturally alive to the fact that the total effect of the Washington Treaties of 1921–1922 had been to leave Japan physically supreme in the Far East on land and sea and in the air. The strategic position was such that the Japanese Empire with its insular and continental dependencies, including the newly-­ occupied territory in Manchuria, was virtually immune from any serious  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 251–3.  Toynbee, 1932, quoted in McNeil, Arnold Toynbee: A Life, 152. 409  Ibid., 152–3. McNeil notes that Toynbee’s father-in-law, namely, Murray  invited Toynbee to join the executive committee of the LNU in order to pursue his boycott proposal. McNeil points out that  Toynbee ‘refused, saying he wanted all this time for the Nonsense Book,’ that is, the Study of History. McNeil, Arnold Toynbee: A Life, 153. 407 408

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attack on the part of any foreign Power, whereas a number of important foreign holdings in the Far East were potential hostages in the hands of Japan.410

In light of this, and given that ‘no one in Europe was ready to fight a war in the Far East for an abstract principle, as important as the ideal of collective security might be,’ Toynbee concluded that ‘practical politics required Great Britain to back away from armed confrontation with Japan.’411 In fact, Bassett points out that ‘none of the critics’ of the British government in Britain ‘ever demanded war’; he observes that ‘on the contrary, they were strongly averse to it and were placed in difficulties by the likelihood that economic sanctions might lead to war.’412 Hudson concluded that the urge towards sanctions in Great Britain and also in the United States was ‘an emotional enthusiasm’ brought about by an attachment to the new international order that the covenant and the Pact of Paris had supposedly established.413 It was an urge, he added, without any basis in ‘immediate national interest’ and which was ‘generally ill-informed as to the likely consequences of the actions it sought to promote.’414 The other criticism of the British government that was aired, was that Britain had been ‘deliberately remiss in her task of co-operation’ with the United States  as demonstrated by, according to the critics,  the Foreign Office’s ‘negative response’ to Stimson’s note of January 7, 1932. Responding to those American critics  who aired this view, Zimmern observed that British opinion remained convinced that the ‘government and people of the United States…were never, at any moment during the long-drawn controversy, prepared to join in any form of collective action involving a real, as contrasted with a paper, conflict with Japan.’415 A similar impression was conveyed to the Quai d’Orsay by Paul Claudel, the French ambassador to Washington.416 Indeed, even the ad hoc cooperation in which the administration in Washington had engaged with the LON raised the ire of an increasingly isolationist America. Benjamin Sumner Welles, the former diplomatic who served as under-secretary of  Toynbee, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 602.  McNeil, Arnold Toynbee: A Life, 153. 412  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 135. 413  Hudson, The Far East in World Politics, 254. 414  Ibid. 415  Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 421. 416  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 88. 410 411

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state in the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, observed in relation to this matter and the story that the British government was to blame for the failure to take effective action against Japan the following: As is well known, the British government, through Sir John Simon, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, tacitly made it clear that it was not disposed to make the action suggested. The British government permitted it to be understood that, inasmuch as she was a member of the Council of the League and the League was already attempting to deal with the situation, she would weaken the effectiveness and prestige the League if she were to join with this government by invoking either the Nine-Power Treaty or the Kellogg-Briand Pact. This attitude did much to create in this country hostility toward British policy and many otherwise objective persons placed the blame for the almost unlimited evils arising out of Japan’s successful aggression in Manchuria squarely upon the doorstep of the British government. It has always seemed to me that this effort to place the burden of blame exclusively upon the British government is not only unfair but unrealistic. I have no doubt whatever that powerful City influences in London were bitterly opposed to any action by their government which could create a breach between Japan and Great Britain, with a consequent loss of British trade and hobbling of British influence at a time when freedom of action was necessary. But, in judging the policy of the British government on this occasion, it must be remembered that neither the second article of the Kellogg-Briand Pact nor Article 7 of the Nine-Power Treaty invoked by the American Secretary of State justified anything more than a consultation between the powers primarily concerned. They did not offer the slightest assurance to the British government, or to any other government in the League, that the United States was prepared to take any action of a minatory character which would be of the least effect. It must also be recalled the whole course of American policy from 1920 until 1932 had made it more and more evident that the American people were determined to evade any responsibility for the use of force in maintaining peace in the rest of the world. The fact that the action taken by Secretary Stimson was bitterly criticized throughout the country and was assailed in many quarters as being ‘war-mongering’ pure and simple is a case in point. The Japanese Government itself was fully aware of the position.417

As a further sign of the American determination to evade any responsibility for the use of force, in early April 1932, just as Stimson was embark Sumner Welles, The Time for Decision (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944), 216–7.

417

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ing on a voyage to Geneva in order to discuss the question of disarmament and the obviously related matter of the Far Eastern situation, the House of Representatives ‘passed by an enormous majority, against the President’s recommendation, the bill providing for the speedy and complete independence of the Philippine Islands.’418 Claudel and others interpreted this move as evidence that American public opinion was little interested in Far Eastern affairs, as no doubt did Tokyo.419 Stimson himself stated in relation to the House of Representative’s action that ‘the effect which such an abandonment of protection of our Filipino wards, as well as of American responsibility in general in the Far East, would inevitably have upon our prestige with Far Eastern countries can be imagined.’420 It is worth noting here an observation made by Lippmann in regard to the Stimson doctrine: irrespective of the intrinsic importance of this ‘new and far-reaching doctrine of international law’ which Hoover and Stimson projected into international affairs, it was a device invented in order to postpone action.421 Developed against a background in which it was clear that Japan was intent on further advancing into Manchuria and in light of the fact that neither the LON nor the United States was willing to undertake positive measures to check the Japanese advance, the doctrine was, Lippmann stated, an attempt to ‘do something that would reserve all rights for the future without entailing any action to maintain them in the present.’ The adoption of this doctrine allowed the United States and LON, Lippmann added, to ‘wait, without too much loss of face,’ for the completion of the work of the Lytton Commission of Enquiry, before turning their attention once more to the question of Manchuria.422 This assessment would appear to find endorsement in observations made by Stimson himself. In the Far Eastern Crisis, Stimson recorded that two basic facts underlay the discussions at the State Department during the autumn of 1931 while  the League’s  proceedings were underway in Geneva and Paris. As Stimson explained, the group of interrelated treaties entered into at the Washington Conference of 1922, under which America and Britain reduced the size of their respective navies in relation to that of Japan and agreed to leave their possessions  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 234–5.  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 88. 420  Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 203. 421  Lippmann et al., United States in World Affairs, 35. 422  Ibid. 418 419

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in the Far East without further fortification, had been intended to make and had made it physically impossible for any single Western nation successfully to intervene by military force in such a matter as the Manchurian dispute even if it should desire to do so. Quite apart from such limitations, no fact was more clear to any observer than that at this period of the great depression none of the nations of Europe or America, even if able, had the slightest desire to go to war in such a controversy. These facts had evidently reduced the area of possible action before us to: 1. some form of collective economic sanctions against Japan, or in default of that 2. by the exercise of diplomatic pressure and the power of world opinion, to try to get as fair play as possible for the weaker power, China, in the eventual negotiated settlement, and 3. by a vigorous judgement against Japan backed by the public opinion of the world, to save as much respect as possible for the great peace treaties which had been publicly flouted by Japan’s action.423

According to Stimson, these were the  three  options discussed at the State Department during the autumn of 1931. As we have seen, the department opted at that time for conciliation in cautious cooperation with the LON, against a background in which Japan was maintaining its actions were defensive and in the hope that the Japanese government could re-establish its authority. However, the downfall of the Miseito cabinet on December 11 signalled, Stimson stated, that ‘our attempt to solve the Manchurian problem by discussion and conciliation had failed.’424 In light of this, Stimson considered that it was most important to find some way of formally expressing the moral disapproval of the world against the breach of the peace in Manchuria and, if possible, to put behind that expression a sanction which would bring pressure upon the party responsible to make amends. We had reason to believe that economic sanctions would not be invoked. The League from the beginning had been hesitant and reluctant to turn to the machinery for such sanctions which it had ready. We had no such machinery ready, and very evident difficulties lay in the path of its creation. If possible, some substitute upon which all nations could agree should be found which would at least carry the force and implication of a moral condemnation.425  Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 1936, 56–7.  Ibid., 82. 425  Ibid., 92–3. 423 424

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That substitute was the policy of non-recognition as expressed in the Stimson note of January 7 and the letter to Borah of February 23, 1932. Stimson later  explained  that ‘[n]on-recognition was a moral weapon, a moral sanction. It was designed originally less as a method of bringing the Japanese to reason than as a method of reasserting the American conviction that no good whatever could come from the breach of treaties….The United States might not be able to prevent aggression against China, but she must certainly make her opinion of it clear.’426 The Economist showed itself to be somewhat  sceptical as to the utility of non-recognition as  a moral weapon. It  observed upon its  issuing  that the Stimson note was from the Japanese perspective ‘assuredly a substitute for action and not a prelude to it. In the picturesque language of a Chinese observer…“the Note has the head of a dragon and the tail of a rat.”’427 William Castle, the under-secretary of state, offered a more sanguine view of the note in an article published in June 1932. Therein, he made clear his view that despite the great virtues of the LON in certain areas, the United States would never adhere to a covenant which allowed for the possibility of war to prevent war and which, if accepted, by the United States, would endow governments other than that of the United States with the right to send American citizens to battle. He then went on to state the following of the policy of non-recognition which he called the Hoover doctrine: It is a powerful sanction without the use of force. It ‘puts teeth in the Pact’ but involves no war to prevent war, no danger of war arising out of boycotts. It keeps this country clear of entanglement while at the same time it proves our willingness to cooperate with others in making the world a safe place to live.428

Yet however risk-free was the policy, it is important to underline the point that Stimson viewed non-recognition as a real and not a pretend sanction, a view which  Castle  clearly also upheld. As Bassett observes, Stimson’s was a policy of ‘mobilising world opinion in protest and condemnation’ based on an apparent belief that ‘in the long run the pressure  Stimson with Bundy, On Active Service, 234–5.  The Economist, January 16, 1932, quoted in Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 79. 428  William Castle, ‘Expressions of American Foreign Policy,’ World Affairs 95, no. 1, 47–9. 426 427

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of public opinion upon Japan would be effective.’429 There was nothing remarkable about this belief: in 1932, the belief that world opinion could act as a restraint on unruly states remained widespread and, indeed, seemed supported by the outcome of the events that occurred Shanghai earlier that year.430 Nor did Stimson, in retrospect, consider that the mobilisation of world opinion in 1932–1933 had been in vain. It had, he maintained, very likely prevented an even worse situation erupting in the Far East, and beyond this, it had led to a further hardening of the new norms governing international behaviour. Japan’s defiance of those norms had produced an unprecedented situation, and it was for this reason that Stimson was inclined to be generous in his assessment of the way in which the LON had addressed it. Indeed, he stated that the LON’s ‘achievement in the Manchurian controversy’ was a ‘signal and momentous event marking a great step forward from previous conditions’: for the first time in history a great power had been arraigned, trialled and condemned for an act of international aggression.  After having drawn attention to the American government’s note of January 7, 1932, and the assembly’s agreement in delivering its verdict on the controversy not to recognise ‘Manchukuo,’ Stimson stated that the cooperative action of the nations ‘very possibly prevented a declaration of war in the Far East, a blockade of China’s coast, and a direct annexation of Manchuria by Japan.’431 By contrast, Zimmern, a LON stalwart writing at a time when the LON was facing what was shaping up to be an existential crisis in the form of the Italian aggression against Ethiopia, found the Manchurian episode almost entirely dispiriting. He noted that no one, not even close observers of the LON, had realised at the time how ‘little security there was behind imposing League façade’ and how ‘sadly the spirit of co-operation, which is Geneva’s all-in-all, had diminished’ since the time of the Greco-Bulgarian case when it was assumed that the council was ‘a Council and not a Conference’: that ‘it was an organic body with a morale and a sense of responsibility of its own.’432 The degeneration of the council into a conference of powers meant that in the case of Manchuria, the process of dispute  Bassett, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 142.  Ibid., 133. 431  Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 242–3. 432  Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 422–3. The preface of this book is dated October 21, 1935. 429 430

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resolution had been reduced to the pace of the LON’s ‘worst intentioned’ member.433 In light of this, Zimmern concluded that the expression ‘“collective system” had ceased to have any meaning’ and what had been intended as a ‘firm union of Force and Law had become a shifty alliance of Force and casuistry,’ the latter description being an allusion to Japan’s exploitation of its veto power and the accession of the neutral parties on the council to it.434 It is also worth calling attention here to a lecture Zimmern gave at the Grotius Society in April 1934, in which he elaborated on certain other conclusions he had drawn from the way in which the Manchurian dispute had been handled. Zimmern drew attention to a conception advanced by Scelle two years earlier: the world conceived of as ‘le milieu intersocial.’435 For Scelle, the expression inter-social milieu denoted a world composed of ‘inter-related social systems from which a single social system is emerging with rules or laws of its own.’436 Zimmern viewed this conception as too ‘bold’ and ambitious to be convincing, noting that certain British writers had put forward a similar notion. Although acknowledging that the British writers in question had employed a ‘more cautious language’ than had Scelle, as reflected in their preference for the expression international society, Zimmern thought they too were open to criticism: for believing ‘that the words “international society”’ corresponded ‘to a living reality.’ In this context, Zimmern cited the 1928 observation of James Leslie Brierly: that ‘the international Society of to-day is not, except in the matter of law, at the primitive stage.’ Zimmern wondered whether Brierly would now endorse this statement in light of the way in which the Manchurian crisis had unfolded. As Zimmern pointed out, in the case of Manchuria no one seriously doubted that Japan had violated the law: the law governing the situation was quite clear-cut and the facts of the case had been thoroughly investigated. All that was needed, Zimmern contended, was for the law to be ‘set in motion.’437 However, this did not happen and the reason why it did not happen, Zimmern maintained, was because the ‘will of the community behind the law’ was lacking. Thus, the Japanese, whom Zimmern maintained had  Ibid., 424.  Ibid. 435  Zimmern, ‘International Law and Social Consciousness,’ 38. 436  Ibid., 38. 437  Ibid., 40–1. 433 434

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shown themselves to be ‘diligent students of le droit des gens réel,’ had been allowed to conduct their military expedition with impunity. What the Manchurian case suggested, Zimmern concluded, was that ‘there does not yet exist anything worthy of being described as a world-wide social consciousness’ and that the expression ‘international society’ had been used far too indiscriminately.438 A common lesson taken from the Manchurian crisis concerned what would become something of a mantra in the years to come: peaceful change. Writing from the perspective of 1933, Rappard stated that of all the difficulties the LON faced, the Sino-Japanese conflict was ‘perhaps the most serious in itself and the most far-reaching in its repercussions, as it was certainly the most spectacular.’ Rappard was emphatic in his denunciation of  Japan’s breach of its international obligations towards  China. He declared that  Japan was certainly  not  relieved of these obligations by virtue of the ‘undoubted and much-stressed fact that the Chinese of today cannot be described as an “organized people,”’ adding that no ‘responsible Japanese statesman before the outbreak of 1931’ would have claimed that this fact so relieved Japan.439 Nonetheless, and after having applauded the lucidity of the Lytton Report, Rappard went on to argue the following: [N]o reader of that remarkable document, which has done more than any other single factor to save the League’s honor in all this dismal affair, can deny that Japan has a case against China. According to all historical precedent, and also to a natural sense of historical justice, Japan, by reason of the nature and density of her population and by reason of her political and administrative superiority, cannot indefinitely be held in check by the whole world. Unless and until the League devises some legal means of authorizing, regulating, and controlling normal and inevitable expansion, it will be exposed to outbursts of violence such as that of Japan in Manchuria. As the safest, and in fact the only, means of preventing revolution nationally is to provide for constitutional methods of constitutional revision, so the prevention of international war imperatively demands the institution and effective application of methods of pacific treaty revision. The drafters of the Covenant, particularly President Wilson, were fully aware of this necessity.

 Ibid., 42–3.  Rappard, ‘Nationalism and the League of Nations Today, 725. See also Scholefield, ‘Peace in the Far East and the Collective System,’ 98–101. 438 439

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But it is questionable whether Article 19, which bears witness thereto, will prove a sufficiently elastic safety valve to forestall future explosions.440

In an address at Chatham House in November 1934, Wright observed that the United States had shown itself to be no more accommodating than the British Empire in its dealings with Japan. He pointed to the United States’ refusal to incorporate in the covenant the principle of racial equality, the introduction of the American Immigration Act in 1924 and the raising of tariff barriers to the import of certain ‘non-competitive’ Japanese goods in response to a petition presented to Congress by Japanese merchants in 1928 asking that the tariffs on these goods not be raised.441 ‘I think,’ Wright declared, ‘that if the United States had paid more attention to what I call the moral and economic necessities of Japan, possibly the Japanese loyalty to the Washington treaties might have been maintained.’442 Acknowledging that the methods employed by the United States in response to crisis of 1931 were ‘not the best,’ by which he meant that the United States had not seen sufficiently clearly the aforementioned necessities and that it had not gone nearly as far as it should have in cooperating with other powers,  Wright  suggested  that  the  means  for preserving the Open Door, which, he noted, was closely related to the policy of maintaining the territorial integrity of China and of promoting Chinese self-determination, should be modified. Wright, who considered that it would be ‘suicide for any of the Naval Powers individually, or even for several of them in combination,’ to challenge Japan’s naval position in the Far East ‘operating from bases that are far distant,’ suggested that the United States, while persisting as a matter of principle with its policy of non-recognition,  might extend an ‘olive branch’ to Japan.443 In this regard, he  recommended reciprocal trade agreements and immigration quotas, noting in relation to the latter the bitter resentment of Japan at being treated differently to European countries  under American  immigration

 Rappard, ‘Nationalism and the League of Nations Today,’ 732.  Wright, ‘An American View of Far Eastern Problems,’ 74. 442  Ibid., 75. 443  Ibid, 70, 74,77, 79–80. Wright explained that at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, when it appeared that China ‘would be divided between the different Powers,’ the United States, ‘desiring to retain a free opportunity to trade and realising that with the division of China she might easily be barred, insisted that the territorial integrity of China be respected’ (ibid., 70).  440 441

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law. At the same time, Wright acknowledged that both of these recommendations would ‘meet with opposition from influential quarters.’444 Toynbee was also inspired by events in the Far East to advocate the course of peaceful change.  He stated  in an article appearing in Pacific Affairs, after having observed that the English-speaking peoples preferred not to provoke a war with Japan as this would lead to social destruction, that it is not enough to be passively innocent of a passion to commit suicide. If we are to be saved, we have to take positive steps to restrain ourselves from laying violent hands on each other. And one feasible and effective step for the English-speaking peoples to take is to give the congested Japanese nation breathing-space by reopening our markets to Japan’s foreign trade…. If Japan is prevented from finding provision…[for her growing population]…by the civilized means of expanding her exports and so increasing her power to purchase foreign foodstuffs, there is only one desperate alternative left open to her. In a world which is hag-ridden by economic nationalism so that the only markets and sources of supply to which a nation has access are those that are covered by its own national flag, the sole resource left open to over-populated states is to seize additional territory from their neighbours by force.445

In the same article, Toynbee observed that the first reaction of the ‘Anglo-Saxon South Sea Islands,’ namely, Australia and New Zealand, to the Japanese push into Manchuria was to exclaim with ‘cynical satisfaction…, “Thank goodness…that the Japanese tiger has sprung northward instead of southward. When he has slaked his thirst on Chinese blood, he will have no craving for ours.”’446 Noting  this  observation, Guy H. Scholefield, national secretary of the New Zealand unit of the IPR and, like Toynbee, a member of the editorial board of Pacific Affairs, stated in a lecture at the GIIR in 1936 that although there was a certain tradition of fear concerning the possibility of Japan expanding into the South Pacific, the initial reaction of Australia and New Zealand to the Manchurian incident was not at all as Toynbee described it. Rather, Scholefield insisted, the general feeling of the people of Australia and New Zealand in response to the ‘startling intelligence from Mukden’ was at first one of ‘indigna Ibid, 79.  Arnold Toynbee, ‘The Next War—Europe or Asia?’, Pacific Affairs 7, no. 1 (1934): 3–14, 13. 446  Toynbee, ‘The Next War—Europe or Asia?’, 8. 444 445

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tion’ at the violation of Chinese sovereignty and ‘warm sympathy for China.’447 In regard to the effective denunciation by Japan of its treaty obligations, Scholefield added that the people of both countries were as acutely conscious as were the people of Britain and the United States of the ‘undignified impotence with which they had to look on.’448 As to the prospect of Japan invading Australia and New Zealand, Scholefield opined that it was hardly to be expected that a ‘sensible tiger’ would forsake the ‘substantial carcass’ of China which lay at its gate in order to consume the ‘distant cadavers’ of Australia and New Zealand. The Singapore base, he added, was another guarantee against Japanese menaces.449 Yet Scholefield also noted that the indignation at first felt in Australia and New Zealand at the Japanese action had later dissipated, observing that this was not solely due to appreciation of the fact that the tiger had moved northward rather than southward. The dissipation of the sense of indignation was a result in some degree, he claimed, of the ‘recognition by our people of the real necessities’ faced by Japan. He added that this recognition was due less to the proximity of Australia and New Zealand to the Far East relative to Europe and much of the United States, than to the ‘fine educative work’ undertaken in the Pacific region by the IPR.450 In this regard, Scholefield highlighted in particular the research projects carried out by the units of the IPR on the question of standards of living in the Pacific basin. This work, he stated, had inevitably brought to light many inequalities of resources and opportunities, and has illuminated the legitimate aspirations not only of Japan, but also other Asiatic peoples. These are quite well understood in Australia and New Zealand. How these requirements were to be met did not appear to be our immediate problem. We ourselves were on the defensive; we also denied Japan’s appeals and helped to force her back on her solutions.451

That the Japanese action came to be viewed through the lens of peaceful change was because, according to Scholefield, most had come to the view that the status quo was unjust. That the West had refused to consider the justice of the Japanese appeals, Scholefield contended, largely explained  Scholefield, ‘Peace in the Far East and the Collective System,’ 91, 97.  Ibid., 91. 449  Ibid., 92. 450  Ibid., 97. 451  Ibid. 447 448

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why a system of collective security, which, he added, most had hoped would be ‘based upon the combined moral conscience of nations,’ no longer existed in the Pacific. Japan, having ‘failed in her appeals for satisfaction of her economic needs,’ had sought to ‘conquer her rights by armaments,’ and in doing this, it had shown itself to be ‘indifferent to the approval or disapproval of other nations.’452 In addition to demonstrating the need for machinery of peaceful change, the Japanese action showed that in order to be effective, collective security could not be based in a combined moral conscience alone: it required a ‘real balance of power,’ without which there could be no collective security system in the Pacific or anywhere else.453 Scholefield predicted that until British and American ‘striking power’ returned to the Pacific, thereby enabling Great Britain and the United States to engage in more forceful diplomacy, ‘the continuance of peace, real or quasi...[would]... involve for a time the acceptance of such demands as Japan may continue to make on China.’ Scholefield was confident that British and American naval power would eventually return to the Pacific because the Open Door, which, he observed, one might well call ‘the integrity of China, because poor China is the corpus vile in the struggle,’  was under  real  threat due to increasing Japanese influence in China.454 Yet Scholefield also thought that Great Britain and the United States would not be in a position to provide a sufficient counterpoise to Japan until the United States had economically recovered and certain difficulties in Europe had been overcome.  By way of clarifying the latter  consideration,  it should be noted that  in  Scholefield’s view  the  question of the ‘proper provision for peaceful change’ in relation to Germany’s economic and other  grievances  had to  be settled  before there could  be  a ­satisfactory resolution of the situation in the Far East.  Such a resolution, as Scholefield envisaged it, would involve the defeat of the Japanese ambition for ‘complete economic hegemony in Eastern Asia’ and the awarding to Japan of ‘a due share of world trade.’455 Noting that ‘great  Ibid., 96, 101.  Ibid., 96, 102. 454  Ibid., 94, 96, 102–3. 455  Ibid., 100, 102–3. A satisfactory resolution of the conflict in the Far East would also involve, Scholefield stated, the acquisition by China of ‘sufficient strength to assert her sovereignty within her own borders’ and to ‘defend herself’ against external aggression: ‘There can be no peace or stability while China is a helpless temptation to her neighbours.’ 452 453

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interest’ was now attached to ‘the next conference of the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation,’ by which he meant the ISC’s forthcoming conference on peaceful change, Scholefield concluded in relation to the adjustments of the economic equilibrium that he considered necessary, that the onus lies heavily and undischarged upon the League to-day, and there can be little hope of regaining the adherence of seceded members and bringing in new members if it is not tackled promptly and courageously by those who still believe in collective security under League auspices.456

Against the background of a disarmament conference that was going from bad to worse and deteriorating conditions in Northern China, the French government attempted to revive the conciliation process. Dreifort notes that in mid-May 1933, Paul-Boncour, demonstrating a heightened awareness of the wider implications of the success of the Japanese aggression, suggested to a French delegate to the Disarmament Conference that he might inquire ‘“informally and discreetly” as to whether the other powers might be disposed to undertake a mediation effort.’457 In regard to the failure of the major powers to respond more forcefully to the situation in the Far East, Paul-Boncour told his colleagues in the French delegation the following: that ‘their silence could be interpreted as a tacit acquiescence, susceptible of encouraging the Japanese government in the work of disintegration that it pursues in China, by means of force and in violation of its contractual obligations. In fact as in law, the development of such situation is serious for its repercussions in the international order and by the precedent it creates contrary to the very objective of our efforts in the European order.’458 At the same time and in view of the United States’ recently expressed ‘determination to proceed cautiously,’ the French had no desire to be seen as responsible for any new initiative.459 In any case, the French démarche was soon rendered nugatory: on May 31, China and Japan signed the Tangku Truce, which provided for a demilitarised zone

 Ibid., 101, 103.  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 94. 458  Joseph Paul-Boncour, 1933, quoted in Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 94. 459  Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 94. 456 457

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of 5000 square miles on the Chinese side of the Great Wall.460 Thereafter, Gathorne-Hardy observed, having been ‘taught so stern a lesson,’ the Nanjing government adopted a ‘strikingly conciliatory attitude, repressing anti-Japanese boycotts with such energy as to lead to rumours of special understandings and even of a secret treaty for the maintenance of the “Asiatic Monroe Doctrine.”’461

460  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 322 and Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 94. 461  Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 322. In an address at Chatham House in 1935  in which he rebuked Western powers for interfering in China, thereby inhibiting its political organisation as a state, Dr. T. F. Tsiang explained the extent of the Japan pressure on China, stating that ‘[o]ur neighbour Japan thinks it to her interest not to allow the unification and modernization of China to proceed without exacting in time a good price for her acquiescence. As things stand, no party or leader can go ahead with the twofold task of unification and modernization if that party or leader is known to be antiJapanese.’ T. F. Tsiang, ‘The Present Situation in China: A Critical Analysis,’ International Affairs 14, no. 4 (1935): 496–513, 504.

Index1

A Akagi, Roy Hidemichi, 157, 158, 163, 164n22, 172n59, 173, 175n69, 179, 181, 181n96, 182n99, 184, 184n111, 185, 190, 196, 278n141, 280n148, 281, 327 Akami, Tomoko, 84n46, 86n55, 144n293, 295n216, 308, 318, 373n227, 374n230, 457, 527, 533 Albert, François, 49 Aldrovandi Marescotti, Luigi, 517, 518, 521, 525 Allen, James, 54 Aloisi, Pompeo, 541 Anderson, Robbins B., 287 André, Charles, 55 Anesaki, Masaharu, 298 Angell, Norman, 76, 476 Angus, Henry Forbes, 144n293, 306, 308, 309, 360n172, 464, 464n268, 497 Appell, Paul, 9

Araki, Sadao, 367 Arnold-Forster, William, 501, 542 Atherton, Frank C., 287–292, 294, 301 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 400 Attolico, Bernardo, 68, 68n292 Avenol, Joseph, 23n88, 70 B Bailey, Abraham B., 78, 86 Bailey, Stanley Hartnoll, 10n28, 75, 97, 98 Baker, Ray Stannard, 159–161, 163, 163n17, 164, 173, 190, 215, 220, 225, 228, 253 Baldwin, Stanley, 124, 442, 550 Balfour, Arthur James, 20, 40, 124, 125, 160, 161, 193n145, 194, 217, 218n253, 221–223, 230, 231, 237, 238, 261–263, 271, 326, 334, 335, 350, 351, 351n133

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part One, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2

579

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INDEX

Bannerjea, Devendra Nath, 21 Barnes, George Nicole, 13 Bassett, Reginald, 473, 482, 485, 489, 525n252, 542, 550, 560, 561, 564, 568 Batalha Reis, Jaime, 168, 422 Bau, Mingchien Joshua, 199, 507n172 Becker, Carl Heinrich, 126, 127, 136 Beneš, Edvard, 512, 535–537, 543, 545 Bergson, Henri, 21, 24–26, 28, 30, 31, 33–44, 46, 48–51, 59–61, 64, 128 Beveridge, William H., 138, 383, 395, 396 Blakeslee, George Hubbard, 195, 264, 294, 323, 324, 348, 367, 455, 522, 523, 545 Bliss, Tasker H., 78, 215, 216, 221, 226, 227, 243, 251, 252 Bonnet, Henri, 8, 17n60, 19, 20, 47, 48, 70, 70n300, 398, 403, 404, 413 Bonnevie, Kristine, 17 Borah, William Edgar, 147, 252, 256n52, 275, 334–338, 340, 508, 568 Borchard, Edwin M., 89 Boulter, Veronica, 133 Bourdillon, F. B., 82, 82n42, 83n43, 86n56, 134n242, 389, 392, 395, 396, 402, 407 Bourgeois, Léon, 5–7, 11, 14–16, 31, 40, 47, 48, 50, 407, 414, 415, 417–419, 419n83, 423, 427–430 Bowman, Isaiah, 83, 86n55, 381, 382 Bradley, Phillips, 437, 438 Brailsford, Henry Noel, 76 Brebner, John Bartlet, 270–271 Brecht, Bertolt, 375 Briand, Aristide, 18, 37, 123, 142

Brierly, James Leslie, 570 Brownlie, Ian, 145 Brüning, Heinrich, 444, 447 Bruns, Viktor, 410 Bryce, James, 77, 132 Bryon, William Jennings, 143 Buell, Raymond Leslie, 96, 295, 302, 303 Bulwer-Lytton, Victor Alexander, see Lytton, 2nd Earl of Burke, Thomas, 312n281 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 92, 92n72, 139, 140, 142, 143, 152 C Cai Yuanpei, 45 Carr, H. Wilson, 36 Carter, Edward C., 295, 402, 403, 406, 409n42 Casares, Julio, 99, 100 Cassin, 442 Castle, William, 568 Castro, Aloysio de, 21 Cecil, Robert, 48n201, 81, 163, 166, 168, 169, 172, 417, 419–422, 424, 425, 427, 431, 433, 434, 438, 439, 446, 470, 472, 474, 475, 556 Chamberlain, Austen, 124, 125 Chamberlain, Joseph P., 143 Charléty, Sébastien, 119 Charlton, Matthew, 52–54 Chinda, Sutemi, 167, 212, 218, 219, 226, 265, 280, 280n150 Ciano, Gian Galeazzo, 502, 503 Claudel, Henri Édouard, 517, 521, 524, 525 Claudel, Paul, 564, 566 Clauss, Max, 386 Colby, Bainbridge, 268 Comert, Pierre, 25–27, 26n102

 INDEX 

Condliffe, John Bell, 76, 142, 143, 145, 150, 157, 286, 290, 299, 300, 305, 308, 312, 313, 315, 317–320, 324, 355, 360–362, 368–372, 374, 375, 391–396, 399 Connolly, Joseph, 535, 537 Coolidge, Archibald Clary, 84 Coolidge, Calvin, 284, 284n166 Cowell, F. R., 20 Cunningham, Edwin S., 502 Curie-Sklodowska, Marie, 21, 24, 26, 27, 62 Curtis, Lionel, 78–82, 85, 85n53, 319 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 140 Curtius, Julius, 444, 551 Curzon, George, 272, 273 D Daladier, Édouard, 59 Danielopol, George, 168 Davies, David, 87 Davis, J. Merle, 286, 289, 290, 310, 312, 315 Davis, Malcolm W., 91, 483 Dawes, Charles G., 482–484 DeBenedetti, Charles, 138 Decassé, Théophile, 334n68 Destrée, Jules, 21, 61 Dmowski, Roman, 168 Donald, William Henry, 520, 521 Doumergue, Gaston, 57 Dreifort, John E., 525, 535, 576 Drummond, Eric, 7, 9, 15, 16, 22, 30, 59, 68, 433, 467, 520 Duan Qirui, 191n142 Dufour-Feronce, Albert, 67–69 Dunn, Frederick Sherwood, 90 Dutasta, Paul E., 233–236 Duus, Masayo Umezawa, 284n166

581

E Earle, Edward M., 96 Ebert, Friedrich, 136 Eden, Anthony, 488 Eggleston, Frederick W., 374n230 Einstein, Albert, 21, 23–28, 25n98, 26n102, 26n103, 27n112, 29n119, 30–33, 31n127, 32n133, 33n137, 45, 62–64, 62n266, 119n177 Eisenmann, Louis, 120, 154, 154n330, 386, 405, 406 Elleman, Bruce A., 224n279, 225n279 F Fénelon, François, 60, 60n251 Fenwick, Charles G., 89 Finley, John H., 294 Fiore, Pasquale, 199 Foch, Ferdinand, 432n135 Focillon, Henri, 45, 47n198 Forbes, William Cameron, 481 Ford, Alexander Hume, 286 François-Poncet, André, 69 Fremantle, Sydney, 556 Freud, Sigmund, 45 G Gandhi, Mahatma, 400 Garfield, Henry A., 411 Garner, James W., 89 Gathorne-Hardy, G. M., 441, 476, 558–560, 577 Gay, Peter, 375 Gentile, Giovanni, 140, 379n247, 406 George V (king), 118 Gilbert, Prentiss B., 479

582 

INDEX

Godshall, Wilson Leon, 163n17, 167n33, 178–180, 179n85, 181–182n99, 183, 183n102, 184n109, 188n126, 191n142, 194, 198–201, 199n175, 201n180, 209, 210, 216, 218n253, 227, 230 Gooch, G. P., 140, 535, 550, 551, 551n367, 553n378, 554, 559 Greaves, H. R. G., 8 Greene, Jerome Davis, 366, 453 Greenwood, Arthur, 103 Gregory, Charles Noble, 266n93, 268, 278n141 Grew, Joseph C., 560 Grey, Edward, 140, 182n99, 272n114, 333, 334, 483 Groom, Littleton, 54 Grotius, Hugo, 458 Grundmann, Siegfried, 24, 27, 32 Guggenheim, Paul, 95 Gunn, J. Alexander, 39 H Haas, Robert, 502, 520, 523 Haas, Wilhelm, 385–388, 407–410 Hale, George E., 21, 22n82, 99n92 Halecki, Oskar de, 26, 26n103, 108 Hall, Hessel Duncan, 307, 308, 366 Hanihara, Masanao, 282–284, 352, 353, 354n145 Hankey, Maurice, 218n253 Hanotaux, Gabriel, 11, 38 Hara, Takashi, 221n265, 347–349, 364, 365 Harding, Warren G., 256, 274–276 Hay, John, 508 Hayashi, Gonsuke, 340 Headlam-Morley, James, 107, 133 Herriot, Édouard, 30, 55–57, 56n233, 61, 124, 413, 442

Hill, David Jayne, 435, 436, 437n159 Hioki, Eki, 178, 181, 181n96, 183, 185 Hirsch-Flotron, Lucie, 108 Hoare, Samuel, 76 Hobson, J. A., 76 Hoetzsch, Otto, 410–413 Holborn, Hajo, 140 Holland, William L., 79, 295, 300, 356, 363, 374, 454 Honjō, Shigeru, 507, 521 Hoover, Herbert, 451, 514, 566, 568 Hornbeck, Stanley K., 181n96, 224n279 House, Edward M., 37, 160–162, 168, 172, 220, 242, 420 Hsu Fu Teh, 19, 57 Hu Shih, 450 Hudson, G. F., 191n142, 196, 219n259, 229, 243, 253, 256, 349, 548, 562 Hudson, Manley O., 89, 117, 151 Hugenberg, Alfred, 411 Hughes, Charles Evans, 259, 260n63, 261–263, 268, 271–273, 282, 284, 285 Hughes, William M., 172, 273, 282, 284n166 Hugo, Victor, 60 Hurst, Cecil, 417 Hymans, Paul, 8, 72, 168, 417, 431, 431n132, 510, 546 I Inoue, Junnosuke, 363 Inukai, Tsuyoshi, 531 Isaacs, Rufus, see Reading, 1st Earl of Ishii, Kikujirō, 191, 326–331, 328n49, 329n52, 330n53, 330n55,

 INDEX 

330n56, 333–342, 334n68, 340n90, 344 Iyenaga, Toyokichi, 264, 272n114, 274, 275, 276 J Jäckh, Ernst, 122, 134–155, 382, 385, 406, 410, 411 Johnson, Hiram, 224, 244, 246, 248–250 Jouvenel, Henry de, 50, 51 K Kat Angelino, Arnold Dirk Adriaan de, 523, 524 Katō, Takaaki, 175n69, 177, 180n93, 181, 181n96, 184, 184n111, 185, 334 Katō, Tomosaburō, 351 Kellogg, Frank B., 108n132, 145–147, 149, 150 Kerr, Philip, see Lothian, 11th Marquess of Keynes, John Maynard, 84, 138 Kilpatrick, James, 295n216 Kim, Helen K., 324 King, Wunsz, 164, 172, 198, 204, 206, 334 Kirk, Grayson, 75, 77 Kittredge, Tracy Barrett, 94, 95 Komatsu, Takashi, 311 Komura, Jutarō, 324 Koo, Vi Kyuin Wellington, 163, 164, 164n22, 167, 196–201, 203, 214, 215, 231–234, 234n322, 238, 239, 257, 353, 354, 354n145, 417, 519–522, 525 Korenblat, Steven D., 135, 137, 411 Kramář, Karel, 417 Krupensky, Vasily, 337 Krüss, Hugo Andres, 32, 33, 33n137

583

L La Fontaine, Henri, 7, 7n10, 11, 12 Lamont, Thomas W., 86, 342n97, 343n101 Lange, Christian, 535–537 Langevin, Paul, 24, 25 Lansing, Robert, 174, 186, 193, 193n145, 194n147, 196n160, 198, 201n179, 202, 216, 216n243, 218–221, 219n255, 219n259, 226–228, 232, 237, 237n333, 241n2, 252, 265, 327, 329–336, 329n52, 338–342, 344 Larnaude, Ferdinand, 168, 422 Lauterpacht, Hersch, 501n146 Laval, Pierre, 446, 447 Lavin, Deborah, 79, 80, 82, 83n43, 85n53, 86n56 Lee, Hoon K., 325 Lemoine, Bertrand, 448 Lenin, Vladimir, 400 Leopold II (king), 74 Lerroux, Alejandro, 470, 471 Lindsay, A. D., 128 Lippmann, Walter, 83, 488n88, 489, 504, 557, 566 Liu Yu-wan, 356 Lloyd George, David, 106, 108, 188, 192, 194, 195, 211–213, 215, 216, 234n319, 236, 265, 266, 273, 432 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 252n38, 269, 275, 282 Loomis, Charles F., 288, 289, 293, 294, 312, 314, 449, 450 Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon, 28, 31n127, 56n233, 59, 61, 63, 64, 69 Lorwin, Lewis L., 451, 452 Lothian, 11th Marquess of, 78, 489, 490, 493 Lu Zhengxiang, 185, 196, 231, 233, 235, 236, 238n335

584 

INDEX

Luchaire, Julien, 5, 8, 10, 10n25, 23n88, 26n103, 30, 50, 56n233, 59, 60, 67–70, 109n141, 114, 115, 115n169, 119, 127, 127n207 Lugones, Léopoldo, 23, 99n92 Lytton, 2nd Earl of, 470, 471, 475, 479, 489, 493, 500, 517, 518, 520–526, 528–535, 538, 540, 544–546, 551–553, 558–560, 566, 571 M MacDonald, Ramsay, 124, 442 Macleay, Ronald, 223, 232 MacMurray, John Van Antwerp, 90 Madariaga, Salvador de, 4, 9, 45–47, 68, 68n292, 69, 80, 117, 442, 474, 476–478, 518, 537, 551–553, 553n377, 561 Mair, Alexander, 38 Makino, Nobuaki, 160–163, 165, 166, 168, 172, 172n59, 189, 191–193, 192n144, 199, 211, 212, 221–223, 231, 264, 265, 417 Mantoux, Paul, 117, 152, 386, 388, 407, 408n39 Martel, Gordon, 104, 106 Matsukata, Saburō (Yoshisaburō), 356, 533n291 Matsumoto, Shigeharu, 533n291 Matsuoka, Yōsuke, 363–367, 454, 535, 537, 542, 545, 547 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 39 McClatchy, Virgil S., 285n169 McCoy, Frank Ross, 517–519, 522, 525 McDonald, James G., 96 McKercher, B. J. C., 432–434 McNeil, William, 128, 563n409 Meighen, Arthur, 272, 273

Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Albrecht, 138, 139, 410 Meston, James Scorgie, 380, 382 Millard, Thomas F., 169–171, 172–173n59, 182n99, 191, 191n142, 192, 193n145, 193n146, 194n147, 199n175, 217, 228–230, 238, 238n335, 244–253, 246n12, 251n30, 253n40, 333, 337, 338n81, 340, 342, 346n111 Miller, Charles R., 250, 422 Miller, David Hunter, 83, 160–162, 417, 419 Milliken, Robert, 99n92 Milner, Alfred, 78 Mitter, Rana, 364 Monnet, Jean, 15, 68, 70, 84 Monzie, Anatole de, 125–127 Moore, John Bassett, 202, 202n185, 203n188 Morgan, J. P., 86, 342n97 Morley, Felix, 162, 166, 169, 341n92, 415, 416, 419n83, 419n86, 442, 467, 468, 471, 473, 481–484, 507, 511, 512, 515, 516, 519, 552 Morris, Roland S., 294, 327n41, 329n49, 332n64 Motono, Ichirō, 337 Mott, John R., 287, 294, 296 Motta, Giuseppe, 54, 510, 511, 537 Moulton, Harold G., 468 Murai, Kuramatsu, 496 Murray, Gilbert, 17, 17n60, 17n62, 21, 26–31, 30n122, 31n127, 36, 39, 40, 40n171, 41n176, 45, 46, 51–53, 61, 62n266, 63, 64, 69, 80, 88, 99, 107, 126–128, 134, 154, 384, 446, 547–549, 555, 556, 563 Mussolini, Benito, 40n172, 68, 68n292, 445, 502

 INDEX 

N Neurath, Konstantin von, 542 Ngata, Āpirana Turupa, 368, 369 Nish, Ian, 470, 517, 520–523, 525 Nitobe, Inazō, 9, 22, 23, 23n88, 26, 26n103, 28, 32, 33, 68, 118, 119, 358–360, 371n218, 454, 454n234, 455, 457, 477, 506, 512, 526–528, 547, 548, 560 Noel-Baker, Philip, 87, 87n58, 108, 490 Northedge, F. C. S., 6n4, 16n58, 17n60, 17n61, 35n146, 38, 40n172, 42n179, 43n182 O Odagiri, Masunosuke, 477 Ohashi, Chuichi, 526 Ōkuma, Shigenobu, 334, 334n68 Oprescu, George, 32 Orlando, Vittorio, 158, 218, 218n253, 219, 417, 431 Otlet, Paul, 7, 7n10 Ozawa, Takao, 281 Ozorio de Almeida, Miguel, 45 P Painlevé, Paul, 59, 61, 62, 69 Parker, Robert John, 105, 105n120 Parmoor, 1st Baron of, 31 Paul-Boncour, Joseph, 124, 502, 539–541, 543, 544, 576 Percy, Eustace, 107, 380 Perry, Ralph Barton, 34 Pham Thi-Tu, 58 Pichon, Stephen, 232, 234, 247 Picht, Werner, 109, 395, 396, 396n301, 398, 399, 401, 405, 410n43 Politis, Nicolas, 523, 538, 539, 544 Pomerene, Atlee, 335

585

Pratt, John T., 488, 490, 492 Preuss, Hugo, 137 Pugh, Michael, 445n192, 446 Puyi, Henry, 505 Q Quiñones de León, José María, 13, 14 R Rappard, William E., 117, 139, 416, 420n87, 429–431, 467, 561, 571 Rathenau, Walther, 25, 136 Ray, Jean, 438 Rea, George Bronson, 187, 187n124 Reading, 1st Earl of, 560 Reed, David, 275 Reidl, Richard, 136n255, 137 Reinsch, Paul Samuel, 178, 181, 241, 242, 242n3 Renoliet, Jean-Jacques, 10n25, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 55, 56n233, 59n245, 60, 60n250, 62, 62n266, 65, 67n285 Reynold, Gonzague de, 21, 24, 61 Reys, Alfonso, 45 Ribot, Alexandre, 414, 415 Rietzler, Katharina, 24n94, 91n70, 94, 136n251, 138, 152 Roberts, Stephen Henry, 309, 310n273 Rocco, Alfredo, 61, 62, 62n266, 379n247 Rohan, Karl Anton, 386 Rolin-Jaequemyns, Gustave, 73 Roosevelt, Theodore, 279 Root, Elihu, 86n55, 139, 351 Rōyama, Masamichi, 533n291 Ruffini, Francisco, 21, 61 Russell, Frank M., 4, 429n123, 431n132

586 

INDEX

S Saionji, Kinmochi, 218 Saito, Soichi, 298 Sakatami, Yoshirō, 298, 451 Salter, Sir James Arthur, 433, 434, 556 Samuel, Herbert, 561 Satō, Naotake, 498, 501, 503, 510–512 Sawayanagi, Masatarō, 311, 321–324 Scelle, Georges, 415, 438, 440–443, 442n182, 445–447, 570 Schnee, Heinrich, 517, 521, 525 Scholefield, Guy H., 573–576 Schücking, Walther, 137 Schulze-Gaevernitz, Gerhart von, 64 Schulzinger, Robert D., 83, 86n55 Schuman, Frederick L., 151 Scialoja, Vittorio, 59 Scott, James Brown, 73n2, 84, 89, 93 Selden, Charles A., 192 Seton-Watson, R. W., 103 Shepardson, Whitney H., 85, 86n55 Shibusawa, Eiichi, 298, 451 Shidehara, Kijūrō, 259, 260n63, 353, 354, 472, 473, 481 Shiozawa, Kōichi, 496, 497 Shotwell, James T., 83–85, 86n55, 120, 133, 138, 140–145, 144n293, 150, 151, 295, 394, 398, 458, 474 Siegfried, André, 140 Silva Pessoa, Epitácio Lindolfo da, 417 Simon, John, 513, 514, 539–545, 549, 551n367, 552, 560, 562, 563, 565 Simons, Hans, 137 Simons, Walter, 136, 136n251, 137, 139n265 Smuts, Jan, 40, 168, 417 Sonnino, Sidney, 219 Spykman, Nicholas, 116

Steed, Henry Wickham, 553n378 Stevenson, Daniel, 134, 134n242 Stimson, Henry L., 150, 471–473, 474n31, 478, 479, 481, 482, 487–493, 487n86, 491n103, 499–501, 504, 508, 509, 513, 514, 519, 526, 527, 551n367, 552, 562, 564–569 Stowell, Ellery C., 89, 89n62 Stresemann, Gustav, 71, 72, 123, 123n191, 136, 136n255, 139, 444, 447 Sugimura, Yōtarō, 68 Sun Yat-sen, 370, 400, 412, 533 Sweetser, Arthur, 434, 435, 467 Sze, Alfred Sao-ke, 262, 354, 468–471 T Takaki, Yasaka, 298, 458, 527, 528, 534, 535, 545 Takayanagi, Kenzō, 311, 320, 323, 454–456, 458, 460–462, 506 Tanakadate, Aikitsu, 23 Tardieu, André, 432n135 Temperley, H. W. V., 133 Thomas, Albert, 139 Tibal, André, 93–94, 94n80 Titulescu, Nicolae, 23, 471, 512, 513 Torres y Quevedo, Leonardo, 21 Toynbee, Arnold J., 34n144, 41, 51, 63, 79, 80, 126–134, 134n242, 154, 253, 260, 285, 378, 380, 381, 384, 391, 395, 398–407, 413, 550, 563, 563n409, 564, 573 Treviranus, Gottfried, 443–445 Tsurumi, Yusuke, 361, 455, 456, 527, 560 Tumulty, Joseph Patrick, 225

 INDEX 

U Uchida, Yasuya, 72, 231n308, 521, 529, 529n272 Undén, Östen, 140, 535, 536 Urice, Jay A., 302, 313 V Valéry, Paul, 44–47, 44n185, 44n186, 45n188–190, 47n196–199, 60, 70, 70n302 Viviani, René, 326 Vranek, Jiri F., 75n11, 87 Vranek, Lilian F., 87 W Wakatsuki, Reijirō, 486 Walters, Frank P., 22, 22n83 Wang Ch’unghui, 174n65, 349, 350 Wang Zhengting, 231, 231n307, 235, 236 Ware, Edith E., 78n20, 86n55, 96n86, 97n87, 120, 120n179, 120n180 Weale, B. L. Putnam, 210 Webster, Charles K., 133, 384 Webster, Daniel, 148, 148n308 Weill, Kurt, 375 Weland, James, 449n207, 456, 476n38 Wells, H. G., 107, 107n127 Whyte, Frederick, 78n20, 85n53, 319 Wilbur, Ray Lyman, 294, 295, 306 Williams, Andrew, 218n253, 414 Williams, Edward T., 106n123, 218, 223n273, 224, 224n279, 226, 229 Williams, John Fischer, 441n175 Willoughby, Westel W., 342n97, 352, 499, 542, 560 Wilson, George Grafton, 294

587

Wilson, J. Dover, 103, 103n109, 104n110, 125 Wilson, Sandra, 449n207, 457, 477n40 Wilson, Woodrow, 48n201, 87, 108, 158, 173, 217n251, 242n3, 384, 419n82 Wolfers, Arnold, 117, 448, 448n206 Wood, Ge-Zay, 192n144, 202, 206, 207n207, 208–210, 208n211, 236n330, 252n38, 263 Woods, Cyrus E., 283, 284, 284n165 Woolsey, Theodore, 147 Wright, Quincy, 89, 146, 146n299, 147, 147n303, 148n307, 149, 150, 259n61, 274, 276, 366, 367, 472, 473, 572 Wriston, Henry M., 89 Wu Tiecheng, 496 Wu Wei-teh, 235 Wu Zhihui (Wu Shi-Fee), 23, 23n92 X Xu, 462 Xu Shuxi, 228–229, 462, 463 Y Yamanaka, Atsutarō, 533n291 Yan Huiqing (Weiching Williams Yen), 498, 499, 507, 535 Yen, Y. C. James, 306 Yokota, Kisaburo, 533n291 Yoshida, Isaburō, 519 Yoshizawa, Kenichi, 463, 468–471, 477, 484, 498, 524, 529, 532 Young, Carl Walter, 324, 341, 344, 346n109, 347, 352, 353, 364, 366, 367, 520 Yuan Shikai, 176n73, 178, 184n108 Yui, David Z. T., 305, 305n257

588 

INDEX

Z Zhang Xueliang, 519, 520, 545 Zhang Yongjin, 219n255, 220n265, 228, 229, 231n307, 233– 234n319, 234n322, 236n330, 237n333, 238n335 Zimmern, Alfred E., 48, 67–70, 74n5, 75, 75n10, 84n49,

87n58, 88, 88n61, 89n63, 93, 93n77, 97, 102–128, 127n207, 133, 134, 135n243, 142, 142n283, 153, 154, 154n331, 359, 376, 377, 382–384, 384n261, 386, 388, 389, 392, 406, 467, 474, 485, 500, 501, 564, 569–571