With Gandhi’s guidance, the goal of independence was extended beyond rejecting British rule and became Swaraj, or national independence through non-violent individual liberation from all forms of oppression: religious, racial, gender, economic and otherwise. Britain involved India in the Second World War without consultation, to which Gandhi and other Congress leaders responded with calls for immediate imperial withdrawal and were imprisoned. Gandhi fasted against the incarceration, and as his health declined pro-independence and Hindu-Muslim violence increased and did not cease upon his release in 1944. He then met with but could not dissuade the leader of the Muslim League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, whose calls for a separate state were supported by the British post-war government. In 1947, India gained independence and the new Muslim state of Pakistan was created, the greatest achievement and disappointment of Gandhi’s life. In the next year, he successfully fasted to end religious violence in Calcutta, and in tours of regions so torn it was reported that his arrival relieved tensions. During his last fast in New Delhi for the same reasons, while on an evening walk, he was shot dead by a Hindu extremist who resented this reconciliation. Gandhi’s influence on the subsequent history of peace cannot be underestimated. In 2007, the UN declared his birthday, October 2, the International Day of Non-Violence to raise awareness that “non-violence, tolerance, full respect for all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, democracy, development, mutual understanding and respect of diversity, are interlinked and mutually reinforcing.”13
The Peace to End all Peace?
In October, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party overthrew the Russian Tzar and formed a new government. In December, he withdrew Russia from the First World War, denouncing it as a bourgeois imperialist enterprise holding back his modified Marxist revolution, and in March 1918 made a separate peace with the struggling Central Powers. On November 11 of that year, Armistice Day (now Veterans’ Day in the US), the Allies signed an armistice with the defeated Central Powers. However, the War was formally ended only six months later at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20) and ensuing Treaty of Versailles. Neither the Central Powers nor Russia were invited to attend the Conference, so while the terms of Treaty were heatedly debated, debates were among the victorious Allies themselves. What began as a meeting of seventy delegates from twenty-six nations soon boiled down to a struggle between three: French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and US President Woodrow Wilson.
Clemenceau openly sought revenge on Germany, the formerly French territory of Alsace-Lorraine, French control of German industries, elimination of its military, its political impotence by a ban on alliances with Central Powers, and reparations that would cover both France’s First World War costs and those of the Franco-Prussian War. Though Lloyd George also sought reparations and coveted the Central Powers’ colonies, he feared that without a viable German economy or military and with Russia in Bolshevik hands, France would become a threat to Britain once again. Ten days prior to the Conference, before Congress, Wilson put forth his famous Fourteen Point Plan, his position at the Conference, summarized as follows:
1. “Open covenants of peace,” i.e. no secret or separate ones;
2. Freedom of navigation upon the seas outside territorial waters;
3. Free trade on equal terms for parties to the peace;
4. The reduction of national armaments consistent with domestic safety;
5. Adjustment of imperial claims with equal weight given to colonist and colonized;
6. Evacuation of and assistance to Russia and its self-determination;
7. Likewise with Belgium;
8. Restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France;
9. Re-adjustment of Italy’s borders along “recognizable lines of nationality;”
10. Autonomous development for the peoples of Austro-Hungary;
11. Economic independence, territorial integrity and old alliances for Balkan States;
12. Autonomous development for former Ottoman peoples and open Dardanelles;
13. An independent Polish state inhabited by “indisputably Polish populations;” and
14. A general association of nations to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.14
In the end, the Treaty held Central Powers wholly responsible for the War; imposed crippling reparations on Germany; restored Alsace-Lorraine to France; made all Central Power colonies mandates under Allied control; made Poland a state and Danzig a free city; provided for plebiscites in which residents chose their state, resulting in the growth of Belgium, Denamrk and Poland at Central Power expense; placed the industrial Saarland and Rhineland under French control for fifteen years; demilitarized the right bank of the Rhine; and reduced the German army to 100,000 soldiers, its navy to insignificance, forbidding its manufacturing, import or export of weapons. At first Germany rejected the Treaty of Versailles, but with no alternatives accepted it in futile protest, and it became effective in January of 1920.
A British delegate, John Meynard Keynes, resigned from the Conference after his calls for moderation went unheeded. His Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) disparaged the Treaty as ill-conceived for its malevolence, its return to mercantilist militarism, and above all for the malicious reparations Germany was forced to pay. The book radicalized the anti-Treaty US Republican Party, which after defeating Wilson never ratified it. Keynes, calling the peace terms “Carthaginian” referring to the devastated ancient city after losing wars with Rome, nevertheless predicted that the economic hardships the Treaty inflicted on Germany would preclude the peace it was meant to restore and ruin Europe again. After a brief and uneven reconstruction boom in the 1920s, hardships spread around the world during the 1930s Great Depression. Keynes, now a Labor Party economist, advocated government-funded public works programs for employment to prevent civil strife. Lenin’s successor in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Joseph Stalin, attempted the same in his Marxist Five-Year Plans for rapid industrialization and collectivization. US President Franklin Roosevelt engaged in similar tactics with his New Deal of relief, recovery and reform, as did the rising stars of Depression-era German politics, Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis). A French economist refuted Keynes’ arguments in The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes, published after he died fighting Nazi Germany, which he held had come into existence precisely because they had not been paid enough by the Treaty of Versailles, contrasting interpretations historians continue to ponder.
As one of them put it, “The Paris peace settlement reveals more than any other episode of the twentieth century the tension between the ideal and real in history,” and particularly in the history of peace.15 More than an ideal, less than a reality was the League of Nations, among the few non-retaliatory results of the Treaty of Versailles, except for the Central Powers’ exclusion and the distribution of their colonies among Allies through a mandate system, as if as prizes. The League was organized during the Paris Conference, its governing Covenant was part of the Treaty and, unfortunately but not unpredictably, they shared similar fates. The League’s stated purpose was to promote international cooperation, peace and security by (a) the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war; (b) regularizing open and just relations between nations; (c) the establishment of international law as the rule of conduct among governments; and (d) respect for all treaty commitments in the dealings of organized peoples with one another. In all, some sixty nations around the globe became League members, nearly half of which withdrew at different times, usually either in protest or circumvention of the League’s resolutions. Wilson was the driving force behind the League’s creation, but the US was the only major power not to join the League due to partisan domestic opposition. The only nation expelled from the League was the USSR for its unprovoked attack on Finland (1939), following the green light of a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, which like other wars the League proved
unable to prevent.
The League was composed of three bodies: an Assembly of delegates from all members which met yearly; a Council of permanent major-power and non-permanent members elected by the Assembly for three-year terms which met as needed; and a Secretariat for year-round civil services such as meeting preparation and report publication at League headquarters in Geneva. The Assembly and Council were empowered to discuss “any matter within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace of the world.”16 Unanimity was needed for resolutions to be binding on members, and enforcement by them was on a voluntary basis. Special Agencies were also formed to achieve League missions from several angles simultaneously. The Disarmament Commission aimed at reversing ongoing arms races by reducing national militaries. The Health Committee focused on preventing the spread of infectious diseases. The International Labor Organization sought to improve working conditions and end child labor. The International Office for Refugees supervised resettlements of those war and other catastrophes displaced, provided material and legal support, and issued passports for stateless persons. The Slavery Commission’s goal was the eradication of slavery and forced labor. The League’s multi-pronged approach to world peace arguably made it actualizable for the first time and is its greatest legacy. Proposals for world peace had been advanced for centuries; that it took a calamity of world war proportions to implement one is one of the greatest misfortunes in world history.
Highlighting the League’s limits were the Locarno Pact of 1925 and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, both negotiated outside its framework, incongruously because they were landmarks in inter-war disarmament and conflict resolution efforts. In 1924, British foreign minister Austen Chamberlain shocked the world at the annual meeting of the League’s Council by rejecting the Geneva Protocols prohibiting the use of certain bio-chemical weapons. He did so based on the contradictory principles that it was the Council’s responsibility to decide on policies and that the League’s Covenant should be supplemented, not replaced, “by making special arrangements in order to meet special needs.”17 The first special arrangement of this kind was the Locarno Pact. On the initiative of the German Weimar Republic’s Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, and with the support of French foreign minister Aristide Briand, delegates from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland met in the Swiss town of Locarno to work out post-war borders, commit to arbitration for resolving future disputes, and admit Germany into the League. The seeming success of this cooperative reconciliatory effort led to the popular phrase “spirit of Locarno,” which Briand sought to extend to the US in a second special arrangement to outlaw war between the two countries. US Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg responded with an offer of a much broader agreement involving other countries, which was again negotiated in Paris beginning in 1927 and signed the next year.
The resulting Kellogg-Briand Pact had fifteen original signatories and later sixty-four. Pact parties agreed that all conflicts of any cause would be resolved only by arbitration and that war would be renounced as an instrument of their national policies. But questions as to the role the League would play in such mediated disarmaments and how decisions would be enforced were fatally left unanswered. Although ratified by all signatory nations and still technically in effect today, for these reasons the Kellogg-Briand Pact proved impotent in preserving peace and preventing wars during the 1930s when Japan invaded Manchuria, Nazi Germany invaded or annexed Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Italy invaded Ethiopia and Albania. Each of the aggressors had rearmed and withdrawn from the League, which they argued had let them down or could not stop them. The benevolent spirit of Locarno became a backstabbing ghost by further special arrangements, also outside the League’s forum, in the inter-war years. Known as appeasement policies, they undid prospects for peace by purportedly doing what the two Pacts prescribed. Blurring peacemaking and pandering, the underlying logic of appeasement was peace at any price, which in actuality meant giving actual or potential aggressors what they wanted, or unofficially already had, for empty promises of non-aggression. Successful appeasements can be claimed for the Commonwealth. Appeasement also helped temporarily diffuse the armed revolt of the nationalist Irish Republican Army (1916– 21) by offering Catholic separatists the autonomy they sought as the Irish Free State and Protestant loyalists had the option to remain part of Britain. But positive appraisals of inter-war appeasement policies end there.
Disregarding that these Pacts were fait accompli, in 1932 the League’s Disarmament Commission hosted the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. There, Hitler argued that because other European powers refused to reduce their militaries as the Pacts required, let alone to the level the Treaty of Versailles had reduced that of Germany, he had a right to rearm his country up to their levels, which he did after withdrawing from the Conference and the League in 1933. While “saying all of the things that peaceful people want to hear,” by 1935 Hitler had abrogated the Treaty of Versailles, and Nazi armed forces quintupled.18 Meanwhile, Britain and France, according to the latter’s ambassador to Germany, were “prisoners of our internal discords and dominated by our love of peace” even when, in 1936, Hitler renounced the Locarno Pact and remilitarized the Rhineland.19 Over the next two years, the Axis with Italy and Japan, foes of Germany in the First World War, was formed. As it became clear that the Nazis had similar plans for resource-full regions of Czechoslovakia, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Austen’s half-brother, held abortive meetings with Hitler. After appeals from Franklin Roosevelt and support from France and Italy on each side, the anti-climax of appeasement policies was reached at a third, inauspicious meeting in Munich in 1938.
Hitler was allowed to occupy the Sudetenland in exchange for promises to respect the territorial integrity of nations from now on. Upon his return to London, Chamberlain pronounced “peace for our time,” and almost everyone seemed willing to believe except Winston Churchill. Most European nations then began rearming at unprecedented rates. That appeasement was a war strategy, not one of peace, aimed at buying time, may have been the case on the British side and certainly was on the Nazi’s side from the start. Within a year of the Munich Pact, Hitler broke a previous non-aggression pact with Poland, which had also signed similar pacts with England and France, by a blitzkrieg invasion of the country, at which point the policy of appeasement was put to a deserved rest. Hitler had signed a similar non-aggression pact with Stalin and also broke it. What appeasing the Nazis failed to do on the European continent, namely prevent war, appeasing the Japanese failed to do in the Pacific region by another string of special arrangements, which one later historian aptly called a “parchment peace.”20 Japan emerged from the First World War as an imperial power by occupying large parts of China formerly under German control, putting the future of the Open Door policy in jeopardy. After rejecting the Versailles Treaty and League membership, the US government under President Warren Harding called a conference in Washington (1921–22) to discuss naval and territorial issues in the Pacific.
The result was a series of special arrangements called Power Pacts that succeeded in preserving peace in some ways, but prepared for war in others. The first was the Four Power Pact among Britain, France, Japan and the US, by which the parties agreed to maintain the territorial status quo, committed to negotiations to resolve disputes, and to discuss joint or separate action should any party’s Pacific interests be threatened. The Five Power Pact, also known as the Naval Limitation Treaty, among these parties and Italy is considered the only inter-war agreement to have effectively curbed rearmament, albeit for less than a decade, because it dealt specifically with battleships by a ratio based on quantified relative security needs, to which all the signatories agreed. Third and lastly was the Nine Power Pact, among the preceding Five Powers as well as China, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands to “respect the sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial and administrative integrity of China” and not to take advantage of its political in
stability in the wake of its nationalist revolution under Ching Kai-shek, while China agreed to leave all foreign economic interests intact and treat them equally.21 In fact, the Nine Power Pact was almost identical to the Open Door note of 1900, neither the first nor the last time the US made a multilateral agreement out of a unilateral decree.
Together, the Power Pacts permitted the US to continue on its isolationist course vis-à-vis Europe and Asia for twenty years. They also allowed the other Powers to turn a blind eye as Japan raised armed forces unmatched in Asia at the time. With these, it invaded Manchuria in 1931, breaching the Pacts. A ten-year military pacification of the Chinese resistance and the formation of the puppet Manchukuo government followed, just as Nazis would do with Vichy France. Japan withdrew from the League in 1933 to form what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, supposedly a bloc of independent countries free from Western influence. Actually, the Sphere was part of Japan’s propaganda used to justify the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that brought an end to this line of inter-war appeasement by directly involving the US in a world war it could no longer ignore. In an appraisal of how the League responded to the Manchurian invasion, a Harvard professor of international law politely but accurately summed up the reasons why the first world government, born after the First World War, died in the Second:
Peace Page 28