CONTENTS
The League of Nations: Wilson's utopian project
America's approach to the larger world of global diplomacy
The court martial of General Billy Mitchell
European political developments lead the world in the opposite direction
The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
America – The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 496-504.
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There had been a number of voluntary diplomatic councils in Europe's recent history (the Congress of Vienna in the early 1800s, the various Geneva Conventions on the rules of war during the 1800s and early 1900s, an Inter-Parliamentary Union in the late 1800s) – but Wilson's dream of having the major countries of the world joined in a permanent, on-going diplomatic union was quite a dramatic development. Wilson's hope had been that the world was ready to enter into a whole new era of diplomatic reason – in strong distinction to the uncontrolled passions that had so recently driven much of the world into the Great War. Wilson's hope was that nations would instead first seek international understanding through negotiations, before letting the heat of national hurt propel them to take up war against another nation. It seemed like a very good idea – very sensible and logical. But as things soon demonstrated it was a quite unrealistic dream. The concept of collective security
It was hoped that reason would bring national disputes to settlement. But failing that, it was assumed that collective security would force war-prone nations to back down and behave, thus preserving the international status quo or world order. The supposition was that all nations loved world peace – and would by instinct come together to gang up on a would-be violator of that peace. That was the heart of the idea of collective security. But in fact, the instincts of nations, the way they viewed the international status quo or world order from their own particular point of view or national interest, varied quite widely from country to country. As it turned out there was nothing automatic about how collective security worked – especially when one or another of the world's major powers was involved. Nations always tended to decide on the basis of their own sense of national sovereignty how they wanted to approach a particular dispute. By no means was there some single rational point of view that all nations automatically came to hold when faced with a dispute. Thus the idea did not work – except in a few minor cases in the early years of the League when the national interests of the members were not deeply affected by the dispute. But as international politics headed into the 1930s things got very tense – and the League not only was not able to resolve disputes that arose during that period, in attempting to do so the League nearly always drove one or another major power to resign from the League.1 The organization itself
The League of Nations was based in Geneva (Switzerland) and consisted of a number of diplomatic organizations, the most important of which were the League Assembly and the League Council. The Assembly was made up of a voting representative of each of the (50+) members. It could take up for consideration any issue it chose – and Assembly decisions required only a simple majority for passage of a League resolution. The League Council however was expected to be more the enforcer of the peace and was a smaller body at first with four permanent members (Britain, France, Italy and Japan); it had been expected that America would be the fifth – but America never joined the League. Eventually Germany was added to League membership and became the fifth permanent member. Non-permanent members elected by the Assembly were at first four in number and eventually expanded to ten in number, each serving for a three-year term. Decisions of the Council were understood to be weightier matters and thus a resolution required the affirming vote of all the members (a unanimous decision) unless one of the Council members was a party to a dispute – and then that nation was not entitled to vote. There was also a Permanent Court of International Justice set up in The Hague (Netherlands) where cases could be put before highly trained international judges as a way of settling disputes. This recourse was used frequently during the 1920s. But as international disputes took on a more warlike nature the PCIJ was used less and less in the 1930s. (The PCIJ was nonetheless highly respected and was one of the several League organizations that was carried over as part of the new United Nations when it was set up in 1945). There were also other organizations set up as part of the League – bureaucracies that were supposed to tackle a number of distinct problems in the area of labor, health, education, women's rights, drug trade, slavery and other social conditions and issues. This idea of government action undertaken by technical specialists was in keeping with the rising spirit of Progressivism in America and Socialism in Europe in the early 1900s. 1A number of major powers party to disputes, in finding decisions going against their national interests, simply resigned: Japan (1933), Germany (1933), and Italy (1937). Soviet Russia was expelled by the League in 1939 when it refused to call off its invasion of Finland.
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The League's Palace of Nations – Geneva
The September 10, 1926
meeting of the
League of Nations on the occasion of Gemany's
entry into the
League. Foreign Minister
Gustav
Stresemann of Germany is addressing
the Assembly with his initial
speech.
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American isolationism with respect to entangling alliances
America had refused to join Wilson's League of Nations. Americans in general had come to feel that there had been a huge betrayal at the end of the Great War by the Wilson government and by their English and French allies. Both Wilson and America's allies had failed to make good the promise of the spread of democracy to the whole world – and thus of world peace (for why else indeed had Americans gone to Europe to die?). Consequently, there was virtually an immovable resolve of Americans never to get involved again in the dangerous hypocrisies of another European conflict. This isolationist sentiment with respect to the events in the European Old World seemed unshakeable. However … a participant in the world disarmament movement
Americans per se were not opposed to peace itself – only to entangling alliances that would compromise the freedom of the nation. This mood therefore did not mean that America would not participate at all in the matter of securing a peaceful world. In the post-war 1920s America in fact was quite active in this regard. The horrors of the Great War had been so terrible that a widespread sentiment among many of the victor nations was that henceforth – except for very dire defensive reasons – war was virtually unthinkable. This encouraged the utopian reasoning of European and American Idealists who sincerely believed that indeed the Great War had ended up being the war to end all wars. Supposedly peaceful reasoning had developed within world culture to the extent that passionate militarism was a dead thing of the past. "International understanding" was now the driving force within the new diplomacy. Accompanying this general hope was the widely-held view of the times, both in America and Europe, that the greatest danger to the peace that the world craved so deeply was to be found in the heavy militarization of the nations. "Take the weapons away and the nations will be forced to act peacefully with each other." Thus the word of the day was disarmament. When Germany was forced to agree to a huge cutback in its military as required by the Versailles Treaty, the Germans were led to believe that this was not intended as punishment but instead as the first step in a larger disarmament of all nations. On that basis the German negotiators seemed to be accepting of the disarmament terms imposed on them. The Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922)
Seeking the same goal, America during the winter of 1921–1922 hosted a great disarmament conference at its capital. This conference was designed to set international standards and limits on the size and functioning of the navies of the major powers involved in the politics and diplomacy in East Asia and the Pacific Ocean, and also other subjects designed to reduce the horrors of war, such as the outlawing of the use of poison gas. Importantly the conference was designed both to recognize the role of the Japanese navy in this region while at the same time to set limits to just that role. It also set out to prevent any kind of naval arms race from developing among any of these powers, thus agreeing to limit the building of naval vessels at a ratio of 5:5:3 for Britain, America and Japan, these numbers reflecting the relative size of each nation’s maritime activity. But beyond this naval accord, the powers were not able or willing to go in reducing the size of their military forces, France being especially nervous about reducing its military in the face of a Germany that would surely one day rebuild. Subsequent protests from the Germans that no serious moves were being made to bring other countries in line with Germany's level of forced disarmament ultimately fell on deaf ears. Instead another approach was made to the ideal of world peace. In 1925 Germany was admitted to the League of Nations – recognizing it as a major power with a permanent seat on the League Council. |
Europeans ascending the
steps
to the U.S. State, War and Navy building in 1921
to begin the Washington
Naval Conference – designed to set limits on naval fleets
National Archives
NA-111-SC-80612
Delegates of the nine nations
participating in the Washington
Naval Conference – 1921-1922
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The Locarno Agreement (1925) And in that same year Germany was a major participant at a diplomatic conference held in the Swiss Alpine city of Locarno. The Locarno Agreement contained the promise of France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Belgium that they would not resort to war in their relations with each other, but would resolve their conflicts only by peaceful means. Locarno thus gave hope that Europeans might be ready to move to more serious thoughts on military disarmament.
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Signing the Locarno Treaty -1925
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The Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)
In 1928 American Secretary of State Frank
Kellogg met with French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and signed a
pact agreeing to renounce war as a means of settling conflicts and to
use peaceful means instead. Soon the Kellogg-Briand Pact was joined by
fifty-nine other nations (including Germany, Italy and Japan) –
seemingly indicating that the world was finally coming to its senses.
Never again would a war such as what the world had gone through ten
years earlier ever have to happen again. Even Italy’s worshiper of aggressive strength,
Mussolini, pledged his country’s support of the ideal – though it would
not be long before Italian, German, Japanese and other supporters of
Fascism were ridiculing the feebleness of such democratic idealism.
Kellogg
Briand The grand illusion
In any case, the pact did nothing to stop or even slow down the Fascist aggressions that in the 1930s again moved the world closer to general war. Rather, it was a dazzling piece of Utopian Idealism: countries pledging to renounce war as a policy – except in instances of necessary self-defense (but when in war do countries not believe that they are fighting in defense of essential national principles?). Unfortunately, all of this was simply humanistic illusion, as events would soon prove. Serious conflicts of interest (such as contested boundaries and revanchist dreams of gathering nationals scattered in neighboring countries) were never really dealt with, nor could they be by peaceful means in any case. Too much was at stake for nation-states not to attempt the use of physical force if push came to shove. And it soon did. But in the meantime, those still shocked by the trauma of the Great War were happy to believe that they had solved rationally one of life's most critical problems, forever.
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The signing of the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing
war
at the Palais D'Orsay in Paris – August 27,
1928
U.S. President Coolidge signing the Kellogg-Briand Pact – January 1929
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It is understandable when a people draw a lesson from a pointless war and thus find themselves very suspicious of anything that might soon draw them into another. What is not understandable is when professional military men do not also draw lessons from a fierce war they have just been through. When an army General Billy Mitchell himself drew a key lesson from the war, namely that air power was a major new weapon that needed to be developed by the U.S. military establishment, he found his urgings ignored. So, he made his case more demonstrably. n 1921 he had four obsolete battleships put to sea – and then attacked from the air. The ships were easily sunk by bombs from his airplanes. He was told to cease his pressuring of the military higher ups. But Mitchell was not able to let the matter simply die quietly – and began to go public with his arguments. By doing so he courted the wrath of the old guard military. Being subsequently brought before a court martial, he was found guilty of undisciplined behavior and suspended from active duty (1925). He resigned his commission the following year to be able to pursue his air power crusade undeterred by military protocol. The effort did indirectly make some headway eventually when America developed a naval air wing complete with aircraft carriers and fighter planes able to take off and land on the decks of these massive ships. This would prove to be a huge factor later in 1941–1942 when America was attacked by the Japanese. It is what not only brought America back from the Pearl Harbor disaster but also delivered a blow to the Japanese navy so stunning (the Battle of Midway, June 1942) that the Japanese navy was never able to recover fully.
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The court-martial of
General Billy Mitchell for his insubordination in pushing for air power
Brown
Brothers
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Meanwhile, Europe also struggles to find its way forward
Despite the Idealism of many of the European leaders, especially those of Great Britain and France, the mood of the average European was not all that different from the average American, rural or urban. For Europeans, who had suffered greatly through the four years of war, the post-war period was troubled with the thought that all of the war's high-sounding nationalist spirit had produced in the end only mindless death and destruction. A spirit of disillusionment with politicians and cynicism with respect to their ideas and programs set in, much as it did in America. This cynical spirit stirred a sense of political opportunity among a number of extremist political factions and their leaders: Communists and Social Democrats on the Left and Fascists on the Right. They found their appeal strongest among the social classes that had suffered most from the crumbling of the older social order. Socialism/Communism. European soldiers coming out of the war found that with the war over and war-time industry cutting back, jobs were scarce, and the ones that did exist paid very poorly. They were deeply resentful of the way their personal sacrifices were so poorly rewarded – while fat-cat wartime industrialist owners or capitalists still seemed to be doing fairly well for themselves. This group of industrial workers was thus easily manipulated by leaders who urged the workers to rise up against the wealthy industrial property owners, seize their property and make it communally their own. This was the basis of the Communist appeal which produced workers’ uprisings all across Europe in the 1920s (and the huge Red Scare in early 1920s America). Fascism. Other European soldiers, upon a return to their farms, found that they had been left behind economically and culturally by developments brought on by the war. With international farm prices running at a new low, farmers found it difficult to sustain a living for themselves and their families. They watched with resentment as a fast-growing urban industrial order appeared to be enjoying many of the new economic opportunities of the post-war world. This agrarian/ small-townsmen group was easily manipulated by leaders who stressed the importance of restoring a largely romanticized traditional agrarian social order. They promised to bring the glories of a mythical past back to existence – if the people simply surrendered their hopes and dreams to the total management by their great leaders. This appeal is the basis for what will come to be called Fascism. Italian Fascism
European Fascism actually had its roots in Italy when post-war Italy seemed literally to have fallen apart politically. Although Italy had finally joined the war in 1915 on the "victorious" side in the Great War, there had been nothing at all about Italy’s performance in the war to indicate to the average Italian that they had achieved anything at all of what might be classed as victory. Instead, coming out of the war, the Italians generally considered their former leaders as grand failures – which the Italian leaders themselves understood was their political standing in Italy. Thus they tended to lay low. And thus also a power vacuum existed in Italy after the war. And into that vacuum had stepped Benito Mussolini, the bombastic editor of a Milan newspaper. Mussolini had started out as a Socialist propagandist – who turned against Socialism when it refused to support the Italian entry into the Great War. Mussolini saw the war as a means of bringing Italy to a new strength and prominence: strength through collective struggle (Fascism). Mussolini became bitterly opposed to Marxist Socialism, with its call to European workers to resist taking up arms on behalf of capitalist war profiteers – a call which Europe’s fiercely nationalist workers had largely ignored … and then had paid a huge price for their patriotism. But Mussolini was opposed not only to Socialist pacifism, he was as opposed to Liberal Idealism with its hopes to build an international order of peace through a new spirit of international democratic cooperation. Mussolini accused such philosophies of peace as merely weakening human strength and producing effete societies. He exalted strength – strength through conflict, strength through struggle – which would produce a warlike character among a people. This in turn would bring them to greatness – greatness such as the ancient Romans had once exemplified. The key to this process was achieving an absolute unity of the people through unswerving loyalty to a great leader, a Duce (Italian simply for "Leader") such as Mussolini himself proposed to become. He promised Italians (notably Italy’s industrial leaders) to bring unity to Italy through a policy of strict enforcement of social conformity through the use of his street toughs (the Fascist Blackshirts) – who stood ready to strike total fear in the hearts of labor agitators and anarchists through whatever means necessary to do so. At a time when Italy seemed to be
threatened internally by the same forces tearing Russia and Germany
apart, this Fascist call of Mussolini's to enforced unity had a very
strong appeal. Thus it was that in October of 1922 a small group of
Mussolini's Fascists marched on Rome – facing virtually no resistance.
The Italian king responded by asking Mussolini to save the nation by
becoming its leader. Italy now began to head down the path of Fascism –
forced national unity under the domination of the Duce, who was to do
the thinking and direct all the actions of the Italian nation. Any
resistance to his program, actively or even just verbally, was met with
stiff repression.
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Mussolini marching with Fascists
soon after his October 28, 1922 "March on Rome"
Mussolini greeted by King Victor Emmanuel III
Mussolini at a Fascist
Rally
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Stalin takes command of Soviet Russia
Slowly and painfully the Communist "Red" Army of Lenin and his close associate Trotsky gained ground against the "White" Armies of Kerensky and the Tsarists2 – and by 1923 the horrendous Russian civil war was finally over. Lenin's Bolsheviks or Communists ruled Russia – and much of its former empire among surrounding non-Russian ethnic groups. But Lenin was a sick man, and died the following year (1924).
Lenin
Trotsky Power was supposedly held jointly by the Bolsheviks serving on the Communist Party's Central Committee – though most observers supposed that Lenin's closest colleague Trotsky would emerge as the supreme leader. But Trotsky was more interested in spreading the Communist revolution to the rest of Europe, treating the Russian Revolution simply as a staging ground for continuing revolution. Working behind the scenes was the mysterious Joseph Stalin, who had been assigned the less glorious task of overseeing personnel issues (recruitment and promotion of regular members) at the lower levels of the Party hierarchy. But Stalin had been using his position to place and promote individuals presumably loyal to himself personally – thereby building up a personal power base within the Party, a development that the Bolshevik intellectuals directing the Party at its highest levels had not been paying much attention to. Toward the end of the 1920s Stalin was ready to make his move: he impressed (or intimidated) his fellow Bolsheviks into agreeing to the need to focus on "revolution in one country" (Russia), to stand behind his Five-Year Plan for the rapid industrialization of Russia (at the expense of the Russian countryside and its people), and to oust Trotsky whose internationalism threatened the security of the revolution in Russia (or so said Stalin anyway).
Stalin With the introduction of his Five-Year Plan in 1928, Stalin took complete control of the wealth, the productivity, the very life of the nation – and completely reoriented its culture to his industrial agenda. Millions of lives would be lost in this transition, millions more permanently shattered as Stalin forcibly made the shift of the Russian economy away from agriculture to heavy industry. Anyone who complained, anyone he even suspected of complaining, he simply destroyed. There was no way to offer resistance to Stalin. And so, the Soviet Russian economy and culture began its move in the new Stalinist direction. 2At
the end of the war, Wilson had sent American soldiers into Russia to
join with other pro-democracy troops (everything from fellow British,
to Czechs and Japanese) in supporting the Whites in the early stages of
that civil war. It was supposedly a most noble effort – in support of
democracy – to intervene in Russia's civil war for such a grand
purpose. Ultimately seeing that this would achieve nothing except to
make the situation worse, Wilson brought the troops home. At least he
got that part right.
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Miles
H. Hodges
