Peace (38 page)

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 Each of the aggressors had rearmed and withdrawn from the League, which they argued had let them down or could not stop them.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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 instability 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.
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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:

In this instance, the world's peace machinery has been put to a laboratory test in unfavorable conditions; but conditions may frequently be unfavorable to its success, and the severity of this test may have served to reveal latent defects in that machinery. It has been shown to operate in a cumbersome fashion, and its operation consumes a great deal of time. It remains incomplete so long as fact-finding agencies must be created ad hoc, so long as they are not at hand for more immediate use. It lacks a worldwide
support, and the necessity of securing the cooperation of “non-member” states introduces elements of perilous uncertainty. At best, it serves to create and to crystallize a world opinion; but even if that process were less difficult, even if it were more prompt, opinion may not be effective to bring hostilities to an end. The clearest treaty obligations do not execute themselves, and each test is likely to disclose new ambiguities in the phrasing of the words on paper. Nor do the institutions which have been created operate automatically. The Council and the Assembly of the League of Nations can function only as the governments represented wish them to function, and in any crisis some government may have interests or commitments which will lead to its hesitation. International agencies must of necessity deal with the established government in each country; yet events have shown that even an established government may not hold the reins of power.
²²

The League was reborn as the UN during the Second World War in a chain of charters, pledges, declarations and conferences among anti-Axis countries, renamed Allies. They were geared towards securing the total defeat of the Axis, the only means the Allies found viable in securing post-war peace. Taking the racial, ideological and territorial goals of their enemies into account as well as their renewed military capabilities, Allied priorities were first to cooperate to win total war and second to cooperate to win total peace. In other words, without victory there could be no peace, and without peace there could be no victory. But while definitive military victory was achieved in a matter of years, decades have since passed without definitive peace.

10

Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part II: 1945–1989

Cold War/Hot Peace

The greatest and most fortunate of many ironies in the history of peace between 1945 and 1989 is that the two superpowers involved not once entered into armed conflict with one another directly in fear of nuclear war. Deterrence, as we have seen, is the oldest and crudest means of avoiding war, yet there seemed to be no other choice as modern societies became “aware that the ‘old' problem of survival reappears as the imperatives of peace.”
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The US, a major power since the century's start, reemerged as one after the Second World War by reinforcing its position as the world's largest economy and introducing the world to atomic bombs. The USSR, a relatively weakened power at the turn of century and US ally during the Second World War, reversed both positions at the start of the Cold War between them by its politico-economic prowess and becoming the world's second nuclear nation a few years after the first. US imperatives were based in the peace traditions of liberal capitalism, those of the USSR in socialist traditions, and both developed nuclear arsenals to back them in a balance of power that brought the world to the brink of annihilation. This dichotomy was antithetical to yet formative of renewed multi-pronged approaches to world peace pioneered by the League of Nations in new conditions by new participants, contrasted below.

The term “hot peace” has recently been used to describe the resurgence of using military force to end armed conflicts after the Cold War.
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As used in here, however, the term refers to individual, social and collective efforts to prevent the Cold War from becoming hot or, in other words, to avoid a nuclear World War Three, which in fact they did. But how did they?
Economic diplomacy was perhaps the primary non-military way for each superpower to attract and retain states into its sphere of influence without giving the other a reason for war. The US Marshall Plan, extending the lend-lease policy of supplying Allies in the Second World War, provided billions of dollars to rebuild Western Europe and stop Soviet advances there. The USSR established a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to do likewise in Eastern Europe. An early climax of conflicting Cold War economic diplomacies came in 1948, when the USSR blockaded western parts of Berlin; the US airlifted supplies until the blockade was lifted a year later. By the 1950s President Truman's Point Four Program provided know-how, funds and equipment to developing nations worldwide (i.e., so they could develop into aligned countries), forming the grounds of the later US Peace Corps; the COMECON began doing the same. Containment policies for keeping external status quos intact and internal ones inviolable were embodied in the Berlin Wall, built by the USSR in 1961 to stem East-to-West migrations. Yet without the military organizations and technologies to support them it is doubtful the superpowers would have agreed to disagree.

Also originating with the Cold War were the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact Organization (WPO). As collective defense alliances based on coordinated armed forces, they politically formed decisive and divisive blocs in the UN, and militarily maintained the balance of power that ultimately checked the superpowers. NATO was created in 1949 by Western European and North American countries to counter threats of Soviet expansion in Europe. In 1955, the USSR and its Eastern European allies created the WPO to counter NATO on similar principles. In accordance with the Truman Doctrine of limiting communism's spread, with force if necessary, NATO considered an attack on one member as an attack against all, as did the WPO. No such attack ever occurred, no armed operation against the other took place, and their drills pushed rather than crossed the precipice. However, unlike NATO, WPO forces were put into action twice in accordance with Premier Brezhnev's Doctrine of keeping Soviet satellite states lockstep with the USSR, with force if necessary. The first was to suppress the Hungarian Revolution (1956), instigated by the USSR's refusal to allow withdrawal from the WPO, turning peaceful protests violent. The second was to suppress Czechoslovakia's liberalization movement (1968). In this case, widespread non-violent resistance to and non-cooperation with WPO forces led to withdrawal, though repressive measures followed. In each case, some WPO members refused to supply troops and Soviet troops were the majority, indicating an effective high-level opposition which NATO members never showed. Ironically, NATO and WPO troops worked together in several UN peacekeeping missions. The WPO
was disbanded after the USSR's collapse and its members have since joined NATO, still struggling to redefine its purpose.