War as an instrument of national policy : and its renunciation in the pact of Paris

Front matter

H

Shot well

war as an Instrument of in¬ ternational policy & its re- Jiunciat inn

Preface

The generation that has endured the World War has at last come to grips with the problem of war itself. The movement to eliminate it from international dealings is not based upon senti¬ ment nor emotion, although they may fortify its purpose ; it is gaining rather than losing in strength as the poignant memories of the war grow fainter, because it embodies the major lesson of the whole vast tragic experience, that as between the highly civilized nations war has become a futile instrument incapable of direction and therefore criminal in use. A new attitude is forcing its way in international politics, — as it also is revealing itself in the world of business and internal economics, — one which seeks to substitute for ruthless competition some measure of cooperation, so that each member of the community of nations may have a larger share in an increasing common good. This change in attitude is itself a fact of history.

The renunciation of war, however, even if only as the instru¬ ment of national policy, establishes a new basis for international law. It strikes at that anarchy of nations which permitted under the pretext of national interest the old predatory world of conquest and violence. That era is now passing; governments repudiate it because the peoples whom they represent insist upon its repudiation. The instruments of international justice are not yet perfected, and the Pact of Paris leaves this problem unsolved, but henceforth, with the arbitrament of war no longer permitted and all disputes referred to settlement “by pacific means,” those means will be developed through the practical experience of the coming years. Whether or not the new structure of international affairs is to be imbedded in a code of laws or in the uncodified practice of peaceful dealings,

VI

PREFACE is a speculation which lies beyond the horizon at this moment ; but it is clear to any but one blinded by legalistic tradition that the realm of international law will gain in both extent and authority in proportion as the anarchy of nations gives way to conceptions of a community of interest, and the extravagant assertion of absolute sovereignty no longer blocks the path of ultimate justice.

Patriotism, too, is throwing off those tribal prejudices which carried into the modern world the barbarian attitude toward foreigners. It is becoming a more civilized thing, but none the less effective. There is no need to fear that patriotism will be lessened if based upon intelligence instead of merely upon emotion 5 intelligence alone can supply the ideals which furnish the inspiration to the citizen in a world so constantly changing as that which has been brought into being by the inventions of modern science. The old-time patriotism that repeated without analysis the prejudices of the past was suitable as a guide only to those nations whose present problems were also simply repe¬ titions of their past. But that is no longer the situation in the civilized world. The age which has achieved a mastery over time and space has no parallel anywhere in the human past. Problems of the present and future are, it is true, rooted in history, but their solution does not lie in a repetition of its experiences. The new and uncharted course upon which we have embarked calls for intelligence in patriotism, and intelli¬ gence in turn calls for the relinquishment of the unintelligent procedure which is war.

The history which follows is largely documentary. But where the documents are so few, as in this case, the student of history must read between the lines, or rather between the documents. For instance, from April 6, when M. Briand made his initial statement, to the twentieth of June, when he submitted his formal draft of a treaty to the American Government, there

PREFACE

• • Vll

were other things going on. This was even more true of the six months’ interval which elapsed before the American Govern¬ ment replied. In the pages which follow, reference is made from time to time to the efforts on the part of private citizens which finally secured government action, but it is impossible to review here all of this story of unofficial effort. It is, however, the opinion of those who watched it develop, that the rising tide of public opinion, voiced in Congress by the Resolutions of Senator Capper and Senator Borah, and others in the House of Representatives, is directly responsible for the negotiations which led to the Pact of Paris.

It was not only in the United States but in France and Great Britain as well, and also in Germany, that public opinion showed itself in advance of the action of governments. The impatience of the British press over the slow decisions of the Foreign Office, which delayed a month and more before replying, found expression in all but the most conservative press. On the Conti¬ nent and in Japan, public opinion played a similar role. In the case of Japan this was of peculiar significance, as matters so vital as these had previously been left in the hands of the Elder Statesmen, and the discussion of them subdued to the dominant note of authority.

The conclusion to be drawn from this short page of history is that the World War has, after all, taught its full lesson to the generation that has suffered from it. The will to peace is paramount in the civilized world} and it is in this fact that the strength of the Pact of Paris resides. But at the same time a world that has been disillusioned so often in the effort to realize its ideals will demand, in some form or other, either now or in the future, that the test of history and experience be applied to the proposed reform itself. There is all but universal agree¬ ment on the need for war-renunciation by the civilized Powers, but the tragic failures of the past — I speak of the period prior to the World War — have left a doubt as to whether the reform

Vlll

PREFACE can actually be achieved or not. The question is therefore not any longer a moral issue, since there is practical agreement as to what should be done 3 it is almost wholly a matter of ways and means, examined cautiously but fairly, and in the light of the ultimate purpose to be attained. The Pact of Paris must be judged, not merely as an expression of international morals, as some of its friends have tried to interpret it, but as the effec¬ tive embodiment of political realities j unless it has some prac¬ tical value, it has little value at all. The present study is an attempt to apply these tests of practicality in terms of both history and contemporary politics. It is not intended to be either an apologia for or a defense of the treaty, but an analysis of it and the diplomatic history which it involved, so that the judg¬ ments passed upon it may have the corrective of the historical outlook.

Acknowledgments are due to the New York Times , the New York Herald Tribune , the New York World , The Cen¬ tury and Foreign Affairs, for permission to use portions of articles previously published.

James T. Shotwell.

New York,

Contents

PART one: historical perspectives

I. THE PROBLEM 3

II. WAR IN HISTORY 8

Chapter I The Problem

On the twenty-seventh of August, 1928, a historic event took place in the hall of the Foreign Office in Paris. The govern¬ ments of fifteen nations signed on that day a treaty by which they renounced the right to use war as an instrument of their national policies, and invited all the other nations of the world to give their adherence to the same great act of renunciation. The whole world watched the ceremony, as the Foreign Minis¬ ters of France and Germany, in the presence of the representa¬ tives of the other Powers, subscribed to this far-reaching principle of international peace. But although the act itself was as simple as the terms of the renunciation, the world that watched it saw it through different eyes. In every country com¬ ment ranged all the way from denunciation of it as hypocritical demagoguery to the enthusiastic endorsement of it as the reali¬ zation of the supreme ideals of morals and religion. Between these extremes of those whose minds were already made up beforehand, lay the great body of public opinion, rejecting alike the cynic and the ultra-pacifist, insisting upon the ac¬ ceptance of the act but haunted by doubts as to its effectiveness in a wicked world and not less troubled as to its exact meaning. These elements of hesitation were not strong enough to check the movement of assent; but the questions which were raised in the great debate have not yet been solved. The debate itself has somewhat subsided in the succeeding weeks and months, for the world must go about its everyday affairs, affairs still fraught here and there with the danger of war ; but this only means that the question has been thrown back now from diplomacy to legislatures, and that when they take up the question of ratifica¬ tion the peoples represented by these governments will once more have to come to conclusions with this unprecedented proposal.

One thing is clear ; the generation that has endured the realities of the World War will demand that the strategy of peace shall be real also. This is not only true of the genera¬ tion as a whole, but it is true of the different countries in pro¬ portion as they have suffered and endured. Humanity cannot afford to trust its wistful hopes to anything, however promising, that may betray it in the hour of crisis ; nor is it likely that the instrument of war so bravely denounced will be actually discarded if nations still believe that the use of this instrument is essential to them. The meaning of the Pact of Paris is, therefore, to be found not solely or even mostly in the text itself but rather in the study of the history of civilization and a survey of the practical politics of the immediate present. If war has been with us since the beginning of time, it will only yield to forces stronger than itself j whether these really exist in the world today or not is as much the subject of this inquiry as the story of the Pact itself.

The full treatment of this subject would carry us very far afield indeed} for it would call for nothing less than an analysis of civilization itself, civilization with war in it and a hypo¬ thetical future with war no longer functioning as it has through¬ out all the centuries of history. It would involve something more than the actual history of war, for the place of war in history is a much larger one than that of actual conflict. War has been in the background of most policies of state down to our own day, so much so that its constant menace has been taken for granted by historians as a commonplace of politics and thus has escaped attention and analysis. It has never yet been dealt with by students of either history or political science. No one knows, and perhaps no one will ever know, the full extent of

THE PROBLEM the influences upon civilization exerted by the fact that the decisions of international politics have been so largely reached through the arbitrament of the sword. We cannot go so far afield in this short survey as these problems would lead; but there is no solving the problem before us unless we keep in mind these historical elements which still persist within and then test their continuing strength by an analysis of those other forces in the modern world which seem to be giving to the movement of international peace a reality and power still more effective than that which has lain behind the instrument of war.

It is, after all, this last element of the problem which is of supreme importance, how to measure the movements of our own day. Unfortunately, there are no such tests to apply here as history supplies when events have already yielded up their ultimate meaning. The peace movement has not yet revealed its full possibilities and is only now gathering momentum in the field of practical politics. But it will become clear from what follows that we are passing from the theoretic beginnings to the practical and definite application of a great reform, and that in spite of all the pressure of accumulated experience, which tends to drag the world back to the routine of the past, the outlines of a new community of nations are emerging before our eyes and the formulation of its principles have passed from the stage of academic discussion to that of political reality.

It may take a generation yet, or even more, before the civilized nations can be sure that they have really turned the corner in this great enterprise j for if it takes a century for nations like France and Britain to assure themselves the gains of an internal revolution, it will undoubtedly take longer for the whole world to appropriate to itself this revolution, which reaches to the very base of international relationships.

In fact, it is by no means clear that the whole world is ready for the proposal to renounce war as an instrument of national policy. Where a people is in a semi-barbarous state, force, either applied or held in reserve, is the very condition of peace itself. International peace is applicable only to responsible govern¬ ments that are able to comply with the conditions of the new regime. It is a wholly false conception of international peace that makes it merely synonymous with a renunciation of war. The new regime of pacific relations is not of this negative character. It does not lessen our international obligations, but on the contrary it is in proportion as the isolation of states is given up that the renunciation of war becomes a factor in real politics.

The movement to rid the world of war is therefore one of those major changes in human affairs which in the very nature of the case can never be fully embodied in any one slight docu¬ ment, however much that document may stimulate the imagina¬ tion or contribute to the basic ideals of a new world structure. Even the Covenant of the League of Nations is only a single chapter in the transformation now under way. Similarly, the Pact of Paris is only a part of a larger whole. Even if it be all that can be claimed for it, it still remains far short of a complete embodiment of reform. No historical analysis is needed but merely common sense to withhold assent from those who would hail the Pact of Paris as marking that single point of time in which the world turns from darkness to light.

The paeans of triumph which have found expression in certain quarters tend to make one hesitate to grant even a just measure of appreciation to the treaty. The statement that this is the natal day of peace — meaning the day of the American proposal — is just the kind of expression that tends to turn any serious student in history toward more conservative ap¬ praisals. The realization of international peace is a very dif¬ ferent thing from the formulation of a denunciation of war; nations which live under the shadow of possible and impending war know only too well the difference between the general statement of their ideals and the practical application in forms

THE PROBLEM that will safeguard them against the bitter disillusionment of all their hopes in the hour of crisis. But while withholding our superlatives with reference to any specific proposal, the fact remains that the world is in the midst of a revolution in inter¬ national affairs which, if it is destined to succeed, is even far¬ ther reaching in its consequences than the revolutions that es¬ tablished self-government within the states themselves. The issues which it presents cannot be solved by any rapid legerde¬ main of cleverness in diplomacy or by that simple idealism that blinks realities.

But although the Pact of Paris is in itself only the embodi¬ ment of a single phase of the movement to eliminate interna¬ tional war, it has so challenged the imagination of the world as to become — for the day at least — a sort of symbol of the larger movement. One does not learn the meaning of a symbol by regarding it alone. Therefore, before we take up the story of the negotiations and discuss the documents themselves, we shall pause for a moment to get our bearings by an examination of both the role of war in history and those new facts which tend to make it henceforth an anachronism.

Chapter II

Those who talk in a light-hearted way of the easy task of elimi¬ nating war from the state system of the world have little idea of the extent to which that institution has been woven into the fabric of our civilization. The red thread dominates in the pat¬ tern of every age, but by the time the design has revealed its form, the passing feet of a work-a-day world have worn both warp and woof until history can only faintly trace their weav¬ ing ; or else mere distance tones the tragic note into those har¬ monies which we call romance, those

Old, unhappy, far-off things.

And battles long ago

which under the color of heroic deeds have lost the crude reality that lies in the sufferings of the inarticulate. From the dim beginnings of society, and beyond, down to this very hour, war has been used without question and almost without interval ; and upon the vicarious sacrifice of its countless victims rests the structure of our peace. The state system of today was built up by a process in which the Christian virtues of charity and self-effacement have had little part; it is a misleading figure of speech to speak of the unfolding of the flower of modern civilization. Nations are not natural units like the tribe or clan, for the science of politics begins when blood relationships are left behind and ways must be found for fitting in the resident stranger along with primitive kinship. This artificial process is one which has been reluctantly entered upon by every

privileged member of the ancient group, and the new institutions which embody the enlarged community have almost everywhere been hammered into shape on the forge of war. Blood- and iron have been not only the historical instruments of every state for the assertion of its will among its neighbors, but they have been as well the instruments within the state by which political institutions have come into life and maintained themselves throughout the centuries.

The argument of the militarist that “man is by nature a fighting animal” is supported by the overwhelming evidence of anthropology. The natural man is a savage ; and savages attack and kill each other with such complete success that, where no other influences enter in to tame the appetite for war, they remain today where mankind was when the ice sheets receded and the cave shelters of Europe lured the wandering hunts¬ man of the neolithic age. The hunt, itself, of beast or man was the chief and only honorable occupation. Valor gave rank and standing in the social group ; there was only one other thing that could measure with it in importance and that was the mastery of those mystic terrors that lay in the taboo. The war¬ rior and the priest rose to control, each in his place, by the exercise of the variant terrors which he could command. There were those who could kill by strength or strategy and those who could kill by fear. Where these two elements are un¬ checked by any other influences, savagery and superstition pre¬ side alike over the twilight of human intelligence and that of the gods themselves. Fortunately, also, from those early days more benign influences were at work; otherwise there would have been no civilization. The masters of the taboo were also the priests of the beginnings of religion, and the warrior hunts¬ man was a protector of his home as well as the destroyer of others.

This early stage of society, however, has the ethics of the pack; it is predatory by nature, robbing either the labor of others or the laborers themselves, a fact which is inherent in the nature of warlike societies. The killers are also the en¬ slavers ; the economic as well as the social structure of primitive society is merciless to the victim, except as the profit from the victim’s work wins him some slight security from violence. Slavery marked in this regard an advance upon absolute savagery. The earliest decisive advance in civilization seems to have come in those communities which learned to keep their victims working and so through slave industry built up that accumulated wealth of goods which made the owners turn at times from their predatory occupations to defend their posses¬ sions from the onslaught of their neighbors. For the very in¬ crease of their wealth made them all the greater temptation to the invader. With these changing preoccupations and the growth of settled life, superstition, too, dropped its cruder forms, and religion learned to give expression to new ideals in the splendors of creative art. Thus civilization began to dis¬ guise its predatory activities and sometimes even to forget them in the enjoyment of enlarging comforts, to carve out for itself areas of security either behind city walls or the frontiers of mountain and desert, and in the routine of settled life to develop the industries of peace.

Practically all the centers of antique society had some such beginnings. If the intervals of peace were long enough and the slave labor sufficiently abundant, they could accumulate the leisure necessary for the development of the arts and those early speculations which precede the sciences. But it should not be forgotten that the splendor of the Parthenon not less than the monuments of Egypt rested upon a predatory economics which, in the last analysis, was but the disguised perpetuation of the savage raid. Tribute from the conquered or from those held in subjection was an advance upon slavery, as slavery had been an advance upon mere wars of extermination ; but it rested equally with slavery upon the superior power — mostly brute strength — of those who imposed it. There was, of course, free

II labor in the ancient world, but it was not given the chance to develop healthfully owing to the competition of the slaves or the forced contributions from conquered territories. Thus the war system was doubly injurious to the arts of peace, both in the robbery of enemies and in crushing out by wholesale com¬ petition the honest industries at home. This was the funda¬ mental weakness of antique society, and ultimately was responsible, more than any other factor, for its downfall.

The peace movement of today can, therefore, learn as much from the downfall of antiquity as from any other single fact in history. The antique peoples had solved practically all other problems but one, that of the just appreciation of the day’s work. This could never happen until that work was done by those who were themselves free to choose.

The warrior state was able to measure all other values, in art and literature and life itself, but it never guessed that the marching legions which protected it from attack were the sym¬ bol of a destructive economics which had vaster forces at its com¬ mand than all the armies of an organized world, — forces which slowly but steadily mined the walls and overthrew the defenses of all antique civilization. The ancient world was not so much overthrown by invaders as devastated from within by the effects of its own war system, which had destroyed the vitality of both agricultural and industrial pursuits. Dependence upon the sub¬ jected, outlying territories ultimately extended into the army itself, and so even the machinery of war became dependent upon the barbarian. Thus the resources of a world that was built upon predatory economics failed to maintain the organ¬ ization necessary for that one industry of war, to which it had, by a false inversion, made the industries of peace subservient. The strength of Rome, which its citizens had thought eternal, died out, as the strength of other empires had before, because it was not repaired from within. Its last defenders were them¬ selves chiefly drawn from among the barbarians, and when these gave way before their fellow warriors of the north, the frontiers were open, and history closed its page upon the antique world.

The fall of Rome was not due to a decline in morals, as the Christian philosophers have led the world to imagine. For, in spite of Tacitus, the morals of the barbarian invaders were on a far inferior plane to those of the Romans of the provinces whose society is mirrored for us in the writings of the silver age. Stoic courage and Christian virtue were altogether on the side of the empire, but the structure of society had rested on a false basis and there was no strength left to repel the invasion.

But the maj or lesson was never learned. The conquerors re¬ peated again the story of antiquity; for another thousand years and more Europe suffered the anarchy of war, and carried on most of its economic life by the oppression of those who were held to the day’s task by slavery or serfdom. Feudalism at its height was simply this anarchy erected into a system. The pro¬ fession of arms was the only honorable one; the knight was a miles , or soldier, and his home was a fortress, a castellum. On almost every commanding hilltop, by river fords or behind protecting swamps, these castles which have left their ruins all over western Europe are reminders of local tyrannies and an age of plunder and rapine. But, throughout all except the darkest age of anarchy there were other forces becoming visible, which were destined, after centuries of growth, to sup¬ plant and overthrow the feudal lordships. There were tradi¬ tions, even among the villeins, of a freer day, kept alive by customary law, and finding, in due time, their support in a kingship which was itself both the product and the enemy of feudalism. There were artisans as well in the communities which nestled beneath the castle walls, or by the monastery gates, and which, ultimately, by bargain or happy chance, gained charters of emancipation from the exactions of the overlord. Communes became cities, and the supply of the mere needs of life passed more and more out of the grasp of the warrior class. Com¬ merce played its part in this, as markets arose and guilds developed.

There was, moreover, another modifying influence, one which reached back through all the history of the Middle Ages, in the civilizing influence of the Christian church. It is a strange fact that while the religion which it taught centered its ideals in the world to come, its missionaries gave the first example that the West had seen of the dignity of human labor. The monks of the Middle Ages were economic missionaries as well, and the Christian equivalent of the primitive taboo — in ecclesi¬ astical law — protected the product of their industry. Slowly and imperceptibly the processes of independent economic life wore their way through the war structure of feudalism, and all sections of society found in royalty the protection necessary for these peace-time developments.

Then began the political formation of the national state, with territorial instead of merely personal allegiance. The institu¬ tions of justice in the king’s name were safeguarded from vio¬ lence by a stronger force than any local chieftain could muster, and the war machine became an instrument for the policing of the realm — and an instrument of national policy. By the thirteenth century this new embodiment of mutual aid was reducing tyranny to terms of contract ; and so once more the world was ready for law and order, to embody them this time in the institutions of free government. From the thirteenth century to the twentieth the long transformation was slowly matured by which within the state not only war but arbitrary power was forced out of existence and at last, through revolu¬ tions in every country, the conception of justice for all men and equality before the law became a reality, or became the funda¬ mental principle and ideal of politics itself, in the self-govern¬ ing state.

But there still remained one problem not only unsolved but practically untouched until the World War presented it to this generation in unescapable form. Although war had been suppressed within the state itself, it remained a free prerogative of nations in their dealings with each other. To eliminate this ancient privilege at any earlier stage of political development might have endangered the whole process of internal evolu¬ tion, for liberty within the state, so slowly and so hardly won, had still to be maintained against possible external foes. Thus, as the state developed, it grew, if anything, more jealous of its rights and asserted the claims of sovereignty in the most abso¬ lute terms. The theory of divine right passed from the apologists of kings to those of the nation. There is little prac¬ tical difference between the theory that the king as the head of the state can do no wrong and that which holds that no power exists higher than the state itself and that its own will is final justice. The temporal powers had become something more than the inheritors of the claims of the medieval church. But whereas there had been one church there were several nations, and because each nation was supreme, there was no other arbiter to settle their disputes than war. Thus the more that the national state gained by the reduction of war and disorder within, the more it accentuated the international anarchy without. This meant an added, not a lessened, im¬ portance for the nation’s army and navy. The war system was necessary as an effective instrument of policy in dealing with other nations.