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Порталус

Soviet Union as an Ally, 1919-1940

Дата публикации: 04 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Soviet Russia (1917-53) →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1188914774


Would the Soviet Union have been a reliable partner in a collective-security alliance with Western Europe against Nazi Germany during the interwar years?

Viewpoint: Yes. A Western European alliance with the Soviet Union during the interwar years would have been helpful in deterring German aggression.

Viewpoint: No. Despite its bluster, the Soviet Union was neither ideologically willing nor militarily able to become an Eastern counterweight to Hitler's Germany.

____________________

Although they had defeated Germany in World War I (1914-1918), the nations of Western Europe, particularly Britain and France, feared its potential resurgence and looked for a collective means of resisting it in the 1920s and 1930s. Over the course of these two decades this endeavor included bilateral security alliances with Eastern European nations, faith in international organizations such as the League of Nations to keep the peace, multinational antiwar agreements, lobbying for a formal security commitment from the United States, and the official appeasement of German demands to revise the World War I peace settlement. Yet, all these efforts failed. Germany was not deterred from its aggressive course, and its invasion of Poland in September 1939 drew Britain and France into conflict for the second time in twenty-one years.
Some scholars argue that interwar attempts to create a collective security alliance ignored one promising avenue: alliance with the Soviet Union. Indeed, Imperial Russia had been France's principal ally before World War I, and during that conflict its efforts had tied down enough German troops and resources to give the Western allies a fighting chance. Even though a bloody revolution and civil war had transformed tsarist Russia into a communist dictatorship, its potential as an ally in deterring German aggression was great. Communism and fascism were already strident ideological enemies; Soviet leader Josef Stalin's crash program of industrialization was making Russia into a major military power; and Moscow's focus on domestic development caused it to play down its antagonism to creditors, traders, and other business partners in the capitalist West. Cooperation with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) against Nazi Germany was, in the view of these scholars, a viable option for Britain and France. Only irrational anticommunism led their elite to resist exploring it.
Yet, critics of this argument maintain that the Soviet government would have been neither competent nor reliable as a collective security partner. The U.S.S.R.'s revolutionary ideology made its own immediate interests paramount and rendered its diplomacy fickle and mercenary. Stalin's reorganization of the Soviet economy actually weakened its potential to battle the Germans, and his brutal purges of the 1930s, especially of the Red Army's experienced officer corps, left it totally unprepared for war. Ultimately, when it suited him, Stalin worked to improve relations with Nazi Germany and signed a nonaggression pact with it just days before the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945). What would have happened had the British and French made a more serious attempt to woo Stalin, and would it have succeeded?



Viewpoint: Yes. A Western European alliance with the Soviet Union during the interwar years would have been helpful in deterring German aggression.

The rise of aggressive ambitions of militaristic Japan, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, which denied the rule of international law and sought to overturn the post-World War I (1914-1918) settlement, radically transformed the whole pattern of international relations in the 1930s. Worried by this challenge, particularly by the mounting threat from Japan in the east and from the resurgent Germany in the west, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) gradually abandoned its previous semi-isolationist policy and opposition to the Versailles settlement (1919) and sought to create counterbalances of power against the new threats to its security. At the same time the specter of a new war drew the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies, which Moscow had previously regarded as its main enemies, closer in the face of common danger.

Although the shift toward reconciliation with the West was a real breakthrough in Soviet foreign policy, some important elements of this new course were detectable even in the late 1920s, when the Soviets, anticipating troublesome international developments, signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), which denounced war as an instrument of foreign policy, signaling their willingness to adopt international norms and patterns of behavior accepted in the Western world. Moreover, the Soviet Union constructed similar arrangements applicable more practically to its immediate neighbors. In 1929 the U.S.S.R., Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Turkey, and Persia signed a protocol that affirmed the Kellogg-Briand Pact. In the 1930s the new reconciliatory trend in Soviet foreign policy came into full bloom. In 1931-1932 the Soviets signed a series of nonaggression pacts with Afghanistan, Turkey, Lithuania, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, France, and Italy. At the World Economic Conference in London in 1933 the Soviet delegation proposed a multilateral convention defining aggression. The convention was signed by the U.S.S.R., Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan.

The new course of Soviet foreign policy, which could be summed up by the term collective security, was aimed at developing formal international arrangements whereby protection against aggression would be maintained by the strength and actions of an international community and peace-loving allied countries. The spirit of this new Soviet policy was fundamentally pragmatic and accommodative. While lowering revolutionary rhetoric, it had a sort of commonsense and business-like approach and favored establishing close ties with the democracies of Europe, the United States, international bodies such as the League of Nations, and, generally, all forces that strove to maintain a system of collective security against the forces of aggression and fascism.

A personal factor was of significant importance in this new Soviet policy. Maksim Litvinov, people's commissar for foreign affairs (foreign minister) from 1930 to 1939, declared that peace is "indivisible," and he became a convincing spokesman for Soviet cooperation with the West. While the concept of collective security did not transform Litvinov's internal Marxist-Leninist beliefs, he was ideally equipped to present Moscow's foreign policy in a new, attractive guise, for he was an old Bolshevik with an English wife and strong personal ties with the West. Since Litvinov was a Jew, few could doubt that he was strongly anti-Nazi. Harry Hopkins, an aide to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II (1939-1945), remarked that Litvinov "had a Western kind of mind."

While playing a major role in the formulation and realization of Soviet foreign policy, Litvinov, contrary to some Western assumptions, never made policy. He merely executed the strategic decisions adopted by Soviet leader Josef Stalin and the Politburo. The decision to cooperate with the West was based on a cold-blooded calculation of Soviet national interests rather than on sympathy toward Western democracies or pacifist intentions. As Stalin put it at the Seventeenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (1934), "we were not in the past oriented towards Germany, and we are not now oriented towards Poland and France. Our orientation, past and present, is exclusively towards the USSR."

The rationale underpinning the Soviet approach to collective security, which made the new course stable and firm, was based on an understanding of the growing internal and external insecurities of the state. Internally, the Soviets experienced enormous and destabilizing costs of their large-scale socio-economic transformation (collectivization and industrialization) and desperately needed economic cooperation with the West. Externally, the rise of Germany in Europe and Japan in the Far East posed, for the first time in Russia's history, a two-front security threat of the first magnitude. This combination of external threats and potential internal instability made the search for collective security and new cooperation with the West an urgent imperative for Moscow. The Soviet Union, with its growing economic potential and formidable armed forces, emerged as a leading advocate and a determined promoter of collective security in Europe and beyond.

The League of Nations, an international organization created in 1919 to preserve peace and ensure cooperation between states, was the primary international institution supporting collective security. Moscow, marking a fundamental shift in Soviet foreign policy, abandoned its long-term hostility toward the League. Japanese and German withdrawal from the League in 1933 presented an opportunity to the Soviet Union to gain international respectability. In September 1934 the U.S.S.R. joined the League of Nations, hoping to meet the growing threat of aggression and to organize an effective system of international security.

The ability of the League of Nations to resist aggression was tested in 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. The Soviets called upon the League to punish the aggressor, but the Western powers, which hoped to exploit German-Italian disagreements at that time, hesitated to apply the most effective sanctions--an embargo on oil supplies to Italy. Diminution of the League's prestige and authority as a result of its failure to deal effectively with this aggression, as well as the lack of progress at the International Disarmament Conference, which had been meeting in Geneva since 1932, strengthened the Russian search for new alliances and bilateral security cooperation as another road toward collective security. The Soviets were quick to understand this reality and redirected their foreign policy.

Moscow revitalized its ties with France, while the latter in its turn tried to erect a European alliance system, including the Soviet Union, to contain Germany. The rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies proceeded promisingly with the negotiations of British foreign secretary Anthony Eden and French prime minister Pierre Laval in Moscow, in March and May 1935, respectively. On 3 May 1935 the U.S.S.R. and France signed a Treaty of Mutual Assistance, in which they pledged to come to one another's assistance in the event of unprovoked aggression. Nevertheless, there was not much trust between the Soviets and their Western partners. When on 16 May 1935 Czechoslovakia (a French ally) and the U.S.S.R. concluded a similar mutual assistance pact, both parties agreed that the Soviet Union would come to aid Czechoslovakia only if France acted similarly in fulfillment of its responsibility within the Franco-Czechoslovak treaty. Later this escape clause played a tragic role in the collapse of Czechoslovakia. Even earlier, on 16 November 1933, the Soviet Union and the United States established diplomatic relations. The Soviet-American rapprochement was another integral part of Russia's collective security policy.

The Soviet turn toward partnership with the Western democracies also required a shift in policy of the Communist International (Comintern)--the Moscow-based and Soviet-dominated international association of the world's communist parties. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern that met in Moscow in July 1935 called for the establishment of a united front (Popular Front) with moderate socialists, liberals, and other political forces that favored resistance to fascism and aggression. This step was a radical departure from Comintern's earlier opposition to "reformist and bourgeois" parties. Popular Front governments came to power in France and Spain in 1936. On one hand, the introduction of the Popular Front strategy demonstrated Moscow's long-term commitment to cooperation with democracies. On the other hand, by promoting broad antifascist coalitions, it widened political support inside Western Europe for Soviet collective security initiatives.

The policy of collective security in its multilateral (the League of Nations) and bilateral forms was put to the test by growing Nazi aggression and instability in Europe. In March of 1936 Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of the Locarno Treaty (1925). The League of Nations and Western powers failed to either act with conviction or intervene militarily. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), in which Germany and Italy decisively intervened, accelerated the disintegration of the collective security in Europe. The Soviets, initially maintaining an official policy of noninterference, acted cautiously. Seeing that Paris and London's neutral stand in fact did nothing about German and Italian actions in Spain, however, the Soviet Union began limited intervention in Spain to help the loyalists. These developments undermined the Franco-Soviet alliance and caused growing Soviet disillusionment about collective security.

In March 1938, immediately after the Anschluss (union) of Germany and Austria and despite Western passivity, Litvinov declared the Soviet Union's readiness to begin discussions with other powers about practical measures to punish the aggressors. Again, Britain and France, hoping to appease German leader Adolf Hitler, failed to respond to the Soviet initiative.

Throughout the Czechoslovak (Sudeten) Crisis (1938) the Soviet government repeatedly affirmed its willingness to support all decisions and recommendations of the League of Nations to combat aggression and preserve peace, irrespective of whether these decisions coincided with the Soviet immediate national interests. The Soviets declared their readiness to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia, provided France did likewise. But France and Britain ignored the Soviet Union and tried to come to peaceful terms with Hitler at Czechoslovakia's expense. Despite the fact that the French refusal to help Czechoslovakia against Germany had formally freed the U.S.S.R. from the obligation to render aid to Prague, the Soviets were ready to provide military support to the Czechs if their government wished it. The Czechoslovak government, however, opted to concede to the German-British- French ultimatum adopted in Munich about the settlement of the crisis, and ceded the Sudetenland to Germany.

The question of whether the Soviet Union was really ready to provide Czechoslovakia with effective military support remains a matter of controversy. On one hand, many Western observers pointed out that the Red Army, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Purge (1930s), was in no condition to operate against a powerful foe beyond the Soviet borders, while neither Poland nor Romania (the U.S.S.R.'s immediate neighbors) was prepared to accept Soviet troops on their way to Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, many critics of official British and French policy at the time, such as Winston Churchill and Joseph Paul-Boncour, insisted that unique opportunities to stop the Nazis were lost when the Soviet offers of cooperation were rebuffed. Moreover, in 1938, before Munich, most German generals expected that a simultaneous war with Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia would be a disaster. For sure, Soviet military aid to Czechoslovakia would have been indirect but still a potent strategic factor in the situation. Thus, during the Sudeten Crisis the Soviet Union proved to be the only country that kept faith with its international obligations in relations with Czechoslovakia and collective security in Europe.

Moscow drew the worst possible conclusions from Munich. The Soviets found out that the shortsighted Western democracies ignored the Soviet offer to help them and accepted Czechoslovakia's dismemberment by Germany. With the evident failure of the collective security policy to halt German aggression, Stalin removed Litvinov from the Foreign Ministry and ended the pro-Western policy identified with him. The Soviets again changed their foreign policy course and became amenable to approaches from Berlin. This shift culminated in the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August 1939. When Britain and France went to war against Germany the following month, the Soviet Union was already a virtual ally of the latter.

During the 1930s the Soviet Union was a determined champion of collective security and a reliable partner for a possible alliance against Nazi Germany. Western Europe's resistance to forming a firm alliance with the Soviet Union was indeed an irresponsible and ill-considered rejection of a viable strategic option. It should be noted also that many misunderstandings rooted in the past, continued suspicions and antagonisms, and mutual ideological hostility precluded politically necessary adjustments between the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies and undermined long-term and stable security cooperation between Moscow and the West. The failure of collective security was to bring tragedy to the Soviet Union and to all Europe.

-- Peter Rainow, San Mateo, California


Viewpoint: No. Despite its bluster, the Soviet Union was neither ideologically willing nor militarily able to become an Eastern counterweight to Hitler's Germany.

The question of Soviet willingness to engage in collective security arrangements is important to scholars looking to make sense both of World War II (1939-1945) and the origins of the Cold War. If the Soviets were willing and able to engage in a revival of the World War I (1914-1918) Triple Entente (Britain, France, and Russia) focused on countering resurgent Germany, then the Western democracies failed to avail themselves of a genuine opportunity to halt German leader Adolf Hitler's aggression earlier and at much lower cost than they did. Arguably even more important, the Western democracies' failure to enter a collective security arrangement might justify Soviet leader Josef Stalin's depredations against his Eastern European neighbors between 1939 and 1941, and the later activities of the Red Army and secret police in "liberating" Eastern Europe. After all, the suggestion of Western hostility inherent in the democracies' refusal even to consider a security arrangement in their best interests because it also would protect the Soviets suggests hostility that made bold unilateral action by Stalin understandable.

A careful consideration of the historical record in the 1930s and beyond makes clear that while the Soviets made some gestures toward collective security, reasons of ideology compelled them to make these overtures in hopes of emboldening the British and French to launch a war with Germany. The Soviets expected such a war to have the same revolutionary consequences for Western Europe that World War I had for Imperial Russia. While reasons of national self-interest eventually might have drawn Stalin into a war in Central Europe, he was not serious about collective security with capitalist nations. The Soviet dictator made this stance clear with his performance during the Czechoslovak Crisis that culminated with the Munich Conference in 1938. Perhaps more important, any Soviet military assistance in the 1930s would have been of questionable value given the state of its armed services at that time. The democracies would not have been allying themselves with the relentless, battle-proven Red Army of the later years of World War II. Rather, any assistance would have been provided by the utterly inept Soviet military whose abundant limitations were on display against the Finns during the Winter War (1939-1940).

Soviet foreign minister Maksim Litvinov made several suggestions for possible combinations against the growing threat of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, but there is good reason to doubt Soviet willingness actually to engage in any meaningful efforts against the Nazis. While any German collapse likely would have brought the Soviets into a war to ensure that they got their share of the spoils, R. C. Raack, in Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945: The Origins of the Cold War (1995), makes a strong case that Soviet overtures to the West were designed chiefly to encourage the West to attack Nazi Germany. Not anticipating the rapidity with which the French collapsed in the face of the German onslaught, Stalin expected that France, Britain, and Germany would bog down into another costly bloodletting such as occurred on the Western Front during World War I. Stalin believed the cost and destructiveness of this war would cause the collapse of social structures in those nations. After they had bloodied themselves sufficiently, ravaged their armies, and caused unrest among their populations, the nations would have been ripe for the fresh Red Army to assist revolutionary forces in seizing power. To facilitate this revolutionary process, and not to encourage a resurrection of the World War I Triple Entente, the Soviet made efforts toward collective security agreements.

Another issue facing the West would have been the cost of reaching an agreement with Stalin. Put simply, Hitler was willing to concede Soviet domination over parts of Eastern Europe, with a cynical disregard for the people of those nations. Given Hitler's disdain for Slavs, Jews, and other Eastern Europeans, he could hardly have been troubled over the fate of the people he was abandoning to Stalin's tender mercies. This "sacrifice" was a cost Hitler could pay easily to ensure that the Soviets did not interfere with his conquest of Poland. In contrast, it is hard to see how Stalin and the Western democracies could have reached a similar agreement in peacetime. The leaders of Western democracies could hardly have been so casually cynical about the disposal of populations, and Stalin demanded precisely such accommodations in his limited talks with Britain and France in 1939.

Those unconvinced about Stalin's brutality in making territorial demands need only consider his performance with his newfound American and British allies after the German attack on the Soviet Union, which commenced in June 1941. Even when his regime's survival was in peril, Stalin continued to demand that his new democratic allies recognize the territorial plunder he had obtained from his agreement with Hitler. It is unlikely that Western nations, at least before World War II, would have been willing to give Stalin any such blandishments. It was true that in the final analysis the Western democracies did virtually nothing to prevent Stalin from taking much of what he wanted in Eastern Europe after the war anyway. Wartime cooperation broke down less over Stalin's disdain for the principles of the Atlantic Charter (1941) and the Declaration on Liberated Europe (1945) than over his refusal to permit even a fig leaf of democratic procedure to conceal his naked brutality. The West was willing to deal with Stalin on his terms, however, only after the astonishingly rapid collapse of the Western European democracies in the spring of 1940 demonstrated the necessity of Soviet participation in the anti-Nazi coalition. Moreover, in the wake of the German attack it was possible for those in the West to read events backward and see Stalin's efforts between 1939 and 1941 as part of a shrewd strategy to prepare for the coming war. Western qualms about Soviet acquisitiveness by the end of World War II were assuaged by the perception that four years of grinding warfare against the Nazis in the East had both purified the Soviets of some of their more unseemly qualities and earned for Moscow the right to take additional territory to assure its security needs.

Additional evidence of Stalin's unsuitability for participation in a collective security arrangement lay in his control of Poland and his attempt to establish a Soviet-style government over Finland. These events also suggested strong ideological incompatibility with Western ideas of self-determination and the territorial and administrative integrity of small nations. Stalin was unwilling to permit even a rump Poland to retain some vestiges of independence. During the Winter War (1939-1940) Stalin presaged his postwar schemes for dominance in Eastern Europe by organizing a Finnish People's Democratic Government that was to be established in the first Finnish town that Red forces captured. The Soviets planned to install this government in Helsinki as soon as they overran the Finns. Again, such naked designs on domination of neighboring territory would have been difficult for Western democracies to accept.

While Stalin's desire to impose a Communist government on Finland would have posed problems for Western democracies looking to make a diplomatic deal with him, he had greater limitations as an ally that were on display during his conflict with the Finns. Arguably, even more problematic was the disarray into which Stalin had plunged his military through his purge of leaders and his own inept leadership. The purge was a public display of Communist cynicism and brutality that could not help but raise doubt about Stalin in the West. The damage done to the Soviet military, combined with ineptitude, was amply displayed during the Winter War. The Soviets, with 171 million people, struggled for months to defeat 3.5 million Finns. Stalin's military leaders underestimated the fighting capacity of the Finns, misjudged the difficulty of maneuvering a mechanized army through subarctic wilderness lacking finished roads, and appeared completely to misunderstand what was involved in winter fighting. While there was much in the Finnish performance that complicated the Red Army's efforts, the Finnish leadership understood their difficulties in trying to face down the Soviets. During Soviet efforts to arrange the surrender of Finnish territory before they launched their attack, Finnish marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim was imploring his government to reach some settlement because his army was not prepared or supplied for war against the Soviets.

If Soviet ineptitude in the Winter War was not enough to raise doubts about Soviet value to a collective security arrangement with the West, their performance during the Czechoslovak Crisis (1938) demonstrated Stalin's lack of interest in taking meaningful steps in concert with Western powers. The Soviets were bound by an alliance with the Czechs that took effect when the French acted in accordance with their defensive treaty with the Czechs. Yet, during the crisis that culminated with the agreement at Munich to surrender the Sudetenland to the Nazis, the Soviets made no effort to prod the French or Czechs into action. Had Stalin been seriously committed to collective security, he had the perfect opportunity to do so in a crisis situation in which the French were committed to act, and the Czechs were confronted by an adversary that could be fought on fairly favorable terms given the rugged terrain of the Sudeten Mountains. The logical time and place to try collective security was at hand, yet the Soviets did not take advantage of it.

Raack argues that the reason the Soviets made no move toward collective security at a time when it could have paid dividends was because of Stalin's determination to see the British, French, and Germans embroiled in war. Had Stalin taken steps to signal the U.S.S.R.'s willingness to enter the fight, this move might have conjured up German visions of another two-front war against France and Russia. Given Germany's experience twenty years earlier, Raack argues, this situation might have induced restraint in Hitler that was the opposite of what Stalin wished to see. In other words, the Soviets were more interested in seeing the rest of Europe consumed by war than they were in taking meaningful steps that might have restrained Hitler and prevented war.

A final argument against Soviet willingness to address collective security was their performance in the summer of 1939. By this time the Western nations saw clearly the true magnitude of the threat posed by Hitler, and their diplomats were looking for common ground with the Soviets from which to build an anti-Nazi security apparatus. Negotiations between the Soviets and Western diplomats dragged on that summer, inconclusively. Meanwhile, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop appeared in Moscow and was able to negotiate an agreement with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov in a single day. This pact was not attributable to particular skill on the part of von Ribbentrop, nor of Molotov. Rather, it was a logical result of Stalin's greater comfort level in working with another totalitarian dictator and his determination to facilitate the general European war from which he hoped to profit.

It is true that Western leaders were slow to understand and respond to the truly revolutionary threat Hitler posed to European civilization. Yet, when they were ready to coordinate defense efforts with the Soviets, at a time when Stalin supposedly was already concerned about possible eventual German aggression, Stalin did not respond like a man serious about addressing the threat or preventing war. It was neither the hostility of capitalists nor the obtuse diplomacy of the West that prevented agreement with the Soviet Union. Rather, it was Stalin's revolutionary agenda and confidence that it would be promoted by another general European war that prevented such agreement. The Western democracies ought not to have felt guilty over the slowness to act, only their foolishness in failing to see the duplicity of the Soviet dictator who in a couple of years would be their cobelligerent in the effort against the Nazis.

-- John A. Soares Jr., Cincinnati, Ohio


KELLOGG-BRIAND PACT (1928)

The President of the German Reich, the President of the United States of America, His Majesty the King of the Belgians, the President of the French Republic, His Majesty the King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, Emperor of India, His Majesty the King of Italy, His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, the President of the Republic of Poland, the President of the Czechoslovak Republic.

Deeply sensible of their solemn duty to promote the welfare of mankind;

Persuaded that the time has come when a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated;

Convinced that all changes in their relations with one another should be sought only by pacific means and be the result of a peaceful and orderly process, and that any signatory Power which shall hereafter seek to promote its national interests by resort to war should be denied the benefits furnished by this treaty;

Hopeful that, encouraged by their example, all the other nations of the world will join in this humane endeavor and by adhering to the present treaty as soon as it comes into force bring their peoples within the scope of its beneficent provisions, thus uniting the civilized nations of the world in a common renunciation of war as an instrument of their national policy;

Have decided to conclude a treaty and for that purpose have appointed as their respective plenipotentiaries:

The President of the German Reich: Dr. Gustav Stresemann, Minister for Foreign Affairs;

The President of the United States of America: The Honorable Frank B. Kellogg, Secretary of State;

His Majesty the King of the Belgians: Mr. Paul Hymans, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Minister of State;

The President of the French Republic: Mr. Aristide Briand, Minister for Foreign Affairs;

His Majesty the King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, Emperor of India:

For Great Britain and Northern Ireland and all parts of the British Empire which are not separate members of the League of Nations:

The Right Honourable Lord Cushendun, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Acting Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs;

For the Dominion of Canada: The Right Honourable William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs;

For the Commonwealth of Australia: The Honourable Alexander John McLachlan, Member of the Executive Federal Council;

For the Dominion of New Zealand: The Honourable Sir Christopher James Parr, High Commissioner for New Zealand in Great Britain;

For the Union of South Africa: The Honourable Jacobus Stephanus Smit, High Commissioner for the Union of South Africa in Great Britain;

For the Irish Free State: Mr. William Thomas Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council;

For India: The Right Honourable Lord Cushendun, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Acting Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs;

His Majesty the King of Italy: Count Gaetano Manzoini, His Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at Paris;

His Majesty the Emperor of Japan: Count Uchida, Privy Councillor;

The President of the Republic of Poland: Mr. A. Zaleski, Minister for Foreign Affairs;

The President of the Czechoslovak Republic: Dr. Eduard Benes, Minister for Foreign Affairs;

who, having communicated to one another their full powers found in good and due form have agreed upon the following articles:

ARTICLE I

The high contracting parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.

ARTICLE II

The high contracting parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.

ARTICLE III

The present treaty shall be ratified by the high contracting parties named in the preamble in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements, and shall take effect as between them as soon as all their several instruments of ratification shall have been deposited at Washington.

This treaty shall, when it has come into effect as prescribed in the preceding paragraph, remain open as long as may be necessary for adherence by all the other Powers of the world. Every instrument evidencing the adherence of a Power shall be deposited at Washington and the treaty shall immediately upon such deposit become effective as between the Power thus adhering and the other Powers parties hereto.

It shall be the duty of the Government of the United States to furnish each government named in the preamble and every government subsequently adhering to this treaty with a certified copy of the treaty and of every instrument of ratification or adherence. It shall also be the duty of the Government of the United States telegraphically to notify such governments immediately upon the deposit with it of each instrument of ratification or adherence.

In faith whereof the respective Plenipotentiaries have signed this Treaty in the French and English languages both texts having equal force, and hereunto affix their seals.

Done at Paris the twenty-seventh day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight.

Source: "Treaty Providing for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy," World War I Document Archive, Brigham Young University http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1918p/ kellogg-briand.html.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Michael Jabara Carley, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II (Chicago: Dee, 1999).

John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

R. H. Haigh, D. S. Morris, and A. R. Peters, Soviet Foreign Policy, the League of Nations, and Europe, 1917-1939 (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower, 1986; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1986).

Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-1939 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).

R. C. Raack, Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945: The Origins of the Cold War (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1995).

William R. Trotter, A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 04 сентября 2007 года

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