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2020 | Book

The League of Nations and the Study of International Relations Read chapter Read first chapter

The Story of International Relations, Part One

Cold-Blooded Idealists

Author: Prof. Jo-Anne Pemberton

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Palgrave Studies in International Relations

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book is the first volume in a trilogy that traces the development of the academic subject of International Relations, or what was often referred to in the interwar years as International Studies. This first volume takes on the origins of International Relations, beginning with the League of Nations and the International Studies Conference in Berlin in 1928 and tracing its development through the Paris Peace Conference, the quest for cooperation in the Pacific, the Institute of Pacific Relations and lessons from Copenhagen, Shanghai and Manchuria. This project is an impressive and exhaustive consideration of the evolution of IR and is aptly published in celebration of the discipline's centenary.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. The League of Nations and the Study of International Relations
Abstract
The development of international studies in the aftermath of the First World War is discussed in relation to earlier and more contemporary efforts to institutionalise international intellectual cooperation. The main focus here is the creation and early activities of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) of the League of Nations (LON) and the principal institution of the executive arm of Intellectual Cooperation: the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC).
The campaign to establish an intellectual cooperation organisation to sit alongside the LON’s other technical organisations was waged by groups who shared the view that for the LON to succeed it must be grounded in a fundamental agreement among minds. It is a mark of the triumph of this view that the expression League of Minds became part of the jargon of the League.
Alfred E. Zimmern participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He was appointed deputy director of the IIIC in 1926. He too thought that the LON would have to live in people’s minds if it were to live at all. In 1927 Zimmern thus began organising within the framework of the IIIC a conference of savants interested in the scientific study of international relations.
Jo-Anne Pemberton
Chapter 2. The League of Nations and Origins of the International Studies Conference
Abstract
The aftermath of the war saw the appearance of a growing number of private organisations devoted to the study of international affairs, one such being Zimmern’s Geneva School of International Studies, which he founded in 1925. In that same year, the first institution devoted to organisation of international studies on an international basis was formed: the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR).
The second such body was the International Studies Conference (ISC). Largely modelled on the IPR, the ISC was the outgrowth of the conference that Zimmern had initiated and which was convened under the heading of the Committee of Experts for the Coordination of Higher International Studies. The conference took place in March 1928 in Berlin within the confines of the German Political Academy (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik). Founded in 1920 by Zimmern’s friend Ernst Jäckh, the academy was the venue at which in March 1927 Shotwell had outlined the first suggestion of what became the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy (1928), also known as the Pact of Paris. Shotwell presented a draft of this treaty at the IPR’s second conference, which took place in Honolulu in July 1927.
Jo-Anne Pemberton
Chapter 3. The Paris Peace Conference, Racial Equality and the Shandong Question
Abstract
At the Peace Conference, the Japanese delegation proposed on three occasions that a racial equality amendment be included in the LON Covenant. Members of the American delegation and its advisers at first attempted to accommodate the Japanese proposal, albeit while working to ensure that any amendment along such lines would have no legal effect on immigration policies involving racial restrictions such as those of the United States and Australia.
The rejection of the racial equality amendment was used by the Japanese delegation as a bargaining tool in respect to Japan’s other chief desiderata at the conference: Japan’s ultimately successful claim to the former German concessions and leaseholds in the province of Shandong which Japanese forces had seized from Germany during the war.
Little comforted by assurances that China would receive a sympathetic hearing should it take her case to the LON following its creation, the Chinese delegates requested permission to sign the Treaty of Versailles with a reservation to its Shandong clauses. This request was denied. Thus on June 28, 1919, the Chinese delegation absented itself from the signing ceremony. On September 10, China signed the Treaty of Peace with Austria, thereby gaining entry to the LON.
Jo-Anne Pemberton
Chapter 4. The Quest for a Machinery of Cooperation in the Pacific: The Covenant Rejected, the Washington Conference and the 1924 Exclusion Laws
Abstract
Effectively exploited by President Wilson’s Republican critics, the Shandong decision was critical in turning American opinion against the Treaty of Versailles and saw a heightening of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States.
With a view to normalising relations with Japan with which the United States was engaged in naval rivalry, the United States invited Japan, China and certain European powers to a conference in Washington on the subject of limitation of armament and on Pacific and Far Eastern questions to begin sitting in November 1921. Japan and China reached an agreement over Shandong outside of but concurrent with the conference.
The détente between the United States and Japan that followed the Washington Conference was interrupted in May 1924 with the coming into effect of an immigration act which for the first time authorised, with a few exceptions, the exclusion of Japanese immigrants as a national group from the United States.
The founders of the IPR were greatly troubled by rising racial tension in the Pacific, fearing that any future war among Pacific nations would be embittered by racial antagonism. Hence, the main items on the agenda of the IPR’s first conference in 1925 were immigration restrictions and interracial relations in the Pacific.
Jo-Anne Pemberton
Chapter 5. The Institute of Pacific Relations 1927–1929 and the Evolution of the International Studies Conference 1928–1930
Abstract
The IPR conference of 1927 spent more time discussing China’s relations with foreign powers than any other subject due to the presence of British representatives at the conference. Participants stressed the need for diplomatic machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes specific to the region given that the two most significant Pacific powers, namely, the United States and the USSR, were not members of the LON.
In view of the Berlin meeting of 1928, a second meeting of experts interested in international affairs was convened in London in March 1929 under the heading of Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations (CISSIR). The next meeting was held at the offices of the IIIC at the Palais Royal in Paris in June 1930. The meeting resolved that the maintenance of peace depended on the extension of teaching in the field of international affairs. In late 1929, the CISSIR began to lay the groundwork for its transformation into an international study conference along the lines of the IPR, and thus it invited the IPR’s research secretary, John B. Condliffe, to address the 1930 conference.
Jo-Anne Pemberton
Chapter 6. International Studies in 1931: From Copenhagen to Shanghai
Abstract
The 1931 meeting of CISSIR was held in Copenhagenwhere it was resolved that the CISSIR should be turned into a study conference along the lines of IPR. After having endorsed this proposal, the meeting chose as the focus for the CISSIR’s first study conference the following topic: the international implications of the relations between the government authorities and private economic activities with particular reference to the new forms of public control and supervision, national or international, that had grown up since the war.
The third conference of the IPR took place in Shanghai in 1931 in the wake of Japanese military action in Manchuria in September. A Japanese delegate emphasised that Manchuria was Japan’s economic life-line. A Chinese delegate insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria and pointed to the international rules governing the use of force. The same Chinese delegate took issue with the suggestion that the LON was not competent to deal with the Manchurian crisis. There was a strong feeling at the conference that the LON was too close to its European origins to serve all the needs of Pacific actors; however, participants understood that the future of the LON was bound up with events in Manchuria.
Jo-Anne Pemberton
Chapter 7. The Lessons of Manchuria
Abstract
The LON addressed the Manchurian crisis in the period dating from September 1931 to February 1933. Washington’s policy of qualified cooperation in respect to the crisis presented problems. The United States' doctrine of non-recognition of situations brought about in violation of the Pact of Paris informed the LON’s deliberations. The conclusions of the LON’s Commission of Enquiry and their adoption in February 1933 led to Japan’s announcement of its withdrawal from the LON.
The Manchurian crisis was an acid test of the LON’s collective security machinery. The LON failed the test: no European power was willing to embark on a military expedition in the Asia-Pacific region to enforce the covenant. Nor was the United States willing to take action beyond the framework of the consultative provisions of the Pact of Paris and the doctrine of non-recognition. Zimmern observed that the failure to enforce the covenant showed that international law had developed in advance of a worldwide social consciousness. Others pointed out that the effect of the agreement emanating from the Washington Conference had been to leave Japan in an almost unassailable position in a region where the powers had important interests.
Jo-Anne Pemberton
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
The Story of International Relations, Part One
Author
Prof. Jo-Anne Pemberton
Copyright Year
2020
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-14331-2
Print ISBN
978-3-030-14330-5
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2