IB History Search for Collective Security and Disarmament Notes

Optimism, Then Collapse: The League's Security Architecture, 1925-1933

The High Point of Optimism (1925-1928)

1. The Locarno Treaties (1925): negotiated outside the League but compatible with it, Germany accepted its western borders with France and Belgium and entered a network of arbitration agreements.
   1. The gap that mattered later: Germany's eastern borders, with Poland and Czechoslovakia, were not similarly guaranteed.
   2. How Locarno actually worked: German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann accepted the western settlement, while Britain and Italy guaranteed the Rhineland pact and promised action against a clear violator. The agreements encouraged the withdrawal of Allied troops from the first Rhineland occupation zone and produced the phrase "the spirit of Locarno."
2. Germany's admission to the League (1926): Germany was admitted in September 1926 and given a permanent Council seat, giving the organization the appearance of universality.
3. The Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928): sixty-three signatories, including Germany, Italy, and Japan, committed to renounce war as an instrument of national policy.
   1. Where the idea came from: French foreign minister Aristide Briand first proposed a bilateral treaty with the United States against war. American secretary of state Frank Kellogg broadened it into a multilateral pact, which fifteen states signed in Paris in August 1928 before dozens more joined, including the Soviet Union. It did not define aggression or provide for sanctions against a violator.

The Geneva Protocol (1924): The Road Not Taken

1. The plan: the Geneva Protocol tried to link compulsory arbitration, collective sanctions, and disarmament in a single framework, treating any state that refused arbitration as an aggressor subject to economic and potentially military measures from other League members.
2. Who backed it: British Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and French prime minister Edouard Herriot supported the initiative, and the League Assembly approved it in October 1924.
3. Why it collapsed: the British Conservative government that took office soon afterward rejected the agreement, fearing undefined military obligations across the empire. Without British participation, the Protocol could not provide the security France required, and its failure showed how a single domestic election could overturn an international security plan.

The Disarmament Failure

1. Unequal disarmament: Germany had been disarmed under the Versailles Treaty on the understanding that other states would follow. Britain and France, with large empires to defend, refused to disarm to German levels.
2. The World Disarmament Conference (from February 1932): finally convened at Geneva after years of preparation, just as the Manchuria crisis was exposing the League's weakness elsewhere.
   1. How the conference unfolded: more than sixty states attended. France linked arms reductions to an international security force, Germany insisted on equal rights in armaments, and Britain tried to mediate through standardized weapons categories, but no common definition separated offensive from defensive equipment. In December 1932 the major powers accepted Germany's equality of rights in principle, only for Hitler to use that concession to justify rearmament rather than negotiated limitation after becoming chancellor in January 1933.
3. German walkout and withdrawal: the new German government under Franz von Papen demanded equality with other powers in armaments. When France refused, Germany walked out. Hitler withdrew Germany from both the conference and the League entirely in October 1933.

Preparing for Disarmament, 1925-1932

1. The Preparatory Commission: the League created this body in 1925 to develop proposals for a general disarmament conference, but delegates spent years debating whether to limit personnel, weapons, military spending, or the capacity to mobilize.
2. Diverging national positions: France wanted international guarantees and assistance before reducing its army, Germany demanded equality with the levels imposed on it at Versailles, Britain sought reductions but opposed costly continental commitments, and the Soviet Union proposed sweeping disarmament while distrusting both capitalist states and League procedures.
3. Why the groundwork was so slow: governments disagreed over whether trained reserves and paramilitary forces should count as armaments, and verification proved difficult because states feared revealing military information, so the Commission took years to produce a draft convention while economic and political conditions deteriorated.
   1. A precedent outside the League: the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922 had already limited major warship tonnage among the naval powers, but it addressed naval competition alone and created no equivalent system for European land security.

Why the Security System Collapsed

1. The Great Depression: intensified unemployment, protectionism, nationalism, and distrust after 1929, so governments concentrated on domestic survival and became less willing to accept international costs.
2. Manchuria and Hitler: Japanese action in Manchuria showed that condemnation did not guarantee effective enforcement, and Hitler's rise placed German revisionism under a regime committed to rapid rearmament rather than negotiated limitation.
3. An impossible combination: disarmament failed because states wanted incompatible combinations of equality, security, freedom of action, and low military cost. By 1933 collective security remained an aspiration rather than an automatic response to aggression.