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The Peace Movement: a Necessary Corrective

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The Peace Movement: a Necessary Corrective . FEATURE REVIEW The Peace Movement: A Necessary Corrective Cecelia Lynch. Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, .xi+. Notes, index. $. (cloth). $. (paper). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/25/4/701/337140 by guest on 29 September 2021 Matthew Evangelista. Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, .ix+. Preface, notes, index. $. (cloth). In our frequent focus on leading diplomats and practitioners of statecraft, we tend to downplay nongovernmental individuals and agencies, that is, people or groups that work, at least in part, outside of traditional political channels. At best, they are perceived as bit players, seldom occupying center stage. One group of nongovernmental agencies in particular, peace movements, is additionally handicapped, for it is seen as at best naive, at worst destructive. According to conventional wisdom not yet fundamentally challenged, peace movements naively sought disarmament at any price, even doing so in the face of predatory and genocidal powers. They thereby endangered the very world stability they sought to preserve. In their respective books, Cecelia Lynch and Matthew Evangelista take issue with such views. Lynch has the more foreboding task, that of recovering the reputation of the peace movement between the settlement and the outbreak of World War II. She does include a prefatory chapter on American and British movements, when Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts established societies, as well as a concluding chapter dealing with the role played by such groups in constructing the United Nations. The heart of her study, however, includes a defense of peace activity during the interwar period. Accusations against the peace movements are indeed serious. According to a long-dominant “realist” school, British and American peace movements (and obviously their counterparts elsewhere) misread crucial elements of security and power at the exact time the dictators made their bid for world supremacy. At the very least, they helped create a climate of opinion whereby appeasement and isolationism predominated, in the process helping to create a devastating global conflict. In fact, the “realists” saw the interwar period as the example par excellence of irresponsible action. Lynch notes that much of the classic literature is replete with highly weighted juxtapositions, revealed in the very D H, Vol. ,No. (Fall ). © The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishers, Main Street, Malden, MA, , USA and Cowley Road, Oxford, OXJF, UK. : book titles of their proponents: Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (); John Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (); and Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics (). Such scholars had more pragmatic disciples. By tacitly invoking “realist” analyses of the thirties, policy makers as diverse as Anthony Eden, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush defended their militant stands against Egypt, the Soviet Union, and Iraq. (Lynch does not mention the most famous use of such “realism,” the Johnson administration’s equation of Nazi Germany and North Vietnam.) Lynch stresses that no scholarship, past or present, finds the peace movement responsible for any economic or strategic decision of the period. She also notes Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/25/4/701/337140 by guest on 29 September 2021 that the “realist” school so predominant in the fifties and early sixties has given way to other interpretations, including a “corporatist” model, though a group of “neo-realists” has revived balance-of-power analysis. She realizes that, contrary to stereotype, many peace activists were not “holistic” reformers, seeking to transform entire lifestyles and economic systems. In her treatment of the British peace movement in the s, Lynch particu- larly challenges the type of indictment espoused in historian E. H. Carr’s Twenty Years Crisis,– (d ed., ). In his own particular “realist” spin, Carr found that the very peace groups that defined a collective good represented the powerful and the prosperous; therefore, they acted as unwitting agents of hegemonic economic interests. Directly challenging Carr, Lynch stresses that the peace movement sought solutions – universal membership in the League of Nations, equality of status in armament – that would weaken the particu- laristic interests of their own nation-state. In confronting a more general criticism, she denies that peace activists naively believed that a League of Nations split between status quo powers and embittered revisionist ones could ensure peace. Furthermore, they did not see a mandate system administered by colonial powers as encouraging either self-determination or economic equality. They saw neither the League nor the Kellogg Pact as nostrums. Any “outlawry of war” lacked real meaning in itself, only being significant if it led to arbitration and disarmament. British peace groups preferred such “realist” options as the Washington Naval Conference of –, the Locarno treaties of , and the abortive of Coolidge (Geneva) Naval Conference of . Most such bodies backed the Geneva Protocol of although it included economic and military sanctions. In covering the thirties, Lynch takes issue with the claim that British peace groups, spearheading an amorphous “public opinion,” exhibited a weak-kneed sympathy for Germany,interfered with prudent foreign policy imperatives, and delayed needed military preparedness. By , in the wake of the World Disarmament Conference, few in the peace movement believed that demilita- rization was attainable. During the Ethiopia crisis, they sought sanctions on Italy, condemned the Hoare-Laval agreement, and levied bitter criticism against Prime Minister Chamberlain’s decision to recognize Italy’s conquest. The Peace Movement : Just before the Munich conference, peace groups opposed any Czech territorial concessions to Hitler’s Reich. Even the much-touted Peace Ballot of – has been misinterpreted. Eighty- seven percent of the respondents supported “economic and non-military mea- sures” to stop aggression. Fifty-nine percent backed military force if necessary. Lynch is fully aware of diversity within the peace protagonists, who differed among themselves concerning such matters as the degree of pacifism and the desirability of military sanctions. As in the United States, the peace movement was split. On one side were such internationalists as the League of Nations Union (LNU), which opposed its government’s “appeasement” policies and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/25/4/701/337140 by guest on 29 September 2021 backed collective security. On the other side were most pacifists, who, while condemning German and Italian policies both foreign and domestic, opposed military preparations. Both wings, however, sought multilateral ways to resolve conflicts. The internationalists concentrated on collective security; the pacifists pushed multilateral conferences centering on colonies, self-determination, and access of all powers to raw materials. Fundamental differences lay not in whether to condone aggression but the desirable means of punishment. Similar revision is advanced for the United States. Like their British coun- terparts, American peace groups backed the Washington Conference of – and the abortive Coolidge Conference. They were far more adamant concern- ing U.S. membership in the World Court than the Kellogg Pact. In the thirties, they favored the London Naval Conference of and the WorldDisarmament Conference of –. As in Britain, peace groups split over the issue of mandatory neutrality legislation and collective security while uniting in con- demning Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. In her treatment of the late thirties, Lynch indicts certain elements of the American peace movement (and inadvertently gives ammunition to the “real- ists”). She claims that they tacitly aligned themselves with elements of “the far right” and adopted such “isolationist” slogans as “Keep America Out of War.” Pacifists, she writes, “lost control of the meaning of neutrality and internation- alism when their tactics and publicity began to emphasize keeping out of war at the expense of international cooperation” (p. ). Beyond Appeasement offers a necessary corrective to those who still see the interwar period as dominated by the struggle between naive “appeasers” in deadly combat with a small but noble band of Churchillian (and “Rooseveltian”) “realists.” The debate was far more complicated, the impact of the peace movement far less destructive. If this reviewer has a specific criticism, it deals with Lynch’s brief description of the – period. To say that the America First Committee (AFC) was “pro-military” and represented “the Right” (p. ) is at best an oversimplifica- tion. The AFC did not endorse Roosevelt’s summer call for extending the draftees call of service, a linchpin of the administration defense buildup. Certainly, the AFC had a conservative cast, but the presence of muckraking journalist John T. Flynn as chairman of the New York chapter, pacifist Ruth : Sarles as research director, and labor organizer Kathryn Lewis on the national committee showed the AFC was not a clone of the Chicago Tribune or of such vehement anti-New Dealers as Congressmen Clare Hoffman (R-MI) or Harold Knutson (R-MN). In a wider sense, the term “peace movement” is so broad that one is inevitably bound
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