The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought

Chapter Eleven: Reflections on Certain Resistances to the Progress of International Law

69 Did some French believe that the League of Nations would never mobilize the powers of its members except in defense of our territory? We must believe so, since the plan introduced by André Tardieu at the Disarmament Conference did not cause his friends to desert him. Thus the League of Nations’ attitude toward the Italo-Ethiopian conflict might cause surprise among people who were poorly informed and poorly equipped to understand the meaning of legal realities. These disillusioned souls, we believe, only played a weak role in the campaign currently underway against the League of Nations; considered in its totality, the Chapter Eleven R eflections on Certain R esista nces to th e Progr ess of Internationa l L aw 70 | The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought campaign is only the chance manifestation of a spirit that has been active for fifteen years; its tone does not express shock, but, to the contrary, wild pleasure at having been right; for the majority of the opponents of the League of Nations ’ action in our country today, the present dangers are only a triumphant confirmation of what they have always predicted. We would like to try to understand here the reasons for this tenacious and impassioned hostility. 1. The popular opinion released right after the war in favor of a League of Nations seemed to many French to be nothing other than the continuation and repetition of prewar pacifism. Inevitably, it shared in the discredit of that earlier movement. The totality of efforts that we are designating by the name of pre-war pacifism had contributed to the insufficiencies of our defensive preparations. All those, whoever they might be, who had advocated maintaining the peace by non-military means, all those who had opposed the increase in the time of service and expenditures on arms were held by an important segment of French opinion as primarily responsible for our defeats in 1914 and in the war itself. The breakup of the Workers’ International made a great impression on very different circles. Too many French had sincerely believed that, in case of war, the international proletariat would withdraw and would respond to the mobilization order with a general strike; the opponents of socialism feared that this possibility might be realized in France, they had little hope that it would happen in Germany; the socialists, on the contrary, believed that the feelings of the German proletariat, the most powerful and most socialist of all the proletarians, would constitute a major guarantee in favor of peace. We know what happened: as soon as war was certain, the proletarian formations in each country reunited themselves to the national unity and while René Viviani Resistances to the Progress of International Law | 71 tore up Notebook B1 the German socialists were voting almost unanimously for war loans. No one had believed such a radical defection was possible. The French noted in particular the defection by the German socialists and swore not to be taken in a second time. From then on it was a widespread notion in our country that military power constituted the only guarantee of peace and that every attempt to ensure peace through the friendly collaboration of peoples corresponded to illusions that the outbreak of war in 1914 had irrevocably revealed. In our opinion, the behavior of the proletariat and of the socialist leaders in 1914 demonstrated above all else a failure of the notion of class: it testifies that the tendency of the proletarian class to withdraw from the rest of the nation is limited by its tendency to reincorporation in the national whole. The attempts to guarantee peace by collaboration among states had nothing, in principle, in common with an internationalism of class that implied, in the measure to which it is effective, the disintegration of divergence from political wholes. As to the policy to follow on the question of armaments (or alliances) it was entirely conditioned by the international situation: in some circumstances, an intense arms build-up is a guarantee against war, in other circumstances it might be a menace to peace. The project of the League of Nations did not imply in itself any resolution to pursue systematically whatever the circumstances, the reduction in national armaments; rather than presuppose an unrealistic disarmament the League of Nations had the task of creating a situation that would make it prudently possible to reduce military burdens. 2. We cannot...