The British people and the League of Nations: Democracy, citizenship and internationalism, c.1918–45

By Helen McCarthy

In the decades following Europe’s first total war, millions of British men and women looked to the League of Nations as the symbol and guardian of a new world order based on international co-operation. Founded in 1919 to preserve peace between its member-states, the League inspired a rich, participatory culture of political protest, popular education and civic ritual which found expression through the establishment of voluntary societies in dozens of countries across Europe and beyond. Embodied in the hugely popular League of Nations Union, this pro-League movement touched Britain in profound ways. Foremost amongst the League societies, the Union became one of Britain’s largest voluntary associations and a powerful advocate of democratic accountability and popular engagement in the making of foreign policy. Based on extensive archival research, The British people and the League of Nations offers a vivid account of this popular League consciousness and in so doing reveals the vibrant character of associational life between the wars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847798015

Helen McCarthy

Helen McCarthy is University Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College. Her first book was The British People and the League of Nations and her second book, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, won Best International Affairs Book at the Political Book Awards 2015. @HistorianHelen

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Introduction: the respectable face of troublemaking

During the first of his Ford lectures of 1956, AJP Taylor drew an analogy with religious conscience in order to distinguish the great dissenters of British foreign policy of the previous two centuries from the mere critics: ‘A conforming member of the Church of England can disagree with the Bishops and, I understand, often does. A Dissenter believes that Bishops should not exist.’ The same rule, Taylor insisted, applied in foreign affairs. ‘A man can disagree with a particular line of British foreign policy, while still accepting its general assumptions. The Dissenter repudiates its aims, its methods, its principles.’¹ According to this formula, those evangelising on behalf of the League of Nations between the wars, who form the subject of this book, lacked the necessary credentials to win a place in Taylor’s pantheon of history’s ‘troublemakers’. The leading lights of the League of Nations Union (LNU), the League’s strongest champion in Britain, were too high-minded, too cosy with the ‘Establishment’ and altogether too respectable to inherit the mantle of Fox, Cobden and the men of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC). Genuinely radical visions of international government – from JA Hobson’s ‘League of Peoples’ to HG Wells’ World State – perished amidst the power-play at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. To endorse the watered-down model which emerged from the manoeuvrings of the ‘Big Three’ in Paris, this interpretation held, was to reaffirm the primacy of national sovereignty, the legitimacy of empire and the imperatives of industrial capitalism within a profoundly unequal world order. LNU rhetoric might trumpet the League’s transformative potential, but its two major leaders, the Conservative aristocrat Robert Cecil and Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray, peddled a version of international co-operation which was fatally stunted from birth, promising ‘all the advantages of revolution without its troubles’.²

This book offers an alternative interpretation of the popular League movement in Britain. It argues that, whatever its ultimate failings as a mechanism of collective security, the League inspired a rich and participatory culture of political protest, popular education and civic ritual which took root in British society between the wars. This League consciousness found expression through the establishment of voluntary societies in dozens of countries across Europe and beyond, but touched Britain in particularly profound ways, above all through the remarkable work of the LNU. Foremost among the League societies, the LNU became one of Britain’s largest voluntary associations and a powerful advocate of democratic accountability and popular engagement in the making of foreign policy. By cultivating allies in the political parties, peace societies, churches, schools and an array of civic associations, the League’s champions in Britain mobilised broad sections of the population in support of a collective system of international relations. This book explains how this was achieved and why the story of the League movement forms an integral part of the larger history of the democratisation of Britain’s political culture between the wars.

The League movement in Britain

The dream of a peaceful world governed through a universal ‘Parliament of Man’ had inspired philosophers and poets for centuries, but it took the collective trauma of the Great War to convince the British people that fundamental reform of the organisation of international relations could no longer be delayed. The League of Nations Society (LNS) was created in 1915 amidst a flurry of agitation and pamphleteering directed towards this end, counting amongst its founder members the intellectual GL Dickinson, the Liberal MP Aneurin Williams and the Fabian socialist Leonard Woolf, authors of three important schemes for a new machinery of international government to be established after the War.³ The League idea spread rapidly from these progressive drawing-room circles into the mainstream of public debate after May 1916 through the advocacy of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States. The USA’s entry into the War the following year established the League’s formation as a major Allied war aim and captured the attention of Cecil, then junior minister at the Foreign Office and shortly to play an important role in negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference.⁴ It was in this later phase of the War that the LNU’s other predecessor body, the League of Free Nations Association (LFNA), came into being, bankrolled by the Liberal MP and businessman David Davies and chaired by Gilbert Murray.⁵

Despite some differences of policy and style, LNS leaders recognised the futility of vying for influence with the better-funded LFNA and, encouraged by the Liberal former Foreign Secretary Edward Grey to join forces, the two bodies merged in November 1918 to become the LNU. The new organisation was conceived on a broad basis; Grey became President, Cecil assumed the chairmanship from 1919 with Murray as his deputy, and the LNU’s main policy-making body, the Executive Committee, was composed in the early years of an eclectic line-up of politicians, journalists and intellectuals, reflecting the movement’s firm policy of non-partisanship.⁶ Actively courting Conservatives alongside Liberals, Labour supporters and those without any party ties, the LNU endeavoured to secure representation for all sections of opinion on its standing committees and at every major public platform.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Cecil’s weighty presence, the LNU did not press for immediate reform of the Covenant, the League’s founding charter. It called instead for the League to be given all the support necessary to enable it to function effectively in its current form, an aspiration neatly encapsulated in the first object of the LNU’s constitution: ‘To secure the whole-hearted acceptance by the British people of the League of Nations as the Guardian of International Right, the organ of International Co-operation, the final arbiter in International Differences, and the supreme instrument for removing injustices which may threaten the Peace of the World.’⁷ These objects comprised an essentially liberal-internationalist programme, which repackaged pre-war principles of arbitration, conciliation and publicity with new provisions for the collective use of economic and military sanctions and an overarching vision of a permanent international authority.⁸ In ideological terms, the LNU was ‘pacificist’ rather than ‘pacifist’ in orientation, promoting international cooperation as the best means of abolishing war, yet willing to countenance military intervention as the price of upholding the rule of international law.⁹ As will become clear, the League movement did not, however, demand consensus on every point; it accommodated a broad spectrum of opinion, ranging from Conservatives who viewed the League as a useful but only secondary sphere of diplomatic influence, to those convinced that British foreign policy should be conducted almost exclusively through it. It recruited pacifists who disavowed Article 16 of the Covenant (providing for the use of force) alongside champions of an international army.

This ideological flexibility enabled the LNU to target its campaigning efforts widely, overseen, thanks to the continuing largesse of David Davies and a spate of further donations, by a permanent staff at the movement’s London headquarters in Grosvenor Crescent. From 1920, this operation was led by JC Maxwell Garnett, a trained mathematician and former Principal of the Manchester College of Technology. Headquarters churned out volumes of pamphlets, leaflets and flyers and was responsible for publishing Headway, a monthly journal of news and opinion on international affairs, whose circulation stood at 100,000 in 1931.¹⁰ This literature found its way into a dense network of free-standing local branches, school branches, youth groups and affiliated ‘corporate’ members; the latter category consisted of everything from Rotary Clubs and trade unions to Scout Troops and Women’s Institutes, but was dominated throughout the period by church congregations, imbuing the grassroots movement with a distinctly religious flavour.

By pursuing this ‘civic strategy’, the LNU acquired a mass following, with individual membership growing steadily throughout the 1920s and peaking in 1931 at just over 400,000 (table 1). In addition to monitoring live subscriptions, Headquarters kept a count of total enrolments, and could boast in 1933 that over 1m British people had belonged to the movement at some point since its inception.¹¹ Most joined through local branches, which ran study circles, organised public meetings, staged themed pageants, hosted garden parties, penned letters to Members of Parliament and much else besides. In 1933, the LNU supplied speakers for nearly 4,500 meetings in Britain.¹² This made it by far the largest and most active of the national League societies, of which there were some forty in existence by the mid 1930s linked through an International Federation based in Brussels.¹³ Only the French association came close, drawing on a rich seam of popular enthusiasm for the Société des Nations (as the League was known in France); but, with a reported 120,000 members in 1927, it still fell well short of the British numbers.¹⁴

Table 1 LNU membership, 1920–39

The LNU’s individual membership covered all parts of the United Kingdom but was disproportionately concentrated in England. The highest levels were found in London, the midlands and home counties, a pattern which reflected the middle-class bias of many branch executives.¹⁵ Membership was weakest in areas such as Yorkshire and the north-east, although, as we shall see, pro-League sympathies in these areas could be expressed in alternative ways, through the Labour movement or by voting in the LNU’s famous ‘Peace Ballot’. The movement in Wales was run by a semi-autonomous Welsh National Council, which established its own advisory committees and produced propaganda literature in both English and Welsh. A Scottish National Council met half-yearly, but most of the work north of the border was organised through a series of district councils similar to those operating in England. The LNU’s numerical presence in Northern Ireland was tiny and largely centred upon Belfast, explaining why this region figures so little in the analysis of this book.¹⁶

Historiographical debates

This, in broad-brush terms, constituted the scope and scale of the League movement in Britain, a subject which has attracted a healthy degree of scholarly interest since Taylor’s memorable observations of 1956. Most of this historiography concurs with his portrait of a staid, middle-of-the-road movement, which, as one scholar puts it, ‘was so cautious in its advocacy that it remained thoroughly safe and respectable’.¹⁷ Existing accounts also tend to relate League activism to post-war controversies surrounding the origins of ‘appeasement’. Arraigned alongside peace societies like the Peace Pledge Union and the National Peace Council in the memoirs of former National Government supporters, the LNU was frequently portrayed as jointly culpable for the pacifist mood which had supposedly inhibited rearmament and convinced politicians that the British people would not fight. Much of this debate centred around rival interpretations of the Peace Ballot, a voluntary referendum masterminded by the LNU in 1934–35 in which millions of British people were asked for their views on League membership, international disarmament and collective security. For some observers, the questions were ‘tendentious’ and misleading.¹⁸ For others, including, most famously, the anti-appeaser Winston Churchill, the recorded majorities in favour of the use of military sanctions offered proof that Britons would have backed the armed resistance of Hitler long before 1939.¹⁹ Historians have continued to debate these interpretations, together with the LNU’s supposed contribution to the pacifist mood of the period and the character and timing of its eventual regrouping with opponents of the National Government.²⁰ For many, the LNU’s reluctance to burn bridges on the right or to embrace the full-bloodied internationalism of the left set it on a path which could lead only to fuzzy thinking and an impact upon the political process which was muted at best.²¹

This book, by contrast, moves beyond these existing historiographical paradigms in order to ask a rather different set of questions about the place of League activism in British politics and society between the wars. The only full-length study of the LNU in existence is Donald Birn’s 1981 monograph, The League of Nations Union, 1918–1945, a well-researched institutional history based primarily on the movement’s central archive and the papers of various individuals prominent within it. Birn’s study provides an invaluable chronological narrative of organisational change and a sound analysis of internal policy debates, but in conceptual and empirical terms its scope now appears limited, especially in light of subsequent scholarship on the interwar period. Rather than treat the LNU as a minor player in the high-level dramas of foreign policy-making, this book conceptualises the League movement as a major presence within the wider political culture, and one which contributed in important ways to the recasting of social, political, religious and imperial identities. One of the largest voluntary organisations of the period, the LNU became a vehicle for the development and interplay of new dynamics evident in associational life following the franchise extensions of 1918 and 1928.²² As attention shifted away from questions of electoral reform and towards the character of the mass electorate now in existence, the League movement nourished a rich conversation about the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship within religious and educational circles, amongst women’s organisations and philanthropic bodies, and in all three of the major political parties.²³ In so doing, the LNU transformed liberal internationalism into a practical experiment in the possibilities of democratic participation and cross-party mobilisation. The belief that British citizens were entitled to have their say over the direction of foreign policy and, moreover, were capable of engaging intelligently in debates concerning foreign affairs, provided the animating principle of the movement’s educational work and informed its broad-based organising style. It is through exploring the origins, practical effects and inherent tensions of this striking proposition that the deeper significance of the League movement – including its much-vaunted ‘respectability’ – can be fully understood. By utilising this optic, moreover, we can begin to measure the full impact of Britain’s membership of the League of Nations and its implications for the practice of national sovereignty at the level of domestic political culture. This subject remains historical terra incognita despite the recent groundswell of scholarly interest in the League and the ever-expanding literature on the cultural legacy of the Great War.²⁴

Studying political culture

These tasks inevitably require some reflection upon the conceptual and methodological challenges of studying political culture. Although this term has multiple valences, ‘political culture’ is here taken to mean those complex linkages between formal political institutions and affiliations and the forces at work in the wider culture, which might include technological and socioeconomic change, shifting class or gender relations, religious identities and intellectual traditions.²⁵ Calibrating these relationships at given moments in the past has occupied increasing numbers of British historians in the aftermath of the ‘cultural turn’, which encouraged many scholars to discard older, more narrowly structural explanations of political orientation in favour of a renewed emphasis on the constitutive power of language and cultural representation.²⁶ Most of this work for the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries has focused on political parties, exploring electoral success or failure in terms of discursive strategies which encouraged voters to identify with constructed narratives or ‘myths’ of Britain’s past, present and future.²⁷ Yet as this study aims to demonstrate, this approach can also yield insights into non-party movements such as the LNU, which sought to infuse the discourse of public life with its own set of conventional wisdoms about Britain’s place in the world and to associate the League with images or ideas charged with certain kinds of symbolic meaning. At the same time, care has been taken to show how the movement’s discursive strategies intermeshed with the practical task of organisation, a less fashionable but equally crucial aspect of political culture sometimes lost amidst the rush to deconstruct discourses.²⁸ Membership of the LNU, as we will see, could often be explained as an expression of the pleasures of sociability and the habits of association as much as a statement of ideological commitment to liberal-internationalist ideas.

Questions of motivation, intention and reception remain, however, by far the knottiest problem facing the historian of the League movement: why did individuals participate in LNU activities and what did they take away from it? To what extent were ordinary people interested in the League and foreign affairs more generally? How far did the movement succeed in transforming the way Britons thought about their nation’s relationship with the rest of the world? The perspectives of intellectuals and politicians on these issues are reasonably well known, but it is how their ideas and pronouncements gained a wider popular purchase that concerns the present author.²⁹ The aim is not to marginalise the intellectual dimensions of early twentieth-century internationalism or to flatten the specificities of high-level foreign policy debates, but rather to investigate and measure their resonances beyond the Senior Combination Room or the steps of the Foreign Office. This necessarily requires a broader empirical base than that found in Birn’s monograph, drawing on sources which reveal the dynamics of the grassroots movement and the LNU’s relationship with organisations outside the conventional peace movement. Alongside the central archive of the LNU and private papers of its key leaders, this study makes extensive use of local branch records, the national and local archives of political parties, trade unions, religious bodies and other civic associations, and the national and local press. An Anglo-centric bias is evident in much of this material, reflecting England’s dominance within the movement (and within national politics more generally), although regional differences are identified and discussed where appropriate.³⁰

The range of sources used in this book is founded upon assumptions concerning the pluralist nature of democratic societies and, more specifically, the analytical value of bringing formal and informal political structures, and elite and popular modes of participation, into a single field of inquiry. The LNU was a body which courted both elite and mass opinion, applied pressure at multiple points of the apparatus of the state, and made a contribution through a multimedia ‘platform’ to the shaping of contemporary political discourse. As such, it must be studied, as far as possible, ‘in the round’, and carefully contextualised in relation to existing traditions of activism and association. With its broad-based membership, crusading rhetoric and strong links to organised religion, for example, the LNU recalled the anti-slavery, temperance and suffrage movements of the nineteenth century, whilst arguably prefiguring the ‘expressive’ or ‘postmodern’ politics associated with later ‘new’ social movements.³¹ Its cross-party lobbying tactics closely resembled those practised by ex-servicemen, feminists and farmers, but also shaded into the progressive centrism associated with the ‘middle opinion’ of the 1930s.³² Like many other pressure groups of the period, the LNU utilised the new technologies of radio and cinema and engaged in pageantry and symbolic performance in a bid to diffuse its message into the wider culture. Nor was it alone in forging bonds with kindred societies overseas; the internationalisation of British civil society was a striking development of the interwar period and, as will be demonstrated, both a cause and consequence of the League movement’s popular success.³³

Yet the LNU also had peculiarities which distinguished it from these earlier and contemporaneous movements. Not least of these was the central challenge it set itself of engaging voters in intelligent dialogue about foreign policy, a sphere of government still shrouded in secrecy and seemingly far removed from the sort of bread-and-butter issues which ordinary people could relate to their own daily lives. As a proponent of the ‘new diplomacy’, the LNU placed a premium on ‘publicity’ as the lifeblood of the League, believing that greater transparency and democratic accountability would serve to moralise the conduct of foreign policy and foster trust between nations and peoples. Yet, as Susan Pedersen has perceptively observed, the League’s various assemblies and committees were always more effective in altering the appearance than the substance of diplomatic relations: ‘statesmen might react to mobilised public opinion by altering not what they did but simply what they said’.³⁴ The government’s response to the LNU in Britain might be couched in similar terms, with League activists frequently complaining that politicians paid mere ‘lip-service’ to their cause. Nonetheless, dictating the style and tone of foreign-policy discourse was, as this book argues, in itself no mean achievement. If, as Maurice Cowling suggested over thirty years ago, ministers came to feel a pressure to present their actions ‘in terms which the League of Nations Union would approve’, it was a testament to the cultural purchase of internationalist values and ideas within interwar society.³⁵

Argument and organisation of the book

In short, this study argues that the creation of the League of Nations inspired a lively popular movement in Britain whose influence was widely felt after 1919, from Westminster village to village hall. The breadth and depth of this movement was the achievement of the LNU, which, by yoking its liberal-internationalist agenda to the values of non-partisanship, political education and responsible citizenship, helped to insulate the League from ideological controversy, religious sectarianism and divisive class politics. The effects of this centrism were paradoxical; it served to popularise the idea of international government whilst in the process domesticating it, persuading many British people to place their faith in an untested innovation in internationalism by situating it within a comforting narrative of continuity in Britain’s encounter with modernity. In other states, the League was identified with the historical rupture of the War, which left continental Europe politically fractured and emotionally scarred.³⁶ In Britain, by contrast, the League came to stand for a break with tradition in foreign policy, but not with the broader moral purpose of the nation’s world role, nor the ongoing maturation of its democracy, nor the civility of its people.³⁷ In the post-Versailles universe of collapsed empires and nascent nation-states, membership of the League thus multiplied Britain’s international obligations, but ultimately did little to challenge the belief that her position within the international community remained that of first amongst equals. It took another global conflict to discredit this myth of national exceptionalism; as a consequence, the League’s successor, the United Nations, never inspired the same groundswell of enthusiasm.

This argument unfolds over the course of the following chapters. Chapter 1 considers the League movement as a product of new strands of thought and action emerging from the First World War which collectively became known as the ‘New Diplomacy’. It explores the importance of the category of ‘public opinion’ for League supporters in light of their efforts to make foreign policy more accountable to the electorate. Focusing on the educational campaigns and media strategy of the LNU and the Peace Ballot of 1934–35, the chapter argues that together these exemplify how League supporters reconciled their faith in the intellectual capabilities of voters with the irrational tendencies of mass democracy. The following chapter examines the LNU’s efforts to present the League to the public as a cause which transcended party politics. It contextualises the movement’s policy of non-partisanship within the major political realignment taking place in this period, and demonstrates how League supporters were well placed to sell their policy not only to all three major parties but to a large body of ‘centrist’ opinion.

Chapters 3 and 4 shift the focus to two constituencies which formed the bedrock of the LNU’s popular base: organised religion and education. As chapter 3 reveals, the movement cultivated sizeable Anglican and Free Church followings in England and Wales, benefiting from but also contributing to the drive towards ecumenical co-operation after the war. Yet the LNU struggled to bridge the sectarian divide between Protestants and Roman Catholics, whilst non-Christian communities remained marginal to the movement throughout. Chapter 4 surveys the League’s popular support in Britain’s schools, adult education bodies and universities, revealing in the process how growing public interest in the study of foreign affairs provided an opportunity for internationalists to introduce League teaching into the classroom and lecture hall. These efforts to inculcate what League supporters called ‘enlightened patriotism’ were, however, continually dogged by accusations of political bias and became characterised towards the end of the period as excessively ‘utopian’ in outlook.

Chapter 5 continues the analysis of the movement’s popular base by examining how League supporters positioned their cause in relation to interwar pacifism, popular militarism and imperialism. Although the pacifist influence within the LNU was significant, it was largely contained by the movement’s leaders who wished to avoid at all costs being tarred with the brush of anti-patriotism. This strategy was further advanced by promoting a narrative of mutuality between the League and the British Empire, an approach which broadened the League’s appeal domestically but inevitably served to legitimise existing global hierarchies between nations and peoples. Chapters 6 and 7 probe the universalist claims of the League movement further by asking how far it cultivated cross-class support and offered opportunities for men and women to participate on equal terms. Chapter 6 shows how the LNU was led at national level by aristocrats, professionals and businessmen and at local level by the provincial middle classes, with working-class people more likely to support the League through their own organisations. This, it is argued, reproduced broader inter-class dynamics, but also proved that the League did not, in ideological terms, reinforce class politics. Chapter 7 finds that, in a similar fashion, the League movement shored up traditional gender stereotypes and inequalities by conceptualising men and women as distinct constituencies requiring differentiated recruitment strategies. Yet the LNU also displayed unmistakable marks of modernity, by creating a space for female leadership and gender mixing, and by challenging the militarist values of pre-war ‘manliness’.

Chapters 1–7 deal in thematic fashion with the period from 1919 to the beginning of 1936, when the LNU was growing in size and organising its most high-profile campaigns. Chapter 8, however, partially reverts to a more conventional chronological structure by focusing on the period from early 1936 to the outbreak of the Second World War. These years marked a turning point for the LNU as well as for the League and the conduct of foreign policy more broadly. In light of the deepening threat posed by fascism to European security, the LNU reinvented itself as a vigorous opponent of appeasement and sought to position itself more robustly within the new political configurations of the late 1930s, leading to a controversial alliance with the International Peace Campaign (IPC), an initiative of the European left. These dalliances with the forces of anti-fascism rent apart the LNU’s ever-fragile coalition and signalled the defeat of its founding vision of a politics of centrism. It seems fitting, therefore, that this phase in the LNU’s development should receive its own chapter. The concluding chapter assesses how far the League movement realised its dream of a ‘democratised’ foreign policy between the wars and, finally, considers its fortunes after 1945, when the LNU was reborn as the United Nations Association and found itself confronted with a dramatically altered world-order.

Notes

1 AJP Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy 1792–1939 (London, 1957), 13.

2 Ibid., 171.

3 Dickinson’s ‘Proposals for Avoidance of War’ was the outcome of discussions held by the ‘Bryce Group’, whose members included the Liberal MPs Willoughby Dickinson and Arthur Ponsonby, the radical economist JA Hobson, Professor Graham Wallas at the London School of Economics and Richard Cross, the Quaker business manager of the liberal journal, the Nation. It was chaired by the jurist and diplomat Lord Bryce. Aneurin Williams, ‘Proposals for a League of Peace and Mutual Protection Among Nations’, Contemporary Review, November 1914, 628–636; Leonard Woolf, International Government: Two Reports (London: 1916, first published as supplements to the New Statesman, 10 and 17 July 1915).

4 Having drafted a memo in November 1916 on the subject, Cecil established a committee under the chairmanship of Lord Phillimore to examine the League idea in greater depth. This first met in January 1918 and reported in March; its recommendations formed the basis of the British government’s position at Paris. The ‘Covenant’ of the League formed the first twenty-six articles of the Treaty of Versailles. See George Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy, Politics, and International Organisation, 1914–1919 (Chapel Hill, 1978).

5 Early supporters included Wickham Steed of The Times, JL Garvin of the Observer, Sir Mark Sykes, a Conservative MP and Middle East specialist, and JH Thomas, the trade unionist MP.

6 Upon joining the Conservative Cabinet in 1923, Cecil handed the chairmanship over to Murray and became joint President with Grey.

7 LNU, The Objects of the Union (London, 1920).

8 Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations.

9 Martin Ceadel, Thinking About Peace and War (Oxford, 1989).

10 LNU, Annual Report for 1931 (London, 1932), 50.

11 This figure included those who had allowed their membership to lapse but were not known to have actively left the LNU or died. ‘The Million’, Headway, April 1933, i.

12 The League of Nations Union Year Book 1934 (London, 1934), 50.

13 Headway, November 1936, 220.

14 Christian Birebent, Militants de la Paix et de la SDN (Paris, 2007).

15 87% of membership subscriptions in 1931 were collected in England; 7.8% were collected in Scotland, 3.6% in Wales, 1.4% in the Universities, 0.3% in Northern Ireland and 0.2% in the Channel Islands and Isle of Man. Based on Census data for 1931, this meant that England was over-represented. In that year, approximately 81% of the population lived in England, 11% in Scotland, 5% in Wales and 3% in Northern Ireland. The LNU’s annual report for 1930 noted that membership statistics revealed that ‘practically half our total strength is concentrated in two distinct areas: London and the Home Counties’. See LNU, Annual Report for 1930 (London, 1931), 246.

16 Membership in Northern Ireland was 1150 in July 1925 (about 0.5% of the total), of which 680 belonged to the Belfast branch. Headway, July 1925, 139. The LNU appears to have avoided entanglements in Nationalist and Loyalist disputes, whilst British and Irish diplomats kept issues concerning sovereignty and partition out of the League. See Michael Kennedy, Ireland and the League of Nations, 1919–1946: International Relations, Diplomacy and Politics (Blackrock, 1996).

17 Donald Birn, The League of Nations Union 1918–1945 (Oxford, 1981), 4. For similar interpretations see Daniel Waley, British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War (London, 1975); Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford, 2000).

18 LS Amery, My Political Life, Vol.3: The Unforgiving Years, 1929–1940 (London, 1955), 159; Viscount Templewood, Nine Troubled Years (London, 1954), 128; Anthony Eden, Facing the Dictators: The Memories of Anthony, Earl of Avon (London, 1962), 237.

19 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol.I: The Gathering Storm (London, 1948), 132–133, in which the author asserts that the Ballot ‘affirmed a positive and courageous policy which could at this time have been followed with an overwhelming measure of national support’. The Churchillian reading was supported by Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs 1931–1945 (London, 1957), 65 and AJP Taylor, Origins of the Second World War (London, 1963), 121. For more equivocal readings of the Ballot, see, for example, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: The Exciting Storm of the Twenties and Thirties (London,1940), 320; PA Reynolds, British Foreign Policy in the Inter-war Years (London, 1954), 112; FS Northedge, The Troubled Giant: Britain Among the Great Powers 1916–1939 (London, 1966), 417.

20 Michael Pugh, ‘Pacifism and Politics in Britain’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 641–656; Donald Birn, ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9 (1974), 131–159; Ernest Bramsted, ‘Apostles of Collective Security: The LNU and its Functions’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 13 (1967), 347–364; JA Thompson, ‘The League of Nations Union and Promotion of the League Idea in Great Britain’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 18 (1972), 52–61, ‘Lord Cecil and the Pacifists in the League of Nations Union’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 949–959, and ‘The Peace Ballot and the Public’, Albion, 13 (1981) 380–392.

21 See, for example, Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London, 2009), 262–264.

22 The Representation of the People Act (1918) increased the number of electors from 7.7m in 1910 to 21.3m, including 8.5m women aged thirty or over. Voting age was equalised in 1928, adding another 7.2m voters.

23 Helen McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Societies and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 891–912.

24 For the League’s impact on national policy, see Peter Yearwood, Guarantee of Peace: The League of Nations in British Policy, 1914–1925 (Oxford, 2009). For overview of new directions in League historiography, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 1091–1117. For a thoughtful review of the historiography of the War’s cultural legacy, see Stephen Heathorn, ‘The Mnemonic Turn in the Cultural Historiography of Britain’s Great War’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 1103–1124.

25 For an illuminating overview from a historian’s perspective, see Ronald Formisano, ‘The Concept of Political Culture’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31 (2001), 393–426.

26 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), 90–178; Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998); Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, ‘Introduction: Electoral Sociology and the Historians’, in Lawrence and Taylor (eds), Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), 1–26.

27 Alex Windscheffel, Popular Conservatism in Imperial London 1868–1906 (Woodbridge, 2007); Lawrence Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–64: Old Labour, New Britain? (Basingstoke, 2003). For an overview, see Jon Lawrence, ‘Political History’, in Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003), 183–202.

28 See Andrew Thorpe’s discussion in Parties at War: Political Organisation in Second World War Britain (Oxford, 2009), 8–9.

29 For intellectuals, see Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, 2005); David Long and Peter Wilson (eds), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-war Idealism Reassessed (Oxford, 1995).

30 For the increasingly national character of politics in the early twentieth century, see Brian Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics 1860–1995 (Oxford, 1996), 119–120; Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1994), 17–23. Goronwy Jones points to surprisingly few differences at the level of policy between the Welsh National Council and the rest of the movement in his Wales and the Quest for Peace (Cardiff, 1969). JA Thompson devoted an entire article to explaining why Wales did not produce special results in the Ballot, although the strikingly high polls of 75% or more suggests that the Welsh movement was exceptionally well organised; see ‘The Peace Ballot of 1935: The Welsh Campaign’, Welsh History Review, 11 (1983), 388–399.

31 Frank Parkin, Middle-Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Manchester, 1968); Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton, 1997).

32 Samuel Beer, Modern British Politics: Parties and Pressure Groups in the Collectivist Age (London, 1965); Arthur Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and Political Agreement’, English Historical Review, 79 (1964), 285–298.

33 Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (London, 1997); Thomas Davies, The Possibilities of Transnational Activism: The Campaign for Disarmament between the Two World Wars (Leiden, 2008).

34 Pedersen, ‘Back to the League’, 1097.

35 Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1975), 7.

36 League activism outside Britain lies beyond the scope of this book, but see Birebent, Militants; Richard Veatch, Canada and the League of Nations (Toronto, 1975); Sara Pienaar, South Africa and International Relations between the Two World Wars: The League of Nations Dimension (Johannesburg, 1987); Warren Kuehl and Lynne Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939 (London, 1997); Thomas Burkman, ‘The Paradox of Pacifism and Powerhood in the Japanese League of Nations Movement’, Peace and Change, 6:1–2 (1980), 43–48.

37 For a discussion of this theme in a comparative European context see the editors’ introduction in Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford, 2001), 1–21.

1

The League of Nations, public opinion and the New Diplomacy

The Democratic Spirit may be relied upon if the democratic mind is sufficiently informed. (Lord Robert Cecil, 1920)¹

In short, the Union believes that the problem of maintaining world peace is mainly a problem of education. (Report on the Work of the LNU, 1921)²

In the official history rushed out by the LNU in summer 1935, its author justified the Peace Ballot as a unique exercise which had, for the first time, made knowable the will of the people on vital questions of foreign policy. ‘If our democracy is a true democracy,’ the book observed, ‘John Smith and Mary Brown, and the sum of their opinions, are the things that matter. They are the rock upon which the fabric of our Government is based. Upon their response all advance ultimately depends.’³ By invoking public opinion in this manner, the LNU pressed into service a technique much used – and, arguably, abused – by politicians, reformers and social critics since the late eighteenth century.⁴ To claim that one spoke for the people seemed a fast-track route to legitimacy, yet it naturally invited dissent and debate. Who exactly constituted ‘public opinion’,