The Kellogg–Briand Pact

On 27 August 1928, in the Clock Room of the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, representatives of fifteen states signed the Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy. After its authors, the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and the American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, it became known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact, and after the place of signature also as the Pact of Paris. The signatories, among them the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and Poland, solemnly condemned recourse to war for the solution of international disputes and undertook to settle all conflicts by peaceful means alone. Ten years after the First World War it seemed that the world had outlawed war. Eleven years later two states bound by the pact, Germany and the Soviet Union, attacked a third, Poland.

It is often said that the pact “banned wars of aggression”. This is a simplification. The text of the treaty does not use the concept of aggression at all and draws no distinction between wars of aggression and wars of defence. It speaks of renouncing war “as an instrument of national policy”. The right of self-defence was acknowledged by the parties in diplomatic notes, not in the treaty itself, and each of them was to judge for itself when it was acting in self-defence.

War outlawed

After 1918 a movement emerged in the United States that sought not so much to limit war as to make it illegal. Its originator was a Chicago lawyer, Salmon Levinson. He argued that as long as international law recognised war as a lawful way of settling disputes, no league and no court could secure peace. The slogan of the “outlawry of war” was taken up by the influential Republican senator William Borah of Idaho, chairman from 1924 of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and at the same time a fierce opponent of America’s entry into the League of Nations. Alongside them worked internationalists connected with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, and the historian James T. Shotwell. In America peace became a mass cause. Churches, women’s clubs and veterans’ associations collected signatures, and newspapers printed draft treaties.

The United States had not ratified the Treaty of Versailles and had not joined the League of Nations. It concluded a separate peace with Germany and kept clear of European commitments. It became involved only where this did not tie it to an alliance: in naval disarmament, which produced the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, and in financial matters such as the Dawes Plan. For France this was painful. In 1919 Georges Clemenceau had agreed to a compromise over the Rhineland in exchange for Anglo-American security guarantees, which collapsed when the Senate rejected the treaty. Ever since, Paris had been looking for a way to bind America to its security once again.

Briand’s proposal

In March 1927 Shotwell met Briand in Paris and suggested an idea that might appeal to American public opinion. On 6 April 1927, the tenth anniversary of the United States’ entry into the war, Briand issued, through an American press agency, an open letter to the American people. He proposed that France and the United States conclude an agreement of perpetual friendship and mutually renounce war as an instrument of policy. The calculation was clear. The pact would give France no guarantee, but it would symbolically bind America to it. If France ever had to use force against Germany – say, in defence of the Locarno Treaties or of its allies in Central Europe – the United States could not take sides against it.

Washington received the proposal coolly. President Calvin Coolidge and Kellogg did not want to conclude an agreement that could be read as a disguised alliance, nor did they like the French minister appealing directly to the American people over their heads. In June 1927 France submitted a formal draft treaty. The State Department played for time: it waited for the outcome of the Geneva naval conference, which ended in failure in the summer, then for the President’s return from holiday and for Congress to convene. The peace movement, however, would not let the matter drop, and Borah argued that America should offer the treaty to every state in the world.

Kellogg’s reply

On 28 December 1927 Kellogg answered Briand with a proposal that turned his plan on its head. Instead of a bilateral agreement, the United States proposed a multilateral treaty open to every state that wished to renounce war. In this way Kellogg satisfied the American peace movement while stripping the pact of what mattered to France: a special bond with America. Briand found himself trapped. France was bound by the League of Nations Covenant, which in certain cases required participation in sanctions against an aggressor, by the Locarno agreements and by alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia. A universal renunciation of war might deprive it of the right to come to an ally’s aid.

The exchange of notes went on through the first half of 1928. In April the United States sent a draft treaty to Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan. The German Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, agreed at once: the pact made French military intervention against Germany more difficult, improved relations with Washington and fitted his policy of peaceful revision. On 28 April Kellogg explained in a speech to the American Society of International Law that the treaty took away no one’s right of self-defence, since that right was implicit in every treaty, and that it should not be defined, because any definition could easily be abused. On 19 May the British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, stipulated in a note that there were “certain regions of the world” whose security was a vital interest of the Empire, and whose defence was for Britain a matter of self-defence. This was dubbed a British Monroe Doctrine. The Americans had no need to write anything of the kind: their own Monroe Doctrine was taken to fall within self-defence as a matter of course. On 23 June Kellogg circulated the final text with a note stating that every state was always free to defend its territory and that it alone was competent to decide whether circumstances required recourse to war in self-defence. The other Locarno states – Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia – were invited to join the original signatories, as were the British Dominions and India.

The signing in Paris

The ceremony of 27 August 1928 was staged with great pomp. Kellogg came to Paris in person, as did the ailing Stresemann, whom his doctors had advised not to travel. Following the order of the French alphabet, the first to sign was thus the representative of Germany, ten years after its defeat. After him came Kellogg for the United States, Paul Hymans for Belgium and Briand for France. Britain and India were represented by Lord Cushendun, standing in for the ailing Chamberlain. Canada was represented by its Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Irish Free State by its head of government, W. T. Cosgrave, Australia by one of its ministers, and New Zealand and South Africa by their High Commissioners in London. Italy’s signature was given by its ambassador in Paris, Count Gaetano Manzoni, Japan’s by a member of the Privy Council, Count Kōsai Uchida, Poland’s by the Foreign Minister, August Zaleski, and Czechoslovakia’s by Edvard Beneš. The ceremony was recorded by newsreels, and in the evening there was a concert and a banquet.

The text of the treaty was very short. In the preamble the parties declared that the time had come for a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, and that any state which thereafter sought to promote its interests by resorting to war should be denied the benefits of the treaty. Article I read: “The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.” In Article II the parties agreed that the settlement of all disputes or conflicts, of whatever nature or origin, should never be sought except by pacific means. Article III dealt with ratification. The treaty was to come into force once all fifteen states had deposited their instruments of ratification in Washington, and was to remain open for accession by all the other states of the world. The English and French texts were equally authoritative.

Immediately after the signing the remaining states were invited to accede, including the Soviet Union, with which the United States had no diplomatic relations, so the invitation was passed on by France. Moscow announced its accession as early as the turn of August and September 1928, although it criticised the pact for containing no disarmament commitments and regarded the reservations of the powers, especially the British, as a loophole for colonial wars.

What the pact contained, and what it did not

The pact was a declaration, not a security system. It did not define war or aggression, established no body that could determine a violation and provided for no sanctions beyond a vague denial of “the benefits of the treaty”. It did not prohibit self-defence, and each party set its limits for itself: the Americans had the Western Hemisphere in mind, the British their Empire, the French their obligations to the League, Locarno and their allies. It dealt only with war, so it was unclear whether it covered blockade, armed reprisals or a “police action” without a declaration of war. Nor did it oblige anyone to stand up to a state that broke it.

These weaknesses were seen at once. The French right regarded the pact as an empty gesture, and German nationalists, Nazis and Communists, each for different reasons, treated it with contempt. In the United States public enthusiasm mingled with politicians’ irony. One senator called the pact an “international kiss”, while another announced that he would vote for it although he did not believe it was worth even a postage stamp. Briand, who knew better than anyone how much he had lost, nevertheless defended it publicly as a step with which a change in mentality would begin. In Germany Chancellor Hermann Müller and Stresemann saw it as proof that the Reich had returned to the ranks of the powers as an equal.

The world in which the pact was signed was not peaceful. In China the Kuomintang’s Northern Expedition was under way, and on 4 June 1928 Japanese officers of the Kwantung Army blew up Zhang Zuolin’s train. A few weeks before the ceremony in Paris Italy had signed a treaty of friendship with Ethiopia. Japan and Italy also signed the Pact of Paris.

Significance

The Kellogg–Briand Pact became one of the most widely accepted treaties of the interwar period. It came into force on 24 July 1929, and by the outbreak of the Second World War more than sixty states – almost the entire world of the time – were bound by it. Poland invoked it in the treaties that were meant to secure it on both sides: the preamble of the 1932 non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union stated that the agreement developed and supplemented the Pact of Paris, and the Polish–German declaration of non-aggression of 26 January 1934 based mutual relations on the principles of the 1928 pact.

The pact stopped no war. From September 1931, beginning with the Mukden incident, Japan occupied Manchuria, calling it the defence of its rights rather than war. The United States responded only with the Stimson Doctrine, a refusal to recognise changes brought about in violation of the pact. In 1935 Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, likewise a party to the pact. States stopped declaring war, because a declaration of war would have meant admitting a breach of the treaty. Wars were therefore waged without declaration, as “incidents” and “pacification operations”. That is how Adolf Hitler attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, and how Joseph Stalin on 17 September 1939 sent the Red Army across the eastern border of the Polish Republic, claiming that the Polish state had ceased to exist.

After the war, however, the pact played a role its authors had not foreseen. The judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg relied on it, among other agreements, in upholding the charges. In their judgment of 1946 they held that the solemn renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy meant that such a war was illegal under international law, and that those who planned and waged it were committing a crime. Thus arose the concept of crimes against peace, for which the leaders of the Third Reich were convicted at the Nuremberg trials, and later the leaders of Japan in Tokyo. Lawyers still argue over whether a pact that provided for no penalties could serve as a basis for criminal liability. The principle of renouncing war was taken over and extended by the Charter of the United Nations, which in 1945 prohibited not only war but any use or threat of force in international relations. The Pact of Paris, concluded outside the League of Nations and with no withdrawal clause, formally remains in force to this day.