The Kellogg–Briand Pact comes into force

At one o’clock in the afternoon on 24 July 1929, in the East Room of the White House, President Herbert Hoover announced that the Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact, had come into force. That same day Japan, the last of the fifteen states that had signed it in Paris on 27 August 1928, deposited its instrument of ratification in Washington. The ceremony was attended by Hoover’s predecessor Calvin Coolidge, the former Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, members of the cabinet, and the ambassadors and ministers of 45 states. From that moment the pact bound the fifteen signatory states and 31 states that had already acceded to it, among them the Soviet Union, China, Ethiopia and Hungary.

The road to ratification

American ratification mattered most, because it was in the United States Senate that the Treaty of Versailles had foundered ten years earlier. This time opposition was weak, but the senators wanted to be sure that the pact would not restrict America’s freedom of action. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by William Borah, adopted a report stating that the treaty did not infringe the right of self-defence or the Monroe Doctrine and did not oblige the United States to take any action against a state that broke it. These were not formal reservations, however, so the text did not have to be renegotiated with the other states. In mid-January 1929 the Senate approved the pact by 85 votes to one. The only vote against was cast by the Wisconsin Republican John J. Blaine, who believed that the pact would sanction British imperialism. President Coolidge ratified the treaty on 17 January. A few weeks later Congress authorised the construction of fifteen new cruisers. The juxtaposition was telling: America was renouncing war, but had no intention of disarming.

On 2 March 1929 the first batch of ratifications was deposited in Washington: those of the United States; of Great Britain together with the dominions, India and the Irish Free State; and of Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. Poland deposited its instrument on 26 March, Belgium on 27 March and France on 22 April. The Soviet Union did not wait for the rest. On the initiative of the Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, a protocol was signed in Moscow on 9 February 1929 that brought the principles of the pact into force between the USSR, Poland, Romania, Estonia and Latvia even before all the great powers had ratified it. Turkey, Persia and Lithuania later joined it, and according to some studies the Free City of Danzig as well.

Japan held out the longest. In the first article the parties declared that they condemned war “in the names of their respective peoples”. The Privy Council and the right-wing opposition in Tokyo held that these words violated the constitution, under which the sovereign was the Emperor, not the people. Washington refused to change the text. On 27 June 1929 the Japanese government ratified the pact, at the same time issuing a declaration that the disputed words did not apply to Japan. A few days later, on 2 July, the cabinet of Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka fell. The cause was not the pact, however, but the affair of the assassination of Zhang Zuolin: the Prime Minister had failed to punish the Kwantung Army officers who had murdered the Manchurian ruler a year earlier, and he lost the confidence of Emperor Hirohito. The Japanese instrument of ratification reached Washington only on 24 July.

The ceremony at the White House

In his speech Hoover recalled that the treaty was “a proposal to the conscience and idealism of civilized peoples” and a new step in international law, and that from now on every concrete action by states could be brought at once before the bar of world public opinion. He named all 46 states and added that the instruments of Greece, Honduras, Persia, Switzerland and Venezuela were already on their way. He credited Aristide Briand with initiating the treaty and Kellogg with extending it to the whole world, and thanked the latter on behalf of the American people. He also paid tribute to Senators Borah and Claude Swanson, who had steered the ratification through the Senate. He predicted that the treaty’s influence would be felt in most future international action. That day the Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, cabled his congratulations to Briand, who a few days later succeeded the ailing Raymond Poincaré as Prime Minister of France.

The same day brought a gesture meant to show that the pact was more than empty words. The British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, announced in the House of Commons that part of Britain’s shipbuilding programme would be suspended and that the principle of naval parity with America was accepted. Hoover replied with a statement that the United States would not lay down the keels of the three cruisers planned for that year until it was known how they would affect a future agreement on parity. This was the beginning of the preparations for the naval conference that met in London in January 1930.

The first test

The pact came into force at a moment when war threatened in the Far East between two of its parties. On 10 July 1929 the Chinese authorities in Manchuria, subordinate to Zhang Xueliang – the son of the murdered Zhang Zuolin, who at the end of 1928 had recognised Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Nanjing – seized the Chinese Eastern Railway, which was run jointly with the USSR. Hundreds of Soviet employees were arrested and deported. A few days later Moscow broke off diplomatic relations with China. Stimson reminded both sides of their obligations under the pact, which both had accepted. China and the USSR replied that they would honour it unless the other side attacked first – in other words, they invoked the right of self-defence.

The assurances counted for nothing. In August Joseph Stalin approved the creation of the Special Far Eastern Army under Vasily Blyukher. In the autumn Soviet troops, supported by a river flotilla, aircraft and tanks, routed the Manchurian forces. When on 2 December Stimson again invoked the pact and called on the other parties to join an appeal for peace, Moscow rejected the note as inadmissible pressure and pointed out that Washington did not even maintain diplomatic relations with the USSR. The conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway ended in December 1929 with the Khabarovsk Protocol, which restored the status quo ante. It had been settled by force, and the pact had proved powerless less than six months after coming into force.

Significance

The pact’s entry into force was the last great moment of optimism of the 1920s. Kellogg received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1929, presented to him a year later. Three months after the ceremony at the White House the New York stock market collapsed, and the Great Depression that followed swept away the policy of conciliation on which the pact rested. The lesson of the Manchurian conflict was learnt best by the Japanese. They saw that a state that used force and called it self-defence would suffer no consequences. In September 1931, after the Mukden incident, the Kwantung Army occupied the whole of Manchuria. Stimson, true to the pact, proclaimed in January 1932 the doctrine that the United States would not recognise territorial changes brought about in violation of it. Non-recognition of Manchukuo did not, however, stop Japan – nor, after it, Italy in Ethiopia or Germany in Europe.

Even so, the pact did not die. Because it bound all the powers that unleashed wars in Asia and Europe in 1937–1941, after 1945 it became the basis for the charge of crimes against peace at the Nuremberg trials and before the Tokyo tribunal. Adolf Hitler’s closest associates and the leaders of Japan were tried, among other things, for breaking the promise made in Paris and proclaimed at the White House in July 1929.