World Disarmament Conference Research Articles

Allen Leeper, the Foreign Office and the Diplomacy of Air Disarmament, 1932-1934

ABSTRACT As the resident Foreign Office expert on air disarmament during the World Disarmament Conference, Allen Leeper was at the forefront of a campaign for the elimination of military aircraft as a radical bid to address German claims to equality and French demands for security. His motivations derived from a deep-seated fear that legitimising a German air force posed an unacceptable risk to European stability by provoking an all-out arms race, heightening continental tensions and raising the spectre of war. But Leeper’s sweeping solution for military aircraft, with its intertwined repercussions for civil aviation, fell victim to an increasingly truculent government in Berlin that refused to delay equality, claimed substantial increases in German military strength and boosted defence spending while surreptitiously rearming behind the scenes. In these altered circumstances, Leeper abandoned disarmament as a diplomatic tool for treating the Franco-German question and, instead, resorted to other traditional methods for ensuring continental stability. In doing so, he displayed the strengths of the ‘world leadership’ school of foreign-policy making that placed a premium on Britain’s active engagement in great power politics to uphold its position as the pre-eminent global power.

Role of shg in tribal development by NGO

International organizations have a history dating back to at least 1839 it has been estimated that by 1914, there were 1083 NGOs. International NGOs were important in the anti-slavery movement and the movement for women's suffrage, and reached a peak at the time of the World Disarmament Conference. However, the phrase non-governmental only came into popular use with the establishment of the United Nations Organization in 1945 with provisions in Article 71 of Chapter 10 of the United Nations Charter for a consultative role for organizations which are neither governments nor member States—see Consultative Status. Globalization during the 20th century gave rise to the importance of NGOs. Many problems could not be solved within a nation. NGOs have developed to emphasize humanitarian issues, developmental aid and sustainable development. Interims of environmental issues and sustainable development, the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992was the first to show the power of international NGOs, when about 2, 400 representatives of NGOs came to play a central role in deliberations. Some have argued that in forums like these, NGOs take the place of what should belong to popular movements of the poor. The role of NGOs in the SHG programmers is to support women to encourage and launch groups, provide training and aid in the group's effort, both its inner operations and its interaction with banks and other organizations. Its infrastructure and team capability tolerate it to endow with strong and steady sustain in reaction to the needs of the SHGs, which vary according to neighborhood issues and stages of enlargement. This research study is to assess the impact of NGO's in tribal areas through promoting education to children & women and their participating through SHGs with special reference. From the above analysis it is concluded that SHGs are developed as a tool for poverty alleviation in different countries of the world. Basically SHGs are developed as a micro finance unit and they gradually move on to more complex income and employment generation activity.

The Foreign Office, the World Disarmament Conference, and the French Connexion, 1932–1934

The traditional interpretation of British foreign policy during the World Disarmament Conference has cast Britain as the honest broker, seeking to bring France and Germany together in a bid to square their respective differences over security and equality. But from the Foreign Office perspective, honest brokerage did not place Britain between Germany and France but between the ex-Allied Powers on one side and Germany on the other. This recasting of honest brokerage had two particular strands, with the Foreign Office desirous, first, to secure French support for any sort of disarmament programme before seeking German adherence and, second with an eye to the post-Treaty of Versailles international order, to circumscribe German military potential where at all possible. While the conference results remain the same, this interpretation alters the traditional role and suggested motivations of the Foreign Office between 1932 and 1934.

Cabinet Government, British Imperial Security, and the World Disarmament Conference, 1932—1934

High-ranking ministers in the British cabinet supported calls at the World Disarmament Conference demanding the abolition of aerial bombing. Their efforts, however, were checked by the Air Ministry, with the result that British delegates at the conference promoted a compromise position advocating abolition, with a reservation for colonial policing. Pressure from the conference made it difficult to maintain this posture, and abolitionists in cabinet came close to persuading colleagues of their case, but events in Iraq, Aden, and India served to underscore the importance of the overseas RAF. Several salient features of government in this period help account for the cabinet’s attitude to aerial bombing: the heightened importance of consensus in the National Government, the enhanced relevance of the Air Ministry, the necessity of affordably securing the empire, and a prevailing cynicism about the feasibility of an agreement on aerial bombing.

Review: The Lights That Failed

THE LIGHTS THAT FAILED European International History 1919-1933 Zara Steiner Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xv, 938pp. US$60.00 cloth (0199226865).The years from the first to the second world wars have lately been the subject of attempted revisionism in that some historians argue that they constitute the 30-years' war of the 20th century. Zara Steiner's The Lights That Failed-the first of two volumes dealing with European international history from the 1919 treaty of Versailles to the Polish crisis of September 1939 - firmly rejects this revisionism. With a well-deserved reputation as one of the leading international historians of the post-1945 era> sne has poured into this book her vast knowledge of the subject. More important, she has confirmed her formidable forensic skills in analysing the interwar rivalry of European powers great and small, a rivalry that altered profound- ly not only the course of European history but, as the European powers weakened after fighting the Second World War, produced a new international constellation for the rest of the 20th century.Steiner's argument in this persuasive analysis is that after overcoming a range of economic, financial, political, and security problems central to postwar reconstruction-a result of surmounting the weaknesses of the Paris peace settlement-the leading European powers created a new and viable international order by the late 1920s. Economic and financial questions tied to inter-allied war debts and German reparations were resolved with the 1924 Dawes plan-and, by mid-1929, Dawes was itself being mitigated by a new initiative, the Young plan. Although after 1919 the new League of Nations existed to provide collective security against transgressors of additional arrangements in the western Pacific Ocean (the 1922 Washington nine-power and four-power treaties) and in Europe (the 1925 Locarno treaty) provided the major powers with national security in Europe and its imperial variant in East Asia. Tied to these security agreements was the crucial issue of disarmament. Limiting the major naval powers' battle-fleets, a third Washington treaty also set displacement and guncalibre maxima for warships below 10,000 tons. Then, immediately after Locarno's initialling in October 1925, the League established a commission to prepare for a world disarmament conference to limit the ground, air, and, appropriating the Washington treaty, naval forces of its members. So important was the preparatory commission that even the isolationist United States and that European pariah, Bolshevik Russia, joined its deliberations.None of this suggests that European international politics ran smoothly in the 1920s. Even after Locarno, Franco-German relations were marked by distrust and mutual suspicion over a range of political, military, and economic issues. In the first years of peace, Anglo-French differences over the German and Turkish questions had the potential to disrupt the postwar balance and, thus, European stability. Consolidation of Lenin's regime by 1921 injected ideology into international politics and brought concern in eastern and western Europe about containing the bacillus of revolutionary Bolshevism. …

Gas disarmament in the 1920s: Hopes confounded

Following the extensive use of chemical weapons in the First World War, which contravened pre-war agreements, gas disarmament was a prime candidate for interwar consideration. Although the issue remained on the international agenda until the ill-fated World Disarmament Conference, this paper argues that it failed on account of military, economic and political difficulties. These included the continuing interest of the military in the potential of chemical weaponry, doubts about the practicality of gas disarmament at a time when states were trying to revive their chemical industries, and profound political differences over security issues between Britain and France and France and Germany.

Making Disarmament Work: The Implementation of the International Disarmament Provisions In the League of Nations Covenant, 1919–1925

This article argues that, despite the eventual failure of the League to deliver the international disarmament that may believed would create peace, the early inter-war years showed signs of great promise. The League's early, often modest, efforts to establish the foundations of international disarmament, deserve greater credit than they are usually afforded because they have been overshadowed by the collapse of the World Disarmament Conference in 1934.

France and the World Disarmament Conference of 1932–34

Traditional accounts of the disastrous World Disarmament Conference of 1932–34 have placed the blame for its failure on France. Recent historians have revised this picture by describing the internal and external constraints on French policymakers and by delineating the equally obstructive policies adopted by the Anglo-Saxon countries. This article outlines each of these approaches, but takes the defence of France one step further. By assessing the evolution of French policy at the World Disarmament Conference, the article demonstrates that France was prepared to make greater concessions for the sake of agreement than any other country.

Piecing Together the Interwar Disarmament Puzzle

DISARMAMENT AS A MODERN PHENOMENON has its roots in the success and, more often, the failure of international disarmament initiatives during the period between the two world wars. Set in motion in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles, which followed four years of horror on an unprecedented scale, the interwar disarmament process culminated in the fiasco of the little-remembered World Disarmament Conference of 1932-1934. In his closing speech to the first session of the conference in July 1932, French prime minister Edouard Herriot was moved to comment on the lack of achievement: There have been times when we may have wondered whether the verb 'to disarm' was not in every language an irregular verb, with no first person, and only conjugated in the future tense.'1 Such failure has led most commentators to dismiss interwar disarmament efforts as either worthless, hopelessly naive or simply irrelevant...

The Press, Public Opinion, Arms Limitation, and Government Policy in Britain, 1932-34: Some Preliminary Observations

One of the least understood issues concerning interwar Britain is the connection between public opinion and the development and implementation of foreign and defence policy. And what is true generally of these crucial elements of interwar British statecraft is doubly so for perhaps their most nettled subset: disarmament. Public opinion polling did not begin in Britain till 1937; yet in 1932-34, when Britain played a leading role in the League of Nations-sponsored World Disarmament Conference, government ministers and their civil service and armed forces advisors sought to produce policy for this conference that would balance between limiting the national armoury and protecting national and Imperial security. Their reading of public opinion was crucial; but so, too, was the reading that the opposition parties and extra-parliamentary interest groups did and the subsequent pressures that they brought to bear on the government. This article offers some preliminary observations on the efficacy of using the national press as a means both of assessing public attitudes and of connecting the public debate over disarmament policy with policymaking within the British government.

‘The disenchantment conference’: Frustration and humour at the world disarmament conference, 1932

A parody of the work of the Air Commission of the World Disarmament Conference of 1932–34 reveals the cynicism and boredom, as well as the personality, of the officials in the British delegation. In doing so, it demonstrates something of the futility of trying resolve the question of disarmament when bureaucrats and military experts are given free reign.

Reducing Offensive Capabilities - the Attempt of 1932

The theme of the article is the multilateral reduction of offensive capabilities, aimed at the enhancement of conventional defensive superiority as a means of war prevention. This approach surfaced at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. It was promoted in order to enhance confidence, prevent a disastrous arms race, and allow for a `cooling-off' period in times of tension. Uppermost in most minds, however, was the aim of precluding the possibility of a `lightning attack' by prohibiting the necessary hardware - bombers and tanks. The origin of the approach cannot be traced back much further than 1930, to the influential leader of the peace movement, Lord Cecil, and the strategic thinker Liddell Hart. After initial widespread support by political delegates, fruitless debates in special technical commissions led to stagnation, while Hitler rose to power. Advocates of the revival of the powers of the offensive, such as Fuller and Winston Churchill, had had no doubts about what kind of hardware to promote, in order to prevent a repetition of the stalemate of World War I. When it came to abolishing rather than promoting weapons, however, they refused to fully accept the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons. In order to save a handful of experimental tanks, and the dream they promised of a revival of decisive offensive warfare, the military experts of the major powers let pass the chance of preventing war through the reduction of offensive capabilities. The Conference failed, and Hitler set out to acquire exactly those bits of hardware that promised success through what was later to become known as the `Blitzkrieg'. Thus, in 1932 the window of opportunity, still slightly ajar, finally closed, preparing the way for World War II. Today the approach has another chance, but once again the window of opportunity is closing.

The First World Disarmament Conference 1932–1933: And Why It Failed

The First World Disarmament Conference 1932–1933: And Why It Failed

UN Deadlocks and Delaying Tactics: The First Three Years of the Soviet Proposal for a World Disarmament Conference 1971-1974

UN Deadlocks and Delaying Tactics: The First Three Years of the Soviet Proposal for a World Disarmament Conference 1971-1974

Conference at the crossroads: Future prospects for the conference of the Committee on Disarmament

The Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD), a 26-member committee chaired by the US and the USSR and reporting annually to the UN General Assembly, has been stalled for three years over two issues which neither super power wishes to agree on: chemical weapons and a comprehensive nuclear testing ban. As a result, the future viability of the world's only multilateral forum for negotiating arms control is in jeopardy. In recent years a movement has been initiated by certain non-aligned states—mostly notably Mexico, Sweden, and Yugoslavia—to shake up the procedural foundations of the CCD so as to bring about substantive changes in its agenda, its manner of operation, its composition, and its results. The immediate diplomatic vehicle for this procedural revolution is the convening of a new deliberative forum, the World Disarmament Conference (WDC). The WDC has been debated in the last three General Assemblies where it has evolved in substance and built a constituency of support so that there is a distinct possibility such a body may be convened in the next few years. Its most significant achievement would be to bring France and China into world disarmament forums, and to legitimize on-going bilateral and regional arms control structures which have been created in the absence of movement at the CCD.

The USSR Position on Disarmament in the United Nations

Inevitability of peaceful coexistence provides new opportunities for peace and disarmament. In accordance with the peace program of the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) held in April 1971, the USSR put forward at the last three sessions of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly three concrete proposals. These are proposals on the convening of a world disarmament conference, on the nonuse of force in international relations and permanent prohibition of the use of nuclear weapons and on the reduction by 10 percent of the military budgets of those states which are permanent members of the Security Council and utilization of part of the funds thus saved to provide assistance to developing countries. Implementation of the UN resolutions adopted on all three items would widen the geographical scope of dis armament and the trend towards reducing armaments and would substantially contribute to actual decrease of the burden of armaments and the danger of war.

A World Disarmament Conference?

“Will a world disarmament conference be approved by the 28th U.N. General Assembly?… Even if China reluctantly agrees and preparations begin for a conference, there could be many detours, many delays…. A world disarmament conference might not be held until the mid-year of this Disarmament Decade. It could, however, be held much earlier, if only to reconstitute the CCD [Conference of the Committee on Disarmament] in Geneva and to flesh out the link between disarmament and development which the Third World is increasingly and impatiently demanding.” Homer A. Jack is Secretary-General of the World Conference of Religion for Peace.

Keeping the Genie in the Bottle: The Feasibility of a Nuclear Non- Proliferation Agreement

During his campaign to mobilize support for the partial test-ban Treaty in 1963, President Kennedy warned that the evil genie of fire-power must be curtailed while time to do so still remained available. His warning has been repeated by dozens of Presidents and Prime Ministers since then but no significant action has yet been taken. Though it is injurious to every single member of the nuclear club that proliferation should take place, they have been unable to agree on any single procedure to arrest so unwelcome but probably a development. The non-nuclear powers of the present day have attempted to force the pace of action by convening the 18-nations Disarmament Conference in Geneva, by exploring the issue of dissemination in depth during the 20th session of the General Assembly, and by calling for a world disarmament conference (which will supposedly include mainland China) to be held during 1967. The non-nuclear powers recognize that there are at least a dozen of their colleagues who could attain an independent capability during the next five to ten years. Their fear that the international system will be destabilized as weapons proliferate is matched only by their frustration at the powers* inability to adopt preventive measures to arrest this spread. Unfortunately, proliferation is now regarded with the same degree of callousness and of myopia by policy-planners as the problems generated by the population explosion. The advanced industrial nations, which could contribute sizeably to birth control and massive agriculture programs, are either unwilling or unable to cope with the issues that will surely become critical in the 1970s. Their defensive statements are logical and apologetic, but abjectly myopic. Diplomacy and policy planning, they insist, are concerned with short-term procedural issues and not with long-run or radical schemes to retain international equilibrium. The few wealthy and nuclear-armed nations are too troubled by immediate policy conflicts to attend to problems of the next decade. Though they claim that this position is based upon a shrewd recognition of the necessities

Isolated Japan: Anglo-American Diplomatic Co-Operation, 1927-1936

DURING THE YEARS 1927 to 1936 the rising forces of totalitarian nationalism in Italy, Germany, and Japan stopped the drive toward armament limitation and eventual disarmament. In those self-styled have-not nations the economically burdened called for relief from armaments competition. There was no relief, but the leadership did direct the existing unrest into familiar nationalistic channels. In other countries more peaceful-minded statesmen, recognizing the dramatic though partial success of the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armament, determined to try again. Thus the League Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference commenced its seemingly interminable sessions in 1926, technical meetings that continued until the World Disarmament Conference convened at Geneva. But the na-

Disarmament. A Review of the Acts of the League of Nations and of Governments, Parliamentary Debates and the trend of Public Opinion and Action relating to the World Disarmament Conference

<sc>Disarmament</sc>. A Review of the Acts of the League of Nations and of Governments, Parliamentary Debates and the trend of Public Opinion and Action relating to the World Disarmament Conference