Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1991

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

History

Major Professor

John Bohstedt

Committee Members

Jonathan Utley, Rosemary Wakeman, Vernon Iredell

Abstract

My area of research for this project has been British policy toward the League of Nations in the 1920s. I went to England in the summer of 1990 and looked at materials in the Public Records Office and the British Library, both in London. At the P.R.O. I examined a wide variety of documents from the various branches of the British government: Foreign Office, Cabinet, Committee of Imperial Defense, Dominions Office and private papers (Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald). At the British Library I examined several sets of private papers of individuals involved with my topic. Back home I also looked at microfilm of three British Newspapers (London Times, Manchester Guardian, Daily Herald). I found in my research that the British government offered a wide variety of criticisms for a plan devised by the League of Nations to prevent aggression. The plan, the Geneva Protocol of 1924, sought to institute a mechanism which would have been set in motion automatically when an aggression occurred against a League member anywhere in the world. The Conservative British government which took office late in 1924 objected to this proposal on the grounds that it might involve Britain in wars worldwide since it had the largest fleet of any League member. I set out to find the complex of reasons and motivations which led Britain to reject such a peace plan as the Protocol. I found that British Conservative leaders, who manned the departments of the British bureaucracy, feared loss of control over their respective departments to League influence and dreaded change of any kind. Their philosophical world lay in the 19th century when the Great Powers controlled diplomatic relations. I also found that British leaders, for economic reasons in the wake of a ruinous world war, wanted to limit their commitments as much as possible to an area which they considered within their vital interest rather than to risk wars worldwide. The rejection of the Protocol represented a repudiation of experimental peace plans in favor of treaties, such as Locarno, which limited commitments to Western Europe.

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