Kellogg-Briand Pact

Can an international agreement bring world peace? This is what the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, set out to accomplish. This postwar agreement in Paris in 1928 by 15 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan. Yet within three years, Japan occupied Manchuria (China), and in 1939, the Second World War began.

Fig. 1 - President Hoover received delegates to the Kellogg Pact ratification in 1929.

Kellogg-Briand Pact: Summary

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed in Paris, France, on August 27, 1928. The agreement denounced war and promoted peaceful international relations. The pact was named after the U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand of France. The original 15 signatories were:

• Australia
• Belgium
• Canada
• Czechoslovakia
• France
• Germany
• Great Britain
• India
• Ireland
• Italy
• Japan
• New Zealand
• Poland
• South Africa
• United States

Later, 47 additional countries joined the agreement.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact found broad support after the devastating First World War. Yet, the agreement lacked the legal mechanisms of enforcement should a signatory violate it.

The U.S. Senate ratified the Kellogg-Briand Pact. However, the statesmen noted the U.S. right to self-defense.

Kellogg-Briand Pact: Background

Earlier, the French sought a bilateral non-aggression pact with the United States. Foreign Minister Briand was concerned with German aggression because the Versailles Treaty (1919) harshly punished that country, and Germans felt discontent. Instead, the U.S. proposed a more inclusive agreement engaging several countries.

World War I

The First World War lasted from July 1914 to November 1918 and involved many countries divided into two camps:

The scope of the war and new technology provided by the Second Industrial Revolution resulted in an estimated 25 million lost lives. The war also led to the redrawing of borders since the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed.

Fig. 2 - French soldiers, led by General Gouraud, with machine guns amongst church ruins near the Marne, France, 1918.

Paris Peace Conference

The Paris Peace Conference was held between 1919 and 1920. Its goal was to formally conclude the First World War by setting the terms of defeat for the Central Powers. Its results were:

• The Treaty of Versailles
• The League of Nations

• The Treaty of Versailles (1919) was a postwar agreement signed at the Paris Peace Conference. The principal victors, Britain, France, and the U.S., placed the blame for the war on Germany in Article 231, the so-called war-guilt clause.
• As a result, Germany was ordered to 1) pay massive reparations and 2) give up territories to such countries as France and Poland. Germany also had to 3) significantly reduce its armed forces and weapons stockpiles. Vanquished Germany, Austria, and Hungary could not set the terms of the agreement. Russia did not participate in the deal because it signed a separate peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk after its 1917 Revolution detrimental to its interests.
• Historians consider the Treaty of Versailles an ill-conceived agreement. The latter punished Germany so harshly that its economic situation, combined with the extremist politics of Adolf Hitler and the National-Socialists (Nazis), set it on a path to another war.

League of Nations

President Woodrow Wilson subscribed to the idea of national self-determination. He proposed forming an international organization, the League of Nations, to foster peace. However, the Senate did not allow the U.S. to join it.

Overall, the League of Nations was not successful because it failed to prevent a global war. In 1945, the United Nations replaced it.

Fig. 3 - Chinese delegation addresses the League of Nations after the Mukden Incident, by Robert Sennecke, 1932.

Kellogg-Briand Pact Purpose

The purpose of the Kellogg-Briand Pact was the prevention of war. The League of Nations was the international body that, in theory, could punish its violators. However, the organization lacked legal mechanisms for meaningful action beyond measures like international sanctions.

Kellogg-Briand Pact: Failure

The Mukden Incident of 1931 saw Japan engineer a pretext for occupying China's Manchuria region. In 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia). In 1939, the Second World began with the Nazi German invasion of Poland.

Fig. 4 - Paris Carnival was mocking the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1929

Kellogg-Briand Pact: Hirohito and Japan

In the first half of the 20th century, Japan was an empire. By 1910, the Japanese occupied Korea. In the 1930s and until 1945, the Japanese Empire expanded into China and Southeast Asia. Japan was motivated by several factors, such as its militarist ideology and search for additional resources. Japan, led by Emperor Hirohito, described its colonies as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Fig. 5 - Japanese soldiers near Mukden, 1931.

On September 18, 1931, the Japanese imperial army blew up the South Manchuria Railway—operated by Japan—in the vicinity of Mukden (Shenyang) in China. The Japanese sought a pretext to invade Manchuria and blamed this false flag incident on the Chinese.

Upon occupying Manchuria, the Japanese renamed it Manchukuo.

The Chinese delegation brought their case to the League of Nations. After all, Japan did not abide by the Kellogg-Briand Pact that it signed, and the country withdrew from the organization.

On July 7, 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War began and lasted until the end of the Second World War.

Kellogg-Briand Pact: Mussolioni and Italy

Despite signing the Kellogg-Briand Pact, Italy, led by Benito Mussolini, invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935. Benito Mussolini was the country's fascist leader in power since 1922.

The League of Nations attempted to punish Italy with sanctions. However, Italy pulled out of the organization, and sanctions were later dropped. Italy also temporarily made a special deal with France and Britain.

Fig. 6 - Indigenous troops serving colonial Italy advancing on Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1936.

The crisis degenerated into the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1937). It also became one of the critical events that showed the impotence of the League of Nations.

Kellogg-Briand Pact: Hitler and Germany

Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 for many reasons. They included the party's populist politics, Germany's dismal economic situation in the 1920s, and its territorial grievances resulting from the Versailles Treaty.

Not only did Nazi Germany have supremacist domestic politics giving preferential treatment to ethnic Germans, but it also planned expansion into other parts of Europe. This expansion sought to reclaim territories Germany perceived lost due to the World War I settlement, such as the French Alsace-Loraine (Alsace–Moselle), and other lands such as the Soviet Union. Nazi theorists subscribed to the concept of Lebensraum (living space) for Germans in occupied Slavic territories.

At this time, some European states signed treaties with Germany.

Fig. 7 - Munich Agreement signing, L-R: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano, September 1938, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany.

Treaties with Nazi Germany

The treaties were primarily bilateral non-aggression pacts, such as the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between German and the Soviet Union, promising not to attack each other. The 1938 Munich Agreement between Germany, Britain, France, and Italy, gave Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Germany, followed by a Polish and Hungarian occupation of parts of that country. In contrast, The 1940 Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan was a military alliance of the Axis Powers.

In 1939, Germany invaded all of Czechoslovakia and then Poland, and the Second World War began. In June 1941, Hitler also broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and attacked the Soviet Union. Therefore, Germany's actions showed a pattern of evading both the Kellogg-Briand Pact and several non-aggression agreements.

Kellogg-Briand Pact: Significance

The Kellogg-Briand Pact displayed the benefits and drawbacks of pursuing international peace. On the one hand, the horrors of the First World War prompted many countries to seek a commitment against war. The drawback was the lack of international legal mechanisms of enforcement.

After the Second World War, the Kellogg-Briand Pact became important during the American occupation of Japan (1945-1952). The legal advisors working for Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), believed that the 1928 Pact "provided the most prominent model for the renunciation-of-war language"¹ in the draft of Japan's postwar Constitution. In 1947, Article 9 of the Constitution indeed renounced war.