Diplomacy for All
SINCE documents are a raw material of history, the safe way to review collections of them is to assume that the reader is a historian and proceed accordingly. This is a little hard on the general reader, unless he is flattered by being treated as a historian, but why worry about him anyway? By immemorial custom documents are not his cup of tea. A book of documents can be measured against other books of documents, or it can be measured according to its success in conveying an accurate impression of the phase of history with which it is concerned. Normally only professional historians have command of either of these standards. But once in a lifetime the common man knocks at the front door and it is opened unto him. This book gives him his chance. If he was alive and reading the newspapers in 1929-31 he will find Professor Woodward and Mr. Butler, his hired servants, holding the doors open, and if his memory and judgement are sound he may get just as much enjoyment and instruction out of his perusal of these papers as any professional historian—and perhaps a little more, since it will all be rather a pleasant surprise to him.
The great project of which this volume is the first fruit was under- taken in March, 1944, when the then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs announced the decision of the Government to publish the most important documents in the Foreign Office archives relating to British foreign policy between 1919 and 1939. The work was
divided into two parts, the first beginning with the year 1919 and the second with 1930, so that both could be undertaken concurrently and the public could obtain access as soon as possible to the docu- ments concerned with the period leading up directly to the war. The present volume is the first of this more topical second half of the work. It covers Anglo-American discussions preparatory to the London Naval Conference of 1930' the Confertnce itself, and subsequent negotiations with the French and Italian Governments with a view to facilitating a Franco-Italian Naval Agreement. It also gives a selection of documents showing the attitude of His Majesty's Government towards M. Briand's proposal for European Federal Union, which may give as much encouragement to present- day seekers after that ideal as, say, the Astronomer Royal may be presumed to give to militant flat-earth theorists—but not more.
The volume concludes with some documents entitled "Relations with Germany from the formation of Dr. 'Briining's administration to the announcement of the Austro-German proposals for a Customs Union" which are on balance, rather more startling than some more seductively labelled spy thrillers. Perhaps the professional historians will not like these comparisons. If so, they may, if it is tot incon- sistent with their dignity, go and chase themselves. Professor Wood- ward and Mr. Butler and the staff of the Foreign Office library are paid by the taxpayers, and the taxpayers have a perfect right to their money's worth, even though it costs a guinea a volume on top of the Income Tax. These documents are the property of the common man and, with 633 xxxvii pages of them, apparently well selected, certainly well arranged and labelled, and beautifully printed by the Stationery Office on a paper and in a binding clearly designed with a view to eternity, they are worth the money.
It is possible that the documents relating to naval matters will not be found as fascinating as the rest of this volume. To the extent that they are devoted to that peculiar brand of arithmetical hypocrisy which is concerned with equating cruisers to the relevant fractions of battleships and reducing national obligations to second-form sums, nobody need bother very much about them. Even the naval experts who may have to do these sums again relating battleships to the relevant fractions of atom bombs, need not necessarily refer to these documents. It is probably easier to make up that sort of thing as you go along. But anyone who wants to know what goes on when Prime Ministers have tea with Ambassadors will find plenty to interest him. In fact any citizen who wants to be well informed ignores these things at his peril, for quite often decisions have been made and courses set on these occasions and nothing but the most scrupulous political memoirs can add anything to the documentary records such as are found here.
Naturally the present-day reader will turn most readily to the chapters on relations with Germany and European Federal Union. As to the latter there is a demonstration of the exact process whereby the Civil Service kills an idea, which, although a little gruesome, is instructive. It does not exactly freeze it to death. It keeps it tepid until it accumulates a sort of scum of phrases such as these- " Moreover, it may well be that M. Briand's purpose could be at least in part achieved not by the creation of any new and elaborate machinery of the kind which he proposes, but by the establishment of European Committees...... "We must not antagonise Latin-America. . . . " •
"If these principles are accepted it is suggested that His Majesty's Government, if they reply before or on July 15, should confine themselves to an expression of warm sympathy with the high ideals. . • . "
Perhaps it doesn't matter. But in case it ever does, it might be as well to learn how to deal with this sort of thing.
If a book of documents may be said to have a piece de resistance, this one has it in the final chapter on relations with Germany, a chapter which covers the first substantial electoral success of the Nazi Party and no doubt sounds the keynote of all the later volumes. Adolf Hitler makes his first appearance in this volume in a conversa- tion between H M Military Attaché in Berlin and Colonel Killdenthal of the Reic.hswehr Ministry. just how difficult it was to size up the menace is illustrated by the fact that in one short note containing a series of penetrating and prophetic remarks about National Social- ism, this curious juxtaposition occurs : "They wish to destroy the present fabric of the State, but have no constructive programme with which to replace it, except a form of mad-dog dictatorship. The movement is therefore, in the long run, more akin to Bolshevism than to Fascism." But in that one remark lies the lesson of the whole book—the extreme importance of accumulating masses of fact on international relations before venturing an opinion—for the writers, as well as the readers, of basic documents are fallible human
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