Remembering the Kellogg-Briand Pact
By Jason Sibert
The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 was widely considered a failure in stopping war.
Although the evidence is stacked against it, the pact did have some impact on the behavior of states. It was named after Secretary of State Frank Kellogg (under Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover) and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, as the United States and France sponsored it and many other states signed it. It was passed outside the framework of the League of Nations. Kellogg-Briand bound all signing nations not to use war to settle disputes regardless of the origin of the conflict or what the conflict is about.
Less than a decade after the passage of Kellogg-Briand, the world was involved in World War II. Some of the ideas it embodied – collective security, peaceful settlement of disputes, and the renouncing of the use of war – were incorporated into the United Nations Treaty in 1945. Journalist Eric Sevareid called Kellogg-Briand “a worthless piece of paper.” However, many would say the pact does have some historical significance. Academics Scott Shapiro and Oona Hathaway credited the agreement as an initiator of less interstate war in the years after World War II.
Kellogg-Briand also held legal significance. It held as a standard that territorial conquests are illegal and provided a historical example of nations banding together to keep the peace. The pact provided a legal framework for the allies to punish the axis powers for starting World War II. Shapiro and Hathaway credit the treaty for the growth of multilateral organizations and the explosion of the human rights revolution around the world, as the pact said no country has the right to disturb the peace of another country – a big human rights statement.
Germany, Soviet Russia, and Japan were among the nations that signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact. After World War I, Germany was starting to act like a responsible member of the international community. In a few short years, it fell under the sway of Fascism and was one the countries that started World War II. Will the decline in interstate warfare continue? Right-wing populism, a nationalistic ideology, is spreading around the world in different forms, a fact stated time and again in the media. While the countries that have fallen under the sway of right-wing populism are unlikely to start anything as destructive as World War II, we’re already seeing a world growing apart and a growing skepticism of multilateral approaches while the methods of killing grow more and more lethal.
A growing lack of trust amongst the nation-states of the world has already started an arms race that could grow more costly, even if interstate warfare continues to decline. This means less money spent on the citizenry of any number of countries. Hopefully, we’ll take control of our history and continue in the tradition of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 .
Jason Sibert is the executive director of the Peace Economy Project in St Louis.
