Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

Copenhagen, on an island facing the coast of a foreign country, was one of the most exposed cities in the world, and Denmark as a whole was hardly in a better position. In her tiny national domain, with its flat surface intersected by numerous arms of the sea, which made the Danish coast-line longer than that of France, there was nothing corresponding to those impenetrable fastnesses which the Turks possessed in the interior of Anatolia with its high altitudes, immense distances, and defective means of communication. Though Denmark had had the good fortune to preserve her neutrality during the War of 1914, that was simply because none of the belligerents had chosen to violate it, and not because it could have been defended effectively by the Danish naval and military forces. Had she been attacked during the years 1914-18, Denmark would have fared far worse than she had done when this misfortune happened to her during the preceding General War of 1792-1815, and her own experts were under no illusions on the subject. Before the close of the War, they had reported to the Danish Government that Copenhagen was no longer defensible, and in Denmark this discovery brought the idea of voluntary total disarmament, which at that time seemed quite Utopian elsewhere, into the field of practical politics. People who have made up their minds that a particular insurance scheme will prove a failure if ever the risk insured against materializes, become restive over paying even a moderate premium year by year. If they' are making no effective provision against possible disaster, they may as well save their money; and if the threatened disaster is war and the premium an inevitably inadequate army and navy, the financial argument for liquidating the policy is reinforced by a psychological consideration. The existence of an army and navy which can offer no effective resistance to an aggressor may yet provide him with a just sufficiently plausible pretext for delivering his attack, whereas, if the country which is his intended victim has voluntarily laid aside all armaments, he may conceivably hesitate to incur the odium of an aggression which he cannot hope, in this case, to represent to the world as being anything but what it is.

Accordingly, the idea of voluntary disarmament became a political question in Denmark at a time when most other nations in Europe were still engaged in the General War. Afterwards, definite proposals were put forward by the Social Democratic Party in the parliament of 1921-2; and when a Social Democratic Ministry took office in April 1924 it cast these proposals into the form of a Bill to be laid before the Folkething or lower house of the Rigsdag.

1

This scheme 1 provided for the abolition not only of conscription, but also of the army, navy, Admiralty, and War Office. The place of the army was to be taken by a constabulary who were to be recruited by voluntary enlistment up to the strength of seven thousand for twelve years' service, and were to be put through a four and a half months' training, but were to live at home as reservists (receiving a retaining fee), except for about two hundred and fifty recruits who would always be in course of training at Copenhagen and other centres. This constabulary were to act as a frontier guard, while the coasts, territorial waters, and fisheries of Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland were to be patrolled by five vessels, in addition to one vessel, three motor boats, and twelve aeroplanes to be retained for coast defence. The total personnel of this marine service was to be limited to a permanent staff of eighty or ninety and a temporary staff of three hundred and sixty. It was estimated that the financial effect of these changes would be to reduce the annual cost of national defence from £2,400,000 to £440,000. The Danish Government appear to have held that these armed forces would suffice for the fulfilment of Danish obligations under Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Presumably they meant by this that the forces in question would be sufficient to control the execution of any economic or financial sanctions which Denmark might put into force against a Covenant-breaking state.

This Bill was duly introduced into the Folkething on the 8th October, passed its first reading (by a very narrow majority) on the 28th November, and thus reached the committee stage. It remained to be seen whether its provisions would be modified in committee by the Radicals, on whose votes the Government depended and who were known to prefer less extreme measures, and thereafter what its fate would be in the Landsthing or Upper House, in which the Government did not command a majority, and in which the opposition to the Bill was known to be considerable.2

These events in Denmark not unnaturally aroused intense interest in Sweden; and in August 1924, a few weeks before the fall of the Conservative Government, the then Swedish Prime Minister, M. Trygger, delivered a speech at Malmö in which he publicly

1 See the dispatch from the Copenhagen correspondent of The Times, published in the issue of the 9th September, 1924.

See an article by F. de Jessen published in Le Temps of the 25th October,

deprecated the Danish disarmament scheme as being a two-edged sword', and went so far as to declare (according to a German report) 1 that, if it were carried into effect, 'Sweden would constantly be threatened with the possibility of a change of neighbours and of seeing the place of Denmark taken by another state whose interests in war and peace would perhaps be quite different from those of Scandinavia.'

The considerations which inclined Danish opinion in the direction of complete disarmament did not apply to Sweden, who, with double the population and with frontiers which were covered by the comparatively broad expanse of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia (except where they marched with her weaker neighbours, Norway and Finland), was in a far better position to defend herself by her own resources. Indeed, the results of the peace settlement had greatly improved Sweden's strategic position; for, whereas before the War she had been threatened, from across the Baltic, by the German and Russian Empires, Germany was now almost totally disarmed on sea and land; Russia had been pushed back from the east coast of the Baltic except for a tiny strip at the head of the Gulf of Finland, and Russia's place along the littoral had been taken by four weak states which could not possibly be a danger to Sweden, while their existence covered her against any direct attack from the Russian side. On the other hand, the annual cost of Swedish national defence, which had been rising steadily since the beginning of the century and stood at £6,360,000 at the outbreak of the War of 1914, had risen to a figure varying between £14,000,000 and £17,000,000 by its close, and even after the peace settlement the figure remained above £12,000,000, that is, about 26 per cent. of the total annual estimates. In consequence, the voluntary reduction, though not the total abolition, of national armaments became a leading issue in Swedish politics, and all parties were agreed that some reduction must be carried out. M. Trygger's Conservative Ministry brought in a compromise Bill and referred it to a select committee of both Houses, in which all parties were represented proportionally, but no agreement had been reached before the Ministry fell. The new Social Democratic Ministry which was formed by M. Branting in September gave the reduction of national

1 Dispatch from Copenhagen, dated the 16th August and published in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of the 19th August, 1924.

2 These figures are taken from a dispatch from the Stockholm correspondent of The Times, published in the issue of the 10th December, 1924.

armaments a prominent place in its programme, and announced its intention to lay a new Bill before Parliament in the forthcoming session; but Swedish opinion seemed to be in favour of reserving action in this matter until the prospects of the Geneva Protocol had become clearer than they were at the end of the year.

(viii) The Rome Conference of Naval Experts,
14th-25th February, 1924.

The Naval Sub-Commission of the Permanent Advisory Commission of the League of Nations for Military, Naval, and Air Questions was convened to meet in Rome on the 14th February, 1924, to consider the application of the principles embodied in the FivePower Treaty for the Limitation of Naval Armaments, signed in Washington on the 6th February, 1922, to states not signatories of that treaty, whether or not they happened to be Members of the League.

The states represented on the Naval Sub-Commission were identical with those represented on the Council of the League (namely: Belgium, Brazil, the British Empire, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and Uruguay), and experts from these states were to attend the conference ex officio. For the purpose in view, however, it was necessary, if possible, to secure the presence of experts from all states possessing' capital ships', since the limitation envisaged in the Washington Treaty was concerned with capital ships and with these exclusively-a 'capital ship' being defined, in the text of the treaty, as a vessel of war, not an aircraft carrier, whose displacement exceeds 10,000 tons (10,160 metric tons) standard displacement, or which carries a gun with a calibre exceeding 8 inches (203 millimetres). Since vessels of this class were possessed by Argentina, Chile, Denmark, Greece, Norway, the Netherlands, Soviet Russia, and Turkey, all these states were invited (though the last two were not Members of the League) and all accepted the invitation except Turkey, who refused on the ground that the Lausanne Treaty had not yet been ratified by other parties and that she was, therefore, still in a state of war. The United States was unwilling to participate, in spite of the fact that the Washington Conference had been convened on her initiative and that the chief architect of the Five-Power Treaty had been Mr. Charles Evans Hughes. Germany was not invited, since she

had been debarred from possessing 'capital ships' by the Versailles Treaty.

Thus the Conference was technically a meeting of the Naval SubCommission with an ad hoc enlargement of its membership; and the delegates being experts and not plenipotentiaries were simply to undertake studies preparatory to the holding of an international conference of a political character at some later date. Unfortunately, the results of the Rome Conference were so disappointing that the more ambitious project to which it was to have been the preface was tacitly abandoned.

Since the meetings were held behind closed doors, exact information in regard to the proceedings was not available at the time of writing, but it appears that the failure was principally due to three causes. In the first place, the amour propre which had been so marked in the French delegation at Washington showed itself equally strong among the delegates of the lesser naval Powers at Rome and made them unwilling to reduce the tonnage of their capital ships in the proportion which had been agreed upon by the principal naval Powers. In this movement the Spanish delegate seems to have taken the lead, with support from several Latin American countries. In the second place, capital ships, to which the reference of the Conference was limited, were of secondary importance to most of the states represented as compared with auxiliary craft and especially with submarines. In the third place, the discussion was inevitably inconclusive because it was limited to technical questions, for political questions were thus ex hypothesi excluded, and this meant that the concrete conditions under which any scheme for reduction would be carried out could not be defined. The success of the Washington Conference had been largely due to the diplomatic skill with which the political and technical discussions had been kept abreast of one another. The technical parts of the Five-Power Treaty of the 6th February, 1922, were interdependent with the political provisions contained in Article 19 and in the Four-Power Pacific Treaty which had been signed on the 13th December, 1921. Thus, in working out agreements in either sphere, the negotiators knew at each stage how they stood in regard to the other sphere, and so commanded all the necessary data for taking decisions. At the Rome Conference no such synthesis was possible, and the difficulty was increased by the heterogeneity of the political interests in the background. The principal naval Powers which came to an agreement at Washington had to deal with a possible conflict of

« AnteriorContinuar »