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Philip Kerr (Lord) Lothian, Pacifism is Not Enough, Nor Patriotism Either: being the Burge memorial lecture for the year 1935 (1935)

Lord Lothian was a British politician and diplomat who underwent a remarkable transformation from being a leading advocate of rapprochement with Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s to become one of the main proponents of British re-armament by 1938. This change in viewpoint came about after reading an English translation of Mein Kumpf, which convinced Lothian that Hitler’s goal was not simply to undo the injustices done by the Treaty of Versailles, but rather to avenge the whole of the German defeat in the First World War. In September of 1939 Lothian was appointed as British Ambassador to the United States, and he is now credited as being one of the key figures in turning President Roosevelt from a position of isolationism and neutrality to become a strong economic backer of Britain’s war effort.

Robert Menzies met Lothian at the palatial Cliveden estate during his first trip to Britain in 1935, and he too was initially won over by the overwhelming public consensus in favour of appeasement before coming to realise that Hitler was a man who could not be negotiated with and must therefore be defeated at all costs. This was a consensus that held sway not only among conservative Empire loyalists, but equally (and in some ways more strongly) within the Australian Labor Party, which during the 1930s remained convinced that the previous War had been the result of a capitalist conspiracy, and that Australia (despite its tiny population and military weakness) could maintain a policy of isolationism similar to that of the Americans.

After their initial meeting, Lothian sent Menzies a copy of Pacificism is Not Enough, a lecture in which he had argued that the true cause of war was not economic or ideological, but rather the system of independent sovereign states, which needed to be replaced by a form of international governance. At a conference on ‘Australia’s Post-War International Relations’ held in 1944, Menzies would quote from Lothian’s work, not because he agreed with it, but rather as an example of how the war had made men abandon utopianism in international affairs:

‘No man devoted a more lucid intelligence to international thinking than the late Lord Lothian. In his Burge Memorial Lecture for 1935 “Pacifism is not Enough”, he made a brilliant intellectual examination of collective security. His central thesis was perhaps best expressed by this passage:

“You cannot erect a peace system on a basis of the coercion of governments by governments, because that is trying to build a peace system on a foundation of war. The only basis for a peace system is a pooling of  sovereignty for super-national purposes, that is the creation of a common nationhood, above but entirely separate from the diverse local nationhoods. To end war the principle of the state – the instrument of peace – must be applied on a world-wide scale.”

As a piece of criticism this was, I believe, profoundly accurate. Yet nobody recognised more clearly than Lothian that the day when Great Powers will surrender any real proportion of their sovereignty is far off and that while the pooling of sovereignties may be and is a great star to steer by, mankind will need for generations yet to be willing to take the world as it finds it and nations as it finds them, and make such progress as it can.

Between 1935 and 1940 theories had rapidly declined in the presence of a resurgence of international gangsterdom. In 1939 Lothian became the British Ambassador to the United States and found himself the interpreter of British war to American neutrality. And on December 11th, 1940, in his last speech to the American people, we find him saying:

“The plain truth is that peace and order always depend, not on disarming police, but on there being an overwhelming power behind just law. The only place where that power can be found behind the laws of the liberal and democratic world is the United States and Great Britain supported by the Dominions; and some other free nations. The only nucleus round which a stable, peaceful, democratic world can be built after this war is if the United States and Great Britain possess between them more aeroplanes, ships of war, and key positions of world power such as I here described, than any possible totalitarian rival.”

Lothian was, of course, speaking before Russia entered the war. I have not quoted his words to adopt them as necessarily my own doctrine, but to show how drastically events can mould ideas…’

Menzies went on to argue that the course of events had similarly transformed Labor’s attitude, which had moved away from isolationism, towards a fairly conservative appreciation of the need for collective security and unity of action within the Empire. He lauded this as a positive, arguing that foreign affairs and defence were a sphere in which there needed to be long-term continuity and therefore cross-party consensus.

In the 80+ years that have since passed, Australia has largely maintained this cross-party consensus, centred around the US Alliance, ANZUS Treaty and now AUKUS. But this book serves as reminder of how differing opinions were in the 1930s, and a lesson in that this was one of the main reasons why Australia and the broader West entered the Second World War so woefully underprepared.