Kellogg‐Briand Pact

Kellogg‐Briand Pact (1928).A treaty purporting to outlaw war in international law, the Kellogg‐Briand Pact, or Pact of Paris, was initially signed by fifteen nations and shortly gained the adherence of sixty‐two nations, including the United States, which ratified it in 1929.

The pact reflected a French search for security in the wake of World War I. Hoping for at least a moral sanction against possible German aggression, the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, in 1928 proposed a U.S.‐French treaty to renounce war between them. U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg (1856–1937), seeking to preserve unilateral policy‐making, finessed the French initiative by universalizing it. Kellogg proposed a treaty that would pledge all signatories to “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy.” Implicitly at least, the pact reaffirmed the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes by pledging to settle conflicts solely “by pacific means.” It carried no mechanism for enforcement.

The acceptance of the pact in the United States reflected a widespread disillusionment with warfare and the emergence of antiwar pressure groups. With political leadership from the Republican senator William E. Borah of Idaho, the pact aligned advocates of outlawing war with proponents of international law. It forged the basis of a broad coalition of peace societies while deflecting stronger commitments to internationalism and more specific challenges to military defense.

The pact was widely understood to preclude only aggressive war, though that was not specified, leaving in place the option of defensive warfare. It was violated by aggressor states during the 1930s, leading up to World War II. Although widely disparaged by foreign policy realists for its idealistic framework, the Kellogg‐Briand Pact was invoked as the main precedent in international law prohibiting the “crimes against peace” that supplemented traditional war crimes in the trials at Nuremberg and, especially, Tokyo following World War II.
See also Peace Movements; War Crimes Trials, Nuremberg and Tokyo.

Bibliography

Robert H. Ferrell , Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg‐Briand Pact, 1952.
Charles DeBenedetti , Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement, 1915–1929, 1978.

E. Charles Chatfield