By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
A Momentous New Reality
In part one, we gave a general overview of the 1919 or
"Wilsonian moment,” a notion that extends before and after that calendar
year, in part two, we next covered issues like
the Asian Monroe Doctrine, how relations between China and Japan from the 1890s
onward transformed the region from the hierarchy of time to the hierarchy of
space, Leninist and Wilsonian Internationalism, western and Eastern
Sovereignty, and the crucial March First and May Fourth movements, in part three the important Chinese factions beyond
1919 and the need for China to create a new Nation-State and how Japan, in
turn, sought to expand into Asia through liberal imperialism and then sought to
consolidate its empire through liberal internationalism.
Thereby we have seen
how Japan and the United States took very different paths in the First World
War. Japan intervened in August 1914 on the side of the Entente, eyeing easy
war spoils in Germany’s possessions in Asia. In the United States, President Woodrow
Wilson endeavored to maintain American neutrality, with the eventual goal of
mediating a “peace without victory” among the belligerents.1 In the spring of
1917, however, two months after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare.
Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. Contrary to casual assumptions.
Wilson did not base his decision for war solely to uphold neutral principles or
eliminate German militarism. Hie president's guiding motives were more
idealistic. Wilson had come to believe the United States needed to enter the
war to hasten its end and guarantee permanent peace. Concluding his message to
Congress. Wilson evoked Martin Luther's principled stand at Worms, declaring.
“God helping her [America], she can do no other." The president's morally
charged words planted the seeds of a more assertive American role in world
affairs as a self-described “indispensable” nation.2
Despite the obvious
relief of the war’s end. A momentous new reality hovered like a vulture over
the human wreckage: modem war had become a genuine threat to the increasingly
interdependent global society built on mutual interests and social and economic
processes, including finance, trade, shipping, technology transfer,
communication. Migration, and global markets. Thus American cosmopolitans have
come to view the stability and “good health” of global society as a vital
interest since the end of the nineteenth century. This concern now intensified
in the wake of the world war. It was not just Americans, however, who grew
apprehensive about the perceived vulnerability of global society. British Prime
Minister David Lloyd George warned. “If this is not the last war, there are men
here today who will see the last of civilization.” In fact, such fears were
present even in the early stages of the war. As the mayor of Tokyo. Sakatani
Yoshiro. Opined in 1914. a major war in the heart of Europe would threaten Japan
and beyond because the world was “intimately entwined.”3 All of which raised a
fundamental question about the international system: how to achieve lasting
peace in a rapidly changing world that offered both promise and peril? This
near compulsion. Arising out the ashes of the Great War. is one of the reasons
the conflict became a watershed event.
There is a little
historical disagreement that President Wilson led the charge to "remake
the world” following the First World War. In speeches and statements before,
during, and immediately after America participated in the conflict, the
president repeatedly asserted the world could no longer afford to conduct
international relations the “old way." Said Wilson, the world must have a
plan that “does not contain the genus of another war.” Wilson’s allusion to the
“old way” meant the peace resulting from the Congress of Vienna. The basis of
that peace had been a reliance on a “balance of power.” En route to the Paris
Peace Conference, Wilson again excoriated the “balance of power" system,
saying it produced only “aggression and selfishness and war.''4 Wilson seldom
alluded to imperialism's stampede in the late nineteenth century, but that
global rivalry was another element in the war's lethal combustion. The great
powers had engaged in one of the most expansive orgies of territorial
aggrandizement in world history, carving up most of Africa. South and Southeast
Asia, and Oceania and obtaining leaseholds in China. Japan had taken Taiwan
(Formosa) and Korea and acquired leased territories in Manchuria and Fujian
provinces, while the United States seized the Philippines. Guam. Puerto Rico,
and Hawai'i.
From Old Diplomacy To An Attempted More Liberal
Internationalist New Diplomacy
Blaming the old
diplomacy for the world's recent trauma, of course, only made the elephant in
the room loom larger than ever: what was to be done? By the time he arrived at
the peace conference, Wilson had been dwelling on the problem for well over a
year. To be sure, the president was hardly alone in calling for a new
international framework. The issue stimulated a robust debate at home and
abroad, including a more radical model advanced by communist revolutionaries
Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. This led to fierce ideological and political
debates between Leninist and Wilsonian internationalism and the rise of
nationalistic movements among peoples under colonial rule sway.
The first students
from China had studied at the Lenin School and the Communist University of the
Toilers of the East, and in 1925 candidates were recruited for a new Sun
Yat-sen University in Moscow. among the first students was the fifteen-year-old
son of Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-Kuo, who found himself in the same class
as later Chinese communist leaders like Deng Xiaoping, the latter who had been
sent to Moscow after his activism in Paris had finally exhausted the tolerance
of the French authorities. On arrival in Moscow, the students were given new
clothes and, as in the case of Comintern agents, new work names. They lived in
relatively comfortable seclusion in a former palace of an aristocrat near the
Kremlin. The first rector of the university was the charismatic Karl Radek
(born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary now Lviv in Ukraine, as Karol Sobelsohn), who taught a formative course on the history of
the Chinese revolutionary movement, as seen through Comintern eyes.
Also, Chiang Kai-shek
himself traveled to Moscow to meet Lenin. In Moscow, Leon Trotsky, the Red Army
head, told Chiang that the Soviet Union would not send troops into China, but
weapons, money, and military advisers. He urged him not to rely on military
force alone: ‘a good newspaper is
better than a bad division’. Chiang was impressed with Trotsky’s candor. He
was impressed with aspects of the new society, especially the youth
organizations, but recorded in his diary that many Soviet high officials were
‘cads and rascals.’ His meeting with Grigori Zinoviev and the Comintern
Executive did not go well. He told them the Chinese revolution happened in
stages, and he could not embrace Bolshevism and class struggle openly. Chiang
was stung by the ‘superficial and unrealistic’ Comintern communiqué that was
issued after the meeting, which urged an opposite course: ‘It considers itself
the center of the world revolution, which is really too fabricated and
arrogant.’ Nevertheless, Chiang’s visit raised Comintern's hopes for their
alliance with the Kuomintang, and Chiang remained deeply impressed by the
promise of material aid.
As a transition from
the imperialistic old diplomacy to a more liberal internationalist new
diplomacy, Wilson had issued his most detailed outline, the Fourteen Points, in
January 1918. Though many of the proposals drew from nineteenth-century British
liberalism,5 Wilson gave the ideas new relevancy and cogency. Moreover, bis
commitment to a just peace as an “associated power”, Wilson refused to enter
the war as an official ally of the Entente powers, added an aura of credibility
to the Fourteen Points. Indeed, the Fourteen Points soon became regarded by
peoples worldwide as the rightful blueprint for the new world order and the
basis for discussions among the thousands of delegates who arrived in Paris
just two months after the end of the bloodiest war in human history.
Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The Paris Peace
Conference convened on January 18. 1919. Although the “Big Five” on the winning
side of the war, Great Britain, twenty-nine countries were represented. France.
Italy, the United States, and Japan, dominated
the proceedings. After March, however, the heavy lifting took place among the
sequestered Council of Four, made up of three prime ministers and a president:
France’s Georges Clemenceau. Britain's Lloyd George. Italy's Vittorio
Orlando—and Wilson. The official explanation for Japan's exclusion was that
ahead of state did not lead its delegation. The more likely reason was the
impression that Japan's contribution to the war had been limited to Asia's
minor conflict (a view that conveniently overlooked Japan's naval assistance
conveying troops and materials for the Allied cause). The conference’s agenda,
meanwhile, ran along two main tracks: a settlement with Germany and a new
framework for world peace. Although the treaty with Germany often converged at
various switching points with the second objective, for this subject matter,
the primary focus will be on the establishment of a new international peace
structure.
By putting forth his
Fourteen Points, Wilson asked his fellow peacemakers to buy into and
internalize a broad range of liberal ideas, which later became known as the
ideology of “liberal internationalism." Some of these concepts included
diplomatic transparency, freedom of seas, disarmament, free trade, popular
government, and “self-determination," or the right to peoples to shape
their own national destiny. As the conference proceeded, however, many of these
ideas became prescribed as ideals to which the work should aspire rather than
new norms. The immediate result of self-determination, for example, was the
creation of a few new states in Europe, while the vast collection of colonies
around the world continued to exist. If morally convoluted, the approach was
emblematic of Wilsonian internationalism: plant an idea, inculcate a sense of
“shared beliefs." establish precedents, and then build on them through an
evolutionary, orderly process. This offered marginalized groups unprecedented
opportunities to advance claims in the name of emerging national identities and
thus bolster and expand their legitimacy both at home and abroad. Put simply,
white domination over colored peoples could no longer be taken for granted.
If some ideas at
Paris became diluted or redirected, the heart and soul of the liberal peace
program- The League of Nations, found widespread support. The league’s guiding
premise was that the use of force in the pursuit of national interests was no
longer acceptable- With its reliance on collective security, what Wilson called
a “community of power”, the league represented a radical experiment in keeping
peace among nations, his Article X of the League Covenant, members pledged to
guarantee the “territorial integrity” of all member nations. In other words,
member states promised to safeguard each other’s territorial boundaries as if
they were their own borders; such reliance on universal selflessness was
uncharted territory indeed.
In the case of
aggression, league members possessed several “weapons” that could be used to
uphold “territorial integrity.” First and foremost was moral condemnation
through the “organized opinion of mankind.” In light of the expansion of the
telecommunications revolution and anticipating the spread of mass participation
politics. Wilson placed enormous faith in the power of world opinion to deter
or alter the behavior of aggressors. As Wilson explained it,
The most dangerous
tiling for a bad cause is to expose it to the opinion of the world. The most
certain way that you can prove that a man is mistaken is by letting all his
neighbors know what he thinks, by letting all his neighbors discuss what he
thinks, and if he is in the wrong, you will notice that he will stay at home,
he will not walk on the street. He will be afraid of the eyes of his neighbors.
He will be afraid of their judgment of his character.7
The expectation, of
course, was that an ironclad consensus of views, representing the conscience
of the world, could shame an aggressor into a peaceful retreat.
A second ‘”weapon’ in
collective security’s reserve against an aggressor involved what Wilson called
“the complete boycott ever conceived in a public document.” Including economic
sanctions and a ban on mail, telephone. Telegraph, and travel privileges.
“Their frontiers,” declared Wilson, “would be hermetically sealed.” A third and
final measure involved the use of military force as a last resort. As Wilson
affirmed. “Armed force is in the League Covenant until the great powers’ views
on issues important to Japan became clearer.8 Above all. Japan’s delegation was
intent on consolidating war spoils.
Japan’s most coveted
prize was Germany’s leased territory in the province of Shandong, China, which
Japanese troops captured early in the war. Germany had acquired the concession
in 1898 during the imperialist carve-up of China. At the turn of the century, a
crumbling Qing dynasty had agreed to lease its coastal territory vast swaths,
typically for ninety-nine years,9 to Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia,
and Japan. The imperialist powers developed railways and mining interests and
built naval bases in their leaseholds: they also held exclusive control over
customhouses and the court system. In 1904 Japan went to war against Russia and
seized the tsar’s leasehold in Manchuria’s Liaodong peninsula (which Russia
previously had prevented Japan from taking). The Qing dynasty fell in 1912. But
China remained in a highly distressed state, politically fragmented, subject to
the whims of warlords, and subordinate to imperial powers. During the world
war. Japan exploited this instability. In 1915, a year after seizing Shandong
from Germany. Japan coerced the nominal Chinese government in Beijing to
transfer the aiser’s concession rights to the empire.
The transfer occurred as one part of a sweeping ultimatum known as the Twenty-One Demands. Japan’s delegation at Paris
subsequently insisted that the conferees officially recognize the Shandong
transfer.
Such recognition,
however, would have violated one of the peace program’s most hallowed
principles to respect “territorial integrity.” This point was made abundantly
clear by China’s Western-educated plenipotentiaries, Koo Vi Kyuin
(Chinese:
顧維鈞; pinyin:
Gù Wéijūn; 1888 – 1985) who
studied at Columbia University and Wang Zhengting (Chinese: 王正廷; pinyin:
Wáng Zhèngtí; 1882 –
1961 who studied at Yale University who represented the interim Canton
government in China’s delegation, headed by Lu Zhengxiang,
at the Paris Peace Conference. Despite their distinctive regional attachments,
Koo to the government in Beijing: Wang to Nationalists in Guangdong province,
the two delegates eloquently laid out the legal and moral justifications for
the return of Shandong. Japan, they argued, had seized the territory under
duress; what’s more, in 1917, China itself had entered the war against Germany.
Shandong’s original occupier. In response. Japan’s delegates brandished China’s
signatures on the Twenty-One Demands. They also laid bare promises that France
and Great Britain made to Japan in 1917 in support of Tokyo’s wartime ambitions
in China, as well as secret agreements the Beijing government made with Japan
regarding Shandong in 1918.10
Wilson sympathized
with China but felt caught between fidelity to his principles and a fear that
Japan would spurn the League of Nations. In fact, Japanese delegates had
intimated that very thing if the conference deprived Japan of Shandong: the
historical record suggests they were not bluffing Tokyo also used as leverage
an earlier Japanese proposal to insert into the final treaty a “racial
equality” clause. The proposal, which stemmed from the repeated slights
Japanese nationals suffered overseas, would have compelled league members to
accord “equal and just treatment” to all peoples regardless of race or
nationality. The anti-discrimination initiative had not been contrived as
leverage. As one scholar has argued, it was a sincere effort to overturn a
“Western-centric definition of a great power.” Indeed, despite Japan’s own
discriminatory treatment of Koreans, Korea’s concurrent March First Movement
against Japanese colonialism was inspired by the promise of Wilsonianism,
the amendment was a forward-thinking, liberal statement.11 It won wide support
at the conference except for the Australian. British and American delegations,
who faced domestic political backlash from a mixture of anti-immigration
agitators, xenophobes, and racists. Wilson, therefore, suppressed the clause,
an unjustifiable action the Japanese then used to pressure the president
further on Shandong. Wilson surrendered, with the stipulation that Japan
promises to retrocede the leased territory to China at a future date.
Suppose the Shandong
transfer represented an unavoidable political trade-off. It also portended
liberal internationalism’s limits as well as future ideological discord between
Japan and the United States. When the decision was made public, students in Beijing
exploded in protest, unleashing the May Fourth Movement. China refused to sign
the Treaty of Versailles, the only nation in Paris to do so (it joined the
league in 1920). Wilson later told the American people he loathed all of the
Chinese leaseholds but that the League of Nations eventually would find a just
solution; if and when that happened, however. The United States would not play
a role. As is well known, the Republican-led and politically fractured US
Senate refused to consent to the League Covenant. The United States never
joined the League of Nations, a strikingly unilateralist message to a world
about to embark on a novel experiment in multilateral cooperation. The Senate’s
rejection resulted principally from conflicting views over national sovereignty.
Theoretically, collective security demanded that nations surrender a
significant degree of foreign policy making to an international inscription.
There was the impression, nor necessarily lire reality, that each member of the
league was expected to send troops into zones of conflict, no matter how large
or small or distant.12
It takes but a moment
to grasp the tragic irony of the Senate’s decision for Wilson. The president
had argued for intervention in the Great War in large part to help create a new
world order. He had spent nearly five months in Paris making certain that would
happen. American scholar-diplomat George Kennan later vilified Wilson’s
“colossal conceit” in thinking he could remake international life in his
image.13 Kennan’s appraisal was neither fair nor accurate. Wilson, of course,
had drawn extensively from nineteenth-century liberalism. Most important, the
president and his fellow peacemakers faced unique circumstances in a world that
had undergone unprecedented change since the Napoleonic Age. Including the rise
of new nation-states like Germany and Italy.
The unconcealed fact
was that the balance-of-power system had broken down and filled cemeteries with
more than nine million human beings. That Wilson approached the shattered world
with an innovative plan is understandable. That the peace program ultimately
failed reminds more about the intractable problem of human conflict and world
governance.
Underneath “The Gap
In the Bridge,” which draws attention to the Irony and weight of America’s
absence in the League of Nations. Note also the curious inclusion of Belgium
and omission of Japan. (Leonard RavemHIII, Punch, 10
December 10,1919)
Notwithstanding its
early setbacks, the ideology of liberal internationalism that emerged from the
peace conference already has planted tools. Delegates from all over the world
had spent six months together discussing the problem of world order. They had
answered the normative question about how an international system ought to be
structured and managed in entirely novel ways. The new norms proceeded from the
principle that naked aggression no longer was acceptable behavior in
international relations. And when disputes arose, they were to be dealt with
multilaterally through rules-based “orderly processes.” By the end of the
1920s, even without the United States (or the Soviet Union) in the league,
these “new world trends.” Had evolved into something approximating a universal
ideology, however tenuous. As Ishii Kikujiro, a
Japanese representative at the League of Nations explained at the time.
World currents of
peace, stirred by the lessons of the Great War. Have drifted toward Geneva and
given to that place the peculiar air know n as the Geneva atmosphere…Tins
atmosphere is a specific remedy for lowering the fever of military aggression,
… It is universally accepted that Hie best way to bring about the peaceful
settlement of international disputes is to recognize as binding the duty of
submitting such disputes to arbitration.’14
Toward this end in
the mid-1920s, the league facilitated a series of security and territorial
agreements are collectively known as the Locarno Treaties, after which Germany
became a member.
In substantive ways,
both Japan and the United States extended the roots of the liberal order during
the 1920s. In Japan, despite a cynical undergrowth of nationalist critics who
claimed that Wilsonianism was simply a fig leaf for
Anglo-American domination, mainstream diplomacy followed in the spirit of an
imperial rescript proclaimed in the name of Emperor Taisho. Declaring that
world affairs had “completely changed,” the rescript instructed Japanese officials
to help build an internationalist order. Japan’s Foreign Ministry, under the
leadership of Sliideliara Kijurb.
Gravitated toward an Anglo- American bias, convinced that cooperation with the
world’s leading powers was the most effective way to advance Japan’s foreign
policy goals. Japan’s rising global status (one of only four permanent members
on the League of Nations Council) gave added incentive for the empire to
conform to the new diplomacy. To be sure, this did not mean the unqualified
subordination of regional interests to internationalist imperatives; still,
Japan’s “cooperative diplomacy’’ during the 1920s was remarkable for its
consistency.15
As for the United
States, although it had spurned the league, it nonetheless remained mostly
committed to an internationalist approach. On the one hand, the succession of
Republican administrations in the 1920s tended to stress capital investment and
trade to facilitate world peace. On the other hand (and more ironically, given
die League of Nations fight). They also took the lead on a number of
initiatives to augment the liberal order. The irony is less striking, however,
if one appreciates how the ideology of Wilsonianism
evoked aspects of conservativism. In that it sought to avoid upheaval by
privileging “orderly processes.” As Frank Costigliola has noted. Republicans
wanted to “strike a balance between order and change.”16 This was a dominant
trait of Progressive-era reforms, which many moderate Republicans had
supported; it was a characteristic that consequently guided Republican
ad-ministrations in a series of multilateral conferences.
"Vulnerable To Violent Disorder"
The American
president and his secretary of state. Charles Evans Hushes agreed that the area
of the Pacific and East Asia was particularly vulnerable to violent disorder.
Not only did interests of the world’s three largest naval powers, Great
Britain, the United States, and Japan, converge there, but the region contained
the seeming tinderbox of China. Warren G. Harding and Hughes were not alone in their geopolitical
anxiety. The concern had been palpable at the Paris Peace Conference as well.
President Wilson, for example, remarked that “the greatest dangers for the
world can arise in the Pacific.” The Slate Department’s China specialist, Paul
S. Reinsch, similarly stated there was “no single problem in Europe" that
challenged the “future peace of the world" more than that of East Asia.
The region’s tensions, Reinsch asserted, made “a huge armed conflict absolutely
inevitable within one generation.” And Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo
predicted a war in East Asia by 1930 if nothing were done to resolve issues
regarding Chinese sovereignty.17
The lingering
anxieties in Asian-Pacific affairs, as well as political pressures at home,
eventually prompted Harding and Hughes to organize an international conference
in Washington, DC, in the fall and winter of 1921-1922.18 The goal was twofold:
to prevent a naval arms race and to promote stability in China, where 400
million people continued to live among a patchwork of autonomous political
units and foreign-controlled leaseholds. Although the Washington Conference
focused on particular issues among a particular group of actors, the summit
nonetheless embodied the Wilsonian emphasis on "orderly processes” and the
sanctity of treaties. Hughes further channeled Wilsonianistn
by directly tackling disarmament and territorial integrity. Wilson had
addressed both issues in his Fourteen Points.
Participants at the
conference included the world's largest naval powers as well as nations with
vested interests in China. The secretary, however, had set his sights primarily
on Great Britain and Japan; in addition to their powerful navies, the two empires
also shared a military alliance and boasted the biggest presence in China, in
both leaseholds and investments.
A reporter for the
London Daily Chronicle declared the opening of the conference to be “one of die
great days in modem annals” and Secretary Hughes’s address “real, palpable,
enormous.” Hughes received a boisterous standing ovation that went on for several
minutes. Wild cheering from the gallery also went up for French Premier
Aristide Briand and Japanese dele-gate Tokugawa Icsato.
Much of the exuberant response came from the fact that Hughes’s speech, as the
Associated Press (AP) asserted, was "farther- reaching than the most
ardent advocate of disarmament dared to hope.” A major catalyst for naval
limitation was pacifist groups who argued that munitions makers had helped
ignite the Great War by fueling an arms race. Partially because of their
activism, the League of Nations had rekindled disarmament talks in Geneva, and
powerful maverick senator William E Borah (R-ID) had mounted an aggressive
campaign in Congress.19 In catching the pacifist wave. Hughes was suggesting
that the five largest naval powers (Britain. Japan, The United States. France,
and Italy) were over armed, that they possessed more warships than what was
sufficient for their security needs. The underlying assumption was that an
oversized navy held within it the temptation for offensive war.
Then came the hard
part. What constituted sufficient defense for each of the naval powers?
Hughes's answer came in die form of a ratio system (5;5:3:1.75), with an eye on
how much territory a nation’s navy had to defend. This included national
coastlines and overseas possessions. Great Britain and the United States.
Hughes argued, required 525.000 tons of battleships, Japan. 315.000 tons:
France and Italy, second-tier naval powers, were accorded 175.000 tons.
Hughes’s rationale was as follows: Great Britain had to defend a global empire
(which, in itself, was becoming increasingly difficult to defend in principle
under the lingua franca of liberal internationalism). The United States,
meanwhile, had to defend two coastlines. Japan's coastlines were smaller and
its possessions nearer. Italy's requirements were the Mediterranean; France’s
were more expansive, but Hughes's pressure and veiled threats brought the
French into the fold.20
Despite a positive
first impression, alarm bells went off among the Japanese delegation. Back in
Tokyo, the Naval General Staff was apoplectic. The naval hard-liners (or “fleet
faction”) demanded absolute parity, explaining that a 5:5:3 ratio was meaningless
in the event of a decisive battle, in which a belligerent would concentrate its
entire battle fleet against an enemy. Japan's official delegation, meanwhile,
argued for a 10:7 ratio. This proportion would give Britain or the United
States a 43 percent advantage in Japanese waters, less than the 50 percent
deemed necessary to defeat a defending nary. Japan’s chief delegate. Navy
Minister Kato Tomosabuio.
maintained that anything less than a 10:7 ratio left tire empire fearing
"for her security and defense." Strategic concerns, however, were not
the only thing that mattered to Japan. National pride was on the line as well.
Underneath: Delegates
to the Washington Conference, 1921-1922. Pictured (L to R): Japan's chief
delegate, Navy Minister Kato Tomosaburo, Shidehara Kijurd (ambassador to the United States), and Secretary of
State Charles Evans Hughes.
Hay’s second note, like
the first, was a request. Again, the great powers gave evasive replies, though
they did pay lip service to the Open Door in subsequent bilateral treaties with
China. In retrospect. Hay’s notes asked too much of imperialists at the height
of tire ' age of empire.” Predatory nations were not about to act selflessly in
leaseholds they had independently acquired and begun to develop, particularly
if they sensed that Hay was concerned more about American economic access than
“territorial entity.” Indeed. The United States was no innocent in China. In
the ] 840s. In tandem with European powers. Washington had negotiated “unequal
treaties” with China, resulting in extraordinary rights and privileges in
designated “treaty ports."21 These rights included extraterritoriality,
control over tariffs, and the creation of foreign-only zones called
International Settlements. In 1882, meanwhile, the United States closed its
door to Chinese immigration.
Despite the world’s
rebuff, the Open Door became entrenched as the official US policy in East Asia.
The results over the next two decades, however. Were modest. The leasehold
spree abated, but the unequal treaties endured. The United States and Japan,
in particular, butted heads over the meaning of the Open Door. This was
especially true during the Great War, when Japan’s sense of regional
entitlement became more pronounced. In 1915, as noted. Japan presented China with
the Twenty-One Demands. Some demands were specific to existing interests, such
as extending the term of Japan’s leased territory on the Liaodong Peninsula
from 1923 until 1997 and control over the South Manchurian Railway until 2002.
However, a series of claims in a “Group V.” would have made China almost a
protectorate of Japan. The Wilson administration refused to recognize the
demands, which left the relationship between the Open Door and Japan's
regionalism in a state of confusion. In 1917. Secretary of State Robert Lansing
and Japanese envoy Ishii Kikujiro met to reconcile
their nations’ conflicting worldviews.
The Lansing-Ishii
negotiations assumed an air of meaningful compromise. But they merely
perpetuated the confusion. Reading sources on their conferences becomes a
mind-numbing exercise in verbal gymnastics, with each side parsing the meaning
of qualifying adjectives. Were Japan's interests in Asia “special” or
“paramount”? Did Japan's geographical propinquity to China make its position
“peculiar” and “unusual”? As it turned out, the final agreement’s ambiguity was
intentional; Lansing hoped opacity would convey a semblance of harmony.22
Mostly, the agreement showed that the Open Door and Japanese regionalism could
occupy tire same room, albeit unpleasantly, as long as the Open Door remained
solely an American principle in the old edifice of power politics. However,
after the Great War, when the world began razing the old structure and building
anew, double occupancy became untenable.
Secretary Hughes now
sought to wind up the conflict between the Open Door and Japanese regionalism
by turning American principles into a universal law. Privately, he said he was
willing to recognize Japan's "natural and legitimate economic opportunities”
in China, but not its "political control.” According to Hughes, the
ensuing Nine-Power Treaty was intended to be "a substitute for all prior
statements and agreements” (read: Lansing-Ishii). As Asada Sadao has made
clear, such sweeping aspirations raised equally sweeping concerns among Japan's
delegation. American delegate Elihu Root, a chief author of the treaty, proved
to be a moderating influence. The Japanese respected Root for his fair-minded
negotiations with Japan during Theodore Roosevelt's administration; for this
reason. Japan's delegates came to him unofficially many times to voice their
concerns. Root’s assurances and the inclusion of his "security” clause in
Article I convinced the Japanese that the treaty recognized their “special
position" in Manchuria.23
On its basic
premises, the Nine-Power Treaty borrowed the language of both Hay's notes and
Wilson’s Fourteen Points, obliging the eight foreign powers with interests in
China to respect the country’s “territorial and administrative integrity.”
Similarly, the treaty sought to eliminate trade and investment barriers in
China so that all nations could enjoy "the principle of equal opportunity
of commerce,” Though the most meaningful trade barriers in China were those of
the still-existent foreign concessions, the Nine-Power Treaty targeted
presumptions of perpetuity by requiring the contracting powers to respect
China's independence and “provide the fullest and most unembarrassed
opportunity to China to develop and maintain for herself an effective and
stable government.” In case of disputes, meanwhile, the signatories agreed to
hew to the liberal imperative of "full and frank discussion.”24
The Nine-Power Treaty
(February 6. 1922) thus signified a solemn pledge to abide by expressed moral
and legal principles regarding acceptable inter-national conduct in China. That
alone was significantly different from 1900. when not a single invited guest
showed up at Hay's diplomatic table, going forward, naked aggression in China
was unacceptable, and exclusive treaty rights should be discharged in the near
future when certain legal conditions were met. Here again, we see the Wilsonian
emphasis on rules-based "orderly processes” and evolutionary change in the
quest toward lasting peace. The status quo mostly remained, but the document's
language and projection looked to a far different future.
To be sure, such
assurances offered cold comfort to the Chinese, who demanded the immediate
repudiation of all leased territories and foreign privileges. One is reminded here of African American civil rights activists in the
1950s being told by white moderates to be “patient,'' Moreover, the treaty was
nonbinding: it was a promise made without any enforcement mechanism. If nations
went back on their word, the violation would be transparent, but the dial was
it. What happened next depended on the unknown power of world opinion. Looking
back, it is clear such piecemeal promissory notes fell far short of the League
of Nations' collective security and were good only as Long as relations among
nations remained tranquil and friendly.
When the conference
concluded, the mood was optimistic, and relations among nations were tranquil
and friendly. Japan, as promised, retroceded its leasehold in Shandong: Britain
vowed the same in Weihai. The good vibrations carried over to US-Japan
relations. As historian Iriye Akira noted, the respective governments “were
soon describing in glowing terms the coming of a new era of peace in the
Pacific.” Back in Tokyo. Navy Minister Kato told his compatriots he could “categorically
state" there was no Anglo- American coercion during the talks. In Tokyo's
Ueno Park, a peace bell rang out daily at a Peace Exposition for four months
following the conference. Among Americans, the former assistant secretary of
the navy in the Wilson administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said it was
notable that Japan had begun carrying out the treaties in good faith. “American
sympathies.” he wrote in Asia magazine in 1923. “have been pro-Chinese rather
than pro-Japanese. Perhaps, however, we appreciate now a little more readily
than formerly the Japanese point-of-view "25
Signs of America’s
new sympathies and improved relations with Japan became manifest in the fall of
1923 after large parts of Tokyo and Yokohama were destroyed by a massive 7.9
earthquake and subsequent fires. The American people responded with disproportionate
generosity, making cash contributions totaling over fifteen million yen (about
$98 million in 2018 dollars), compared to the rest of the world’s combined
total of six million yen (S40 million). Relations also remained on an even keel
because of robust Trade between the two Pacific powers. The United States
purchased nearly 40 percent of Japanese exports. And starting in 1924, the
Japanese ambassador to the United States and Washington Conference delegate
Shidehara Kijuro was appointed Japan’s foreign
minister. For much of the 1920s. Shidehara became the face of Japan’s liberal
internationalism and cooperative engagement, which earned the moniker
“Shidehara diplomacy.” When he assumed office, Shidehara alluded to the Versailles
and Washington treaties, saying, “Machiavellian stratagem and aggressive policy
are now things of the past. Our policy must follow the path of justice and
peace.”26
Japan's 'National Day Of Humiliation'
Despite this budding
optimism in US-Japan relations, there nonetheless were significant detours
along the internationalist road in the 1920s. The most conspicuous one involved
America’s discriminatory immigration act of1924. This nativist law arose out of
widespread alarm at the influx of nearly 20 million immigrants between 1885 and
1920, mainly from southern and eastern Europe. The xenophobic backlash against
some 200,000 Japanese residents was confined mainly to the West Coast. The
legislation was designed to limit immigration from any nation to 2 percent of
its representation in the 1890 US Census. Citizens from countries with nearly
nonexistent populations in the United States in 1890, such as Japan, therefore,
were effectively barred from immigrating once the law took effect.
In the case of Japan,
however. Congress went even further. The proposed law categorically excluded
Japanese immigrants by exploiting a recent Supreme Court ruling that
identified Japanese as racially ineligible for citizenship. A section of the
immigration bill thus simply stated that “no alien ineligible to citizenship
shall be admitted to the United States,” Almost immediately Japanese Ambassador
Masanao Hanihara (1876 –1934) made clear to Secretary
Hughes that the thing was anathema to his countrymen In an era touting liberal
internationalism, one in which Japan played a prominent role at world
conferences and the League of Nations, the legislation would grant Great
Britain an annual quota of 65,721 immigrants to the United States, while Japan
would be consigned to a status below that of Albania.27
Groping for some way
to stir Congress from what he believed were dangerously myopic impulses.
Hughes asked Hanihara to write him a public letter
outlining the efficacy of previous voluntary restrictions, namely, the
so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907. Hanihara had
worked closely with Hughes at the Washington Conference and duly responded with
a missive that included this infamous sentence: “I realize, as I believe you
do. the grave consequences which the enactment of the measure...would
inevitably bring upon the otherwise happy and mutually advantageous relations
between our two countries.” An outraged Congress took the statement as a veiled
threat and passed the law with Japan’s exclusion intact.28
Tokyo's official
response to the National Origins Act was surprisingly muted, but public
reaction was vociferous and indignant. Patriotic organizations announced a
"National Day of Humiliation.” and renowned internationalist Nitobe Inazd declared he would never set foot in America again.
What incensed the Japanese was not the assertion of a sovereign nation to place
limits on immigration but rather legislation that discriminated against Japan
solely on the basis of race. Elihu Root, who had negotiated the Gentlemen’s
Agreement, very bitterly blamed fellow Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, de facto
Senate majority leader, and a Washington Conference delegate. So. too. did
Hughes, who wrote to Lodge shortly a Her the law’s passage, saying, ”I fear
that our labors to create a better feeling in the East, which have thus far
been notably successful, are now largely undone ”29
Thus, for
cosmopolitans in the 1920s who dreamed of a permanent peace by eroding national
differences and cultivating mutual understanding through international
organizations and cross-cultural networks, such aspirations seemed to be
maturing rapidly within their own lifetimes. And yet there remained a yearning
to say directly and simply what all of the conferences had implied: an
unequivocal statement that outlawed war.
The Kellogg–Briand Pact Or Pact Of Paris 1928
In the 1920s,
academics working within the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
including Columbia professor James T. Shotwell, had kept a proposal for the
universal repudiation of war in the public eye. In 1927, Shotwell and others,
having impressed upon French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand that Americans
were growing irritated by French posturing on the continent, suggested that
Briand that bilateral relations be repaired with a “DO-war” pact. Briand was
receptive. Consequently, with Shotwell's guidance. Briand floated die idea of a
bilateral peace pact to US Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg. Kellogg was
concerned about such a treaty drifting into a security alliance, but he was
intrigued enough to encourage an expanded pact. As a result, in August 1928,
nine years after the Treaty of Versailles, fifteen nations, including Japan,
gathered again in Paris to endorse a multilateral treaty that outlawed war.
The preamble of the
ensuing Kellogg-Briand Pact read like a prospectus for liberal
internationalism. With the purpose of perpetuating “peaceful and friendly
relations” among nations, the delegates pledged themselves to “a frank
renunciation of war," and that “changes in . . . relations with one
another should be sought only by pacific means and be the result of a peaceful
and orderly process." Thus the liberal mantra was stated verbatim. These
principles were squeezed into a few succinct articles. In Article I., the signatories
renounced war “as an instrument of national policy." When two nations
went to war, therefore, either one or both must be at fault. This view also
negated the idea that there ever again could be neutral bystanders to a
conflict. The treaty’s wording, however, allowed for military action in the
name of self-defense. Article II. meanwhile, it dealt with conflict resolution,
obliging signatories to resolve “all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature
or whatever origin" through peaceful measures.30
Significantly, the
memory of the Great War, as well as the peace efforts of the now-deceased
President Wilson, enveloped the signing ceremony on August 27, 1928. Minister
Briand proposed that the treaty be dedicated “to the dead" of the Great
War; he then turned to German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann and intoned
"to all the dead.” The moving gesture showed how far the new diplomacy had
traveled in just nine years. In paying tribute to President Wilson. Briand
called the new treaty "reinsurance” for the League of Nations. A key
factor was reinsurance with American participation. which was crucial to
European leaders. Taking stock of the profound symbolism of the day’s events in
the Hall of Clocks at the French Foreign Ministry (where the 1919 Peace
Conference opened), a New York Times reporter wrote, “It would be a heartless
man who did not feel that the spirit of Woodrow Wilson lived this afternoon.”
One political cartoon imagined Wilson’s ghost peering over Secretary Kellogg’s
shoulder as he signed the pact, invoking the Wilsonian phrase, “And now they
have all become too proud to fight.’31 By The end of the decade, the no-war vow
included sixty nations.
On the critical
question of its capacity to deter aggression, the treaty leaned on the liberal
weapon of world opinion. Following Wilson’s lead. Briand warned, “The nation
which went on a warpath ran the risk of bringing against it all other nations.”
Back in the United States. President Calvin Coolidge asserted that a Kellogg
Pact in 1914 would have prevented the Great War. In hindsight, such boundless
faith in public opinion seems deeply naive. But a preponderance of voices at
the time believed aggressors could not long function in an interdependent world
in which they were ostracized. There simply was too much to lose, which is why
the pact's preamble declared that aggressors were to “be denied the benefits
furnished by this Treaty,” These unstated benefits implied the unimpeded
participation in a global society, what one scholar has called “a transnational
economic society of free commerce and industry linking people across
borders.”32 In reality, they seemed to confer little more than a stamp of good
state-keeping.
For this reason, not
all contemporaries were impressed with the new treaty. Japanese diplomat Ishii Kikujiro said the most striking thing about the pact was
the absence “of any restraint on states violating its provisions.” Here he
blamed the Americans, who. he said, consistently opposed “the inclusion of a
penalizing provision.” On this point, Ishii was correct. Similarly, journalist
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., grandson of the late senator, writing in Harper's,
excoriated the treaty's promises of securing peace without sacrifice:
“thousands of persons are being made to believe that something really has been
done. when, of course, nothing has or can be until a price is paid. ... Is it
not apparent that the Kellogg treaty, with its many textual dangers, only
thickens the haze, deepens the pitfalls, and once again postpones the day when
some evident thinking is done?” In light of such criticisms, one historian has
labeled the Republican approach to liberal internationalism in the 1920s as
involvement without commitment ”33 It is important to remember, however, that
critics of the pact tended to champion other multilateral measures. The
apparent success of the Washington Conference. In particular, it had kept the
pressure on governments to limit classes of ships omitted in the Five-Power
Naval Treaty. Toward this cud. At the invitation of Great Britain, the largest
naval powers convened in London.
The Treaty For The Limitation And Reduction Of Naval
Armament, 1930
In January 1930.
officials from Great Britain, the United States, and Japan, amid the scrutiny
of four hundred newspaper reporters, began work on what they believed would add
yet another layer of protective coating to the interlocking treaty system.34
The focus this time was on long-range, high-speed “heavy cruisers." In the
spirit of Wilsonianism, US Secretary of State Henry
Stimson. Interviewed on newsreels before his departure, he said he wanted to
remove any “feeling of insecurity" among the naval powers, especially Japanese
fears of Anglo-American collusion. Accordingly, upon arriving in London. The
secretary met at once with the Japanese, in order, as he put it. To erase “any
suspicion" about playing favorites at the conference. Despite this
Wilsonian air. Stimson pursued somewhat duplicitous diplomacy: two days before
the start of the conference, he met privately with British Prime Minister
Ramsay MacDonald and urged a united front against Japan's strategic
ambitions.35
The American
delegation subsequently returned to the 10:6 ratio agreed on at the Washington
Conference, treating it as an established formula. Japan’s delegates demurred,
countering once again with a 10:7 ratio, which they considered the minimum
requirement for maintaining naval superiority in the western Pacific. After
intense negotiations, the Japanese accepted the 10:6 ratio with conditions that
guaranteed a de facto 70 percent ratio in heavy cruisers until 1936. In Tokyo,
the Naval General Staff was again livid, fueling a public backlash against the
empire's allegedly weak-kneed delegation. Viscount Ishii said lie was
"astonished” by the virulent opposition to the treaty; why, the Japanese
asked, did Washington insist on a naval ratio that theoretically gave it the
capacity to bring the offensive war to Japan's home waters, unless it held some
notion to do so?36 The London Conference thus exposed a fierce undercurrent of
dissent in Japan over perceived inequities and the supposed benefits of the new
liberal order.
Not unrelatedly,
Japanese complaints also had surfaced in Paris dining the no-war talks.
Japanese officials at that time had considered submitting reservations to the
Kellogg Pact out of concern about the die treaty’s potential impact on Japan’s
freedom of action in its Manchurian leasehold. Although the Japanese balked,
not wishing to challenge world trends, a year later, at the 1929 IPR conference
in Kyoto, Japanese delegates gave expansive defenses of the empire's rights in
Manchuria, thus shedding light on a persistent strain of regional entitlement.
And yet. prominent internationalist James Shotwell’s War as an Instrument of
National Policy, published shortly after the Kyoto conference, makes clear that
reading the prevailing ideological winds in Japan at the time was fraught with
complexity: Shotwell devoted an entire chapter in praise of Japan’s commitment
to die liberal order.37
For the present, the
Loudon Conference concluded with participants outwardly buoyed by good
feelings arising from cooperative action and the belief they had further
immunized die world against the scourge of global conflict. Japan’s chief
delegate. Wakatsuki Reijiro. for example, said he
hoped their work would "fulfill the earnest desire of humanity, scarred by
bitter ordeal, to earn the appreciation of subsequent generations.” Stimson.
meanwhile, said the conference “increased our hope that civilization will be
able to form the habit of settling peaceably the questions and controversies
which arise between nations." In oilier words, a hope that the emphasis on
‘'orderly processes" was becoming second nature. Such aspirations were repeated
in a dramatic coda to the treaty, one that symbolized the interconnected
global society the new peace structure aimed to preserve. In October 1930, the
leaders of the three naval powers, Premier Hamaguchi Osachi.
Prime Minister MacDonald and President Herbert Hoover, participated in an
international radio hookup from their home capitals to mark the treaty’s
significance. Premier Hamaguchi lauded the striking overhaul in diplomacy over
the previous decade, which he referred to as the "growing consciousness of
mankind.” According to Hamaguchi, “a more generous spirit” was quickly
replacing "the jealousies and suspicions of the past.” resulting in
"a new chapter in the history of human civilization.’’38
Of course, no one
knew that the London Conference would be the last great expression of
cooperative diplomacy before the long and troubled road to World War IL.
Certainly, disturbing signs were in the air. For one thing, the London
Conference had begun two months after the onset of the global stock market
crisis. Yet, most financial observers anticipated nothing more than a bad
recession. Then, a month after his radio broadcast. Hamaguchi was shot in the
abdomen by an ultranationalist (dying of complications nine months later). And
yet. although Japan at the time was a fertile breeding ground for right-wing
militants, its political system in the 1930s did not succumb to the cliche of
’’government by assassination."39
It, therefore, was
not entirely surprising that, almost a year later, oil September 17, 1931,
Japanese Ambassador Debuchi and Secretary Stinson
agreed that US-Japan relations appealed more tranquil than in many years past; Debuchi remarked with satisfaction that he had just
completed a long trip throughout the United States and “had found everywhere
more marked evidence of friendliness towards his own country than he had ever
before noted during his long stay as Ambassador.”40 Within twenty-four hours of
this conversation, however, Japan’s Kwantung Army began its move in Manchuria.
The new liberal order was about to face its first real test.
Part 1: Overview of
the discussions following the 1919 or "Wilsonian moment,” a notion that
extends before and after that calendar year: Part
One Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 2: Issues like
the Asian Monroe Doctrine, how relations between China and Japan from the 1890s
onward transformed the region from the hierarchy of time to the hierarchy of
space, Leninist and Wilsonian Internationalism, western and Eastern Sovereignty,
and the crucial March First and May Fourth movements were covered in: Part Two Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 3: The important
Chinese factions beyond 1919 and the need for China to create a new
Nation-State and how Japan, in turn, sought to expand into Asia through liberal
imperialism and then sought to consolidate its empire through liberal
internationalism were covered in: Part Three Can a
potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 5: The
Manchurian crisis and its connection to the winding road to World War II are
covered in: Part Five Can a potential future
Pacific War be avoided?
Part 6:The war itself
quickly unfolded in favor of Japan’s regionalist ambitions, a subject we
carried through to the post-world war situation. Whereby we also discussed when
Japan saw itself in a special role as mediator between the West (“Euro-America”)
and the East (“Asia”) to “harmonize” or “blend” the two civilizations and
demanded that Japan lead Asia in this anti-Western enterprise there are
parallels with what Asim Doğan in his extensive new book describes how the
ambiguous and assertive Belt and Road Initiative is a matter of special concern
in this aspect. The Tributary System, which provides concrete evidence of how
Chinese dynasties handled with foreign relations, is a useful reference point
in understanding its twenty-first-century developments. This is particularly
true because, after the turbulence of the "Century of Humiliation"
and the Maoist Era, China seems to be explicitly re-embracing its history and
its pre-revolutionary identity in: Part
Six Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 7: Part Seven Can a potential future
Pacific War be avoided?
Part 8: While
initially both the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek (anti-Mao Guomindang/KMT),
including Mao's Communist Party (CCP), had long supported
independence for Taiwan rather than reincorporation into China, this started to
change following the publication of the New Atlas of China's Construction
created by cartographer Bai Meichu in 1936. A turning
point for Bai and others who saw China's need to create a new Nation-State was
the Versailles peace conference's outcome in 1919 mentioned
in part one. Yet that from today's point of view, the fall of Taiwan
to China would be seen around Asia as the end of American predominance and even
as “America’s Suez,” hence demolishing the myth that Taiwan has no hope is
critical. And that while the United States has managed to deter Beijing
from taking destructive military action against Taiwan over the last four
decades because the latter has been relatively weak, the risks of this approach
inches dangerously close to outweighing its benefits. Conclusion and outlook.
1. Thomas J. Knock.
To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992). 60-61,71-75.80-81; Lloyd Ambrosius Wilsonian
Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I
(Wilmington. DE: SR Books, 1991), 65-92. See also Woodrow Wilson, Peace without Victory*. January 22, 1917, in
Arthur S Link, ed , The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (hereafter PfVW)
vdL 40 (Princeton. NJ Princeton University Press.
1986), 531-39.
2. See Wilson War
Message " April 2, 1917. PWW vol 41,527; John Milton Cooper Jr , Woodrow
Wilson: A Biography (New York Knopf, 2009), 162 89, and Knock To End AU Wars
119-22 Allusion to ' indispensable nation from a comment made in 3998 by
Madieleme Albright. secretary' of state under President William J Clinton.
3. Frank Ninkovich,
The Global Republic: America 's Inadverrenr Rise to
World Power (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2014), 4 See also liiye, Cultural Internationalism 11-50; Glenda Slug*
Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia University of
Pennsylvania Press. 2013), 11-44. Lloyd George in Wilson, Life and Letters:.irmistice. 397; Tokyo mayor in Frederick Dickinson, Toward
a Global Perspective of the Great War; Japan and the Foundations of a
Twentieth-Century World." American Historical Review 119 no 4 (October
2014) 1162
4. Wilson. September
27, 1918, Wilson, Life and Letters: Armistice 428 Isiah Bowman "Memo on
Remarks by the President ’ December 10,1918. PWW, vol 51, 354
5. On liberal
precedent see Ninkovich. Global Republic; 99-106, Mark Mazowei
Governing the World: The History' of an Ideai,
1815-Present (London Penguin, 2012), 38-45, 81-90; and Alan Sykes, The Rise and
Fall of British Liberalism (Loudon Longman 1997), 21-52, 58-68. 100—108,
133-42.
6. Erez Manela. The
Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Ann
colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8, and Akira Inye. China and Japan in a Global Setting (Cambridge. MA
Harvard University Press. 1992). 48-49
7. Wilson, An Address
m the City Auditorium in Pueblo, CO," Sepiember
25, 1919, PWW. VOl 63,501-4.
8. Yoshino comments m
Child kdron (Central Revte»r)t
quoted in Sadao Asada, " Between the Old Diplomacy and the New.
1915-1922,” Diplomatic History 30. no 2 (April 2006) 212; Uchida instructions
in Mizumo Hamliaia Chow and
Kivofnku Chuma. The Turning Point in L'S-Japan
Relations (London Palgrave, 2016), 10, 34.
9. The system of
imperialist leaseholds adopted the ninety-nine--year- term from standard common
law contracts, which mandated the longest possible term of a lease of real
property to be ninety-nine years
10. John J O Brien.
China Defies Japan Peace Delegates Denounce Nipponese Anns as Imperialistic ”
Washington Post; March 6f 1919, 1. On the Beijing government s additional
agreement1, with Japan, see Bruce A Elleman Wilson and China: A Revised
History' of the Shandong Question (Armonk NY: M E. Sharpe 2002), 41-43. Wang’s
name was written at the time as C. T Wang
11. On bluffing, see Burkinan. Japan and the League. 93-94 On the racial
equality clause, see Naoko Shimazu Japan, Race and Equality: Hie Racial
Equality Proposal of 1910 (New York: Routledge. 1998), 79-80. 91 On the Korean
protest movement, see Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 119-36, 197-213
12. On the May Fourth
Movement, see Manela Wilsonian Moment, 177-96 Wilson. “Pueblo Speech. September
25, 1919, PWW, vol 63, 507-8 On the Wilson-Senate straggle, see Joint M Cooper
Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodroyy Wilson
and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001)
13. George F. Kennan
American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1951), 69
14. Ishii essay in
The New World and Japan March 1928. included in Kikujiro
Ishit Diplomatic Commenranes (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1936), 137-38. Commentaries is a translation of Ishu
s 1930 memoir.
15. Emperor Taisho,
“1920 Imperial Rescript on the Establishment of Peace,’ in Dickinson “Toward a
Global Perspective of the Great War,” 1167; Burkman Japan and the League.
xi-xiv
16. On the business
bent in the 1920s, see Akira Inye The Globalizing of
America, 1913-1945 (Cambridge Cambridge University
Press 1993), 88-102 Frank Costighola, Awkward
Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe,
1919-1933 (Ithaca NY; Cornell University Press, 1984), 31
17. Wilson, April 15,
1919, PWW vol. 57, 358; Reuisch and Koo cited an
Margaret Mac Millan. Pans 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York
Random House, 2002), 331,335
18. On domestic
political pressures,. see Roger Dingman, Power in the Pacific: The Origins of
Naval Arms Limitation 1914-1922 (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 3976),
139-59.
19. Hamilton, “Says
America Has Justified Her Call 4. Dingman s claim that the powers were
motivated mainly by “an abiding concern for domestic political power is well
supported but it understates the impact of war trauma Dmgman.
Power in the Pacific. 139-214.
20. On the
motivations of all the naval powers, see Erik Goldstein and John Maurer, eds.,
The Washington Conference, 1921-22: Naval Rivalry\ East Asian Stability and the
Road to Pearl Harbor (London: Rout ledge, 2012).
21. On the treaty'
port system and US China relations, see Michael H Hunt. The Making of a Special
Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York Columbia University
Press, 1983).
22. See FRUS: The
Lansing Papers, 1914-1920, vol. 25 432-53, and Burton F Beers, Vain Endeavor:
Robert Lansing's Attempts to End the American-Japanese Rnalry
(Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 1962), 114-16.
23. Hughes comments,
November 11, 3921, FRUS, 1922, vol. 1, 3-2, and Akira Inye,
After Imperialism: The Search for Older in the Far East, 1921-1931 (New York
Atheneum. 1973), 18 In the “security clause, signatories promised “to refram from taking advantage of conditions in China m
order to seek special rights or privileges which would abridge the nghts of subjects or citizens of friendly States, and from
countenancing action inimical to the security of such States. See Asada,
“Between the Old Diplomacy and the New , 216-26, and SD. September 2, 1932,
150-51.
24. Nine-Power
Treaty, February 6. 1922, FRUS, 1922, vol. 1.276-83.
25. Iriye, After
Imperialism, 25-6, Kato Cited in Asada. “Between the Old Diplomacy and the
New,"' 228 See Dickinson, Toward a Global Perspective of the Great War,”
1177-78, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Shall We Trust Japan?.” Asia, July 1923, 478.
Britain officially returned Weihai in 1930.
26. Cash figures from
Payson J Treat, Japan and the United States, 1S53-192I (New York Houghton
Mifflin. 1921; rev. ed.. 1928), 263. Shidehara quoted in Asada. Between llie Old Diplomacy and the New, 229.
27. In Ozawa v.
Unified States (1922), the Supreme Court found Ozawa Takeo ineligible for
citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906 because, contrary to his
claim, he failed classification as a white person Immigration figures from Mae
M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination
of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no 1 (June
1999): 74.
28. Hughes memo,
March 27, 1924, FRUS, 1924, vol 2, 337-38 Hamhara to
Hughes, April 10, 1924; "No Veiled
Threat Intended in Note," New York Times, April 20, 1924, 1 On Japans view see Chow and drama, 7liming Point in US-Japan
Relations 135-67 See also Asada Ryo Taisenkan and
Nichi-Bei Kankei. 273-323.
29. Root comments m
SD. Sept. 2, 1932.150-51; Hughes to Lodge, in lrye.
After Imperialism, 35.
30. FRUS, 1928, vol
I, 153-57. On neutrality, see Brooke L Blower, “From Isolationism to
Neutrality: A New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture,
1919-1941,” Diplomatic History 38. no. 2 (2014): 345-76 See also Robert H.
Ferrell Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven
CT: Yale University Press. 1952); and Gorman Emergence of International
Society, 259-308
31. Edwin James
"15 Nations Sign Pact to Renounce War m Pans Room Where League Was Bom;
Briand Dedicates It to Nations' Dead," New York Times, August 28. 1928, 1;
Briand Calls Pact Direct Blow to War.” New York Times, August 28, 1928. 5;
Springfield Republican. August 28. 1928.
32. Briand Dedicates
It to Nations Dead/ New York Times Coolidge quoted in Henry Cabot Lodge Jr..
'The Meaning of the Kellogg Treaty/ Harper's, December 1928, 38 Stanley Hoffman
‘The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism. Foreign Policy, no 98 (Spring 1995):
161.
33. Ishii, Diplomatic
Commentaries, 243^14; Lodge, "Meaning of the Kellogg Treaty." 41.
"Involvement without commitment in George C. Herring. The American Century
and Beyond: US Foreign Relations, I89X-2014 (Oxford Oxford
University Press, 2017), 137. See also Warren I Cohen Empire without Tears
America's Foreign Relations, 1921-1933 (New York Knopf, 1987)
34. France and Italy
also participated but became disaffected early and declined to sign the ensuing
treaty.
35. SD January 7,
1930, vol II, 45; January 20 1930, vol 12, 47-49, February 3, 1930, vol 12. 113
James B, Crowley', Japan's Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign
Policy, 1930-1938 (Princeton NJ Princeton University Press. 1966), 38-48.
36. Ishii, Diplomatic
Commentaries, 320-24. Crowley, Japan's Quest for Autonomy, 48-66.
37. Michiko Ito The
Japanese Institute of Pacific Relations and the Kellogg Pact.” in Hawai’i at
the Crossroads of the U.S. and Japan before the Pacific War, ed Jon Thares Davidann (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008),
78-82, 89. Another criticism was the pact being signed ‘in the name of the
peoples” instead of the emperor. On the 1929 IPR conference see Akanu, Internationalizing the Pacific 139-65, and Burkman,
Japan and the League 362-64.
38. Wakatsuki quoted
in Dickinson, World War I, 180. Stimson address April 22, 1930, SD, vol 11,
63-65.
39. Iriye,
Globalizing America, 103.
40. Henry L. Stimson,
The Far Eastern Crisis (New York: Harper and Bros., 1936), 3.
Continued in Part
Two: Could the Pacific war Dec 1941-2 September 1945 be avoided?
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