Abstract
The naval limitation conferences of Washington (1921–2) and London (1930) stand at either end of a period in which, by and large, it seemed as if the major states of the world were making some, if hesitant progress towards the regulation of their rivalries. There were setbacks, and even at the London conference France and Italy were unable to resolve their differences. Many outstanding questions still menaced Franco-German relations, and of many of the accords concluded in these years it soon became evident, as A.J. P. Taylor has remarked, that the promises were ‘black and big on paper, and only there’.1 Nevertheless British policy-makers had sundry, if short-sighted reasons for experiencing a sense of modest satisfaction. Britain’s relations with France, the United States and Japan on the whole were turning out to be less disturbed than had seemed possible at the beginning of the 1920s. Some progress was made with the problem of Germany, while Bolshevism was proving only an embarrassment, not a major threat outside the territories of the USSR. The ten-year rule, whereby the British services were instructed to plan on the assumption that they would have ten years notice of a major war, was being automatically renewed each year.
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Notes
A.J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–45 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 221–2.
K. Middlemas and J. Barnes, Baldwin: a biography (London, 1969), p. 285; see also pp. 225, 327.
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I. Nish, Alliance in Decline, 1908–23 (London, 1972), p. 392.
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A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961), p. 189.
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W. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany (London, 1985), pp. 205–10;
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A. J. P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers (London, 1957), pp. 185–99;
J. F. Naylor, Labour’s International Policy (London, 1969), pp. 252ff.;
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G. L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany, 1937–9 (Chicago, 1980), pp. 503–14, 533–4, 551–2, 575–7, 580–1.
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P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (London, 1986), p. 181.
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© 1989 C. J. Bartlett
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Bartlett, C.J. (1989). Too Many Challenges. In: British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20092-4_2
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