Summary

The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 was an agreement between countries to outlaw war.

The USA had not joined the League of Nations but still wanted to promote peace. When France suggested a treaty to ban war between them, the USA expanded the idea worldwide. Fifteen nations signed, and many more followed.

The Pact had major weaknesses. It had no way to enforce its rules, and countries found ways around it. Historians have dismissed it as unrealistic and useless.

However, although the Pact did not stop war, it influenced international law, and the way the world thinks about war and 'crimes against peace'.

In 1934, international lawyers confirmed that threats of war or helping aggressors were illegal. They also ruled that land taken by war could not be legally recognized. These ideas were used to punish war crimes after World War II and became part of the United Nations Charter.

‘Married Again’, a cartoon by American William Adler published in the Columbus Dispatch, 1928.
It is a cartoon of hope. After their 'divorce' in 1914, Peace is again 'married' to 'this wicked world' – only this time she has the protection of the Kellogg Treaties.
The fifteen signatories wish them well, as they set out on a marriage that can now last 'forever'.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact (Paris Pact), 1928

Background

Although the USA had declined to ratify the ToV or join the LoN, that did not mean it disagreed with their principles or was disinterested in internation relations … it simply did not want to be dragged into Europe’s quarrelling and wars.

When French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand approached US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg seeking a bi-lateral treaty to outlaw war between them, the US saw it as an opportunity to offer it to the rest of the world… it was a sort of US-alternative to the LoN.

Source A

Article I
The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.

Article II
The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.

The Pact

… only had two articles (Source A):

1. to renounce war;

2. to use only peaceful means to resolve any disputes.

Fifteen nations signed the Pact on 27 August 1928, to a fanfare of acclaim (Source B). Others followed so that the Pact (still in force today) has 63 signatories.

The praise was not universal:

• Britain was reluctant to sign, fearful that outlawing war could be interpreted as denying the right of self-defence.

• The Pact had no means of enforcement, beyond a woolly phrase that “any signatory Power which shall hereafter seek to promote its national interests by resort to war should be denied the benefits furnished by this Treaty” (whatever that might mean).

• By its brevity, the Pact also allowed massive loopholes. What was ‘aggression’, what was ‘self-defence’, what did ‘threatening’ mean, what did ‘denied the benefits [of] this Treaty’ imply? After 1928 many of the signatory countries simply attacked without declaring war. It was also pointed out that to make war illegal was to invalidate most of the treaties ever made, which would now have to be revised.

• Above all, even at the time the Pact was declared useless – “a piece of paper”, as the British Lord Snowden termed it – and a naïve pipe-dream (Source C).

• It can be argued that the Pact actually damaged the LoN (Source D).

Source B

It will be, I hope, no exaggeration to say that today's event marks a new date in history-making… Branded with illegality, [war] is by mutual accord truly and regularly outlawed so that a culprit would incur the unconditional condemnation and probably the enmity of all its co-signatories. It is a direct blow to the institution of war, even to its very vitals.

Aristide Briand, speaking at the signing of the Pact, 27 August 1928.

Source C

Few people have heard of it. Most historians ignore it… When it is mentioned, it is usually to dismiss it as an embarrassing lapse in the serious business of international affairs, a naive experiment that should never be repeated. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger mocked the effort to outlaw war as ‘meaningless’. The Cold War strategist George Kennan described it as ‘childish’. The British historian Ian Kershaw described the Peace Pact as ‘singularly vacuous’. The diplomat Kenneth Adelman judged it ‘a laughingstock’.

Legal scholars Oona Hathaway & Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists (2017).

Source D

[The Kellogg-Briand Pact] was another example of nations acting independently from the League. It made the League look like a platform for countries to air their problems rather than an organisation where practical solutions were found.

Clever Lili GCSE History revision site.

The Impact of the Pact

It is not true that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was worthless.

It may not even be true that it had no political effect. Hathaway & Shapiro have calculated that, where there was one military conquest every ten months in the period 1816-1928, after 1945 the number of such conflicts declined to one in every four years (though other factors may well have affected this).

It is true, however, that the Pact had a massive effect on international law. You will read in the Historiography that the same was true of the LoN – that, where historians declare it a failure, international lawyers declare that its principles changed the world forever. Exactly the same is true of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

In 1934, a Conference of international lawyers met in Budapest to establish the legal precedents of the Pact. They declared:

1. Once signed, a signatory state cannot release itself.

2. To threaten armed force violates the Pact.

3. Helping a violating state violates the Pact.

4. If a state is attacked, all the other states are free to assist it with financial or material assistance, including munitions of war and armed force.

5. Signatory states cannot recognise as lawful any territory acquired by war.

6. An attacking state is liable for all damage caused by its attack.

In terms of international law, therefore, the Pact was world-changing. Legal scholars Oona Hathaway & Scott Shapiro (2017) argued that it changed forever the way that war was viewed, and therefore the way states treat each other (Sources E and F).

The principles of the Pact were built into the Charter of the United Nations, and became the legal basis for the concept of a crime against peace (and therefore, eg, for the Nuremburg Trials after WWII).

Source E

[War] has become illegal throughout practically the entire world…. Hereafter, when two nations engage in armed conflict, either one or both of them most be wrongdoers – violators of this general treaty-law. We no longer draw a. circle about them and treat them with the [respect] of the duellist's code. Instead, we denounce them as lawbreakers.

Henry Stimson, US Secretary of State, 1932.

Source F

In criminalizing war Kellogg–Briand played a role in the development of a new norm of behavior in international relations, a norm that continues to play a role in our current international order

Political scientists Julie Bunck & Michael Fowler (2018).