The Kellogg-Briand Pact

AUG 27 1928 · 12:00

Frank B. Kellogg signs the instrument of ratification for the Pact of Paris, which had been concluded at the foreign ministry on 27 August 1928. Place: Quai d'Orsay, Paris Figures: Frank B. Kellogg, US Secretary of State · Aristide Briand, French Foreign Minister · Gustav Stresemann, German Foreign Minister · representatives of fifteen original signatories, eventually sixty-three War Renounced Briand proposes a bilateral Franco-American treaty in April 1927, on the tenth anniversary of US entry into the World War. Kellogg, wary of an entangling alliance, counter-proposes a multilateral treaty open to all states, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Briand accepts. The Pact is signed by fifteen states in the Salon de l'Horloge at the Quai d'Orsay on 27 August 1928. Sixty-three states eventually accede, including all major powers of the day. It enters into force on 24 July 1929. The text is two articles long. Article I: the signatories 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: all disputes shall be settled by pacific means. There is no enforcement mechanism. A Treaty Without Teeth, A Charge With Them Within three years Japan invades Manchuria (see [[japan-invades-manchuria-1931]]); within seven, Italy invades Abyssinia (see [[italy-invades-abyssinia-1935]]); within eleven, Germany invades Poland (see [[germany-invades-poland-1939]]). The Pact prevents none of them. It is widely cited in the 1930s as a monument to interwar naïveté. But its language reappears as legal foundation in 1945. The Nuremberg Tribunal charges the surviving Nazi leadership with crimes against peace, defined as the planning and waging of aggressive war in violation of international treaties, with Kellogg-Briand cited specifically. The Tokyo Tribunal does the same. Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue in The Internationalists (2017) that the Pact's longer effect is the dismantling of conquest as a legal route to territory: states acquire by treaty after 1945, almost never by war.