Inter-Allied socialist conference in London

On 23 February 1918 the inter-Allied conference of socialist parties and trade unions meeting in London adopted a joint memorandum on war aims. That is the date given by the American diplomatic papers and a British chronology of the war. A reprint from The Times of 25 February, later published in the United States, gives 22 February. It was the third meeting of the socialists of the Entente countries since the beginning of the war.

The road to the conference

The idea grew out of the failure of the Stockholm conference. In the summer of 1917 the Allied governments refused passports to delegates to the general socialist congress in Stockholm, and the secretary of the Labour Party, Arthur Henderson, left the War Cabinet. Together with Sidney Webb he began to prepare a programme of his own. In September the British Trades Union Congress at Blackpool decided that nothing could be achieved at Stockholm for the time being, and called for war aims to be agreed with the workers of the Allied countries. The memorandum prepared by the Labour Party and the unions was approved by a special conference in London on 28 December 1917. A few days later the prime minister David Lloyd George, in a speech to trade unionists, set out Britain’s war aims, and in January the party conference at Nottingham approved his programme and Wilson’s Fourteen Points in so far as they agreed with the memorandum.

The conference sat in London on 20–24 February (the French edition of the memorandum gives 21–23 February). It was attended by representatives of the Labour Party and the British trade unions, the Belgian Labour Party, the French Section of the Workers’ International and the trade-union General Confederation of Labour, and the Italian reformist socialists. Delegates from South Africa, Romania and South Slav organisations took part in an advisory capacity. At the opening the French socialist Albert Thomas announced that his party and the unions had almost unanimously supported the British draft. The Russians were absent. The secretary of the International Socialist Bureau, the Belgian Camille Huysmans, read out a letter from the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who had been refused passports by the Bolshevik government. Nor were there any Americans.

The memorandum

The conference upheld the declaration of the Allied socialists of February 1915: the peoples of Europe had had no part in causing the war, the socialists were fighting not the peoples of Germany and Austria but their governments, and a victory for German imperialism would be a defeat for democracy and liberty. The aim of the continued struggle was to make the world “safe for democracy”. The most important condition of peace was declared to be a League of Nations, to which all states were to belong, with an international court, an international legislature and joint action, economic or military, against any state that refused arbitration. Plebiscites on self-determination were to be held under its supervision. The socialists demanded the democratisation of all states, the abolition of secret diplomacy, the limitation of armaments and the nationalisation of arms production, so that private armaments firms profiting from war scares would disappear. They also explicitly endorsed the four principles that President Wilson had announced on 11 February.

On territorial questions the memorandum demanded the restoration of an independent Belgium and reparations from Germany under the supervision of an international commission. It called the question of Alsace-Lorraine a question of right, not of frontier adjustment. The peace treaty was to recognise that Germany, by declaring war in 1914, had itself broken the Treaty of Frankfurt, and France, having obtained this recognition, could agree to the population being consulted again on its wishes. Of Poland it was written that, in accordance with the right of every nation to determine its own fate, it must be restored “in unity and independence, with free access to the sea”. Any open or disguised annexation of Livonia, Courland and Lithuania by Germany the memorandum called a flagrant and inadmissible violation of international law.

The socialists did not make the break-up of Austria-Hungary their aim, but they did not accept that the aspirations of the Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs should be treated as an internal matter of the monarchy. Its peoples could, if they wished, replace it with a free federation of Danubian states. Armenia, Mesopotamia and Arabia could not return to the sultan’s rule, and the Dardanelles were to be neutralised. Palestine was to become a free state under international guarantee, to which Jews could return, and Jews of all countries were to receive full civil rights. The colonies of tropical Africa were to pass under the control of the League of Nations. The memorandum also rejected plans for a post-war economic war and demanded the restoration of devastated lands and a court of claims and accusations to examine charges of atrocities against civilians and merchant seamen that could not be justified by the customs of war.

Resolutions

The conference considered that a general conference of the socialists of all the belligerent countries would be useful during the war, convened in a neutral country by an impartial committee. The condition for taking part was to be public acceptance of the principle “no annexations and no punitive indemnities, with the right of peoples to self-determination”. Thomas, the Belgian socialist leader Émile Vandervelde and Henderson were to press the governments for at least one representative of labour to sit in every official delegation to the peace conference. It was decided to send a delegation including Huysmans to the United States to win over the workers and socialists there. The memorandum was sent to the socialists of the Central Powers with a request for a reply.

The governments received this coolly. At the meeting of the Supreme War Council in London in mid-March Lloyd George warned that the socialists would soon demand permission to meet their colleagues from the enemy countries. The French prime minister Georges Clemenceau and the Italian prime minister were opposed, and the American Secretary of State Robert Lansing told the Allies that unofficial political conferences in wartime were “unwise and dangerous”. The replies of the socialists of the Central Powers arrived over the following months.