In February 1933 the call for refusing military service became the subject of a famous resolution at the Oxford Union. The specific proposal presented to the Union during one of its weekly debates was “That this House will in no circumstances fight for King and country.” The resolution was adopted by a vote of 275 to 153. The same resolution was debated and approved at other British universities, indicating considerable support for an absolute pacifist position among British students.
Winston Churchill later decried the Oxford pledge as that “ever-shameful resolution,” which supposedly displayed “decadent, degenerate Britain” to the calculating totalitarians in Germany, Russia, and Japan. In truth the pledge was simply one modest expression of the widespread revulsion against war that existed in Britain at the time. The incident was blown out of proportion by the press and by the failed attempt of Randolph Churchill and other conservative Oxonians to expunge the “red” resolution. The broad support for the Oxford pledge reflected a deepening sense of revulsion at the narrow nationalism and uncritical patriotism that many saw as the root causes of war.
A similar movement emerged among students in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of US college students signed a pledge that they would not “support the United States government in any war it may conduct.” This movement was led by young socialists and communists, who were able to work together in a rare united effort to mobilize the widespread youth pacifist sentiment that existed at the time. In April 1934 nearly 20,000 students across the country left their classrooms in a student strike to protest the mounting threat of war.
The following year the student strike was even larger, as more than 150,000 protesters gathered on 130 campuses across the country. In New York 10,000 youths demonstrated on campuses with placards that read “Life is Short Enough” and “Build Schools – Not Battleships.” The student pacifist movement continued for several years thereafter and was folded into the Emergency Peace Campaign that began in 1936.
Absolute pacifism also emerged in France. As in Britain and other countries the horrors of the world war and the threat posed by the new technologies of aerial bombing and chemical weaponry prompted some to reject war totally. The internationalist/just war tradition of the APD remained the dominant perspective among French peace advocates, but a new form of “integral pacifism” emerged in the Ligue internationale des combatants de la paix (LICP), founded in 1930. The evils of modern war were greater than any gains that it might achieve, LICP leaders argued.
They supported the principle of collective security and the use of economic sanctions but opposed military action. They emphasized the Gandhian method of civil resistance as the preferred means of national defense. The LICP grew rapidly for a few years and gained a following not only in Paris but throughout the provinces, claiming some 20,000 members at its peak. Integral pacifism was a passionate outcry against war, but it was essentially antipolitical and offered no convincing strategy for countering the rising threat of fascist aggression. “With each succeeding crisis in the thirties,” wrote Norman Ingram, “the sands of intégralité poured faster through the pacifist hourglass towards September 1939.” Integral pacifism became increasingly untenable after Hitler came to power and it declined sharply in the second half of the decade.
The Failure of Peace Efforts
