2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 153been a source of tension between Germany and Britain, Hitler stated
that ‘[n]o sacrifice is too great in order to win England’s good will
(Geneigtheit)’ and that this meant ‘[r]enunciation of world trade and
colonies; renunciation of a German navy, concentration of the whole
force of the state on the land army.’^229 Yet as indicated by Toynbee’s
discussion of the colonial question during a meeting with the Nazi ide-
ologist Alfred Rosenberg in June 1934 and in his meeting with Hitler
in February 1936, once installed in power the National Socialist Party
gradually modified its rhetoric regarding the colonial thesis. From May
29 to June 2, 1933, Carl Brinkmann, a sociologist and economist from
the University of Heidelberg attended the sixth session of the ISC. This
session, which was held in London, was devoted to the subject of ‘The
State and Economic Life’ as had been a conference held in Milan in
May in the previous year, albeit in that case under the auspices of what
was then called the CISSIR. In the course of the London conference,
Brinkmann insisted on the democratic nature of the new Germany. In
this regard, he drew a contrast between plebiscitary and parliamentary
democracy, dismissing the latter as a fiction. Some weeks earlier, on May
3, Brinkmann had delivered an address at Chatham House. It was per-
haps a sign that a shift in the public stance of the Reich in respect to
the colonial thesis was in the wind that he declared during his address
that Germany ‘could not be excluded from the mission of colonial devel-
opment’ and that there would be ‘in future an ever increasing danger
from the non-white races that Germany would have to help resist.’^230
(^229) Mein Kampf, 1936, quoted in Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 81.
(^230) Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 244. For Toynbee’s meeting with
Alfred Rosenberg, see McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: A Life, 171. Carl Brinkmann declared the
following at the 1933 session of the ISC: ‘Professor Manning has emphasised the point, in
speaking of privilege, of a monopoly of political power as the backbone of the new State,
that there must be sufficient guarantee that this political monopoly will be exercised in har-
mony with the wishes and interests of the nation and of the State. I would submit two con-
siderations. Firstly, that under what you call a Liberal democracy the parliamentary method
of government [sic] there were no such guarantees; secondly, that in all the countries where
the more modern movements have latterly come to the fore, it is practically certain that
the will of the nation, as expressed by Parliament, did not correspond to the will of the
nation in general.’ League of Nations, Sixth International Studies Conference, A Record of
a Second Study Conference on the State and Economic Life Held in London From May 29 to
June 2 and Organised by the International Institute of Intellectual co-operation in collabora-
tion with the British Co-ordinating Committee for International Studies (Paris: International
Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1934), 209.