2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 209War, Dulles urged ‘“alterations of the international status quo” in order
to head off “powerful forces emotionally committed to exaggerated and
drastic change”’ which his brother, according to Kinzer, took to mean
‘accepting the rise of Nazism as a way to fight Bolshevism.’^434
tHe coloniAl Question After PAris
Although the prevalent view among the participants in the ISC’s 1937
session at the time of its conclusion was that peaceful change at least as
it related to Europe was something of a chimera, the notion continued
to prove attractive because, as Wood put it, ‘of the large-scale sanguino-
lence of modern war.’ Wood noted that at least some of those attracted
to the notion would ‘applaud the Munich. “settlement”,’ although
Wood himself suggested that a better description for the Munich
Agreement than peaceful change was a description employed by C. R.
M. F. Cruttwell in discussing events of the nature of the incorporation
of free city of Kraków in the Austrian Empire in 1846: he stated that the
city’s incorporation was the result of a bloodless war. Although increas-
ingly subject to derision in the wake of the Munich Agreement, for
some time after the conclusion of the 1937 session of the ISC, peaceful
change would remain a popular slogan amongst a mixed crew of con-
servatives, liberals and pacifists who were anxious for a peaceful settle-
ment with Germany. The currency of the expression suggests that its use
was assumed to have a palliative effect.’^435 Despite the almost entirely
negative attitude adopted in Paris in 1937 towards peaceful change in
the specific form of the transfer of colonies or mandates to Germany and
the contempt that had been heaped on the idea of colonial transfers else-
where, public discussion of the colonial question continued. The authors
of a letter published in the Times on October 7, 1937, which bore the
heading of ‘The Question of Colonies: A Case for Inquiry— Extend the
Mandatory System,’ declared that they looked forward to the convening
(^434) Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, 54.
(^435) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 36–7. In discussing whether or not
the Munich settlement could be described as a case of peaceful change, Wood drew on the
following statement by C. R. M. F. Cruttwell: ‘Doubtless whether a change was simply
enforced by a threat of overwhelming strength it would be inappropriate to describe it as
peaceful even though no drop of blood was shed in its accomplishment....Changes such as
these may be described as the result of bloodless wars.’ C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of
Peaceful Change in the Modern World (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 1.