2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 213policy’.^445 In that same month, James Scorgie Meston, the chair of RIIA,
noted in a letter to the Times written on behalf of the BCCIS, that the
ISC was exactly the kind of fact-finding body that some had called for
in order to test the German claims. Lord Meston informed readers that
in Paris that year the ISC would be ‘checking...[their]...exploitation for
political capital’.^446
It was in this spirit that Manning affirmed at the Paris conference
that there is such a thing as an aspiration with ‘a merely conventional
existence—cultivated, as an instrument of policy’ and pronounced him-
self deeply sceptical of the idea that there was a solution to the putative
problem of peaceful change.^447 A few months later, in a paper delivered
at Chatham House, Harold Nicholson (who had been a member of the
BBCIS’s study group on peaceful change), elaborated at length on what
he believed to be the Reich’s real strategy in relation to the colonial
question, the broad outlines of which were touched on in the previous
chapter in the context of a discussion of Toynbee’s meeting with Hitler
in early 1936. Before discussing what Nicholson considered to be the
Reich’s real strategy in pressing its colonial demands, I want to address
certain of Nicholson’s observations concerning the case put for the
transfer of colonies by German propagandists and his observations con-
cerning the objections to such transfers. In his Chatham House paper,
Nicholson quickly disposed of the legal case advanced on behalf of the
(^445) Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 56n. The Berlin correspondent of the Times,
reported the following of the colonial claim in November 1936: ‘At this point, the more
direct aim...[is to use]...the colonial claim as a bargaining counter. After Western coun-
tries, especially Britain, have been suitably impressed with the obstinacy and the annoyance
of the German colonial claim, it might be suggested that this claim could be abandoned
or left harmlessly in abeyance in return for a free hand for Germany in the East. By this
would be meant, if not formal approval of her eastward expansion, at least an assurance
of non-intervention in any seriously obstructive form. A weapon of such contested value
as the colonial claim is bound, however, to be used experimentally in situations as they
arise.’ ‘Colonial Demands: Germany’s Campaign a Vehicle for Bargainig,’ Sydney Morning
Herald, November 5, 1936.
(^446) Lord Meston, letter to the editor, Times, January 28, 1937, Conférence permanente
des hautes études internationales, publications (préparations), brochure de propaganda sur
la Conférence, AG K-II-6, UA.
(^447) International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw
Materials, Colonies, 271–72.