2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 233of lectures given at the Geneva Institute of International Relations in
August 1937. In his two lectures in the series, which bore the subtitle
Geneva and the Drift Towards War, Angell drew attention to the assump-
tion of those British conservative opponents of collective security that
‘commitment to “the League” as a commitment for a vague and danger-
ous altruistic purpose remote from British interests’.^520
Referring to the Italian attack on Ethiopia and Italy’s intervention
in Spain, Angell stated that it was because Italy knew that Britain was
‘in two minds about the defence of the Covenant,’ that the Duce had
been ‘ready to gamble’ and remained so.^521 Angell predicted that much
of the opposition to collective defence would evaporate once it lost its
dreaded ‘Geneva flavour’ and was called another name, a prediction that
he in fact thought had already been confirmed in light of the support in
conservative circles for the ‘Grand Alliance’ which was then in the pro-
cess of formation.^522 It was with a view to promoting collective secu-
rity under this guise, that Churchill had exploited his role in the New
Commonwealth and it was to collective security in the form of a grand
alliance, that many former advocates of an IPF were now converting if
they had not already.^523
Angell also took aim at those pacifists who had misguidedly leant
their support to those who would deny the LON the means of enforc-
ing the law: that in seeking the best they had become enemies of the
better.^524 As William Arnold-Forster had stated in 1935 in a lecture at
the Geneva Institute of International Relations, the pacifists had been
‘misled into the anarchic assumptions of militarists and nationalists.’^525
(^520) Norman Angell, ‘How may League Principles be Made Political Realities?’ in Problems
of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the Drift Towards War, 144. See also, Norman Angell,
‘Current Criticisms of the Peace Front,’ in Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the
Drift Towards War, 203.
(^521) Angell, ‘Current Criticisms of the Peace Front,’ 204–05. See also Edgar Ansell
Mowrer, ‘The Spanish Conflict: Its International Repercussions,’ in Problems of Peace:
Twelfth Series, Geneva and the Drift Towards War, 54.
(^522) Angell, ‘How May League Principles Be Made Political Realities?’ 144.
(^523) Pugh, ‘Policing the World: Lord Davies and the Quest for Order in the 1930s,’ 111.
(^524) Angell, ‘Current Criticisms of the Peace Front,’ 206–07.
(^525) Arnold-Forster, ‘The Elements of World Order,’ 36.