2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 237(^534) Ibid., 149–50. Emphasis added.
of collective security ‘could not be satisfactorily solved without provision
for the reasonable reconsideration and settlement of situations threaten-
ing trouble’: without such provision ‘neither the dissatisfied insurgent
nations nor the many neutrals, so-called,’ whose support for the interna-
tional system was ‘indispensable,’ could be relied upon to fully cooperate
should an emergency arise. Davis stated that it was this conclusion that
had caused the ISC to decide at its 1935 session to spend the next two
years examining what came to be known as ‘Peaceful Change’. Davis’s
claim regarding the conclusion reached by the 1935 session of the ISC
in respect to the problem of collective security was an over-statement.
The view that the problem of collective security cannot be satisfactorily
solved without making provision for the satisfaction of the demands of
the dissatisfied insurgent nations was a view promoted by a minority of
the participants at the conference. Further to this, the conference’s deci-
sion to spend the next two years studying peaceful change appears to
have been largely influenced by a push in that direction on the part of
the conference’s American membership to which certain of the confer-
ence’s British members leant their support. In an opening address that
he gave in his role as chair of the conference’s study meetings in London
in 1935, Allen W. Dulles stated that Americans were apprehensive that
when Europeans called upon the help of the United States, that help was
being sought in order to preserve a status quo favoured by certain pow-
ers rather than to maintain peace. Given that Davis referred in his lecture
in Geneva to the post-war tendency on the part of Americans to turn
away from Europe, it is very likely that Davis had this same American
apprehensiveness in mind in urging in his lecture that Europe should
adopt a policy of peaceful change and in stating in connection with this
that the support of the many neutrals for the international system was
indispensable.^534