22 J.-A. PEMBERTON
investigations in various countries as to the possibility of securing a general
relaxation of quotas and other obstacles to international trade,’ although he
added that no international conference involving the British, Belgian and
French governments on the subject was ‘at present envisaged.’^69
Van Zeeland’s report, which was based on inquiries throughout
Europe and America, appeared on January 28, 1938. According to the
Labour parliamentarian Arthur Henderson, the son of the Labour par-
liamentarian who had served as secretary of state for foreign affairs from
1929 to 1931 and as president of the Disarmament Conference in 1932
and 1933, namely, Arthur Henderson senior, it put forward ‘concrete
proposals’ in respect to tariffs, quotas, exchanges, raw materials, colo-
nies and immigration and urged that ‘the representatives of the principal
economic Powers, the United States of America, Great Britain, France,
Germany and Italy, should come together to take soundings and prepare
the ground.’^70 Unsurprisingly, it too came to nothing in policy terms. In
the context of a debate concerning what various speakers labelled eco-
nomic appeasement, on April 8, 1938, Richard Austen (Rab) Butler, the
under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, relayed Van Zeeland’s obser-
vations that it would be futile to pretend that one could ‘artificially’
isolate the mission of finding practical solutions to economic problems
from the surrounding political conditions and that an ‘improvement in
economic conditions depended on least a certain degree of confidence,
good will, sincerity, order and security prevails in international rela-
tions.’^71 Echoing these observations, Butler stated that a ‘certain degree
of confidence in the political sphere’ was essential if any progress in the
economic sphere was to be made ‘particularly if we are to try to persuade
those who have set up barriers, with which to insure their own economic
self-sufficiency, to pull them down.’^72
(^69) 322 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), April 8, 1937, 342. See also Wood, Peaceful Change
and the Colonial Problem, 98.
(^70) 336 Parl. Deb., H.C. (5th series), June 3, 1938, 2481. Wendy Way observed of Van
Zeeland’s report the following: ‘it was to prove disappointingly lacking in practical pro-
posals for joint action when it was produced’ in early 1938. Wendy Way, A New Idea
Each Day: How Food and Agriculture Came Together in an International Organisation
(Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013), 200, http://epress.anu.edu.au.
(^71) Paul Van Zeeland, 1938, quoted ibid., 2496.
(^72) 336 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), June 3, 1938, 2496. See also Wood, Peaceful
Change and the Colonial Problem, 98–99.