3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 349failed to provide for an effective mechanism to enact changes to the status
quo in order to preserve the same. As what this particular criticism claims
about the covenant is correct, it should of be of no surprise that the con-
cept of collective security was far more associated with the League than
ever was the concept of peaceful change. Anatola’s second explanation as
to why the debate on peaceful change evaporated, has more force. While
some approached the debate on peaceful change from the perspective of
legal and moral principle, as evidenced by the contributions to that debate
of Webster, Wright, Zimmern and others, approaches of this kind were
fewer in number than those which were oriented towards the actual prob-
lems of the day: oriented towards the problems thrown up by the actions
of the unruly states of Italy, Japan and Germany. The main reason why
peaceful change did not survive the war was not because of any connec-
tion between it and the League, but was because of its association with
appeasement. The term appeasement and the expression peaceful change
were often used interchangeably in the context of the debates concerning
treaty revision and the granting of colonial and other concessions which
took place against a background in which certain states were advertising
their dissatisfaction with the status quo. It is thus hardly surprising that
by the time of the onset of the war, the expression peaceful change had
acquired the same negative connotations that had lately been acquired by
the term appeasement.
Schumann’s 1940 essay ‘War, Peace and, the Balance of Power’
touched on the main reason why the notion of peaceful change fell out of
favour in arguing that the problem of organising peace ‘is only remotely
and indirectly one of rectifying “injustices” and promoting “peaceful
change and thereby diminishing deprivations, insecurities, aggressions and
national wills-to-fight.’ The conflagrations witnessed in the twentieth cen-
tury, Schumann insisted, were not the result of injustice or the absence
of procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes. Rather, they were a
consequence of the supposition of certain powerful states that engaging
in violence and ‘playing the power game’ held out more advantages than
dangers. Schumann observed that such a supposition could only be made
in a context in which the instruments of coercion were dispersed among
states or alliances of roughly equal fighting capacity and that it would fall
to the future organisers of international peace to ensure that such a sup-
position could no longer be rationally entertained.^388
(^388) Schumann, ‘War, Peace, and the Balance of Power,’ 75.