| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Carolyn J. Kitching. Britain and the Geneva Disarmament Conference: A Study in International History. (Studies in Military and Strategic History.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. Pp. vii, 230. $65.00.
Although multilateral diplomacy has become a common feature of international relations, the Disarmament Conference of 1932–1934 remains a more or less unique exercise. As Carolyn J. Kitching points out, after 1945 the focus of negotiations was much more on arms control of certain categories of weapons than on the general and multilateral disarmament that the lengthy discussions of the early 1930s unavailingly aspired to. Indeed, the conference arguably served as much as a focus for growing international tensions of the period as an arena in which those tensions could be addressed. Meanwhile, its failure allowed Adolf Hitler to point to other nations' abrogation of disarmament obligations under the Versailles Treaty while embarking on his own energetic revision of that treaty. The conference's failure carried enormous consequences.	1
Of course, success would have been difficult to achieve. The lengthy discussions in the preparatory commission set up in 1926 led to a draft convention that satisfied no one. The main protagonists, France, Germany, and Britain, all had different priorities that repeatedly surfaced throughout the conference. Germany wanted equality of rights, an expectation the conference raised but could not fulfill. Any move in that direction, moreover, was bound to increase French anxieties, and ingenious French suggestions—such as the internationalization of weapon stocks, which won the plaudits of the smaller countries—mattered not a whit if they failed to please the Germans. The British, meanwhile, had the more limited goal of preventing any Franco-German agreement on disarmament that might trammel their ability, for instance, to guard their imperial frontiers with bombers.	. . .

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