Composition and organisation
The New Commonwealth Society was created in October 1932 in London by David Davies (Lord Davies of Llandinam), British liberal millionaire and former secretary to the liberal politician Lloyd George. [2] Its patrons included Lord Gladstone, Lord Robert Cecil, Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and its inaugural executive committee consisted of, in addition to Davies, one member from each of the larger national branches: the former leader of the Labour party George Barnes for Britain, the journalist Henry de Jouvenel for France, the liberal activist Ernst Jäckh for Germany, and the businessman Oscar Terry Crosby for the United States. [4] [5]
Notable members of the organisations also included Eyvind Bratt from Sweden, J. J. van der Leeuw from the Netherlands, and distinguished academic scholars such as the émigré Albert Einstein, Norman Bentwich, Nicholas Murray Butler, George Scelle, Hans Kelsen and Alfred Verdross, who founded the Austrian branch of the organisation in 1937. [7]
The German branch of the Society was led by the SA-group leader (SA-Gruppenführer) Friedrich Haselmayr. Their activities were tolerated and on occasions even encouraged by the Nazi regime.
The Society advocated the creation of an international tribunal and an international police force. [8] The Society defended the creation of an international air force which would act as a military arm of the League of Nations, promoting disarmament and keeping the world's peace. Those promoting the New Commonwealth included the David Davies, who became its chairman, others who had taken part in building up the League of Nations Union, and Winston Churchill, who was elected as the organization's president. Ernst Jaeckh was appointed as international director. [2]
In a speech to the Society in May 1937, Churchill said
We are one of the few peace societies that advocates the use of force, if possible overwhelming force, to support public international law. [9]
Some of the ideas of the New Commonwealth Society were later incorporated into the United Nations Charter.
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, was a British statesman and Conservative politician who dominated the government of the United Kingdom between the world wars. He was prime minister on three occasions, from May 1923 to January 1924, from November 1924 to June 1929, and from June 1935 to May 1937.
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
The Vienna Circle of logical empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick. The Vienna Circle had a profound influence on 20th-century philosophy, especially philosophy of science and analytic philosophy.
The Austrian Empire, officially known as the Empire of Austria, was a multinational European great power from 1804 to 1867, created by proclamation out of the realms of the Habsburgs. During its existence, it was the third most populous monarchy in Europe after the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom, while geographically, it was the third-largest empire in Europe after the Russian Empire and the First French Empire.
Philip John Noel-Baker, Baron Noel-Baker,, born Philip John Baker, was a British politician, diplomat, academic, athlete, and renowned campaigner for disarmament. He carried the British team flag and won a silver medal for the 1500m at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959.
Albert Victor Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Hillsborough, was a British Labour and Co-operative politician. He was three times First Lord of the Admiralty, including during the Second World War, and then Minister of Defence under Clement Attlee.
Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was a German paratroop officer during World War II who later served in the armed forces of West Germany, achieving the rank of General. Following the war, Heydte pursued academic, political and military careers, as a Catholic-conservative professor of political science, a member of the Christian Social Union political party, and as a Bundeswehr reservist. In 1962, Heydte was involved in the Spiegel affair.
Isotype is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form. It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. Gerd Arntz was the artist responsible for realising the graphics. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.
Antifaschistische Aktion was a militant anti-fascist organisation in the Weimar Republic started by members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) that existed from 1932 to 1933. It was primarily active as a KPD campaign during the July 1932 German federal election and the November 1932 German federal election and was described by the KPD as a "red united front under the leadership of the only anti-fascist party, the KPD."
David Davies, 1st Baron Davies was a Welsh Liberal Party politician and public benefactor who was MP for Montgomeryshire from 1906 to 1929. He was a grandson of the great Welsh industrialist David Davies. As a philanthropist, he established the King Edward VII Welsh National Memorial Association to combat tuberculosis in Wales, as well as the Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.
The No More War Movement was the name of two pacifist organisations, one in the United Kingdom and one in New Zealand.
Marie Neurath, born Marie Reidemeister, was a German designer, social scientist and author. Neurath was a member of the team that developed a simplified pictographic language, the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, which she later renamed Isotype. She was also a prolific writer and designer of educational books for younger readers.
The League of Nations Union (LNU) was an organization formed in October 1918 in Great Britain to promote international justice, collective security and a permanent peace between nations based upon the ideals of the League of Nations. The League of Nations was established by the Great Powers as part of the Paris Peace Treaties, the international settlement that followed the First World War. The creation of a general association of nations was the final one of President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. The LNU became the largest and most influential organisation in the British peace movement. By the mid-1920s, it had over a quarter of a million registered subscribers and its membership eventually peaked at around 407,775 in 1931. By the 1940s, after the disappointments of the international crises of the 1930s and the descent into World War II, membership fell to about 100,000.
Rudolf Nadolny was a military intelligence officer under German Foreign Office cover. During the First World War, he worked in a branch of the German General Staff that experimented in biological warfare. He was the German Ambassador to Turkey (1924-1933) and the Soviet Union (1933-1934) and the head of the German delegation at the World Disarmament Conference (1932-1933). He sought to pursue close relations between the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union. Nadolny left the diplomatic service in opposition to Hitler's policy towards the Soviets.
Otto Heinrich Greve was a German lawyer by profession and a politician of the German Democratic Party (DDP) and its successor German State Party, the Free Democratic Party and Social Democratic Party of Germany and a member of the German Bundestag.
Winston Churchill retained his UK Parliamentary seat at the 1929 general election as member for Epping, but the Conservative Party was defeated and, with Ramsay MacDonald forming his second Labour government, Churchill was out of office and would remain so until the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939. This period of his life has been dubbed his "wilderness years", but he was extremely active politically as the main opponent of the government's policy of appeasement in the face of increasing German, Italian and Japanese militarism.
Hugo Krabbe was a Dutch legal philosopher and writer on public law. Known for his contributions to the theory of sovereignty and the state, he is regarded as a precursor of Hans Kelsen. Also Krabbe identified the state with the law and argued that state law and international law are parts of a single normative system, but contrary to Kelsen he conceived the identity between state and law as the outcome of an evolutionary process. Krabbe maintained that the binding force of the law is founded on the "legal consciousness" of mankind: a normative feeling inherent to human psychology. His work is expressive of the progressive and cosmopolitan ideals of interwar internationalism, and his notion of "sovereignty of law" stirred up much controversy in the legal scholarship of the time.
The Anti-Nazi Council was a London-based organisation of the 1930s. Initially part of the left-wing anti-fascist movement, it gained political significance when allied to Winston Churchill, though at the time its influence was largely covert. Between around 1935 and 1937 it was a vehicle for Churchill's attempts to form a cross-party alliance against appeasement of the fascist dictatorships. The group behind it used the title Focus in Defence of Freedom and Peace, and variants, and is sometimes known as the Focus Group.
Wolfgang Lüder was a German lawyer and politician. He was a member of the Free Democratic Party.
Alfred Verdross or Verdroß or Verdroß-Droßberg was an Austrian international lawyer and judge at the European Court of Human Rights.
