ABSTRACT
Negotiated responses to the knock-out blow relied upon the cooperation of other nations, individually or collectively. During the peace negotiations at Paris in 1919 of giving the proposed League of Nations its own military arm, an idea favoured especially by France, but nothing came of it. By the early 1930s, the time seemed right to reopen the question of a League police force, with the spirit of Locarno calming relations, the worldwide economic crisis suppressing military spending, and the Disarmament Conference providing a fresh opportunity for debate and negotiation. But liberalism was no longer as politically powerful as it had been before 1914, and it was the left which was the main source of strength for airminded negotiation in Britain But the potential strength of negotiation was precisely its weakness: it required the consensus of a community of nations, a consensus which was already fragile in the 1920s, and which fractured beyond repair by the mid-1930s.
