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Great Britain

Pacifism and revulsion with war were very popular sentiments in 1920s Britain. Novels and poems on the theme of the futility of war and the slaughter of the youth by old fools were published, including, Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington, Erich Remarque 's translated All Quiet on the Western Front and Beverley Nichols 's expose Cry Havoc. A debate at the University of Oxford in 1933 on the motion 'one must fight for King and country' captured the changed mood when the motion was resoundingly defeated. Dick Sheppard established the Peace Pledge Union in 1934, which totally renounced war and aggression. The idea of collective security was also popular; instead of outright pacifism, the public generally exhibited a determination to stand up to aggression, but preferably with the use of economic sanctions and multilateral negotiations. Many members of the Peace Pledge Union later joined the Bruderhof during its period of residence in the Cotswolds, where Englishmen and Germans, many of whom were Jewish, lived side by side despite local persecution.

The British Labour Party had a strong pacifist wing in the early 1930s, and between 1931 and 1935 it was led by George Lansbury, a Christian pacifist who later chaired the No More War Movement and was president of the PPU. The 1933 annual conference resolved unanimously to "pledge itself to take no part in war". Researcher Richard Toye writes that "Labour's official position, however, although based on the aspiration towards a world socialist commonwealth and the outlawing of war, did not imply a renunciation of force under all circumstances, but rather support for the ill-defined concept of 'collective security' under the League of Nations. At the same time, on the party's left, Stafford Cripps 's small but vocal Socialist League opposed the official policy, on the non-pacifist ground that the League of Nations was 'nothing but the tool of the satiated imperialist powers'."

Lansbury was eventually persuaded to resign as Labour leader by the non-pacifist wing of the party and was replaced by Clement Attlee. As the threat from Nazi Germany increased in the 1930s, the Labour Party abandoned its pacifist position and supported rearmament, largely as the result of the efforts of Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton, who by 1937 had also persuaded the party to oppose Neville Chamberlain 's policy of appeasement.

The League of Nations attempted to play its role in ensuring world peace in the 1920s and 1930s. However, with the increasingly revisionist and aggressive behaviour of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, it ultimately failed to maintain such a world order. Economic sanctions were used against states that committed aggression, such as those against Italy when it invaded Abyssinia, but there was no will on the part of the principal League powers, Britain and France, to subordinate their interests to a multilateral process or to disarm at all themselves.