Norman Angell

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Norman Angell

Sir Ralph Norman Angell (born December 26, 1874 in Holbeach as Ralph Norman Angell Lane , † October 7, 1967 in Croydon ) was a British writer and publicist. In 1933 he received the Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the Executive Commission of the League of Nations and the National Peace Council.

life and work

Early years

Norman Angell was born in Holbeach, Lincolnshire in 1874 as one of six children of the farmer and merchant Thomas Angell Lane and his wife Mary Lane. Brittain was born. At the request of his father, he should seek a business education, so I went at the age of 13 years at the Lycée St. Omer in northern France and subsequently to London to economics to study. He only completed this course for one year, while he was already working as a journalist for a provincial newspaper. He then went to Geneva and studied literature there .

Acting as a publicist

At the age of 17 he emigrated to the USA for some time . From 1894 he worked there as an overseer, cowboy , farmer and teacher, mainly in California ; He also traveled to Mexico and Central America and published in the San Francisco Chronicle about the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898. After he returned to Europe, he reported on the Alfred Dreyfus affair ( Dreyfus Affair ), condemning the British government for its policies and the Boer War with the African Boer states and founded the Daily Messenger in Paris .

In 1903, Angell published his first book, Patriotism under three flags, under the name Ralph Lane . A plea for rationalism in politics , through which Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe noticed him and offered him the post of editor of the Continental Daily Mail . He accepted this offer and got to know several important politicians.

After 1909 Angell no longer used the family name "Lane".

His second book, which made him internationally famous, was published in 1910 and was entitled The Great Illusion (Eng. The wrong calculation. What does the war bring? ). It was translated into 15 languages ​​within a year. In the book, he denounces warfare as well as traditional pacifism . He showed that every war is always a loss, even for the victors, in which enormous financial resources and human lives have to be expended. Effective pacifism must view war as a lack of common sense in order to be successful. His book marked the beginning of a new peace movement that originated in Britain and came to be known as Norman Angellism . By 1912 there were 40 clubs of the movement in Britain.

First World War and the interwar period

In 1914 Angell returned to Great Britain. At the outbreak of the First World War , he spoke out decisively against his country entering the war. In 1915 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Foundation invited him to a summer academy at Cornell University . Angell spoke out against US entry into the war, but also against isolationism . Rather, the US should bring its economic power on the side of the Allies into play. At this time he also developed ideas for a League of Nations, referred to in his draft as the League of Free Nations , and for a reorganization of international relations that is already close to what was later referred to as " collective security ".

After the war, Norman Angell campaigned for a revision of the Versailles Treaty in favor of Germany, from which, as the supposed sole warden, immense reparations payments were demanded. In 1919 he became a member of the Labor Party and its foreign policy advisor. From 1928 to 1931 the newspaper Foreign Affairs was published under his leadership . He was also an MP for the Bradford North constituency in the House of Commons from 1929 to 1931 , after defeating the Conservative mandatee Eugene Ramsden . In 1931 he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor ("Sir"). In 1939 he published his book You and the Refugee, written with Dorothy Frances Buxton . The Morals and Economics of the Problem , with which they campaigned for understanding for the refugees from the Third Reich . Accepting them is - as Buxton and Angell mention in the subtitle of their book - both as a moral duty and, insofar as the majority of German emigrants are professionally highly qualified, an economic gain for Great Britain.

Since 1951 Angell lived largely withdrawn in Surrey . Until his death in 1967 he published a number of other books and writings.

reception

John Ironmonger remembered Norman Angell in his novel The Whale and the End of the World (2015).

literature

in order of appearance

  • John Donald Bruce Miller: Norman Angell and the Futility of War. Peace and the Public Mind. Peace and the Public Mind . Palgrave Macmillan, London 1986.
  • Bernhard Kupfer: Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners . Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf 2001, ISBN 3-491-72451-1 .
  • Martin Ceadel: Living the Great Illusion. Sir Norman Angell, 1872-1967 . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-957116-1 .

Web links

Wikisource: Norman Angell  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Norman Angell  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Footnotes

  1. ^ John Donald Bruce Miller: Norman Angell and the Futility of War. Peace and the Public Mind. Peace and the Public Mind . Palgrave Macmillan, London 1986, p. 12.
  2. ^ John Donald Bruce Miller: Norman Angell and the Futility of War. Peace and the Public Mind. Peace and the Public Mind . Palgrave Macmillan, London 1986, p. 14.
  3. ^ John Donald Bruce Miller: Norman Angell and the Futility of War. Peace and the Public Mind. Peace and the Public Mind . Palgrave Macmillan, London 1986, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Martin Ceadel: Living the great illusion. Sir Norman Angell, 1872-1967 . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009, pp. 236-240.
  5. ^ John Donald Bruce Miller: Norman Angell and the Futility of War. Peace and the Public Mind. Peace and the Public Mind . Palgrave Macmillan, London 1986, p. 21.
  6. ↑ Frankfurt a. M. 2019. S. 144f.
personal data
SURNAME Angell, Norman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Angell Lane, Ralph Norman (maiden name); Lane, Ralph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British publicist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Holbeach
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1967
Place of death Croydon