Nyon Conference

Background

The Nyon Conference met in Nyon, Switzerland, in September 1937 to address attacks on international shipping in the Mediterranean during the Spanish Civil War. The Non-Intervention Committee, a group of twenty-four nations set up in London in 1936, had tried to restrict the flow of weapons to the parties of the civil war, but its control measures were widely evaded. For Britain the committee formed part of the policy of appeasement towards Germany and Italy and aimed at preventing the conflict from escalating into a major pan-European war.

The immediate cause of the crisis was Italian unrestricted submarine warfare. Italy was not officially at war and no attacking submarine identified itself. Between 31 August and 1 September 1937 the Italian submarine Iride unsuccessfully attacked the British destroyer Havock between the Gulf of Valencia and the Balearic Islands, strengthening British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden's sceptical stance towards Italy. The Soviet government formally accused Italy of sinking two Soviet merchant vessels, the Timiryazev and the Blagoev, an accusation the Italians called "aggressive and offensive".

Britain arranged the conference for all parties with a Mediterranean coastline, along with Germany. Nyon, not Geneva, was chosen as the venue because Italians associated Geneva with the League of Nations over the Abyssinian crisis. Britain extended an invitation to the Soviet Union at France's request but blocked one to a Republican Spain representative. Germany rejected the invitation, arguing that piracy should be handled only by the Non-Intervention Committee, and Italy likewise declined.

The conference and the agreements

Opening on 10 September 1937, the conference ended on the 14th with the signing of the "Mediterranean Agreement". The signatories were Bulgaria, Egypt, France, Greece, Romania, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the USSR and Yugoslavia. The agreement held attacks on neutral shipping by submarines to contravene the London Naval Treaty of 1930 and the Submarine Protocol of the Second London Naval Treaty of 1936. Any submarine that attacked neutral shipping, including one in the vicinity of a recent attack and judged responsible for it, was to be sunk if possible. British and French fleets would patrol the seas west of Malta and attack suspicious submarines, with the division of patrols decided by their governments. Of the 60 destroyers needed, Britain would provide slightly more than half and France the remainder and most of the aircraft. The agreement repeated the suggestion that Italy could patrol the Tyrrhenian Sea if it wished. A second agreement signed in Geneva on 17 September extended the same rules to surface vessels.

Aftermath and assessments

Invited to join on 13 September, Italy refused, demanding "absolute parity" with Britain and France, and later indicated the refusal would be reversed if parity were granted. A compromise was signed on 30 September and Italian patrols began on 10 November. The patrols strained the Royal Navy and were relaxed from January 1938; submarine activity returned and full patrols resumed in early February, were relaxed again in May, and the agreement was suspended in August.

In marked contrast to the Non-Intervention Committee and the League of Nations, the conference succeeded in preventing submarine attacks, but its achievement was limited. The agreement left intact the fiction that the attacks were the work of "pirates unknown" and preserved the naval status quo in the Mediterranean. Nyon has been characterised as "an appeasers paradise": the Francoists received whatever they wanted and the Republicans got very little. British historians have generally seen Nyon as an important stand against aggression, with reservations; Christopher Seton-Watson calls it a "diplomatic victory", while Jill Edwards points out that it failed to change Italian policy. Italian historians tend to downplay the conference's importance.

The Soviet representative Maxim Litvinov was pleased with the outcome and stressed the USSR's "indisputable right" to commit naval forces to the Mediterranean. He regretted that Spanish merchant shipping had been left out, which the other nations believed would have amounted to formal intervention in the civil war. Because other nations opposed Soviet naval participation, Britain and France agreed to handle Aegean Sea patrols, which the Soviet Union accepted.