First World War
During the First World War his language skills led to his employment as an Intelligence Officer in the Balkans. Later, as an under-secretary in Lloyd George's national government, he helped draft the Balfour Declaration (1917). He also encouraged Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the formation of the Jewish Legion for the British Army in Palestine.
Amery was an opponent of the idea of a League of Nations that was canvassed during the war as he believed that the world was not equal and therefore a League of Nations that treated all states as equals with equal voting rights was absurd. Amery instead believed that the world was tending to larger and larger states, with the outcome resulting in a balanced world of inherently stable units. He contrasted this idea favourably to President Woodrow Wilson's "facile slogan of self-determination".
Read more about this topic: Leo Amery
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle- class world, and everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“In time of war you know much more what children feel than in time of peace, not that children feel more but you have to know more about what they feel. In time of peace what children feel concerns the lives of children as children but in time of war there is a mingling there is not children’s lives and grown up lives there is just lives and so quite naturally you have to know what children feel.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)