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:
“There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The war shook down the Tsardom, an unspeakable abomination, and made an end of the new German Empire and the old Apostolic Austrian one. It ... gave votes and seats in Parliament to women.... But if society can be reformed only by the accidental results of horrible catastrophes ... what hope is there for mankind in them? The war was a horror and everybody is the worse for it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)