Office of the Historian

800.51W89 Belgium/236

The Belgian Embassy to the Department of State 47

[Translation]
(1)
In a note of December 6, 1932,48 the Belgian Ambassador informed the Government of the United States of the reasons why the Belgian Government was not in a position to resume the payments which had been suspended pursuant to the agreement entered into in July 1931. The Belgian Government is obliged to point out that the circumstances which motivated its attitude have not changed and that the arguments it invoked have retained all their force.
(2)
The solemn engagements of the Allied and Associated Powers and the spontaneous promises of Germany concerning the entire restoration of Belgium create a moral right which nothing can destroy and place Belgium in a special situation among the Powers which took part in the war of 1914–18.
(3)
Relying upon the declaration of President Wilson which had made the restoration of Belgium one of the conditions of peace, the Belgian representatives in 1919 did not consent to sign the Treaty of Versailles until they had received formal assurance of the cancellation of their war debts.
(4)
When the Belgian Government signed the Washington Agreement of August 20 [18?], 1925, it did so because it had been assured by the statements of the American representatives themselves that the payments due to the United States would be amply covered by the payments of Germany on reparations account.
(5)
In June 1931, when President Hoover proposed to suspend for a year the service of intergovernmental debts, the Belgian Government in its reply to the American Government49 recalled the (recognized) special rights of Belgium. In a spirit of international solidarity it consented to give up temporarily a claim which the country regarded as sacred, but it took pains to affirm that it did not intend that an action taken with a view to international recovery should become a cause of ruin for Belgium.
(6)
Later, in consenting at Lausanne to make definitive the sacrifice which the Hoover proposal imposed on it, Belgium assumed the cancellation of its claim to reparations to be inconceivable without the parallel suppression of its intergovernmental debts.
(7)
By its note of December 5 [6?] 1932, the Belgian Government set forth the effects on Belgium of the interruption of German payments [Page 852] and of the general economic depression. The difficulties pointed out at that time have continuously increased.

In these circumstances the Belgian Government, while reaffirming its good will and its desire to collaborate in a comprehensive settlement of the debt question, finds itself unable to make on December 15 next the payment provided for in the agreement of 1925.

Washington , December 12, 1933.
  1. Transmitted to the Department by the Belgian Ambassador as an enclosure to his note No. 4095, December 12, 1933.↩
  2. Foreign Relations, 1932, vol. i, p. 704.↩
  3. Ibid., 1931, vol. i, p. 177.↩