SECRET DIPLOMACY

Evening Star, Issue 19723, 25 November 1927, Page 4

SECRET DIPLOMACY

ARE FOIMft METHODS STILL WITH US? “Tho League attempts to substitute for the old diplomatic methods a new system intended to prevent tho possibility of secret intrigue and tfi secure the scrupulous observation of justice,between great nations and small. And surely there is a fundamental error in supposing that you can first use all the'old’forbidden weapons of secrecy, diplomatic pressure, private bargaining, and the like, and then, if they lull, resort to frankness and mutual confidence. Tho confidence will by that time have disappeared.”—Professor . Gilbert Murray, in ‘The Times.’ The practice of the representatives of the Great Powers discussing policy and arriving at decisions prior to dis cession at the session of tho League of Nations Assembly, now that Lord Cecil has resigned, is tho subject o) keen debate. Wo shall deal later with tho work of tho Assembly, and the hopeful note of the president’s speech quoted above has already made an excellent impression. “ Sir Austen, in one of those pathetic speeches in , which ho proclaims his faith in the League ” (writes Mrs Swanwick, in ‘Foreign Affairs’), “explained that ho wanted ‘the progress of the League to be as gradual, as ordered, and as imperceptible for the moss part as onr own constitutional progress.’ Tins is pathetic, because it is so fantastically inadequate and yet it is a genuine cri du coeur, a heartfelt British tribute to the -glorious British constitution; so heartfelt that Sir Austen can, wish the League nothing better than that it should follow the ‘ impurcep tible ’ progress of British constitutional procedure. “How many centuries lias that ‘ ordered and imperceptible ’ (not always so very ordered, when you come to remember it I) progress taken? Can the League afford to wait till Sir Austen's .children's children's children arc gathered to their fathers before its progress becomes perceptible P Besides, much of our legal and constitutional procedure is based on case-lawand on precedent. You can’t malic case-law without cases, and you can’t follow precedents if you have never made any. “And yet precedents must be made now if the League is-to_live. Truly it is not worth while keeping it in being as camouflage lor tho old Concert of Europe.” “The essential problem which faces the League,” says the ‘ Liverpool Dost,’ “ is how to separate tho national and international elements in the Council, or, to put it otherwise, how to assure the existence in the Council of a temper of detachment from purely national bias or aim, and thus maintain a real international outlook, in keeping witli the acknowledged spirit of tho League. “ lb must occur to many that, on the whole, the interests of the League might bo better served were Foreign Secretaries to withdraw from the Council and leave their places to be filled by specially appointed representatives of the various Rowers concerned.

“ The absence of Foreign Secretaries from Genova during Council meetings would no doubt bring to an end tho secret diplomacy in hotels which of lato years Ims been rampant. On tho present occasion tho Foreign Secretaries of the Locarno Powers will discuss between the sittings ol tho Council, in tho close hotel privacy, tho future of tho llhmcland, Germany's claims in relation to her disarmament, and similar ,matters of vital consequence to the'peace of Europe. “ They may even reach decisions affecting the weal or woe of all of us, and our children's children. Yet the League, as such, has no voice in these carefully-guarded conversations. There is, surely, something farcical' about tho whole business. Why make the Council meeting an excuse for indulging in an orgy of that secret diplomacy Which the League of Nations was designed to abolish ? “it is a practice very harmful to tho League, though it is doubtless only t,oo convenient for those who still control, if not the diplomacy perhaps, at least the diplomatic machinery of Europe.” “ The League and its ideals are the only things that stand between the civilised world and the prospect of another conflagration, and that, without it, there would bo nothing save a fresh svstem of alliances and competitive armaments. Lot it once become certain that the League is doomed, or that it is impotentj what would be the reflections of tho masses in tins and other countries upon that certainty?” writes Mr Wickham Steed, in the ‘ Observer/ dealing with tho general work of the League. “Is it likely that they would quietly resign themselves to a situation from which the only issue would be new butchery, vaster and more indiscriminate than ever, with civilians as. well as soldiers marked down in advance as its victims? What argument could lend greater cogency to the Communist doctrine .that, since capitalist civilisation is inherently incapable of producing aught but crises and wars, the sooner it be swept a tray by an organised, class-sonscious proletariat the bettor? “ Truly, in his denunciations of the League ns a bulwark of capitalist society, M. Tchi.tch.crin is not altogether wide of the mark, for the League is essentially, progressively, conservative, the only general agency for the maintenance of what remains of the liberal institutions and philosophy upon which representative government and orderly democracy are founded. “Of all the Assemblies that have been held, this Eighth Assembly, despite the apparently trivial nature of its official agenda, may well prove the most important and the most, critical. It meets under a cloud to which the Anglo-Franco-iiclgian agreement upon tho reduction of the ilmncland armies of occupation by IU,OUU men provides but the dullest of silver linings. . , , , ; “in the depths of the cloud the rumblings of an increase of naval armaments across the Atlantic may be heard, and other rumblings from the direction of tho Reichswehr Ministry in Berlin. Whether the ‘ Geneva atmosphere ’ will bo darkened to the point of lasting gloom, or whether it will be cleared by a few sharp Hashes and a healthy breeze, only a sooth-sayer would bo foolhardy enough to predict. “The failure at Geneva is fundamentally due to tho decline in international idealism since 1919. During the war all right-minded citizens believed that somehow or other the fruit of the universal sacrifice would be a world of closer international co-operation, in which war would ho abolished, at least between tho great civilised Rowers. The Covenant of the league of Nations was the outward and visible sigh of that inward and spiritual hope. These war-time hopes, however, have not been realised. The League has been established and has done good work, but it has,.been paralysed partly by inner discords inside Emopc, ipaitly by the refusal of the United States to co-operate. On both sides of the Atlantic selfishness rather than ‘ world - mindedness 1 has been the rule, the Washington Conference caught tho last rays of war-time idealism. The Geneva Conference is the inevitable result of post-war _ “If the two halves of the Englishspeaking world continue as they are at present it will be very difficult for them to avoid drifting into antagonism and competition. If they think only of thcpiselves the United States will claim that position 6f predominance which wealth and numbers place within her grasp i tho British Empire will

follow suit in defence of its own security and existence. “Other nations will then fall into Tin© behind one or other, :and the scone will have been set for, a world war which will end civilisation. If, on ;tlie otner hand, the two halves of the English-speaking people put first the realisation of that ordered world which they both so ardently hoped for during the war, a world in which justice and liberty' and peace are secure, they will cease to cavil at one another’s armaments and work together without difficulty to find tho solution for the supreme problem of our time—the ending of war, “Before this can happen two things are necessary. The first is that the United States should reconsider her attitude towards the rest of the world. She does not yet realise what she did in rejecting the League of Nations (and, incidentally, in upsetting the delicate machinery created by the Peace Treaty for European reconstruction in 1920), and her refusal, to put any alternative in its place. Political isolation and naval ■ parity, which are the two cardinal principles or American external policy to-day, are not constructive policies. “They are in their essence purely self-centred, and, as such, are leading the United States and the world towards the abyss as certainly as the feuds of Europe are. This does _not‘ necessarily mean that the United States should join the. League of Nations. The situation to-day is very different from what it was in 1920, and a different approach to ; the problem may be necessary. But it means that she should be willing to enter into active and continuous and unreserved co-operation with her fellow nations in the search for world justice and world peace. Without her co-operation no real progress can bo made; with it anything is possibc. . . . “There is no use expecting lire United States to take .a British or a European view of world problems, or making it a'sine qua non that she should join the League.or the International Court. The problem must be thought out do novo, for her method of approach will be quite different. There is in the United States a widespread and genuine desire for international pence. There is a deep distrust of political entanglement, either with Europe or Asia. American co-opera-tion will not easily come through entry into leagues or alliances of any sort or kind.

“It will come rather through the discussion of way r s and means for making tho rule of Jaw effective in inlernational relations and for making war difficult if not impossible as a method of settling international disputes. One question which must be fearlessly faced is the difficult problem of the freedom of tho seas. Another is arbitration. But the most important is the movement for tho outlawry of war, which has for its object the ruling out of war altogether as an inhuman, wicked, and preposterously cruel and _ wasteful method of settling international disputes. “ This movement lias recently received a fresh impetus from the remarkable proposal for making war impossible between the four great democracies of tho world made at Harvard by Air Houghton (tho American Ambassador in London) last June. It is along such lines as these rather than by trying to get her into any league or treaty that tho interest and the cooperation of the United States in world affairs wih he secured.

“ if tho failure of the Geneva Conference leads not to evil but to good it will be because th© energies of the English-speaking peoples have been directed not to comparisons of naval armaments or to tho discovery of possible weakness in case of war, but to the question of how the world is to be made safe from war, safe for national liberty, safe for justice and democracy, which they have somewhat forgotten in the distractions and preoccupations of the post-war years.”