ORGANISATION FOR PEACE.

Evening Star, Issue 25083, 26 January 1944, Page 4

ORGANISATION FOR PEACE.

A main- clause of the agreement by the representatives of Great Britain, the United States, and Russia at the Moscow Conference was to the ! effect that the Powers concerned recognised "the necessity of establishing at the earliest possible date a general international organisation based on the principle of thef sovereign equality nf all peace-loving States, and open to membership by all such States (large or small) for maintaining international peace and security." It is obvious that such a body mi:st take the form either of a reorganised League of Nations or some body similarly constituted. In commenting upon this aspiration at the time when it was being endorsed by the Canberra Conference we wrote: " The two weaknesses of the League were its requirement that all decisions upon major issues should be supported by a unanimous vote, almost impossible to obtain, and its lack of ' teeth ' to give effect to decisions. Tt will bo necessary to overcome the first weakness without giving the main influence in determining a policy to a majority of smaller States that would have no real responsibility for enforcing it."

In a thoughtful little book which ho has just published, ' To-morrow Always Gomes,' in which he endeavours to foroseo and straighten out some of the problems that must be expected iu the future, Mr Vernon Bartlett, the wellknown war correspondent, offers a solution of this difficulty. A majority vote, ho considers, must suffice for the future, but as the greater nations clearly have more responsibility than the small ones, if only because they control the greater military power and resources, more votes might be given to them in proportion to the greater contributions which they make to the expenses of the League, which have always varied in accordance with ability. _ Incidentally, apropos of former criticisms of the high cost of the League, he recalls a Spanish computation, made well before the present war began, that a levy of only 2 per cent, on the world's armament expenditure for one year would have produced so large a capital sum that the interest on it would have paid the League's total budget for ever and over.

Mr Bartlett suggests that the same system of proportional voting might be applied to the regional councils, which, so far as the Pacific is concerned, were a subject of consideration by the Canberra Conference. The main functions of these councils, forming an enlargement of the previbus mandates system, will be the important one of fostering the development of native peoples concerned in terms of the Atlantic Charter. In a general sense that suggestion would hardly apply to the regional organisation which the Canberra Conference has envisaged, including representatives of the Governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and France, because only advisory powers are proposed for it, but' the system under which' islands formerly under Japanese mandates are to be controlled is not yet laid down. It is obvious that the future will not be without its problems.