Waning Prestige Of The League

Hawera Star, Volume LIII, 30 September 1933, Page 14

Waning Prestige Of The League

American Fears Of "Nationalism In The Saddle”

THE Assembly of the League of Nations this year will face a situation that must bring disappointment if not despair to the heart of the stoutest champion of this Geneva institution. Not in a decade, not, in fact, since the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, has the European situation appeared more desperate, writes Frank Simmonds in the “San Francisco Chronicle.”

Austrian territory began. Britain, France, and Italy, the co-signatories with Germany, have been forced to admonish Berlin that this Austrian operation was inconsistent with the spirit and letter of the Four-Power Pact, and Britain and France have been answered by public defiance.

As far as the New Germany is> concerned, the League of Nations is non-existent, and the men and women of Gei*many that have sought to associate their country with it are impotent, and in not a few instances are in prison or in foreign lands. But the very essence of a League that can function is an equal willingness on the part of all member nations to act in accordance with principles of the Covenant. While the pi*esent leaders and the contemporary spirit survive in Germany, Geneva is and must remain in a state of paralysis. Public opinion in Germany is deaf to the moral appeal of the League. World opinion, which was to be Geneva’s most potent weapon, is not audible within German frontiers —as it was not heard within Japan during the acute phase of the Manchurian crisis. As a consequence, nations that relied upon the League as an instrument for the preservation of peace are norv acting on the assumption that for all present time Geneva is helpless. The economic phase of the tVnrld situation carries the same implications. Nations today are determined to maintain economic as well as military policies that are inconsistent with the basic conception of inteimational cooperation. For the failure of the London Conference, Europe blamed America, and the United States held Europe responsible. But the fact, of course, was that the blame was equal, for at bottom the unwillingness to compromise was universal. Technically, President Roosevelt’s July 3 telegram broke up the Conference; actually, neither the gold bloc nor the sterling group was willing to yield on essential points. The truth is that for the time being the world has gone national, and gone with a bang. Politically, economically, psychologically, nationalism is .in the saddle everywhere, and distrust, dislike, deep-seated and passionate resentment of the foreigner are to be found on all sides. At London, Secretai'y of State Hull, who pleaded for internationalism, seemed even to an audience that respected his sincerity and admired his personality only a latter-day Casablanca.

Ten years ago it was possible to find consolation in the fact that if the world was in an uproar the League itself had not yet completed its organisation, and to believe that with the later development of the Geneva society change was assured. But now, a decade later, the League has been fully organised, has functioned with regularity, has even succeeded in enlisting American co-operation if not actual membership. Yet the international situation at the moment is beyond debate the worst since the close of the World War over half a generation ago. In the last three years Japanese Imperialism, German Fascism, and economic nationalism everywhere have combined to dampen the optimism of those that satv mankind moving towards international rather than national thought and action. The utter failure of two great international conference, the Economic in London and the Disarmament in Geneva, has disclosed a temper in every country equally fatal to the removal of barriers to international trade and to the reduction of armies and navies.

It is still possible to believe that but for the great depression the League of Nations might have acquired for itself some measure of the role its founder dreamed. Certainly, during the years of the Locarno truce, from 1925 to 1930, in which economic recovery seemed in full swing, political disputes lost something of their acuteness.

Nevertheless it is now clear that the armed nations will not reduce their forces or armaments save as they are assured of international guarantees against the purposes of nations at least nominally disarmed but resolved to bring about treaty revision at the expense of their neighbours. It is equally plain that these disarmed nations will not consent to renounce their purposes. Demanding equality in armaments, Germany, for example, refuses with ever-inere&sing vigour to accept her existing frontiers.

The League could function between nations resolved to set peace above all else; but between nations, one group of which will fight rather than surrender territory and another openly considering war a lesser evil than their existing territorial status, there is nothing the League can do. It cannot persuade the armed nations to reduce their forces, because it is unable to promise them security thereafter; nor can it hold out for the revision States any promise of frontier changes by peaceful means. It is commonly said in America that the cause of Eui-opean armaments is fear, but it is less common on this side of the Atlantic to perceive that the feai’s themselves are founded upon patent facts. Since the last adjournment of the Disarmament Conference there has been a deliberate attempt in certain quarters of this country to build up the idea that real progress had been made behind the scenes and that when it reassembles concrete results may he expected.

Thus the League meets with the realisation by the representatives of all nations that Europe is nearer to a new war—and another general war at that —than at any moment since the Armistice; that war may come next week, next month, next year—the date is problematical. But it must come eventually if nations continue to pursue their present political policies, and for some it is well nigh inevitable if the present spirit of economic nationalism continues to prevail everywhere. For, to take the example of Germany, foreign war must be the sole escape from domestic revolution if tariff barriers continue to rise about an overpopulated State that must sell abroad to live at home. In reality the world situation has become so tense and so dangerous that experienced students of international affairs look with keenest apprehension upon every new international conference or assembly. Each in turn, far from making’ any progress towards peace or prosperity, produces new disputes, exacerbates old rivalries and precipitates new crises. Yet in the United States, at least, the idea that to

Blit nothing that has yet happened has served to wipe out the effect of the Japanese operation in Manchukuo, which along with the Shanghai fighting proved a fatal prelude to the opening sessions. Nor has anything occurred since the latest adjournment to offset the incidents and events that have surrounded the campaign of the German Nazis in Austria—a campaign that called forth public protests from official London and Paris and private admonition from Rome. Every nation neighbouring on Germany is now profoundly alarmed over German events and the menace Nazi programmes, publicly proclaimed, have /for their security and unity.

bring representatives of irreconcilable policies together can promote understanding dies hard. From the inner circle about President Roosevelt there has issued in recent days the plain hint that the forthcoming session of the Disarmament Conference' will mark the last American effort to co-operate with Europe politically. But what chance is there that our co-operation can be more effective now when it is remembered that at all times since the defeat and disappearance of Woodrow Wilson, it has produced no tangible results because it rejected all responsibilities or commitments? At the bottom of the conception of the League of Nations was the assumption of a state of mind among all peoples equally resolved against war and similarly convinced of the need of practically unlimited international co-opera-tion—political, economic, and intellectual. Today no such basic sentiment exists. The world, which was to have been made safe for democracy, has resolved itself into units that in turn have adopted either political or economic dictatorships. Thus, instead of becoming- a potent factor for peace, the League has in recent years rapidly declined to the status of an international bureau still capable of performing usefully a certain number of tasks, but utterly without influence in the sphere of peace or war, whether political or economic.

For all practical purposes the frontiers of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, Belgium, and Holland, where these march with thdse of the Reich-, are patrolled and guarded as they would be did war itself seem imminent. Even Denmark has been forced to take cognisance of the Nazi purpose to recover the Northern Schleswig that in 1919 voted three to one for separation from Germany and union with the former mother country. All these countries have received their shai’e of Jewish fugitives and Socialists and Liberal exiles, who have brought with them alarming reports of the temper and designs of the new masters of the Reich.

It is true that recently the Four-Power Pact was drafted and signed; but the ink was hardly dry upon this document when Nazi

operations along Austrian frontiers and over