"The League of Nations Can Stop Wars"

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22540, 3 October 1936, Page 3 (Supplement)

"The League of Nations Can Stop Wars"

By JOHN GUNTHER

fused ratification of the Versailles Treaty, they torpedoed the Covenant almost beyond recovery. With the United States a League member, sanctions could absolutely outlaw and isolate an errant State. But American withdrawal from the League system made effective sanctions all but impossible, because America, by insisting on its neutral right of trading with an aggressor, could frustrate any League blockade. The British Navy, necessarily the chief instrument of a blockade, would not risk conflict with the United States. International Disputes In assessing the value of the League one should first separate its nonpolitical activities from those entangled in nationalist politics. That the League has done sturdy service in extra-political fields is undeniable. In collating statistics on a reasonable international basis, in forming the nucleus of a world approach to matters of health, agriculture, the drug traffic, transport, refugees, codification of law, its value is indisputable, and only a persimmon-minded Pharisee could minimise it. One should not forget, too, the able work of the League in financo and economics, particularly the afctempt to stabilise the Danube countries after the war. As to politics, the thing to keep in mind is that the League is an admirable mechanism for settling international disputes when —and onlj' when

—the groat Powers agree. It is sill}' to say that the League, even if it lias no executive authority, cannot stop wars; it has stopped at least one war which might have been extremely dangerous —for instance the Bulgar-Greek upset in 11)25 —and it can stop others provided Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and Italy, are united in wanting them stopped. For instance, the League prevented the Yugoslav-Hungarian outbreak in 1904 from developing into war. This averted a first-rate international crisis. But when the Powers disagree, then the League is blocked. The League's record as an administrator of doubtful territories is almost beyond reproach. The League is, as Edgar Ansel Mow re r put it, the product of thousands of years of slow ethical growth. Feeble as it may be, it "speaks for a much larger proportion oT the world than any other human institution. It represents—l quote a recent letter in the London Times —"man's lirst fumbling approach to national decency, conceived in the spiritual anguish of the war." And it has been in operation only half a generation, which in the historical process, is a very brief interval indeed. 1 remember President iMasaryk saying to mo in Prague, "It is only 15 years since the war —an instant's flash. Give us time —time —" The brief history of the League may ho divided into three periods. Until the Treaty of Locarno In 1925 it was

N'OTHING is. easier than to sneer at the poor old League o£ Nations, foisted on the Allied Powers by an American, Woodrow "Wilson, because he happened to care more for the United States of the World than the United States of America,. It gives one a Btart to r.ead the Covenant to-day and see that paragraph three of Article Five still says, "The first meeting of the Assembly and the first meeting of the Council shall be summoned by the President of the United States." Nothing is easier than to list the charges commonly made against the League. Speaker after speaker mounts the Assembly tribune and tells the world what everybody already knows.— Nothing happens at the Counci table until the [lowers that bo have settled the b.isiness beforehandand in secret. What tho League mostly does is deliberate upon an ancient dilemma—how to lock the stablo door after the horse has gone. '1 he League does nothing but spawn a plethora of feeble committees. 'J hw League provided a mean:) for minorities to voice their grievances; therefore minorities have been doubly nuisancemakers. The League compelled the registration of treaties; so treaties nowadays have more secret clauses than before. The League is a junta of the Versailles Powers. And so on. And so on. Covenant "Torpedoed" Some of these charges are true. But the point to make is that the countries themselves, not the League, are responsible for most of the weaknesses of the Geneva system. The League as such has no sovereign rights. It has no authority to compel a State to follow its recommendations. The League is a pool of all the member Powers, but it has no executive rights over any individual country. The League is not a super-State;, it is merely tho mouthpiece of member States when happily and rarely they reach agreement. The League itself decides nothing; the individual States bear all the responsibility. The Covenant, moreover, was written on the assumption that tho United States of America would bo a signatory. When Senator Ixxlge and his baud of irreconcilable isolationists re-

Whole World Looking Toward Geneva AN AMERICAN TELLS OF SPLENDID WORK ALREADY DONE

(Copyright Reserved) To-day's article by the well-known author of " Inside Europe " is of outstanding interest just now in view of the present meetings of the Assembly and Council of the^ League of Nations, tor the first time delegates have assembled in the new " Palace of Peace.

for tho most part the instrument of the victorious Powers, strengthening the peace against the upward writhings of the vanquished. Then, till 1933, when Germany departed, it laboriously struggled with the problem of disarmament; namely, the Allied Powers refused to obey their pledges and to disarm, and tho disarmament conference collapsed. Since 1933 the major issue has been "collective security." This means an attempt to bring Germany into a security system on the basis of moro or less equal rights; if it fails, tho League will become tho instrument of reversion to the balance of power and overt military alliances. The League's "Cabinet" The League secretariat comprises 637 men and women of 44. nationalities, and there are some queer fish among them. All take a solemn pledge to the League, and tho group represents the nearest approach to an international civil servico that tho world has yet seen. The secretary-general, Avenol, is a Frenchman; his two deputies are Spanish and Italian. The under-secretary-general is British, the legal adviser Uruguayan, and the chiefs of section comprise two Britons, two Italians, one Greek, ono Frenchman, one Dane, ono Swede, one Pole, ono Dutchman, one South African, and ono American, tho astute and amiable Arthur Sweetser. These men are tho

"Cabinet" of the League. In various sections the number of diflercnt nationalities is augmented. In the information section, for instance, there are men and women of 17 countries. This melee does not, however, produce much discord. Tho lato secretarygeneral, Sir Eric Drummond, told a friend that quarrels in tho staff, when they rarely occulred, wero usually between people of the same nationality. Members of the secretariat represent a cross-section of equipment as well as nationality. There aro former soldiers, professors, engineers, diplomats, newspaper men, health officers, lawyers, economists. All aro strenuous idealists, and all are devoted to tho League. A fair share of them entered

League service, young men —in the original secretariat there were only two men over 40—fresh from the war and determined to give voice to their disillusion and idealism. Some were inveterate internationalists even then; Pierre Comert, for instance, for many years head of the information section, was a teacher of French in a German university. The chief "personalities" commonly associated with the League are delegates from the Powers, like Dr. Benes, of Czechoslovakia, young Anthony Eden, who is by all odds Geneva's star attraction, and Don Salvador de Madariaga, the Spanish .professor who was head of the League's disarmament section, before becoming ambassador of Spain first to Washington, then to Paris and Geneva. Madariaga, fiercely intelligent, a bald little wasp, writes books in English in a style few Englishmen can match. " Never gets Excited " The head of the secretariat, Joseph Avenol, is French and yet has been called the Frenchman's conception of a typical Englishman He is extremely shy, a little slow, tenacious; he never gets excited, loves England, and has a passion for bulldogs and gardening. Avenol was a financial expert, an advisor to the French treasury, who worked in England during the war on inter-Ally financial problems; ho was once offered the governorship of the Bauque do France but he preferred Geneva. The Treaty of Versailles, the alleged source of all our woes, is a sturdy document running to 453 pages which weighs just under three pounds. You can buy it at His Majesty's Stationary Office for the very reasonable sum of 2s.Gd, and it is an interesting lot of reading matter for the money._ Some of its clauses, written in passion in 1919, seem outrageous and indefensible now, like the "Hang the Kaiser" and war-guilt paragraphs. Large parts, you discover with some amazement, are long since out of date; the cry to revise the treaty still resounds, but as a matter of fact the document has already been so whittled down that not much except the territorial clauses are left. Reparations,

Rhineland, disarmament, are no more than waste paper now. This serves to make more pressing the potential demand for territorial revision. The Allies gave way to Germany, though with ill grace, first on the financial clauses of the treaty, then on German rearmament. Territory will not be so easy to give away. As a matter of blunt fact, the territorial provisions of the treaties, including even those dealing wLfeh the Danube and Baltic, were not so utterly indefensible —some minor instances excepted—as is generally assumed. The basis of the settlement was selfdetermination; frontiers were drawn with ethnic considerations predominant. As a result, whereas in pre-war Europe something like 45.000,000 people lived under foreign domination —including the whole of what is now Poland, the whole of Czechoslovakia, the whole of the Baltic States and much of Yugoslavia —the situation to-day is that only 16,800,000 are genuine minorities. The fact cannot be denied that, as Hamilton Fish Armstrong put it, "vastly more people on the Continent of Europe live under their own national regimes than before." New Minorities Created The trouble was that the Allied Powers overstepped themselves, and created —as we have seen —new minorities by grabbing what didn't belong to them. But it should be pointed out that some frontier lines, like that between Hungary and Rumania, can never be drawn without leaving some miserable folk on the wrong side of the border. Another point should bo kept in mind. If Germany had won the war, the Treaty of Versailles might not have been nearly so nice a one. At the end of 1935 the gentlemen of tlio League were too busy catching Mussolini's tail in Abyssinia to worry unduly over storm clouds elsewhere. But the Continent, shaken by political worry and economic discontent, was far from dutifully quiescent. Indeed the chief latent worry in connection with the Abyssinian war should have been its possible repercussions elsewhere. Abyssinia aside, let us look at Europe from the point of view of war or peace. The forces making for war, the sourco and embodiment of all indecency and evil, are, roughly, the following: First, rival nationalisms. We have noted, ad nauseam, the internicine hatreds of much of Europe, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"; war is the last refuge of a patriot. And there are many "profiteers in patriotism" in Europe to-day. Economic Stresses Second, economic stresses. The last war caused the present economic crisis. The present economic crisis will help to cause the next war. The unity and confidence of capitalism has been shaken; national poverty is unloosing unpredictable international forces. Third, the outward push of countries like Germany and Italy, who are starved for raw materials, which coincides with their political revisionism, their nationalist urgo to destroy the treaties and thus expand. Five countries in the world possess about 75 per cent of the total of the world's key-products. Germany, Italy and Japan are not among them. Fourth, tho difficulty of localising civil disturbances; Europe is so interlocked that a revolution in Austria with 6,500,000 people, may set 100,000,000 marching; frontiers were multiplied by Versailles, Europe "balkanised," and the whole Continent enmeshed in rickety alliances. Fifth, the incapacity of certain peoples to develop democratically. Sixth, tho growth of armament. Millions of armed men cannot sit around with millions of pounds' worth of guns and ammunition and just twiddle their thumbs —indefinitely.

Seventh, the fact that the United States of America is not a member of the League, which would be a thousand per cent more effective with American adherence. Eighth, the spread of Fascism, and the explosive force of personalities like Hitler. "Everybody is Poor" The forces making for peace may similarly be outlined: First, wars cost money, and everybody is poor. Nobody has paid for the last war—except the dead. (On the other hand, of course, domestic poverty may teinpt a country —Italy, for instance, to break out, both as an effort to cloak discontent at home, and, more "legitimately," to seek wealth abroad. Also, one might note that the less wealth a country has, the less it stands to lose by war. Second, the general tempo of thp economic crisis has been an anodyne. The struggle of almost all nations to keep from drowning in the seas of their owfi poverty has, to a certain extent, minimised the danger of conflict. Third, as pointed out above, the peace treaties went a considerable way I toward drawing a correct ethnic map of Europe, and thus removed many

former sources of revolutionary and in« ternational friction. There are approximately 30,000,000 fewer Europeans anxious to upset the status qyo. Fourth, in 1914, in Europe there were 18 kingdoms or empires, four of them ruled by absolute or nearly absolute monarchs, and only two republics. To-day there are 12 Kingdoms none of them absolute, and 15 republics. Absolutist wars in the fashion of former centuries, arranged between royal houses almost like their marriages, are out of fashion. (On the other hand, totalitarian Fascist dictators can with equal impunity throw their countries into war.) Fifth, a general European war would probably produce revolution and Communism everywhere except in England. Sixth, at the end of 1935 the League system was by no means proved to be a failure. The Locarno treaties were still a powerful guarantee of peace. League machinery, even with tne Powers disagreeing, provides a valuable central clearing-house for information and v negotiation- -Popu pacific opinion, especially m r Jf > ' was mobilised behind the League to an extraordinary extent. It is not necessarily stupid ldealisn to hope that the League can ally become strong enough .to : etp E wars..