THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1939 TRADE AND PEACE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23272, 15 February 1939, Page 12

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1939 TRADE AND PEACE

The fact that four trade pacts, affecting among them six countries, are being signed this week, offers food for thought. Some of the thought may be superficial. Lightly it may be assumed that such agreements, arid especially a number of them, am promises, if not assurances, of peace. That depends—on many things. Private business dealings do not always promote friendship ; thisre is no certainty that international bargains will. The parties to these four commercial agreements are, respectively, Italy and Germany, France and Germany, Germany and Norway, Poland and Russia. This assortment of nations may seem to imply a fairly general readiness to overstep the bounds that to-day are tending to divide the Powers into two groups, totalitarian and democratic. Not necessarily. Rather is it clear that each, of the six is actuated by motives of self-interest. Germwiy, for example, as a party to three of these pacts, is undeniably bent on acquiring, by means as convenient as possible but by inconvenient means if need be, essential foodstuffs, raw materials and textiles, facilities for the prosecution of her armaments programme. She is not economically happy or even tolerably comfortable. As a matter of cold fact,, her difficulties are increasing. Not only do her exports go sharply down, but her recent endeavours to float another loan, in order to fund a part of her large short-term debt, encountered an inadequate response. Her people are compelled, in the name of the new Germany, to accept a falling general standard of life. Herr Hitler is trying to turn this evident disability to propagandist account, in the spirit of his Nuremberg declaration—"lf I had the Ural Mountains, with their incalculable stores of raw materials, Siberia with its vast forests, or the Ukraine with its tremendous wheat fields, Germany under National Socialism would be swimming in plenty." She is not, and his programme is of doubtful result. E!e is aiming at the moon, but appears to have done little more tha,n hit the church steeple. A wider consideration of motives, again wil;h reference, in part, to Germany,, is suggested by the circumstantial accounts of an extensive arrangement of barter between German manufacturers, on the one hand, and co-operative farming and packing organisations in the United States' Middle West, on the other. This isl to operate between the business interests directly concerned, but it goes without saying that the German Government, supreme in all things, is behind that side of the bargain—to exchange manufactured goods for lard, wheat and other primary products—and behind mmilar arrangements with citrus growers in California and apple growers in Virginia, who are to be paid in German fertilisers. The American Secretary of State, it appears, will not object, so long j as artificial currency devices do not obtrude and his favourite reciprocal trade-agreement project be not hampered; that is, the United States will tolerate this local engagement in barter—only so long as it does not cross national policy, as it certainly would if on a nationwide scale. So Italy will take German coal, and France, Poland and Russia conduct foreign ti'ade within stipulated limits, so long as their own immediate ends are served. Let circumstances alter, and in a twinkling the agreements will be gone down the wind. It would be a different story were there an allround fostering of trade, unrestricted by the adventitious "double coincidence of wants," as in barter most notably. The totalitarian States a,re palpably, at the present time, bent on torpedoing that development, and enter these limited reciprocal undertakings under no illusiion about their opportunist value; these States will take a rougher way to get what they want, as soon as circumstances give them a chance, and are doing their utmost, with means that include these restricted agreements, to change circumstances to their liking. 1 To be said for such agreements, and it iB the best that can be said, is that they may become part of a network eventually all-inclusive. Then, and then only, will be justified Tennyson's phrase, "kindly links of gold," in reference to international trade. This eventual outcome is, however, far from the thought of such States as Germany and Italy, to judge them by their own enunciations of policy. Yet in these agreements, even conceived severely as bilateral, is an interesting practical comment on the doctrine of national economic isolation. They are an admission, whatever be the ultimate aim of this or that propounder of the destiny of his people, of the present impracticability of the idea. Never was a more naive confession of its futility. Every one of these trade pacts, and this local American instance of international barter—implicitly sanctioned in one of the great nations most nearly self-contained in material resources—is a testimony to the fate dogging the fond purpose, To develop these resources to the limit of possibility is unexceptionable; it can rightly be regarded as a duty. But a moment's thought will discover that "to the limit oE possibility" is a vital phrase, and that the total prosperity and happiness of the world, includ- j ing its every unit, turn finally on the principle of full and friendly commercial intercourse. Various j devices may be wisely used to regulate the intercourse, but wilful obstruction is fundamentally evils