The Timaru Herald SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1940 Federation And Peace

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21575, 10 February 1940, Page 8

The Timaru Herald SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1940 Federation And Peace

ALTHOUGH great nations are now so heavily engaged in war that the minds of leaders and people alike are inevitably preoccupied with the struggle, many are yet able to spare thought for a happier future which may realise the dream expressed by Tennyson in lines written in the calm of Victorian days:—

When the war drtuns beat no longer When the buttle flags are furled, In the Parliament of man, The federation of the world.

Inspired thought is being given now to possible methods of organising the world so that the calamity of war will not be repeated. This idea nourished amidst the bitterness of 1914-1918, and an effort was made after the war to secure abiding peace through the League of Nations. That this method has failed temporarily does not mean that the idea was inherently bad. The explanation of failure, in fact, is to be found in the fact that the world was not ready to make the essential preliminary sacrifices which might have assured the success of the League of Nations. Writing recently Sir Arthur Salter, I’arlia mentary Secretary to the Ministry of Shipping, said: “The last quarter of a century should at least have taught the world one lesson; and the students, if not the practitioners, of international politics seem to have learnt it. This is that the tap-root of war is the international anarchy of uncontrolled sovereignty; and stable peace will never be assured except through a form of international or supernational government. We may redraw frontiers, or exchange populations, or induce governments to act more generously to minorities. We may thus in time mitigate political grievances, but we shall certainly not, by these methods alone, reduce them to the point at which they will no longer cause explosions.’’ In the article from which this qifotation is taken, Sir Arthur Salter considers reasons for the failure of the League of Nations. lie asked whether failure could be attributed to the fact that the League Covenant did not provide for sufficient surrender of sovereignty to make international government effective. His answer to the question is that the member States were not wholehearted or loyal in making even the modest surrender of sovereignty they had promised. The further imperfection in the League, of course, is that it was based upon an unsatisfactory division of Europe. The League was attached to the Treaty of Versailles and it was too much to hope that Europe could be kept static at that point in history. The League was uncertainly founded on the mistaken presumption that Ute victors would need to surrender nothing and the vanquished to hope for nothing. This, more than anything else, accounts for the League’s ineffectual attempt to fulfil the hopes of its founders. With this unhappy experience as a guide, it is possible that statesmen and people, when the present struggle is decided, will be able to devise a system of international government which may have a reasonable chance of success. It has already been admitted, by Mr Chamberlain for one, that Europe will be organised differently after the war. He has declared that the question of the access to sources of raw materials will have to be considered, and that the methods of international trading will have to be reorganised so that Europe may become akin at least to an economic unit. Suggestions are being made in many places for a federal system of government and this idea has been submitted on a number of occasions by Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador in the United States. The conception of a united world has been for many centuries in the mind of man and there have been periods in history in which it became a reality, or nearly so. The trouble has been that the unifications of the past were achieved by coercion. Two thousand years ago Alexander the Great had the right idea and lie did make the world of his day one. The torch Alexander lit passed on to Rome, and from Rome it passed into the hands of Charlemagne. After Charlemagne’s collapse the Dark Ages intervened. Then came the attempts of monarchies such as that of the Hapsburgs to unite Europe, and after them Napoleon tried his hand at the task but failed. To-day the Nazis are attempting to achieve European unity on their own terms, but if history is any guide this cannot be accomplished by force. A federal system which is to remove the menace of future war must be the fruit of a spontaneous and voluntary effort on the part of individual nations.

Early last year, Clarence K. Streit, an American writer, published a book called Union Now, in which he suggested a federation of 15 democracies as a preliminary to world union. He limited the founders to democracies because he could see that it was impossible to include those dictatorship which scorned individual liberty, glorified war and insisted that man is made for the State, not the State for man. Streit argued that the federal experiment had succeeded in America; in Canada between the British and the French; in South Africa between the Dutch and the British, and in Switzerland among the French, Italians and Germans. He proposed that the chosen democracies should follow the method of having a representative government elected by the citizens and empowered by them to raise from them individually the means of governing them individually wherever they empowered it to govern at all. The Union would be made by the people for themselves, to guarantee to each of them equally a set of individual rights. Under pressure of war Britain and France, in the Supreme War Council, have taken a step towards a kind of federation, and the French Premier has said that the Council would conduct itself now almost as if it were the Cabinet of a single Government, War has made this unity possible and there is no reason why genuine anxiety for peace should not have a similar cohesive effect. This federal dream may be impracticable; it may be regarded as absurdly visionary, but as long as it remains unrealisable there seems no alternative to the rule of force with its certain recurring accompaniment of war.

Nothing that we have done on the sea has brought into peril a single life of any neutral citizen. — Lord Halifax.