LEARNING THE WAY TO PEACE

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21098, 27 April 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

LEARNING THE WAY TO PEACE

International Co-operation :: Restraint Cr Sacrifice

(J. Emblyn Williams)

'JHE PRESENT EUROPEAN struggle has been termed “peculiar” by hundreds of different people for hundreds of different reasons. Some think it “peculiar” because it does not conform to their ideas as to how it should be conducted, while others, mixing up the war with its causes and its ends, are gravely concerned as to the kind of Europe whidh will arise. But it is also peculiar in a much deeper sense. Human thought takes a long time to develop, and ideas exert their influence long after they are considered outworn. Even down to 1914 there continued to live on the mentality which believed that war was the Natural State of Mankind and that “to the end of time the rights of arms will endure and therein lies the sacredness of war.” But within the last 25 years the World War has been fought and another continental war has broken out, wars unlike anything which preceded them. They have involved whole populations and disrupted the complicated mechanism of modern civilisation, so that men have been forced to face up to the problem of international disputes in an entirely different way. More important than the mechanical changes has been the revolutionary idea that war is a catastrophe but one of a quite different sort from that formerly imagined. It has become a catastrophe which can be avoided. Nobody today places war in the same category as “an act of God,” as something over which ordinary human beings have no control. On the contrary, eveh the most cynical pessimist admits that war is an act of man, that its causes lie in the minds of those who have allowed it to come to pass. This war, we realise, would never have begun except that certain human beings thought certain thoughts, willed certain acts and ends. Such a change is a clarification fundamental to the proper solution of this great problem, since it apportions blame in the right place. The period from 1919 to 1939 appears superficially as two disastrous decades in which the problem of international peace was hindered rather than furthered; but, seen aright, it affords a good oportunity for eliminating many plausible fallacies which have tempted this generation to unsupportable lines of action. The last 20 years’ experience has also revealed that Europe is yet in process of learning the place which power is to occupy in their new world. The period 1919 to 1935 was not so much a “peace” as one in which it was clearly shown that “power used, threatened, or silently held in reserve is an essential factor in international change” and that so much depends upon who is controlling that power. Today it is generally agreed a New International Order alone can avert another catastrophe in a new generation. So it was thought in 1919. when the solution was believed to reside in a rebuilding of the nineteenth century world order upon conditions which had become obsolete for a great part of the world. The smaller neutral States have been strong in their condemnation of the Great Fowers’ failure to recognise aright and solve leading problems. But at the present time among these same neutrals there is growing acknowledgment of the fact that there will be no lasting peace in Europe unless Britain is there to maintain the balance—unless, that is, Britain belongs organically to Europe.

Gradually, too, the deeper significance of this present European situation is beginning to dawn upon people. It is not simply a nationalist struggle, of Britain anxious to “keep down Germany” or of Germany wishing to conquer Britain, in the old and narrow sense of that phrase. This war is part of a human struggle which will have as great repercussions on the world of the future as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had on that of the past century. As Mr Anthony Eden has written, “It is utterly futile to imagine that we are involved in a European crisis which may pass as it has come. We are involved in a crisis of humanity all the world over. We arc living in one of those Great Periods of History which are awe-inspiring in their responsibilities and in their consequences. Stupendous forces are loose, hurricane forces.” This new crisis is but the continuation of that which began with the Russian Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Nothing is more interesting than to read the literature of the extremes, both Left and Right, in these days. Those which were advocating the great war on capitalism, or Socialism, may represent it as simply a contest of nationalisms, whereas it is in reality a struggle for those qualities of freedom and justice which, imparted, have no place in doctrinaire conceptions. One of the greatest failings of the pre--1939 Europe was that it applied earlier political ideas in toto without applying them in accordance with the stage of development and environment at the time, and particularly without preparing for their extension from the political to the economic sphere. Everybody'is asking what kind of a new world is to follow this war. “We are not aiming only at victory,” Premier Chamberlain has declared, “but rather looking beyond it to the laying of a foundation of a better international system which will mean that war is not to be the inevitable lot of every succeeding generation.” For every great continental struggle has produced a new advance in international organisation in the past two centuries—e.g., the Vienna Congress of 1815 which ended the Napoleonic Wars gave the first impetus to modern international transport organisation. The Paris conference which ended the Crimean War, 1855, gave the first legal rules for war at sea, and the amelioration of the sufferings of war through the Red Cross; while 1914-1918 gave the world the League of Nations, the International Labour Office, and the Permanent Court of International Justice. It is signficant that today continuation of this trend toward More International Co-operation through some form of federal union should be in the foreground at the start of the war, not at the end. In 1919, as we now see, the time was not ripe for such a tremendous step forward. In fact, the problems involved in the limitations of the sovereignty of the Great Powers within an international organisation have only now been given a real test. Today we can appreciate the significance of the words of Professor A. F. Pollard, who wrote at the end of the World War that “even the simplest form of a League of Nations will require from all of u> a self-restraint and a sacrifice of nationalistic pride which will tax our moral qua - ities lo the utmost it is prudent to demand.”