Sanctions—Abyssinia and After

SANCTIONS-ABYSSINIA AND AFTER P. E. CORBETT I N the last eight months our new post-War world has - , been br'ought brutally face to face with the question whether it really differs in any essential iteln from the old world of 1914. Its ark and covenant have run into a' storm of primeval passions and the result looks dismally like ship-wreck. When, in the autumn of 1935, the League of Nations, for the first time in its fifteen years of existence, brought into operation against an aggressor the sanctions ofArticle XVI of the Covenant, the hopes of the new-worldlings ran high~ -At last, , after the tragic falterings of 193I and 1932, there appeared to emerge a clear resolution to assert the principles of collective security against the anarchy of national lust. But now, in June, 1936, national lust is triumphant, and a disillusioned civilization asks in dejection whether all its plans for keeping the peace have been so much moonshine. "}Ceeping the peace" has a vain, tintinnating sound in a world of marching troops and clanging armalnent factories. Could- the League of Nations in October, 1935, still be considered a serious factor in international politics? Were sanctions a farce solemnly played out by politicians with one eye upon the formal satisfaction of treaty requirements, as a sop to earnest peace movements at home, and the other upon the condition of the aggressor, who must not be enraged to the point of upsetting the apple-cart, League, pacts, alliances, and all? Sometimes the world seemed to take this view; witness the shocked astonishment exhibited in so many quarters .when there first appeared to be a likelihood of 482 SANCTIONS-ABYSSINIA AND AFTER oil embargo. "Stop oil!" shouted politicians and newspapers . "Why, man, if you stop oil, Italy won't be able to carryon ,her war." Or was the remarkably unanimous and singularly ineffective action against I taly an earnest if belated effort by the League to do its essential job, and at the same time to patch up aprestige shattered by the Manchurian episode? Cynically defied in 1931 by a major power whos~ guilt was duly established in trial before its peers, it had stood quiescent because its greatest members feared to give a lead. That display of calcu~ lating poltroonery was the signal for all the malcontents to arm themselves with arrogance. "Japan could do it," sang Germany and Italy, (C so can we." And in October, 1935, when the direct threat to national interests, following upon a pop-qlar demonstration in favour of the Covenant, had driven one of those -greatest members to , shelter in the League, the vindication of reason and justice came, or so it would appear, fatally late. The weight of evidence is for the second view. Neither French nor British governments have ever treated the League of Nations with conscious hypocrisy. This is true even of England's National government, tortuous as its course in foreign policy has been. ~ut they have ' lacked fai th, and ' they have tried to bolster up the League as a line of defence with national armaments and a fluctuating system of unstable alliances, both of ~hich are devices utterly incompatible with the esse'nce of collective security. They were like men trying to build up a COmlTIOn fortress and all the time tearing away its foundations as ll1aterial for their own private castles. All that they built was in a perpetual state of crun1bling, and the welkin rang with their complaints of each other. 483 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY And so what happened last winter on the peaceful shores of Lake Leman was a serious endeavour to use the League's penultimate means of restraining a Covenant -breaker. Penultimate,· because there was no recourse to militar,y sanctions. Serious, but neither quite wholehearted nor yet very bold. I t was a cautious experiment, not a confident exercise of the police-power.- "Without committing ourselves too far/' the "sanctionists " seem to say, "let's see what can be done by a little mild pressure." The total result has been a compelling demonstration of the "futility and folly of half-lneasures. A short analysis of the machinery...