What Kind of Post-war Security?

WHAT KIND OF POST-WAR SECURITY? J. R. MALLORY I THE kind of peace-keeping machinery men want will depend upon what they think are the causes of war. The Peace Conference which followed the last war revealed two widely different schools of thought, the chief exponents of which were on the one hand Clemenceau and on the . other Wilson. The establishment of the L~ague of Nations was a triumph for the vVilsonian view, but the enormous and unworkable reparations payments represented t~e demands of Clemenceau. The resulting peace was therefore a compromise between two irreconcileable ideas as to the cause and nature ~f the war. On the one hand the reparations demands, the attempt to make Germany pay the cost of the war though her trade was so' crippled that full payment was impossible, were the result of a determination to impose the whole respo~sibility for the war upon Germany. On the other hand, it was implicit in the whole structure of the League of Nations that the cause of war lay elsewhere than in the villainy of any particular nation. The League Covenant was a vehicle for saving the .nineteenth-century capitalist state from; itself. It was the product of a generation which realized that war was bad for trade and a source of eeo-' nomic woe to both victor and vanquished. Clearly, therefore, war was contrary to the best interest of all states. Each state, however, in pursuing its own interest as it sees it, is sometimes driven to war through, as it were, the imperfection of its own environment. Actually all differences between states were thought of as being capable of settlement through negotiation and reasoned compromise. However, the thing that led to war was a fear of being "had," a sense of insecurity because it was not possible to know the. real bargaining strength of one's rival. Accordingly the Covenant aimed at keeping international agreements above the table, so that there could be no room for suspicion. Again, the League was to bend its efforts towards disarmament, because the army of a rival, no less than his secret allies, gave cause to fear him. Causes of friction, of course, did exist. But if they could be attended to in time and examined impartially, away from the atmosphere of contingent force that accompanied the old diplomacy, they seemed to stand a good chance of settlement without being magnified into major disputes. That was the international philosophy of life that permeated the League and, in spite of the punitive clauses in the treaties, it came more and more to dominate the international scene in the twenties. It sought in essence to superimpose a voluntary self-denying code on the members of the international comm·unity. It accepted the comfortable belief that the paramountcy of the. common interest, given reasonable stimulation, ' 90 WHAT KIND OF POST-WAR SECURITY? 91 was self-evident, and it sought peace by increasing the area of co-operation between states. Yet the framers of the League were not naIve enough to believe'that reason would alway~ prevail. Provision was made for imposing both economic and military sanctions on any 'state which failed to see .an identity of interest ,between its own needs and the common welfare. It is quite possible that if the conditions 'of t~he twenties had persisted, these provisions would have been adequate to keep the peace. , However the League laboured under serious disadvantages from the outset. The defection of the United States was a hard.blow to its capacity to back the interest of the community of states with a suitable show of force. Unfortunately, too, the League inherited the incongruous provisions of the peace treaties. In so far as it took on the shape of a mere defender of ~he status quo, it seemed more and more to be committed to preserving a prime cause of war instead of removing it. The provisions under Article XIX for peaceful revision of outworn treaties aroused little enthusiasm and were' from the first a dead letter. But its chief weakness 'was structural. Because it failed to challenge the doctrine ofunlimited national sovereignty, ~t could only recommend action...