The League of Nations

Large and Small Problems at Geneva

When the League of Nations seems in for a quiet Assembly a good many people decide to make it their business to stir it up. Consequently the quietness, so far as this year's meetings are concerned, is already being sensibly dispelled. No doubt there are influences on the other side. M. Voldemaras, the Lithuanian PAL-ire Minister, for example, when he enters on his interminable disquisitions before the Council, can be as soporific 'as the opium derivatives his colleagues are so emphatic in denouncing and so unsuccessful in controlling. And it is rather on lesser than on greater matters that the Assembly his been stimulated so far this

. year

Here Here again an exception must be made. There was nothing lesser or secondary about' the problems M. 13riand raised in 'his perplexing speech of last Monday morning, for he dealt in it with the whole relationship between France and Germany. For a master of conciliation the tone was quite unexpectedly unconciliatory and the German delegates at the end of it sat mute and sombre. For that matter the applause accorded by the Assembly as a whole at the end of the French Foreign Minister's speech was markedly less emphatic than the cheers that had greeted him when he mounted the platform.

Why did M. Briand, in the midst of delicate negotiations about the evacuation of the Rhineland, come to the League Assembly to declare that even if Germany could claim that she was disarmed she had only been disarmed for the short space of two years, that even if her army had been reduced to 100,000 men it was an army of specialists capable of swift and effective expansion, and that even if her war material had been surrendered she could in a matter of weeks meta- morphose her peace industry to serve efficiently the needs of war ? To those questions there is no authoritative answer. The speech caused general surprise and some concern. That it could be delivered from the League Assembly without evoking comments more forcible than it did is no doubt a notable :testimony to the freedom and frankness the establishment of League traditions has made possible. But whether the effect in Germany will be such as to promote the further _spread of the League spirit is a question that cannot be answered in an article written of necessity an hour or two after the Briand speech was delivered.

But this at least it is just to say. Briand has shown himself too genuine a friend of peace to leave room for the suggestion that he had any thought of widening whatever breach still exists between his own country and Germany. He was undoubtedly pursuing some purpose of his own, and the exigencies of domestic politics often explain Geneva declara- tions that on any other ground would be inexplicable. Of the sincerity of the speaker's opening panegyric on the League there can be no doubt whatsoever, and the easiest theory that fits the fact is that he was satisfied the League meant enough both to him and to the German Chancellor, whom he was particularly addressing, to make unusually plain speech both possible and politic. But it does not follow that that judgment was necessarily sound.

Apart from this we have been concentrating on more secondary matters. The League, among other activities, has got to live. It has got to live, moreover, in some other habitation than the one in which it painfully exists at present. The hall where the Assembly is condemned to meet is pesti- lentially bad, with an atmosphere calculated to lay out the diplomats Of the world in rows. Such (once more) is the League spirit that they struggle indomitably on, but each year in which the conditions are experienced makes the erection' of permanent and adequate buildings more urgently

imperative. _ That, of course, is nothing new. The plans for a permanent Assembly Hall and a permanent Secretariat have been under discussion for long enough, heaven knows. But now the project has run on a fresh shoal, as the result, oddly enough, of a benefaction for which in itself the League cannot be sufficiently grateful. To tell the story very briefly, the

League, with the assistance of the Swiss authorities, has acquired two adjacent lakeside properties a little beyond

the present Secretariat, with the assured prospect of securing subsequently a third, owned by an English lady highly regarded both in League and Genevan circles, who is anxious to remain where she is for her lifetime. Immediately beyond this third property, which adjoins the other two, is the Inter- national Labour Office.

To begin with, everything promised well. The first two properties were large enough for the new Secretariat and the new Assembly Hall, and if subsequent extensions became desirable the third property would subsequently be available for them. But then came Mr. J. D. Rockefeller with his notable gift of £400,000 for a League library of international studies, and the whole situation was altered. Not only were the two sites inadequate for the three buildings, but it seemed essential that the library should be built on the third, and still unacquired, site in order that it might be immediately contiguous both to the existing Labour Office and to the new Secretariat, since it was intended for the benefit of each of the two institutions. There is the problem. There are various ways of settling it unsatisfactorily, but only one of settling it satisfactorily, namely, by acquiring the third property forthwith. That would in any case be an uncongenial course to take on personal grounds, even if the Swiss authorities were prepared to acquire the property in question compulsorily, which is very doubtful. As a result, instead of devoting all their attention to great inter- national matters, Assembly delegates have to divert a good deal of it to the solution of the exercising problem, how to be happy though homeless.

To the next main preoccupation the transition is simple. The word " Secretariat " at Geneva has two connotations. It may mean, as in the paragraph above, the building where the League's permanent officials work. It may mean, on the other hand, those officials themselves taken collectively.

Interpreted in the latter sense, the Secretariat is causing some anxiety to delegates. It is suggested—and everyone who knows the facts must concede that there is the justice in the allegation—that the Secretariat is not the Secretariat it was. In the trailing clouds of glory did they come, those first officials picked by Sir Eric Drummond from the men (with a woman or two), not one of them, or hardly one, professional diplomats, who had proved their worth as administrators on Inter-Allied bodies in the later stages of the War. Out of them was built a unique and single-minded international civil service devoted to the execution of its duties as a League agent and to nothing else.

To-day things are different. The League has come to count for so much in the world that Great Powers think it worth while to insist that their nominees, very often now pro- fessional diplomats, shall be given high places in the Secretariat. Theoretically the Secretary-General has unfettered discretion in making all appointments, but it is obviously not in the

League's interest for him to appoint a Patagonian who is persona non grata to the Government of Patagonia, and from that it is no great step to the exercise of pressure on him to appoint a particular gentleman who is definitely persona grata to that Government. Will a man so appointed be as undivided in his loyalty to the League as the old Secretariat officials of 1920 ? It must be doubted.

Just a word is needed about China's failure to secure the right of re-election. It should be made clear that if she had secured it she would have been accorded an exceptional

privilege, so that its denial means no injustice, and still less any kind of humiliation. Actually a clear majority of the

Assembly supported the Chinese request, but not the necessary two-thirds majority. At the same time it is impossible to resist the conviction that the minority failed completely to grasp the realities of the Asiatic situation, and that their action has by no means served the interests of the League.

YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.