BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Long Live the League!
A History of the League of Nations. By F. P. Walters. (Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs. 2 vols. 60s.)
To the post-war generation the League of Nations is hardly even a memory. The cause of international co-operation seems bound up with that of the United Nations Organisation, which has nowhere, except perhaps in some quarters in the United States, attracted to itself the generous idealism which animated the supporters of the League, at any rate in its earlier years. To the wearied cynicism of the present age of naked power, the evocation of the '• spirit of Geneva "may have some value if only to show that the failure of the United Nations need not necessarily mean the failure of the inter- national ideal. Everyone commented on the first speech that Mr. Eden made at the United Nations at Paris after his return to office last autumn. But the reasoned deliberation of his utterances when contrasted with the surliness of the spokesmen of both Russia and the United States could be taken as due merely to the fact that Mr. Eden brought with him the habits of courtesy and restraint which were common form at Geneva, at least until the Italian journalists howled down Haile Selassie from the gallery and the Gauleiter of Danzig " cocked a snook "at the League.
For this reason, and as a major contribution to the history of the inter-war years, Mr. F. P. Walters' history is doubly welcome. It is to be hoped that neither its length nor its price will prevent it from having the widest circulation. It steps straight away into the rank of those feW, very few, books which no student of international affairs can decently admit not to have read.
Mr. F. P. Walters was the obvious candidate for writing the first history of the League. A member of the secretariat from its begin- nings, and later, as deputy-secretary general and head of the political section, the senior British official in it, all the documentation of the political matters with which the League was called upon to deal passed across his desk. He was thus uniquely qualified to make use of the League's archives which (with its printed records) form the basic material of the book. (It is horrifying to learn from the appendix that these archives are now in danger of dispersal owing to the habit of the United Nations Secretariat of removing bodily to New York single files on matters that happen to become topical). In addition, Mr. Walters is gifted with a prose style of an elegance uncommon among bureaucrats ; and, despite the complexity of his story, interest never flags.
Academic historians, whose narrative of diplomatic proceedings usually resembles the undigested contents of an ostrich's stomach, may well ponder on the technical excellence shown by this non- professional recruit to their ranks. Only one caveat may be entered. Mr. Walters has rightly decided that, since the printed records of the League are arranged chronologically, he need not, provided he gives the dates of particular statements, give footnote references to the volume and page where they are to be found. But this distaste for footnotes leads him to be too sparing of them where he refers to transactions which were outside the League framework and which cannot therefore be documented from its own records. This is particularly the case where, as in dealing with the Ethiopian affair, he brings what amounts to an accusation of bad faith against the British Government and its Foreign Secretary.
Admirable though this work is, it must be read subject to certain reservations. In the first place Mr. Walters was concerned with the political side of the League only, and, although in describing its organisation he emphasises the importance of its various non- political technical sections, their activities receive only the barest mention. In the second place, Mr. Walters is rightly concerned to keep to his subject, which is the League of Nations and international relations as seen from the Special viewpoint of Geneva. But this tends to make him give too little weight to the evidence about the activities and intentions of different countries that did not at the time make itself apparent at Geneva. It is true that it is partly this very defect that gives the feeling of contemporaneity to Mr. Walters' resuscitation of long-dead crises, but only at the price of some unreality. This is equally true of his treatment of Germany, where Mr. Walters does little to penetrate behind the Weimar facade, and of the Soviet Union. Indeed, Mr. Walters seems to have been so captivated by the personality and arguments of the late M. Litvinov —" nothing in the annals of the League," he writes, can compare with Litvinov's speeches " in frankness, in debating power, in the acute diagnosis of each situation "—that he almost deliberately refrains from penetrating into the heart of Soviet policies.
The third and most important point for the reader to bear in mind is that Mr. Walters writes throughout as a man convinced, not only of the enduring value of the League experiment, but of one pal ticular version of its proper duties. He stands by the Covenant, the whole Covenant and nothing but the Covenant—by both disarmament " and " sanctions," and he believes that the lesser Powers and the general public in all countries were let down by the folly and short- sightedness of the Governments of the Great Powers—of the United States in the first place, whose disservices to the League did not end, as he shows, with its first betrayal of the Wilsonian ideal, and of '- France and Great Britain in the second place. It is perhaps still a tenable viewpoint, though all that we have since learned suggests how far are most democratic peoples from accepting in matters of life and death the decisions of an external authority. But once or twice it betrays Mr. Walters into special pleading. It is not fair to quote the peace ballot " and not to refer to the most obvious fact that it revealed, namely that millions of people were capable of believing that, if a country imposes economic sanctions, it retains in its own hands the power of deciding whether or not war will follow.
Furthermore Mr. Walters is absolutely convinced of the value of public debate upon all international issues and of the equal rights of all Powers to be heard. He thus treats every attempt at Great Power consultation within the period as a direct assault upon the League idea, and as an attempt to return to the idea of the Concert of Europe, for which he has an unconcealed contempt. Yet, so long as power is a factor in world affairs, it is hard to see how those who wield it, and run the risks of wielding it, can be denied a special position. Nothing in the history of the United Nations, certainly, suggests that there is anything particularly virtuous about small Powers or that public debate is always a better method of handling affairs than private negotiation. The case for" collective security" or " coercion " as the core of international action, rather than methods of conciliation, has not yet been proved though it may, of course, be argued. Collective security may be much too heavy a weight for the frail plant of international goodwill to bear.
But the reviewer's purpose must be to call attention to Mr. Walters' presuppositions, not to attempt to conf.e. them. Indeed the more one questions these presuppositions, the more incumbent it is upon one to treat seriously this most serious and moving book.
MAX BELOFF.
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