The League of Nations
A Survey of the Assembly
THE end of one League of Nations Assembly is very much like the end of any other. Always the same anxious speculation as to whether the work can be got through by the Saturday of the third week, always the same rather undignified scramble to get it through, sometimes with success, sometimes, as this year, without. The usual efforts have not been wanting. The Fourth, or Budget, Commission, for example, began an important meeting at 10.44) on Saturday evening and ended round about 12.50. In spite of it all the end, as I write, has still to come. It will certainly come before this article is in print, and the work already is complete enough to enable broad judgments to be passed upon it.
The economy battle continued till the last, one of the most doubtful achievements of the British delegation being to secure the passage of a resolution ordering that Minutes of League Committees shall not in future be published (apart from those of the Mandate Commission and Committees of the Assembly itself) without the Council's special leave. As that leave will probably be given in all ordinary cases no great harm has probably been done, but when it is remembered that but for this the ban would fall on Minutes of such bodies as the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Confer- ence and the Health Committee, it will be realised that such a measure, in the case of an organisation which depends to the extent that the League of Nations does on publicity, is one of those forms of economy that it would be wiser to avoid.
This morning—to make an observation perfectly meaning- less to those unfamiliar with the procedure of Geneva— the First and Third Commissions have been sitting together. The fact, when explained, is reasonably symbolic. The First Commission deals with legal questions, and the Third with armaments problems. Their joint session was an out- ward indication of the intimate inter-relation between the juridical and the material aspects of the largest problem with which the League has to deal. We have got back, as we get back year after year, to Sir Austen Chamberlain's declaration of 1925, " Disarmament through Security, Security through Arbitration, is the common platform of the whole League of Nations." Accordingly this year, while the Third Conunission has been discussing the preparations for the Disarmament Conference, the First Commission has been elaborating a model Arbitration Treaty. Both tasks need delicate handling, and sharp divisions have arisen in each Commission.
The arbitration movement his, on the whole, made more progress than was expected. Since the last Assembly met a body known as the Security and Arbitration Committee has been drawing up a number of alternative treaties, some bilateral, some multilateral, some providing for conciliation. only, some for conciliation and arbitration, some for concilia- tion, arbitration and mutual assistance against aggression. The more resolute spirits in the First Conunission have deter- mined to try and evolve some unity out of this plurality and have accordingly drawn up a single arbitration treaty to which it is hoped a number of States will, in due course, adhere. It is multilateral in form, being open, that is to say, to the signature of anyone who will sign it, and is arranged in three chapters, one dealing with conciliation, one with arbitration or judicial settlement in legal cases, one with arbitration in non-legal. A State can declare its adhesion to all three parts, as it is hoped most States will, or it can make its selection on a less ambitious scale. The real effect of the adoption of the Treaty as an instrument approved by the Assembly as a whole will be to constitute, side by side with the Optional Clause of the Permanent Court of International Justice (which Spain and Hungary have just signed), an optional arbitration treaty, to which a gradually increasing number of signatures is likely to be appended.
The arbitration treaty cannot be strictly described as " all-in," provision being made for any nation to sign with specific reservations. That concession to the slower-paced was, no doubt, necessary, but it means that there are more loop-holes in the treaty than some of its authors really like. Nevertheless, its preparation under the aegis of the League is a distinct step forward, and the treaty supplies a necessary piece of machinery to implement the second provision of the Kellogg Pact.
Meanwhile the Third Commission, in its discussion of dis- armament prospects, has been running on several shoals. The Anglo-French naval compromise has been dangling pro- minently in the background, but no one knew its precise terms until they were disclosed in the last day or two by an American paper. No one was willing to take a line that might increase the danger of friction with the United States, and no one, or not many people, thought it was much use calling another meeting of the Preparatory Commission till the Naval Powers had been able to compose their differences. In regard to this, however, two schools of thought disclosed themselves—or, rather, three. Lord Cushendun thought the Committee should simply stand by till the Naval Powers had thrashed their differences out by themselves. M. Loudon, as Chairman of the Preparatory Commission, mentioned innocently enough that he thought of asking the Powers in question to talk privately with him at Paris about the technical points on which they were still in disagreement, and help them to find common ground. (Lord Cushendun's intervention at this point, with the suggestion that M. Loudon appeared to be anticipating the Conference due in 1931 under the Washington agreement, need not be discussed, as it was obviously due to a misunderstanding on the British delegate's part.) Count Bernstorff, on the other hand, took a quite different and— theoretically, at any rate—very defensible view. He com- batted vigorously the suggestion that the League was there merely to await the decisions of a handful of the governments composing it. He considered that the Preparatory Commission was the proper place for thrashing out differences, and he therefore urged that a date should be fixed, not only for the Preparatory Commission itself, but for the International Dis- armament Conference which was to follow it.
These three points of view are worth explaining at some length, for they represent divisions of opinion, not only at Geneva but in most of the countries belonging to the League. As for the Third Commission's decision, which was that the Powers con- cerned should be encouraged and, if need be, assisted, by the Chairman of the Preparatory Commission to reach agreement and that the Commission itself should meet not later than the beginning of 1929 (whatever " beginning " may mean), it represented a compromise with which the Germans, basing themselves on their Chancellor's demand in the Assembly for the calling of the Disarmament Conference, refused to be satisfied.
The discussions generally on disarmament have been by no means as hopeful as those on arbitration. The Kellogg Pact seems to have been left completely out of account. That may be so at the moment, for the Pact is not yet ratified by any State, but when once ratification by the principal Powers has been carried through the agreement will clearly be exposed as a piece of insincere and valueless verbiage unless it early becomes reflected in a new readiness to cut armaments down. Meanwhile, the League is apparently to mark time for some months yet, and the Germans are likely to make what capital they can out of this inaction. They can claim that they have disarmed in order, as the Treaty of Versailles provides, to make it possible for other nations to disarm, and that other nations seem as far as ever from coming to any agreement on the execution of their part of the bargain.
The Ninth Assembly, all the same, has yielded satisfactory results. What has been, perhaps, most satisfactory is the smoothness with which the League machinery as a whole rolls on. Certain special problems like those here discussed have to be carried a stage further by the Assembly, if they can be. For the rest the League's enterprises run on by their own momentum and Assembly delegates have little to do but take cognizance of the results achieved. They have done that, and the spectacle of the harvest has left them reasonably content.
YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.
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