Order or Chaos?

Extract

Lord Davies, indomitable apostle of international order, turns the Abyssinian fiasco to good account to reinforce his familiar plea for the creation of a tribunal of equity and an international police force. The latter remedy, it is true, has lost some of its pristine simplicity. Instead of an international air force coming fully fledged to life, it is conceived as the end of a process, “the organization of sanctions culminating in the establishment of an I.P.F.” The writer’s main conception of what is required to maintain peace in the future can be judged from the moral which he draws from the failure of the League to mobilize effective sanctions against Italy. “In order to rally world public opinion in support of the maximum penalties provided for in Article 16, both the moral and the material factors should have been brought into play, the former represented by an impartial tribunal charged with the task of recommending an equitable settlement to the Assembly, the latter by a Standing Board of Commissioners entrusted with the duty of co-ordinating sanctions in order to exert the most effective pressure upon the aggressor. Both these institutions were indispensable if it was intended to assert the rule of law.” Lord Davies sees that such a system—a supranational tribunal judging ex aequo et bono supported by adequate force—is impossible in the present condition of the League of Nations, which is little more than an association of Sovereign States. He therefore concludes that “the problem of the League is the problem of federalism,” and he urges that the League, beginning with the Federation of Europe, should develop into a Confederation, similar to the United States of America, having a Supreme Court and an executive authority “entrusted with a superiority of centralized force.”