International Organization Its Prospects and Limitations

I

THERE are numerous indications that American public opinion is once more devoting serious attention to the problem of the better organization of international relations. But if the discussion is to lead to the practical results which are hoped from it, if it is to rise above the atmosphere of thoughtless idealistic phrase-making and equally thoughtless cynicism that together contributed to the deadlock in which the problem has too long been involved, it must be based upon a clear analysis of the existing condition in the various fields of international organization, of the difficulties with which schemes of closer union are confronted, and of the directions in which advance can most usefully be attempted. It is the object of the following pages, if but in the briefest outline, to attempt such a survey.

The simplest and clearest way of approaching the subject is to begin by setting forth the nature of the material with which international relations are concerned. When we have before us a view of the business which has to be conducted, we shall be better able to form a judgment on the machinery needed for its effective discharge. No business man would dream of organizing an office before he had a knowledge of the business that passed through it. Yet a good deal of the current comment on the problem of international relations is carried on in complete detachment (to use no stronger word) from the nature of the material with which it is professedly concerned. A survey of this material will enable us at the same time to measure the change in the character of international contacts which has taken place during the last two generations, and to appreciate the change in international machinery which has already taken place as its natural consequence. The school of writers in Europe and elsewhere who maintain that the fabric of civilization is dissolving and that the world is relapsing into chaos are simply ignorant of the facts.

The business of international relations, the business that is arising out of the relations between sovereign states, transacted through public officials, may to-day be grouped roughly under five heads.

First, to begin with the easiest, there are routine matters arising out of international contacts. These fill the greater number of the files which occupy the desks of the officials concerned with international relations in foreign offices and elsewhere. Two groups of business may be specified among them. There is the material arising out of the appointment and transference, the regular reports and special recommendations, of ambassadors, ministers, consuls, and other officials residing abroad; and there is the material arising out of the network of treaties concluded on what may be called the noncontentious side of international relations — the prevention of disease and crime, the improvement of communications, the promotion of science and scientific standards in the numerous regions in which mankind is moving, by general agreement, toward a greater uniformity. All this is part of what has increasingly become in recent generations the fabric of a common civilization.

The second group of material, which is distinguished by no clear line of demarcation from the first, deals with what may be described as routine matters outside the zone of agreed principles. We pass here insensibly from routine administration to diplomacy proper. All civilized states are agreed as to the desirability of extraditing criminals, of facilitating postal, telegraphic, wireless, and other means of communication, of providing effective quarantine regulations against plague, promoting safety at sea, and so on. But when we pass to business, however insignificant, involving such issues as the Open Door, the equality of races, the control of immigration in the homeland or in dependencies, the Monroe Doctrine, we pass from a region of agreed principles to a region of difficulty, contention, and possible danger. Such business cannot be transacted by standing upon agreed first principles and working out convenient ways of putting them into practice. It must be transacted by avoiding the discussion of first principles, or, at any rate, their logical and methodical application, and working out a provisional arrangement such as will meet the immediate need of the moment without arousing popular passion or prejudice. This is the characteristic work of foreign offices and ambassadors. It is this which distinguishes their work, and the qualities required from it, from the work of administration in the domestic departments of government and from the work of administrators, at Geneva or elsewhere, who are carrying out the provisions of a general treaty.

The third class of business, which impinges closely on the second, is what is described, sometimes with bated breath, as ‘high policy.’ It is concerned with the handling of issues arising not out of ordinary routine contacts, whether in the noncontentious or the contentious zone, but out of the policies of the powers, and especially of the Great Powers. The difference between a principle and a policy, in foreign affairs as elsewhere, is the difference between passivity and self-assertion. Disagreement about principles may leave the waters of diplomacy unruffled; but it is of the essence of policy to awaken life and movement. There is nothing regrettable about this. It is as right and healthy for a state to have a foreign policy as for an individual to manifest his personality. A state without a foreign policy is a dead state. If, for fear of the resulting contacts and clashes, civilized states and their foreign ministers forbore to put forward policies, and thus abstained from seeking to incorporate in the general world-order principles which they held to be of value, mankind would be spared the risk of warfare only to perish of inanition.

If Britain stands for the lowering of fiscal barriers and a one-power standard of naval strength as essential to her life and security; if Japan stands for the recognition of the equality of nations as essential to her self-respect; if Australia stands for the exclusion of nonwhite immigrants as essential to the survival of her national personality; if the United States stands for the Monroe Doctrine, and the Open Door in the Far East and elsewhere, nothing is to be gained by attempting to repress, conceal, or ignore these fixed and firm expressions of national will and determination. They are indeed far more dangerous repressed than expressed.

On the other hand, everything depends on the manner of their expression. Generally speaking, it is not nowadays in policies themselves that danger lies, but in their handling. There have been criminal autocracies, as recently as 1914; but the criminal democracy is not a real source of peril. It is the unwise, ignorant, and precipitate democracy, pushing a policy, not in itself unreasonable, by unreasonable and unimaginative means, which constitutes the danger-point at the present time. And it is the main function and justification of foreign secretaries and diplomats to promote the fixed policies and permanent interests of their countries in a manner so persuasive and reasonable as to make them intelligible to peoples who necessarily view the same issues from very different angles of vision.

Wise statesmanship can go far in the promotion even of contentious and difficult policies without evolving active displeasure or bringing about a crisis. But it remains true, even under the most prudent and tactful régime, that complications with a foreign power will occur, sometimes, as in the Venezuela boundary dispute of 1895, from unforeseen and relatively trivial causes. Such complications involve the fourth class of international business, the material which, whatever its nature, or the importance or insignificance of the opposing state, may be described as disputes. It is in the technique of the handling of this class of material, as we shall see, that very notable improvements in international organization have been made in recent years.

Finally, affecting and affected by the work of those who conduct foreign relations, but not actually administered by them, are the armed forces upon which states rely, in the last resort, for the maintenance of their independence and the promotion of their policies. The acutest form of international contact is war.

II

Having thus rapidly surveyed the material of international relations, we may turn to consider the organization available for dealing with it.

The recognized method of transacting international business is through a special department of state, the foreign office or ministry of external affairs, with its staff of ambassadors, ministers, and consuls abroad, in regular communication with it. The foreign office as an institution dates back to the middle of the seventeenth century, and the institution of permanent legations, adopted by Britain, France, Spain, and Germany as early as the end of the fifteenth century, became regular among the civilized states in the seventeenth century. Foreign offices and their agents abroad were, in fact, until comparatively recently, apart from the personal activities of monarchs and heads of states, practically the sole channel of international intercourse. Not only the routine business in normal times but the conferences and congresses which supervened in time of crisis wore left in the hands of foreign secretaries and their personnel. The ‘staff of secretaries and Foreign Office assistants’ with which Lord Salisbury and his chief repaired to the Berlin Congress in 1878 did not differ in composition from the staff which accompanied Castlereagh to Vienna in 1814.

But in the period between the Berlin Congress of 1878 and the Paris Conference of 1918 an important, if little noticed, change occurred in the conduct of international relations. A number of routine matters belonging to the first, or noncontentious, class specified above were withdrawn from the management and, in some cases, from the control of foreign offices, and handed over to special bodies created by treaty for that purpose. The process, in fact, had begun a few years before 1878, and was a direct and inevitable result of the nineteenth-century inventions and the immense increase in international contacts which resulted from them. The most important of these new agencies may be briefly enumerated. The International Telegraph Office of the International Telegraph Union was established in 1868. The International Post Office of the International Postal Union was established in Berne in 1874. The International Office of Weights and Measures for states using the metric system was established in Paris in 1875. The International Union for the Publication of Customs Tariffs, with its office in Brussels, dates from 1890; the Central Office of International Transports at Berne also from 1890; the International Institute of Agriculture at Rome from 1905, and the International Health Office in Paris from 1907.

Two reflections suggest themselves from a perusal of this list. In the first place, the subjects which it covers are not only noncontentious but of a kind to invite uniformity — in other words, management by an international authority. Posts and telegraphs, weights and measures, transport, the prevention of disease, and the dissemination of information about tariffs and crops, are all matters which can safely be withdrawn from the day-by-day management and vigilance of separate sovereign governments and allowed to become what may be described as international material. I remember once calling on a clergyman of my acquaintance just after he had returned from a visit to the hospital. I asked him whether he confined his ministrations to patients of his own denomination. ‘Did you ever hear,’ he replied, ‘of Jewish dropsy, Presbyterian measles, or Roman Catholic housemaid’s knee?' The material of the International Health Office is material from which every drop of the bitter waters of nationalism has been squeezed out. It is, therefore, material which can be studied impersonally, supernationally, scientifically, in the interests and under the auspices of mankind as a whole. And what is true of health is true, if in a lesser degree, of most of the other material for which international unions and offices had been created before the war.

The other reflection which leaps to the mind from the list is that the matters with which it is concerned have now ceased to be foreign-office material, even at the domestic end. Posts and telegraphs have passed from the foreign secretary to the postmastergeneral; tariffs, weights and measures, and transport to the department of commerce or board of trade; crop reports to the department or board of agriculture, and health to the ministry of health. In other words, contact is in these cases no longer between foreign office and foreign office, or between foreign office and this or that international board, but between the specialized departments of the various governments and the international boards concerned with the same material. Instead of a single form of contact, through the agency traditionally and rightly concerned with the maintenance of the national interest and prestige, we now have a whole series of contacts through agencies established to promote human welfare in various departments of social activity. States which used to touch one another with a single finger, the finger of power, now meet with a handclasp in a spirit of collaboration and joint human service.

So far we have been dealing with international relations prior to the World War. But in this, as in other spheres of international organization, the war, by creating new problems, forced men to take stock of the progress already achieved. For the contacts between the Allied states in the war were not exclusively military, naval, and diplomatic, as in previous wars, but extended along the whole line of governmental activity. There was hardly a department which was not required to contribute from its expert service to the Allied collaboration. By the autumn of 1918 the Interallied organization had reached a point of development far beyond the wildest dreams of pre-war administrative internationalism. Never before in human history has the world been so regimented in its activities, from Iceland to Australia and from tonnage to tobacco, as in the closing months of the war. This amazing achievement of collaboration disappeared with the disappearance of the common purpose which had sustained it; but its administrative experience remains. The lessons to be drawn from the experiment have been ably and lucidly summarized by Sir Arthur Salter, one of the men most closely concerned in it, in his volume on the Allied Shipping Control; and from his pages we can learn of the prospects and pitfalls of international organization in the field of noncontentious activities. What is wanted, he sums up, to make international administration more effective is ‘morally, a great effort of faith,’ and ‘administratively, a great effort of decentralization.’

Future historians, looking back over the process of world-integration, are likely to fix on Article XXIV of the Covenant of the League of Nations as the most epoch-making section of that much-discussed document. That article, which has lain quietly under the hedge while the battle raged to and fro over its more obtrusive colleagues, lays it down that ‘There shall be placed under the direction of the League all international bureaux already established by general treaties if the parties to such treaties consent’; and adds that ‘all such international bureaux and all commissions for the regulation of matters of international interest hereafter constituted shall be placed under the direction of the League.’

It is by virtue of this article that the Secretariat at Geneva does a large and expanding part of its dayby-day work. The work of the Secretariat is not, as is commonly supposed, a work of ‘centralization.’ It is a work of coördination. Its significance lies, not in the importance of the material that it is handling, or in the number and authority of the governments which allow part of their domestic concerns to pass through its hands, but in the fact that it is engaged in working out a satisfactory technique for the collaboration of governments in the handling of problems which are at once too intricate and domestic to be centralized and too international in their ramifications to be solved by individual governments acting in isolation. We are a long way yet from the full possibilities of administrative internationalism. There are a host of thorny problems — the conservation of the world’s mineral resources is an outstanding example — which are not yet ripe for the sober Geneva technique. But the mould is there ready to hand; and when the public opinion of the world is prepared for the experiment, the metal can be poured into it.

So far we have been concerned entirely with the first, or noncontentious, class of international contacts. It was necessary to emphasize the transformation that has taken place in the transaction of this class of business, because it indicates the general drift and direction of international organization. The world cannot be integrated by sentimental crusades against war or by ingenious devices to conceal divergences of high policy. Diplomacy is, at best, only a makeshift, and propaganda, however well-meaning, is hardly even a makeshift. Integration must begin with the material that is ready for it. Fifty years ago the world was not ready, Britain was not ready, for an opium policy. What is being done for opium and dangerous drugs to-day may be practicable for oil, or nickel, or tin to-morrow.

What is important, let it be repeated, is not what has already been achieved, but the testing of the soundness of the method of procedure. We know now that it is possible, when public opinion is ripe for it, to take a problem ‘out of politics,’ or, to be more accurate, out of diplomacy, and to entrust it to a body of men drawn from many nations who have the training and outlook, not of the negotiator and old-time statesman, but of the doctor and the scientist. This is what is meant when it is claimed that Geneva has given the world for the first time an international civil service, an organized body of servants of mankind. This surely marks one of the greatest advances ever made in the art of managing human affairs. Yet it has been effected without doing violence to existing principles and ideals. It does not reject democracy and substitute the tyranny of the expert, nor does it invalidate national sovereignty by the imposition of a centralized oligarchy. It merely enables the free self-governing peoples of the world, if and so long as they desire it, to employ the best men and the best means for collaboration in problems which no government, however powerful, can solve for itself alone.

III

We pass now to our second class of business, the zone of contention, difficulty, and danger. What means exist for improving the handling of this still essentially diplomatic material? It has already been said that governments, in dealing with this material, are compelled to avoid the discussion of principles. There are few more fatal errors in statesmanship than the attempt to push a principle, however apparently unexceptionable, which important parties to the negotiation are not prepared to accept. In the existing state of opinion in Australia about the equality of races, to take an instance replete with possibilities of controversy, it is idle to seek to lay down a general principle as the basis of an agreed world-policy. It may be that in a few generations’ time Australians will feel as much ashamed of their present attitude toward nonwhite races as Englishmen do of their mid-nineteenthcentury opium-policy. It is, however, much more likely that the problem conveniently summed up in the slogan, racial equality, will be seen in a different light; that numerous interrelations, at present unperceived, will be brought into view; and that, if the problem as we see it now has not been solved, some elements of it will have been disengaged and found susceptible of noncontentious treatment. A survey of these and kindred attitudes suggests that the existence of strong feeling among any people or peoples in opposition to what seems to be an enlightened and progressive world-policy should be taken as an indication that the question has not been sufficiently explored.

What then is the line of advance? Surely it should be an advance in double column. The diplomatist, working necessarily by rule of thumb, meeting each crisis and difficulty as it arises, must keep in close touch with the prevailing sentiment of the opposing parties. Meanwhile, outside the range of day-by-day solutions and provisional formulæ, students of politics must be attacking the problem from every angle, seeking to probe its difficulties and to disengage some elements which admit of a more scientific treatment. The fact that a problem is not yet ripe for scholars and scientists to manage is no reason why they should abstain from considering it. On the contrary, it is a challenge to submit it to the process, first of research and then of expert conference, in the hope that conference may lead in due time to consultation by governments, and that the recommendations thus arrived at may eventually form the basis of an agreed policy.

Scholarship and statesmanship necessarily dwell in different worlds, as Plato told us long ago; but in this at least Geneva has brought his Republic to life, in that it has provided, and will increasingly provide, for their meeting and collaboration. Diplomacy is still necessarily diplomacy, and rash attempts to impose solutions by pressure and propaganda may have broken down; but the philosophers and the engineers, the economists, the chemists and the geologists, the doctors and the lawyers, have been enticed down from their ivory tower to the consulting-room, to their own advantage and that of mankind.

In one of these departments, indeed, that of law, a definite and fundamental relationship has been established with international politics. The International Court of Justice has, at present, but a restricted scope of activity. Its work is confined to questions which arise under treaties, or within the very limited area of agreed principles known as ‘established international law.’ But we have only to look back, not to Grotius, but to Austin, to realize what an achievement it is to have secured any real terra firma at all amid the hazards and vicissitudes of the world’s affairs; and the setting-up of the Hague court, like the institution of the Geneva Secretariat, marks, in Mr. Hoover’s words, a ‘sound and sure step’ toward the ultimate establishment of worldwide ‘processes of justice and moral right.’

In the third sphere, that of high policy, there has been, as a result of the war, a remarkable advance in the understanding of the possibilities and limitations of organization. The first result of the war was to drive men to simple and ultra-idealistic solutions. The war, it was argued, had arisen out of the diplomatic struggle between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, itself a product of the European tradition of the Balance of Power. The postwar settlement therefore should provide for the disappearance of all alliances and for the extinction of the idea of a balancing equipoise. They should be replaced by a comprehensive partnership of peoples working with singleminded community of purpose in a League of Nations. In other words, it was proposed to replace Triple-Alliance policy, Triple-Entente policy, and American Monroe-Doctrine policy by world-policy, carried on by the powers, especially the Great Powers, in close and organized coöperation.

In the light of what has happened in the last four and a half years this notion may well seem fantastic to-day, and there are some who will even deny that it was ever entertained in the framing of the Covenant. But it must be remembered that in 1918 men were living under the impression of the close war-time collaboration of the Allies, and that, on the British side at any rate, there had been an encouraging precedent. When the framers of the ‘Cecil draft’ devised their plan of the Council of the League, or Conference, as they preferred to call it, they modeled it deliberately on the Conference of Premiers in the British Commonwealth, one of whose main functions was, and is, to arrive at a common foreign policy for six or more peoples in five continents. It is true that, as General Smuts has remarked, a common policy for the British Empire must necessarily be drawn up on very simple lines; but the difficulties which have since arisen, in connection with the Japanese Alliance, the Near East, and other questions, were not then foreseen; and even now, in spite of all, and with necessary modifications, the Conference of Premiers to frame a common British foreign policy remains a standing institution.

But what is barely practicable for Britain has proved totally impracticable for the world at large. It is true that the experiment was never given a fair chance; for when room on the Council was found for four (now six) so-called representatives of the lesser states, appropriately called ‘states with special interests,’ any chance that it would be used by the Great Powers as an organ of high policy was dissipated. But it is probable that, in any case, the idea of such a world-organ was too ambitious. The questions that form the material of high policy are too various and scattered, the passions and interests involved are too diverse, the responsibilities too unequally divided between continent and continent, and, above all, the angles of vision from which they are approached are too divergent, to permit of the framing of a real partnership. Quite apart from the breakdown of this side of the League’s original design, all sorts of natural causes, psychological, political, and economic, have been operating since the Armistice to drive peoples and governments away from the idea of world-partnership in high policy back to the idea of special affinities and alliances.

We need only mention the close association between France and Belgium, the Little Entente between Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, with which Poland is in such close touch, the revival of Monroe-Doctrine sentiment in the United States, and the Four-Power pact limited to the regions of the Pacific.

But these new groupings, closely examined, bear a very different character from that of the traditional European system, and give a clear indication of the direction in which we must look for a reconciliation between the vigorous pursuit of national interests and the necessities of a harmonious world-order. In the first place they are public, not secret; in the second place they are regional and not general; thirdly, and most important of all, they are not merely compatible with, but actually sanctioned by, the Covenant of the League and therefore included within its larger framework. As for noncontentious issues Article XXIII is all-important, so Article XXI is pivotal for the future conduct of high policy.

‘Nothing in this Covenant,’ it runs, ‘shall be deemed to affect the validity of international engagements such as treaties of arbitration and regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine for securing the maintenance of peace.’

Thus the present possibilities for international organization in the field of high policy seem clearly indicated. There is no super-government. We are far even from true international cooperation. We are limited to regional coöperation, backed up, on the one hand, by an elastic concert of the Great Powers, operating through conferences, as and when the need arises, and, on the other, by formal and strongly guaranteed precautions against a breach of the world’s peace. The post-war world still finds France more interested in her eastern frontier than in the Far East, the United States more interested in Panama and China than in the Rhine, Australia more interested in the Pacific islands than in Upper Silesia, Czechoslovakia and Poland more interested in the evolution of Russia than in the Tacna-Arica controversy.

Those who are disappointed with this situation, and with a world in which (to quote from a disillusioned member of the Geneva Assembly) ‘nations are only internationally minded where their own interests are not immediately concerned,’ should remember that the substitution of democracy for autocracy in the conduct of the policy of the Great Powers has necessarily tended, in the early stages, to the advantage of passion as against reason. It was easier for Bismarck and Lord Salisbury in the eighteen-eighties to take long-distance views on questions of national interest than it was for Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau in 1919. On the other hand, the reader of Bismarck’s dispatches and of Lord Salisbury’s life rises with a vivid sense of the definite advance brought about in the conduct of high policy since their time.

The framework of the League may seem a weak and flimsy bulwark against the forces of national growth and selfassertion which it is designed to check or channel. But as public opinion comes to realize the meaning and incidence of its various safeguards, as, when occasion arises, its provisions against the validity of secret engagements, against sudden resort to war, against inequitable commercial policies and proved abuses in colonial government, are brought into play, it will become increasingly clear that, if the ship of high policy is still tossing on a rough and partly uncharted ocean, at least she has a compass and strong anchors, and a crew pledged and eager to bring her to port.

We have already encroached upon the fourth region — that of disputes. Here Articles XII to XVII of the League, together with the Bryan treaties, mark an advance which has not yet been fully realized. They commit civilized states to the doctrine that to resort to war without inquiry and delay, in however good a cause, is an international crime.

In other words, they make, once and for all, a broad distinction, too often ignored in discussing the events of 1914, between the predisposing and determining causes of a breach of the peace. This distinction is a direct result of the interdependence of the modern world. Historians of the nineteenth and previous centuries have not been wont to ask who lit the match which embroiled Piedmont with Austria or the Kingdom of Naples, or William III with Louis XIV, or Queen Elizabeth with Philip II. Bismarck, who manœuvred declarations of war against his master both in 1866 and in 1870, was perhaps the first to see the importance of formal correctitude in the initiation of hostilities. But it was the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, followed by the German ultimata to Russia, France, and Belgium, which brought home to public opinion that, in our modern large-scale world, the way in which a dispute is handled is of more concern to mankind than its actual merits. All that remains, after the formulation of the League’s provisions against a breach of the peace, is to ensure that their sanctions will be effective. This is the object of the joint scheme of disarmament and guaranties, partly general and partly regional in scope, which Lord Robert Cecil and the Temporary Mixed Commission on Disarmament are preparing for the consideration of the League Assembly next September. Its details are too complicated to be discussed here, and the degree to which military force, sea power, and economic power are to coöperate in the enforcement of peace will form the subject of much debate; but the general principle, that of the organized coöperation of the police forces of civilization against a lawbreaking state, or, in other words, the organization of Might behind Right, may surely be regarded as acceptable to practically every school of opinion.

Our argument has already carried us forward from disputes to armaments. Of armaments in general there is indeed little to be said. They are a symptom, not a disease; a thermometer by which to register the fever in the blood of the world’s body politic, not a germ to be extirpated by direct action. The road to the reduction of armaments lies through the promotion of confidence by wise policy. And the road to the promotion of confidence in statesmanship is the same as in any other department of responsible trusteeship — through a large-minded prudence in the assumption of obligations, a strict and even pedantic loyalty in their observance, through continuity in the framing of policies, tact and consistency and patience in their promotion, and a keen and delicate sense of what is owing both to the comity of nations and to the interests of which statesmanship is the trustee. And of statesmanship of this order in the post-war world, at last provided with sure precautions and anchorage against a drift to disaster, of men such as Cecil, Bourgeois, and Beneŝ in the Old World, and of others whom it would be invidious to mention in the New, surely we may apply the words which Newman used of the scholar in his ideal university: —

‘The intellect which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands and how its path lies from one point to another.’