The Great Decision. By James T. Shotwell. The Macmillan Company. $3.00. The Time for Decision. By Sumner Welles. Harper and Brothers. $3.00. U. S. War Aims. By Walter Uppmann. Kittle, Brown and Company. $1.50.
Three very important books by eminent authors in rather different fields have recently attracted wide attention. The first to be published was "The Great Decision," by Professor James T. Shotwell; the second, "The Time for Decision," by former Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles; and the third, "U.S. War Aims," by Walter Lippmann. Professor Shotwell brings to his conclusions of today the history of his experience at the Paris Peace Conference, his experience with the International Labor Organization, and his efforts at Geneva, Paris, and Washington to bolster the League of Nations with the General Act for the Pacific Settlement of Disputes and the Pact of Paris. He also brings the experience of twenty-five years of long and hard work in the field of American education of public opinion.
Professor Shotwell's book is the most elaborate in its treatment of world organization. All of it is devoted either to the philosophy of such organization or suggestions for its future form. Indeed, there are times in the book when Professor Shotwell leads the reader through almost too great a maze of philosophic dissertations before reaching his conclusion.
Sumner Welles brings to his readers an idealism very similar to Professor Shotwell's. His experience is that of the trained diplomat, and one of his achievements as a diplomat was to help to shape the good neighbor policy. His account of his visit to the warring nations of Europe in 1940 is one of the most valuable documents of our time. He has portrayed eloquently the cynicism of Mussolini, the brutality of the German leaders, the moral decadence of the French statesmen, and the confusion of the British Government, still groping in the fogs of Stanley Baldwin's stupid policy carried on to Munich by Neville Chamberlain.
I can understand Sumner Welles' intuition of French collapse after his interview with Leon Blum. A few days after the Munich settlement I walked the streets of Paris, visiting old street corners and cafes that I had visited when France and her Allies were triumphant, twenty years before. The Paris that to me as an American soldier had been so courageous, a few days after Munich, seemed doomed.
The portion of Mr. Welles' book devoted to international organization is comparatively small. One wishes that it might have been more elaborate. But Mr. Welles was imposing self-discipline, because of the extensive part he had played in the State Department in the preparations for the creation of the General International Organization.
Professor Shotwell and Mr. Welles believe in the Wilsonian tradition. They believed in the League of Nations, and thought that with American participation, the League could have prevented this war. Both of them would create a much stronger world organization after this war, with stronger obligations to keep the peace, with greater decentralization and recognition of local responsibilities.
The statesmen gathered in Washington to draft the constitution of the General International Organization, will be faced with a solution of certain problems which these books have raised. One will be the granting of adequate authority to the four Great Powers in the transition period while creating, at the same time, a democratic world organization. There are over three hundred million people, not counting the Germans, between the Russian borders and the English Channel. They will not long be content to have their destinies determined by four Great Powers, not one of which is a Western Continental Power, no matter how benevolent the rule of those powers may be.
On the other hand, because of the conditions of modern warfare, power will be concentrated as never before in the hands of a few. There will not be more than four or five Great Powers who will have the population and resources and industrial development combined enabling them to prepare sufficiently to withstand a blitz from one of the Great Powers for more than a few hours. To the Norwegians, Belgians, and others, military preparedness will have no value except for prestige and for internal poliee purposes, and in some cases, to poliee colonies. These smaller nations, however, will wish some part in the maintenance of their own security. The answer is participation in world security. And this leads me to the conclusion that there must be some system of police force in which the smallest states may share.
Undoubtedly, plans for the General International Organization provide for an Assembly on which all states will be represented. The heart of the problem will be reached in the composition of the Executive Council, and the way in which the vote of this Council is taken. If a Council of eleven members is decided upon, and decisions taken by majority vote, as they should be, how much must this vote be weighted in favor of the Great Powers who would make the greatest contribution to the enforcement of peace? Theoretically, nationals of those states with little military power could cast a majority vote for military action, although all of the four Great Powers would be opposed to such action. It might be well to have decisions of the Council for the enforcement of peace taken by a majority vote, providing that such majority include a majority of the four or five Great Powers occupying permanent seats on the Council.
No matter how the majority vote is weighted in favor of the nations who will make the greatest contribution to the maintenance of security, one principle must be upheld: the large states must not be permitted to be above the law, In other words, no Great Power with a permanent seat on the Council any more than one of the small powers must be permitted to vote when it is a party to a dispute.
Perhaps the basic agreement for the use of military force to prevent aggression would be an agreement upon the part of the nations to earmark a certain proportion of their military establishments such as men, planes, tanks, destroyers, for the service of the international community. These earmarked forces would be contributed immediately upon request of the Executive Council. It is my hope that such forces would be supplemented by an international air force and strategic air bases occupied jointly by the nations with the greatest security interests in a particular area, but occupied in the name of the world organization.
Military and economic action to prevent an incipient aggression from developing into a full fledged war must be quick and overpowering. Some regional obligations may very well be taken. If the nations in the Western Hemisphere can keep the peace among themselves, so much the better. So much the better, also, if the nations in Central Europe can keep the peace through a Central European federation and relieve the world from the burden of Central European quarrels and minority problems which clogged the League of Nations agenda. Rut in no sense must regional organization or responsibility be an excuse for the refusal to take world responsibility. Twice the United States has been drawn into world war by Germany, despite the fact that the spark that fired the first world war was the German-inspired attack upon Serbia, and in the present war, the German attack on Poland. Neither Poland nor Serbia was in the American region or the so-called Atlantic community. The attack of Italy upon Ethiopia cut across all so-called communities and regions, yet if the nations, including the United States, had jointly applied sanctions, Italy might have been stopped and with it a train of aggression.
The world has so shrunk that the distance from (Washington to any other place in the world is less in time than the distance from Washington to New York in the early history of our country. In this kind of a world there is not room for several sets of moralities and rules of international conduct. Above and beyond any natural groupings must be universal law, and a common morality, and a universal organization.
