Welsh Journals

Possibly the lowest point so far reached was registered in the early days of Nov- ember with something like a boycott of Geneva by the chief delegates of the Great Powers at the Disarmament Conference, a "strike" of the rapporteurs like Dr. Benes and M. Politis, and a threat by Mr. Henderson to let go the Chairman- ship. He was appointed to his high post while yet Foreign Secretary and when he was still on very friendly terms with the British Prime Minister. He took up his heavy task in February 1932 after the Labour debacle, physically broken and ob- viously much wounded in spirit. The more the Dis- armamentConference has failed the higher has stood the personal prestige of this extraordinary ordinary man. It never stood higher than when, three weeks ago, he let it be known that, through the appropriate channels, he would demand that a special meeting of the Council of the League should be convened, at which he would personally tender his resignation and state the reasons for his act. The very threat was sufficient to bring to Geneva post-haste Sir John Simon, M. 'Paul-Boncour and Capt. Anthony Eden. Baron Aloisi, the Italian chief delegate, intimated that he was "too busy" just then to answer the "S.O.S." call; in other words Italy was giving more thought to the next move in the 1933 diplomatic game of "Rome or Readers of this page will recall the terms of the first rough programme of the "Rome Pact" presented to the British Prime Min- ister and the British Foreign Secretary when they took the path to Rome on March 17th, the day after Mr. MacDonald had presented his British Draft Convention to the Disarmament Conference. Pre- sumably they went to win Mussolini's backing for the British Plan and to strengthen his restraining influence on Hitler. They found the Duce ready with quite another scheme for a European "alli- ance" of the four Great Powers to take over the liabilities of a Disarmament Conference likely to be bankrupt, to guarantee by stages "equality of status" to Germany and to tackle immediately the territorial re-arrangement of Europe. The news created consternation in Geneva and the little nations saw themselves put back a whole century. So effective was their protest that the Conference won a fresh lease of life. Sir John Simon returned to his task of championing the British draft, the Italians became loud in its praise and Chancellor Hitler accepted it as "an admirable basis of dis- Japan apart-the Japanese with their im- perialistic urge and their eye on 1935, the year of the end of the naval treaties, will ratify no Convention-there did seem a fair chance at Whitsuntide of a Disarmament Treaty with some essential features. "Mr. MacDonald's Economic Conference," in London in June made inevitable, however, the adjournment of "Mr. Henderson's Disarmament Conference. The rest of the story is the confused tangle after the private conference in Paris in September when the Germans alleged that the British had materially altered their own draft of March by making it still harder for Ger- many to obtain "a square deal." Then came in quick sucession the banging of the door by Hitler, the praise of the Four Power Pact by Sir Eric Drummond, now the British Ambassador in Rome, and the fresh outburst in which Signor Mussolini denounced "parliamentarism" and in which he spoke of the League of Nations as "absurd." The issue, therefore, is clearly defined in the renewed Fascist challenge of 1933. Is, what Dr. David Mitrany has called "the progress of Inter- national Government"* to continue or is there to be a relapse to the ancient and secular play of "the equilibrium of forces" ? That is the question which will be ultimately decided by the peoples who, as yet, have the determining voice-the peoples of the democracies of the world and es- pecially of the British Commonwealth, France and the U.S.A. In the U.S.A. and Great Britain the recent trend has been backward-the U.S.A. with its contemplated huge increase in armaments and Great Britain in the emphatic resumption of its traditional foreign policy of maintaining "the equilibrium." May this not be the real explana- tion of the pre-Covenant attitude of Great Britain in the Sino-Japanese conflict? English diplo- macy desired above all to see no weakening of the influence of Japan which might lead to the strengthening of the influence of the U.S.A. in the Far East as that would upset the "balance of power." In the Disarmament Conference the British attitude has been coloured by the same pre- occupation. The historian will say that the Dis- armament Conference foundered on the rock of national sovereignity on the night of the 7th of 'March, 1933 in a vote on the European Pact of Mutual Assistance. Capt. Anthony Eden, in his friendly way, re-iterated that Great Britain had gone to the limit at Locarno to promote security in Europe. It would do no more. The Italian delegate made it clear that Italy would do nothing without England. In the vote Germany and Italy were against a European Pact of Mutual Assist- "The Progress of International Government." David Mitrany. George Allan & Unwin. 5s. nett.