The League and Manchuria
(Foreign Editor of the Journal de Genhe).
TWO facts impress themselves on anyone who studies the treatment of the Manchurian affair by the League of Nations Council. The first is the importance of the question. On the eve of the Disarmament Con- ference, in which the security problem will play a part of the first importance, it was of vital importance for the League to demonstrate in the sphere of action that the provisions of the Covenant arc not empty words, and that they can give real protection to a weak State exposed to open aggression. The importance of that is so great that it might have been expected that the Council would leave no stone unturned to achieve success. In fact, it has done nothing of the kind. That is the second fact which strikes the observer. It was on September 18th that the Japanese launched their troops into Chinese territory. After three months they are there still, and the League of Nations has taken no active, step. That is the brutal fact.
How is it to be explained ? We have an official answer to. that question. The League of Nations found itself confronted with a case of peculiar difficulty and of completely specialized character. Nowhere else in the world can you find a territory where four sovereignties are. intermingled, where frontiers do not really separate peoples, where foreigners possess contractual rights over the territory of their neighbours, where they may .maintain troops in a country which is not their own— and so forth. All that is perfectly true, but it is not relevant because, as Lord Cecil observed, that is not the question laid before the League. A distinction must be drawn in this Manchurian affair between two com- pletely different things. The first is a conflict between .China and Japan. The observations I have just made apply to this conflict on which, admittedly, it is extremely difficult to pass a reasoned judgement without detailed examination. The other is a conflict between the League of Nations and one of its members which has violated the Covenant. This conflict, on the other hand, is extremely simple. It has often been observed that the Covenant could not be applied because it would be very difficult for the Council in case of a conflict to determine the aggressor. That, in fact, has not happened any more in the Manchurian case than in the Corfu affair, or the Graeco-Bulgarian conflict, or that which broke out between Bolivia • and Paraguay. It has been 'clearly demonstrated that it is always easy for the Council to recognize the aggressor, because the aggressor in fact convicts himself. It is the State which has marched its troops out of its own territory, which refuses to recall them, which rejects arbitration. In this par- ticular case no single person has ever seriously questioned whether it was the Japanese .or the Chinese who were the aggressors. The question gives its own answer.
'The curious thing is that it is the very clarity of the ease which has made it difficult. The Council finds it morally impossible to condemn the Chinese, for their 'juridical position is far too strong and their juridical rights in the special conflict we are discussing far too clear. On the other hand, for various reasons which I will discuss, the Council was unwilling to condemn Japan. It was, therefore, between two alternatives, both impassible ; one political, the other juridical, and it is still making vain attempts, after three months' dis- cussion, to escape by some form of compromise. The question would have been perfectly simple if a clear distinction had been drawn between the conflict between Japan and the League and the conflict between Japanese and Chinese. But the Council let itself be entangled with an exhaustive and confused examination of the two affairs. That was what caused the difficulty. Out of a clear case they made an insoluble problem. They should have said to the Japanese : " Withdraw your troops ; then we will immediately examine your argu- ments." Instead of that, they began with the arguments. How is this mistake in method to be explained ? Only by the weakness of the Council ; but that weakness in itself demands explanation in its turn. The Council is weak in its composition. Its President is tired, and .overstrained. Out of its fourteen Members there are a good half-dozen who count for nothing, who never express an opinion, who have no political weight. And the misfortune is that they are precisely the Members who occupy the seats of the small nations, that is to say, the most disinterested nations, the nations which ought- to play a principal part in an affair like this. The Great Powers, on the other hand, were paralysed by their own interests. You had there a classical ease of a conflict between the particular interest and the general interest, and more precisely between public treaties and secret agreements. It appears that Great Britain and the United States at the time of the London Naval Conference promised Japan to leave her hands free in Manchuria in exchange for a reduction of her fleet. France, on her part, in order to protect Indo- China from Japanese immigration, appears to have advised the Japanese to turn their eyes towards Man- churia and to have assured them that no difficulties would have been made for them there. These secret agreements have no juridical validity. They arc doubly null and void on two grounds. ney are contrary to the League Covenant, and they have not been registered. But they tic the hands of the diplomats who concluded them. That is the explanation of the fact that, in the three countries principally concerned, a clear divergence has been manifest between the governmental policy and diplomacy. Lord Cecil, Monsieur 13riand and Mr. Stimson have all three had to light their officials, and it cannot be said that they have emerged victorious. That is one of the gravest factors in the whole affair, in view of the future. It proves that secret diplomacy is not dead, that its poison has not ceased its work.
Another complication is due to the fact that the United States have great interests in Manchuria. The League of Nations could not dream of acting without the United States, because that would have made it ' too easy for Japan to resist the directions of the Council. The United States, too, saw that their interests lay in co-operation, and for the same reason: Unhappily, a fact well known already to all close observers was on this occasion disclosed to the public at large. It is that in the absence of permanent machinery of information and contact, the United States are badly informed on the course of events at Geneva, and not well provided with competent representatives to accredit to its meetings. The American representative in Paris had to be taught everything from the beginning, and a volume could be filled with anecdotes to which his ignorance gave rise.
All these errors of method would have been of small importance if their effect had not been to extenuate a much graver weakness, fear of action. If the Council did not make the distinction I have indicated between the two conflicts, the reason is that it realized that in that event it would be obliged to apply sanctions, or at any rate the threat of sanctions, to Japan. It is not true to say that the League of Nations lacks means of action. It has many means at its disposal— the withdrawal of Ambassadors, or a wholesale sale of yens, with economic or actual military sanctions still available in the background. But Japan was dexterous enough to persuade the foreign Ambassadors that she would resist and defy any threat of sanctions. The statesmen saw the spectre of possible war shaping itself on the horizon, and they were so alarmed at it that they preferred anything to such a risk. The responsibility was great, but I believe they have in fact assumed a still greater responsibility—namely, the possible failure of the Disarmament Conference—and that they have allowed a precedent to be established which may one day result in war in Europe itself.
That is why the Council's prudence seems to me in the last analysis the worst possible imprudence.
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