Shifting sands

Llew Gardner

The Rise and Fall of the League of Natiora George Scott (Hutchinson £4.80)

The United Nations ideal, for all the rhetoric, Design Council flags and trendy postage stamps, has never gripped the imagination Of our generation as the League of Nations did our fathers'. To be sure, United Nations Associations sprung up around the countrY and proof of their existence can occasionally be seen in the letter columns of local newspapers. But the majority of the population have tended to regard the UNA rather as rnY schoolfellows regarded the Boy Scouts:, the hedgerow of worthiness being no substitute for the snooker hall of life. But for a time, as George Scott makes plain in this excellent,. history, the League fired the minds not only o' the politicians, who would sooner rather than later betray it, but of ordinary people. I recall a Sunday lunch-time discourse by my father in the summer of 1936. Mussolini? army was poised to invade Abyssinia alto' between mouthfulls, my father was denouncing the dictator. Thus far and further would the civilised world allow him t° go. The League of Nations would stand firul. There would be sanctions. I, who kneW nothing of the League's abject record in th,e matter of standing firm, was suitabOrt impressed. The air-raid sirens would n°.5 sound that night. Llew could go to sleep in hi own little bed once again. As for sanctionai: whatever they were, they sounded ti.mate deterrent. Raining down on ita`l'id cities, decimating their armies, they w°L1.5 soon bring the blue-jowled dictator to knees. I gazed in awe at my father. He was sure. Then my mother spoke (and I can be" herwords): "Nothing will haPPeilr' Abyssinia will fall. There will be world Wa.0 within two years." Of course she was put her place. Told not to be silly and leave `,"0 conduct of the world's affairs to those vv" understood such things. yet it was my mother who was out of SterPv with the 'spirit of the age.' Despite eve.:e". failure, people still believed in the Leag' Scott recounts how, in the very flurry of the laSt minute negotiations to save Abyssinia, the League of Nations Union conducted their ,°,!vri public opinion poll. It became known as 1ne "Peace Ballot" although Lord peaverbrook, with an eye for a prejudice as well as a headline, called it the "Ballot of blood." Half a million pollsters went from door to door throughout the land. Elevenand-a-half million people voted. Ten million of them voted in favour of the proposal that an aggressor should be stopped by economic and non-military measures. Even more significantly more than six-and-a-half million were prepared to see Mussolini deterred by military measures.

that Scott points out, this vote did not mean mat there were six and a half million people in the land prepared to don their tin hats, Shoulder arms and settle into the trenches alongside the Lion of Judah. But "the poll did 4, reveal an incipient recognition of what was g°ing to be necessary one day and a governMent with the will to do so could have harnessed that mood, could have made it ar , ticulate and given it definition and direction. ta the Baldwin government was not made of such stuff." It is fashionable now to dismiss the League tais a sorry joke and its founders as nat,.list-minded fools barely able to see over nueir own high stiff collars. And it is true, as cott is able to show from his examination of '-abinet papers, that, as the war neared its ,eN, the British Government had given little `nought to the League's structure or aims: `estions, objections, platitudinous senhfnents there were in plenty, but detailed roPosals and constructive analysis were acking.,, t,One member of the War Cabinet had given Zo,ught to the League and his words, hough entirely hostile, had a prophetic ring ..ilcout them. He was William Morris (Billy) Nughes the Australian Prime Minister who on °Iiember 26, 1918 delivered himself of this sething attack: 0,. object altogether to President Wilson's scheme a League of Nations. Where does it end? I don't It would appear that there is no substantial ktieree nce between his view and that of Wells (a „ ular hate). That is to say, he wants some sort

world state, in fact a Utopia, in which all nations Old have to surrender some of their self-govern

There is to be an international police and the is to be a navy and an army, and so on, for ten Purpose. But it will not bear examination for con minutes. It is a very obvious thing that no bentrY will allow for a moment its vital interests to 'ecided by anybody but itself. I speak with some eons;ra deble experience of what nations will do in at direction, and those who shout loudest for th„e;triational arbitration will stand most rigidly on own rights when a vital right is threatened. toin the event President Wilson was not able NaPersuade his own people of the League of by`,Tns' ideal and it was born a child crippled

Lne absence of what could have been its

the limb. Yet in those early days, despite tit drawling cynicism of Mr Hughes, despite tr)11 final absence of America, the ideal was Y bright 41, ,erging from the most savage conflict in cii,11s history, the final proof that the old .Macy could no longer function, nations prrne together to produce a Covenant (the keso bYterian Wilson's word) which does, as pir,tt says, stand "as a testament to the asrea:tion of man to govern his affairs by fae:nn." It was a noble aspiration, and the tle that it was crushed beneath the weight of r,

q

N s Panzers does not make it less so. lye,.,(3r is the story all one of sorry betrayal. qr;" Iike Austen Chamberlain for Britain, 'stide Briand of France and Germany's list lilteresa V Stresemann strove to balance the , of their governments with the sur41 of Rove_ the League. The pity was that the stAr.vpirrients never fully understood that their Teal was bound up in the League's. terrir League had its successes. On Sep er 8, 1926, exactly twelve years, Scott

recalls, after the first battle of the Marne which had brought the German army to the gates of Paris, the League met to vote Germany into membership. It was the culmination of months of diplomacy between Chamberlain, Briand and Stresemann, and Briand expressed the emotion and triumph of the hour when he said: "No more blood, no more cannon, no more machine guns."

It was Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 that set the pattern to be followed by,the European dictators. The British attitude is well summed up in a memorandum from Sir John Simon to the Cabinet. Having walked a delicate path between loyalty to the League and antagonism toward Japan, he concluded: "In fact, we must strive to be fair to both sides. But we must not involve ourselves in trouble with Japan." The Cabinet decided that it was this last sentence which was the most important but it would be as well not to blab it abroad.

The League condemned Japan and that country, having successfully completed its aggression while the nations procrastinated, walked out. So the scene was set. The League could huff and puff, pass a resolution or two, but nothing would happen. The generals, could get on with their killing while their politicians suffered no more than a verbal slap on the wrist.

Why did the ideal fail? Scott offers no ready explanation. Perhaps there isn't one. The decay was gradual. The foundations had been built on shifting sands. It is hard to say what this or that historical moment is when it all began to go bad. But it was not the League that failed but the nations of the world and their peoples. As they have continued to fail since. At the end of it all, in 1946 when the Assembly met to wind up the League's affairs, the Argentine delegation walked out over the procedure for the election of vice-presidents.

The piles of dead had been raised higher but national pride still came first. Nevertheless, the entrusting of the peace of the world to a philandering jet-setter seems a poor substitute rusting of the peace of the world to a philandering jet-setter seems a poor substitute for the noble sentiments of the Covenant.

Llew Gardner is a presenter of the Today programme on Thames Television.