Foreign News: No Paper Plan

Back in September 1929, when world prosperity still nourished world idealism, that great dreamer Aristide Briand started talking about “The United States of Europe.” He even went so far as to send a circular to 26 Governments asking them what they thought about federation. Only three were enthusiastic. Their names are significant: Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia.

Since war broke out, Aristide Briand’s dream has walked again. When the first Allied shot was fired, many thoughtful Britons began worrying less about what war would be like than about what possible peace could follow it. Many a Briton did not expect young men going to the front to refrain from asking: What are we fighting for? Can we have something better this time than another Versailles and another war?

Dismal as was the failure of the League of Nations, democratic thinkers answered these questions by proposing a new concert of nations, stronger than the League, not quite so tight as the U. S.

Among protagonists of various versions of this plan have been Clarence K. Streit (Union Now) and radical Economist Harold J. Laski, who proposed a union roughly like America under the Articles of Confederation.* Last week the chorus grew. Speaking at an audience with the Haitian Minister to the Vatican, Pope Pius XII urged formation of “a stable and fruitful international organization.”

At Founder’s Day of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, British Ambassador to the U. S. Lord Lothian—who so far has got neatly over every hurdle that might offend U. S. public opinion—proposed “unity of nations under law, with government possessed of police powers.” Totalitarian imperialism must be ended, he said, and the weaknesses of democracy corrected. “Democracy was right in its insistence on liberty and personal responsibility, but in practice the free peoples have abused the freedom it has given them by turning it, as St. Paul says, to uses of the flesh. . . . The leaders of democracy in Europe have for the first time come publicly to recognize the real root of Europe’s persistent troubles and that federalism is the basic remedy for them.”

Pressure for a declaration of war aims has been severe in Britain. One of the aims collapsed with Poland. Another—Stop Hitler—was negative and took no account of the future. When Belgium and The Netherlands last week proposed peace, Britain’s Government tried to decide and announce what it expects of peace.

Addressing a private conference of Laborite M. P.s, Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition Clement R. Attlee put first on his list of Opposition aims the idea of federation. Next day Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax broadcast to the world what were supposed to be Britain’s official aims—and federation was not among them.

“After victory, what then?” asked the Foreign Secretary. His answers, still vague as a Solent fog:

War. “We are determined, so far as it is humanly possible, to see to it that Europe shall not again be subjected to a repetition of this tragedy.”

Armaments. “We shall use all our influence, when the time comes, in the building of a new world in which the nations will not permit insane armed rivalry to deny their hopes of fuller life. . . .”

Autonomy. “The new world that we seek will enlist the cooperation of all peoples on a basis of human equality, self-respect and mutual tolerance.”

Security. “We shall have to . . . find means of reconciling the necessity of change in a constantly changing world with security against the disturbance of the general peace through resort to violence.”

Federation. “There are some who believe that the new order will only come through surrender in some measure by the nations of their sovereign rights, in order to clear the way for some more organic union. But if it is our hope to create a more truly international system out of independent States, we must learn the lessons of the past. No paper plan will endure that does not freely spring from the will of the peoples who alone can give it life. . . . There is a cynical saying that it is often the task of the wise to repair the harm done by the good. When this war is over, we shall have to see to it that wisdom and good will combine for the immense task that will await us.”

* A notable cooperative failure.