Essays in Liberalism | Page 4

an international outlaw.
Before you begin to build you must have freedom from actual war, and the provisions have been effective. They are not merely theoretic. I am not sure whether it is generally recognised, even in so instructed an assembly as this, how successful these provisions have actually been in practice. Let me give you briefly two illustrations: the dispute between Sweden and Finland, and the much more urgent case of the dispute between Serbia and Albania. In the first case you had a dispute about the possession of certain islands in the Baltic. It was boiling up to be a serious danger to the peace of the world. It was referred to the League for discussion. It was before the existence of the International Court. A special tribunal was constituted. The matter was threshed out with great elaboration; a decision was come to which, it is interesting to observe, was a decision against the stronger of the two parties. It was accepted, not with enthusiasm by the party that lost, but with great loyalty. It has been adopted, worked out in its details by other organs of the League, and as far as one can tell, as far as it is safe to prophesy about anything, it has absolutely closed that dispute, and the two countries are living in a greater degree of amity than existed before the dispute became acute.
But the Albanian case is stronger. You had a very striking case: a small country only just struggling into international existence. Albania had only just been created before the war as an independent State, and during the war its independence had in effect vanished. The first thing that happened was its application for membership of the League. That was granted, and thereby Albania came into existence really for the first time as an independent State. Then came its effort to secure the boundaries to which it was entitled, which had been provisionally awarded to it before the war. While that dispute was still unsettled, its neighbour, following some rather disastrous examples given by greater people in Europe, thought to solve the question by seizing even more of the land of Albania than it already occupied. Thereupon the Articles of the Covenant were brought into operation. The Council was hastily summoned within a few days. It was known that this country was prepared to advocate before that Council the adoption of the coercive measures described in Article 16. The Council met, and the aggressive State immediately recognised that as a member of the League it had no course open but to comply with its obligations, and that as a prudent State it dared not face the danger which would be caused to it by the operation of Article 16. Immediately, before the dispute had actually been developed, before the Council, the Serbians announced that they were prepared to withdraw from Albanian territory, and gave orders to their troops to retire beyond the boundary. Let us recognise that this decision having been come to, it was carried out with absolute loyalty and completeness. The troops withdrew. The territory was restored to Albania without a hitch. No ill-feeling remains behind, and the next thing we hear is that a commercial treaty is entered into between the two States, so that they can live in peace and amity together.
THE SPIRIT OF THE LEAGUE
I want to emphasise one point about these two cases. It is not so much that the coercive powers provided in the Covenant were effectively used. In Sweden and Finland they never came into the question at all, and in the other case there was merely a suggestion of their operation. What really brought about a settlement of these two disputes was that the countries concerned really desired peace, and were really anxious to comply with their obligations as members of the League of Nations. That is the essential thing--the League spirit. And if you want to see how essential it is you have to compare another international incident: the dispute between Poland and Lithuania, where the League spirit was conspicuous by its absence. There you had a dispute of the same character. But ultimately you did secure this: that from the date of the intervention of the League till the present day--about two years--there has been no fighting; actual hostilities were put an end to. Though that is in itself an immensely satisfactory result, and an essential preliminary for all future international progress, yet one must add that the dispute still continues, and there is much recrimination and bitterness between the two countries. The reason why only partial success has been attained is because one must say Poland has shown a miserable lack of the true spirit of the League.
Let me turn to the other parts of the Covenant--those which