Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR LEAGUE OF DEMOCRACIES Stanley Hoffmann's interesting article, "What Keeps the UN Alive" (NL, October 30), expresses some of the increasingly prevalent disappointment with the...
...This idea has long been dear to me...
...Senator Fulbright sees the salvation of the UN in the development of massive coordinated efforts to achieve economic and political recovery—such as the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, Council of Europe, NATO, European Coal and Steel Community, European Common Market, Euratom and, most recently, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...
...This settlement—the Concert of Europe—opened a century of relative peace...
...New York City Mark Vishniak...
...So are many pragmatic political scientists and experienced statesmen...
...I have reached the conclusion that the only certain guarantee of international peace is a League of Democracies, since they alone possess the trustworthy character which makes their word inviolate...
...He foresaw that the cooperation of democracies with regimes of totalitarian dictatorship in the League of Nations would not be successful...
...At the time, Lansing believed that before a League of Nations could succeed a League of Democracies must first be created...
...He wrote: "The practical element, in my opinion, in any League of Nations is the good faith of the members...
...Now Senator Fulbright suggests a "Concert of Free Nations" to create, through those institutions that have come into being over the last 14 years, "a broader Atlantic Community...
...Until autocracy is entirely discredited and democracy becomes not only the dominant but the practical universal principle in the political systems of the world, I fear a League of Nations, particularly one purposing to employ force, would not function...
...but a League composed solely of democracies would by reason of the character of its membership be an efficient surety of peace...
...The idea is attractive—and somewhat overdue...
...the other looks grimly backwards to the anarchic self-help of the old world, well before the foundation of the League of Nations...
...Abstract legalists searching out the inner inconsistencies of UN action—and inaction— in the letter and in the spirit of the Charter, are deeply disappointed...
...DEAR EDITOR LEAGUE OF DEMOCRACIES Stanley Hoffmann's interesting article, "What Keeps the UN Alive" (NL, October 30), expresses some of the increasingly prevalent disappointment with the United Nations...
...A long time ago I came across a reference to it in a letter written by Secretary of State Robert Lansing on April 8, 1918, to Colonel House...
...The same situation repeated itself after World War II, when, as Senator Fulbright rightly emphasizes, democratic nations shared the victory with great totalitarian powers...
...He describes the UN problem in the words of the international lawyer, Julius Stone: "The very ambition of the Charter turned it into a two-faced instrument...
...To my mind it comes down to this, that the acceptance of the principle of democracy by all the chief powers of the world and the maintenance of genuine democratic governments would result in permanent peace...
...is less interested in the causes of the UN's incapacity and impotence than in what can be done to rescue and help it...
...Hence Fulbright's yearning for a Concert of Free Nations—or a League of Democracies...
...A League composed of both democratic and autocratic governments and pledged to maintain peace by force would be unreliable...
...But writing in the October issue of Foreign Affairs, Senator J. W. Fulbright (D.-Ark...
...If they are untrustworthy, an agreement to unite in the forcible maintenance of peace would be worthless...
...A compromise with this principle of government, and an attempt to form a League of Nations with autocratic governments as members will lack permanency...
...Lansing's words appear to be prophetic...
...A League, on the other hand, which numbers among its members autocratic governments, possesses " the elements of personal ambition, of intrigue and discord, which are the seeds of future wars...
...To this question, posed back in 1954, Fulbright now answers: "Unfortunately, [it] is the 'second face...
...At the Congress of Vienna, almost a century and a half ago, Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia formed a quadruple alliance to provide permanent security...
...One face looks nobly towards the beginning of a super-State well beyond the League of Nations...
...Which was the real face...
...If this view is correct, then the effort should be to make democracy universal...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 40
