Still Chasing the Dream

...It reaches its highest form when pragmatism is put in the service of principle...

...The Japanese Army showed that ruthless power was more than a match for flabby rhetoric and the Kellogg-Briand Pact that "outlawed war...

...Point One, "Open covenants openly arrived at...

...It carries on an urge which punctuates history-man's dream of a peaceful order...

...The UN's problems are the raucous, sweaty problems of life...

...Even so, it is most interesting to observe how Wilson might have salvaged a great part of his dream with the right approach to Congress...

...There was, to be sure, the equality of one member, one vote-carried to the extreme of requiring substantive decisions in the League Assembly as well as in the Council to be taken unanimously...

...Politics, as the art of the possible, is cancelled out by dogmatic determination...

...But his lines did not fit the play, and when they were revised in their meaning they only compounded the confusion...

...The Nazi-Soviet Treaty rearranged Versailles' map of Eastern Europe and paved the way to Stalin's winter war against Finland...

...Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue were slugging it out then, too, as Woodrow Wilson tried to ram the League Covenant and the Treaty of Versailles down the throat of a Congress that did not quite know what it wanted but felt it had had enough of him...

...Walter Lippmann and Frank I. Cobb, editor of the New York World, wrote an "explanation" of the Fourteen Points to reduce them to more practical dimensions...

...Peacemaking is still largely left to bilateral diplomacy, although the UN has repeatedly been called upon to serve as a convenience, a channel, a scapegoat, or a figleaf...

...On that basis, disarmament never got started...

...and despite the organization's occasional success, its path led clearly downward...

...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet UN correspondent, CBS News No one would read the story of the League of Nations now for inspiration...

...Nevertheless, the UN has presided over the true, inevitable liquidation of colonial empires and the emergence of scores of new states that grew out of no more than local convulsions...

...Still, as the account of an idea whose time had come that collapsed nonetheless, A Time for Angels takes on strikingly topical overtones...

...The Great Powers who wrote the Treaty of Versailles, however, cast themselves in the main role...

...The near ancestors of familiar conflicts, groupings and individuals pass before our eyes-young faces of half a century ago very much like those at the UN today, except for the funny hats and the slightly more limited geographical vocabulary...

...Entangling alliances were the nightmare at the time and this raw country, its inner frontier barely closed, was not tempted by the call to world destiny that was to overwhelm it only 30 years later...

...In the invasion of Manchuria, every principle of the Covenant was challenged with impunity...

...If, as in Somerset Maugham's Rain, Sadie Thompson comes out laughing, there's a reason...

...Strange as it may seem, the League's world was even untidier than our own...

...Fridtjof Nansen dealt with a flood of refugees-the hundreds of thousands of Russians, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Turks and others displaced by the War and its aftermath-struggling against indifference, hypocrisy and entrenched suspicion as his successors must today...

...We see an earlier installment of that apparently unending battle between New World Idealism and Old World Cynicism...

...And she doesn't laugh long...

...The world of the League was vastly different from the world of the United Nations, yet many of its phenomena seem painfully familiar...

...Furthermore, the respective peoples' interests did not figure in the distribution of the Ottoman Empire or the German overseas possessions...

...They were merely acting out a 19th-century drama, baffled by the scope and ferocity of the conflict they had somehow survived and clinging to what they knew best-sovereignty, security and the notion that you had to get something out of a war if you were on the winning side...

...Elmer Bendiner was quite right to review the record for a generation that looks upon the League not only as musty, but irrelevant...

...It has certainly been the Soviet-American nuclear balance more than the UN Charter that has kept peace from being swept away altogether...

...Central to the Wilsonian concept of peace was the Covenant of the League of Nations: "A general association of nations for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike...

...But 11 years after the League was born Japan uncovered its fatal weakness...

...really meant open covenants secretly arrived at, since no one wanted to rule out confidential negotiations...

...Point Four called for "Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety...

...Yet its success is not assured...

...Fair enough...

...The United Nations has-or, perhaps more accurately in this context, have-profited only erratically from the mistakes of its predecessor...

...Mussolini was not to be left behind in his dreams of empire, and when he launched his invasion of Ethiopia the nominally great powers went through a dress rehearsal for appeasement and a sordid charade of toothless sanctions...

...Suddenly, the League bethought itself of its Covenant, expelled the Soviet Union and collapsed...

...Says Bendiner, "The League withered and died when each nation remembered that its holy mission was to serve itself, and that all agreements, oaths, treaties and compacts are invalid when they conflict with that sacred cause...

...International peacekeeping has been a highly useful instrument but remains haphazard, improvised from case to case...

...There followed the international civil war in Spain, with the sanctimonious fiasco of nonintervention...

...But this informative, melancholy journey through the land of deja vu gains fascination from the critical reassessment of the UN currently in progress...

...It started the fruitless hunt for disarmament which is still in full cry...

...Point Five spoke of the "free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims," taking the interests of the population fully into account...

...As it turned out, this referred exclusively to colonial claims against the former enemy powers...

...But when Japan asked that the principle of equality be defined so as to rule out any distinction between individuals because of race or nationality, it was turned away with a reference to "serious problems within the British Empire...

...Even in Europe, the nationality principle-a noble, if extraordinarily difficult idea-was disregarded in the payment of various obligations...

...It sought a definition of aggression, spoke of sanctions against the aggressor, espoused collective security, and denounced monopolization of raw materials...

...The men who gathered in Paris to make the peace in 1919 were neither evil nor stupid...

...Not when our experience with the United Nations suggests anaphylaxis...

...The exegesis passed the reassuring word that "domestic safety" implied not only internal policing, but also protection of territory against invasion...

...In other words, a universal veto...

...Wilson came from across the sea with a quaint and tiresome insistence on morality, equality and self-determination that was hard to oppose directly and had a great deal of popular support...

...Bendiner doggedly retraces that path from the dispute over the Aaland Islands to the surge of Zionism from the flames of Nazi oppression...

...It has assumed a form and addressed itself to major issues-space exploration, ecology, food distribution, population control, the law of the sea, and now the definition of a new relationship between industrial states and raw material producers-that go far beyond the scope of the old League...

...The F. Scott Fitzgerald and Scott Joplin nostalgia does not extend to Geneva and the Fourteen Points-nor should it...

...And once this commitment on race was dropped, a similar commitment on freedom of religion was discarded...

...This is the lesson of his excellent book...

...Awareness of what may be abandoned in order to preserve what must be kept is its essence, and does not-as we see all around us-come easily...

...Hitler moved in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland...

...Adolf Hitler took his cue from Japan's success and dismantled the postwar security structure, adding insult to injury by walking out of the League...