SHALL IT BE A NEW HOLY ALLIANCE?
Rodell, Fred
Shall It Be A New Holy Alliance? By FRED RODELL AS THE WAR GETS WON, the talk today is more and more of the peace. From cracker-barrel to floor of Congress, in the press and over the air, men...
...In fact this statement, binding all the powers to the use of Christian principles, was the real Holy Alliance...
...In 1848, all over Europe, the peace—and with it the Holy Alliance—blew up in the peace-keepers' faces...
...Not even under the banner of a new Holy Alliance—in the name of the Four Freedoms...
...its strength would be supreme...
...The fear is always of wars to come, "inevitably," "every 20 years...
...But these powers, if they would keep the peace, cannot depend on police to do it...
...Nations as we know them would cease to exist and would become big or little subdivisions of one nation of two billion-odd citizens...
...The catch here is that, with no world legislature to pass written laws for the court to apply, decisions would have to be based on what today is called "international law...
...It is not only that aggression is often hard to pin down...
...Doomed To Failure In the first and easiest kind of world government complete with legislature, the nations would take part as nations...
...It is strange so little has been thought or said of that international police scheme which has come to be called the Holy Alliance...
...Keeping their present sovereignty, their power to govern the people within their own borders and treat with the rest of the world, they would simply send their representatives to get together at a sort of international round table and try to solve, by talk and vote, the world's big political problems...
...Until, if ever, they are prepared to blend their national interests and aspirations and cultures into a single powerful government for the whole globe, no international police force can serve to keep permanent peace on earth...
...Toward the self-respecting resurgence of the defeated nations a delicate course will have to be steered between two equally dangerous extremes...
...No new Holy Alliance, no modern international police model, could ever keep it from happening again in 1948—or '58 or '68...
...With two or three rather small exceptions, war had been stopped by stopping change—internal and external change, change in government forms and change in national boundary lines...
...In fact, it would be utterly impossible to achieve today...
...Its laws would be supreme...
...And the fear stems in large measure from the deadly parallel of last time—the parallel that runs straight through from the "War to End All War" slogan to the high resolve that went, in words, into the League of Nations...
...And therein lies the deadly parallel that apostles of international police schemes might give a little thought to today...
...In short, international law has kept hands completely off the dynamite of the world's political problems...
...Above all, the peace can never be kept by merely using a world police force, in frontier vigilante fashion, to put an automatic end to armed aggression...
...But under the wings of this pious pact, the big nations used force, not words, to keep the peace...
...The United Nations would be wise to learn a lesson from that failure...
...It is not only that economic aggression may be more effective than military might, and may reasonably provoke resort to arms...
...The idea is to stop future wars simply by calling on this police force, made up in whole or in large part of the military might of the nicer nations, to beat down anyone who starts to break the peace...
...Its strength consists of their strength, its legislature is usually their catspaw, its police force is —or is dominated by—their armed forces...
...Instead of controlling, its strong members, they control it...
...It is not self-starting, it has to have its orders...
...It is not only that aggression may ride disguised as civil war, as when Germany and Italy helped saddle fascism on Spain...
...That is why the Holy Alliance failed...
...Then It Exploded The peace of Europe blew sky high, the Holy Alliance failed, for one simple reason...
...If so, the government will be at most a weak confederation, and as such will be wholly dominated by the U. S., Britain, Russia, and maybe China...
...The scheme even carried the moral blessing of a vague statement as idealistic as the more recent and familiar proclaiming of Four Freedoms for all the globe...
...That is what the Holy Alliance tried to do in the last century...
...True, these nations cannot be allowed to rearm for eventual revenge—as certain British and French statesmen deliberately let Germany rearm once before...
...No more war...
...it merely enforces laws...
...It is that the simple squelching of armed aggression, uncoupled with any real effort to solve the problems that cause aggression, amounts to freezing the global status quo...
...To form a federated world government, the separate nations would have to turn over to it most of their sovereignty, most of their power to govern the people within their own borders...
...There are three possibilities: One is a world court, to which all disputes between nations would be submitted, and whose decisions the police would enforce...
...They can ignore it as they please, they can secede when they please, they can war against each other if they please...
...In theory, it is the third possibility—and the only one that would work...
...This is the way the late League of Nations was set up and this is why it was doomed to failure...
...On one point there is no dispute...
...No conceivable world court would be competent to solve them...
...Whoever sought to achieve such change would first be forced to resort to arms and would then be handled by the international police...
...So the two other possibilities for an international government—to give orders to a world police force— involve world legislatures...
...But international law, as few men realize, deals only with differences between nations and sedulously steers away from the big disputes that bring on wars...
...In fact, as Time Magazine recently made clear in full detail, the whole idea of depending on a police force to keep the peace of the world can be logically proved a pipe-dream right from the start...
...The term is "international police force...
...What kind of government...
...But it was an international policing scheme that was set up by the big continental war-winners, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, when they pledged their armies to squelch armed trouble where-ever it raised its head...
...Then as now, the little man's flair for military strategy and his strong if twisted grip on the minds of his.followers had brought him to the brink of success...
...But because men tend to favor their hopes—and because they will jump at whatever sounds like an easy answer to a tough problem—there has come in vogue in the talk of the peace a term and an idea, neither of which is new...
...It Worked-For A While From start to climatic finish, the analogy is almost too apt...
...Whatever its seeming strength in terms of arms, its real strength can only be gauged from the basic strength of the government it, represents...
...From cracker-barrel to floor of Congress, in the press and over the air, men speak their hopes and fears and guesses about the kind of world there will be...
...For the world moves, and no world police force can long keep it from moving...
...For a short time, as history goes, the police force worked...
...What happened in 1848 was revolution—revolution against the rigid maintenance of the status quo in the sweet name of peace...
...And after Waterloo, as it will come after Berlin, came the task of keeping the new peace...
...Not much more than a frankly-labelled alliance, a confederated world government could last only so long as all or almost all the stronger nations cared to keep it alive...
...No judge, however wise, could conjure out of his head a "fair" or "just" or "impartial" answer to such many-sided issues as British imperial policies, U. S. immigration restrictions, or conflicting claims to colonies in Africa—any or all of which might lead to war...
...For this far-off Utopian plan, the peoples of the world with all their proud and bitter nationalism are not prepared...
...The United States would be wise to remember that a freezing of the status quo back in 1776 would have delayed though it could not forever have prevented the birth of this nation...
...But neither can they be trodden under the heel of a ruthless occupying government so as to kindle the sort of resentment that still smolders in the Southern states today, four score years after the Civil War...
...For a "confederation"—as this brand of group government is called—by its very nature has no real power to govern...
...In the course of keeping the peace by force, the major powers had also been guarding the status quo as of 30-odd years before...
...Napoleon failed as Hitler has failed, downed by the slow but certain massing of great powers against him...
...Then as now, a little man, a man with a mania for power, had set out to conquer the continent of Europe...
...The term "international police force" was not in vogue in 1815...
...and so some sort of international government would have to give the orders...
...The A-B-C of it runs like this: A police force does not and cannot make laws...
...Yet this is only the hope...
...But a world legislature might try...
...It is strange that, with all the thinking and writing on international police, so little has been made of another deadly parallel from the past—not 25 years ago this time but roughly a century back...
...But a "federated" world government, a genuine union like the United States, could last, could really govern, could effectively run a world police force...
...And yet it would be folly not to recognize that out of this war will likely come some sort of world police scheme, and that it may even be backed by some so-called world government...
...and the confederation is impotent to stop them...
...They cannot, for instance, afford to duck the big world problems that lead to war—international trade and tariffs, population trends and immigration, the development or exploitation of "backward" countries, worldwide cartels...
...For a police force can be no more than an agent of some government...
Vol. 7 • November 1943 • No. 45
