International Police

Ask John Citizen, anywhere from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Me., is he against war and he will say Yes, sure. Sure he's against war. Even smack in the midst of a war that is being won, war in the abstract, war in the future, is about as popular as the man-eating shark. Sure he's against war. Yes, sir.

Ask John Citizen how he'd go about stopping wars and he'll hem & haw and say Well --.

Disarmament?

Well--no. We've got to guard our shores and the Panama Canal and Alaska and Hawaii. Can't trust those other nations. They'd say they were going to stay disarmed and then build stuff on the sly. No, not disarmament. I'm against it.

How about an international police force to keep the peace around the world? Well, maybe you've got something there. Yes, sir. International police. I'm in favor of that.

The most extraordinary sign of America's temper today is that in a recent Gallup poll, 74% of the people voted for the idea of an "international police force." What the too pious hope of general disarmament was to the '20s, the more practically attractive picture of a world cop, hand on holster, is to the U.S. of 1943.

Among well-known citizens who want an international police force after the war are Vice President Henry Wallace, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, Ambassador John Winant, Republican hopeful Harold Stassen of Minnesota, Philip Murray of the C.I.O., Matthew Woll of the A.F. of L., and Politico-Pundits Dorothy Thompson, Edgar Ansel Mowrer and Max Eastman. The president of the British Section of the New Commonwealth Society, for more than a decade the most vocal and powerful British group backing an international police force, is none other than Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.

And what about the problems of enlarging the simple and practical idea of local police protection to a worldwide scale? Is it a simple matter to convert the idea of a police force with squad cars and motorcycles into the idea of a police force with battleships and bombers? Actually mankind has been pondering the basic problem for a long time and knows a great deal about it both in principle and practice.

Men Have Planned for It. The dream of world peace imposed by force has had a long and largely honorable history. Although the prototype existed in such early alliances as the Greek Achaean League, up until the 19th Century international policing flourished chiefly in the realm of ideas.

It was part of the Great Design of Henry IV of France and his minister Sully. Rousseau included it in his Project for Perpetual Peace. Mild William Penn was for it. So was Abbe de Saint-Pierre. But not until 1815, when the reactionary genius of Prince Metternich bore splotchy fruit in what has accurately been called the Unholy Alliance, was international policing really put to the test of action.

Then, just as today, a dictator had tried to conquer Europe and flopped. The victorious powers of Russia, Prussia and Austria got together to keep peace by force.

They kept the "peace" of central and eastern Europe for a few decades--and with it the status quo. Inasmuch as keeping the imperial status quo meant squelching every liberal chick in its egg, the Alliance eventually could not stand against the rise of liberal fervor in Europe.

Came 1848, and both Italy and France kicked over the traces; revolt spread to Austria and Germany and Prince Metternich, for 33 years the mastermind of the Alliance, fled his country; the Unholy Alliance was dead. Yet its influence on the minds of men lived on. For this despotic use of international force by a club of contented war-winners gave the whole ideal of international police an unsavory aura which lasted well into the 20th Century.

Meanwhile, the British Navy, with the help first of France, then of the U.S. and others, began to maintain a world patrol of its own. In Mexico, Chile and Argentina, at Navarino in Greece, at Dulcigno on the Adriatic and at Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, against the Barbary pirates and the pirates of the Far East, Britain and other great powers used force or the threat of force to keep the peace.

That the peace that was thus kept involved in each case the national interests of the intervening powers, that the actions were against groups too weak to fight back was natural under such an arrangement. But that impromptu, largely naval police force could not prevent a major explosion. The big explosion came with World War I.

The Last Effort. Out of the caterpillar of war, through the cocoon of Versailles, was hatched that beautiful butterfly, the League of Nations. Ardent apologists for the League--which still exists in form and largely in exile--insist that its prime purpose was not to stop wars once they had reached or passed the boiling point, but rather to promote international cooperation. "A place for talk" is the way League-loving Sir John Fischer Williams describes it.

Yet there is no doubt that the League was sold to the peoples of the world--and turned down by the U.S. Senate--largely on the basis of Article 16 of its Covenant, which clearly contemplates the prevention of war by the use of military force. The sorry failure of the League and its members ever to resort to force made the League a laughing stock long before World War II.

It is popular today to blame the farce that the League became as a war-prevention body on the fact that it had no teeth. The fact is that it had teeth but refused to bite.

The League had no militia of its own, no bombers, or battleships to send around the world under an international flag. But its teeth consisted, precisely as the Covenant meant them to consist, of the armed forces of the member nations.

Although the use of military power under Article 16 did not purport to be compulsory, no compulsion of written words in a document could have forced the member nations, against their will, to call out their armies and navies to stop aggression. And no compulsion of written words in a document could have forced the member nations, against their will, to call out a League army and navy if a League army and navy had existed.

The League of Nations refused to use its teeth simply because the two nations which dominated the League had no will to use them. Those nations were Great Britain and France. European politicians came to believe that the League was no more than an alternate tool of the Franco-British balance of power--a belief that was ignobly confirmed when the Hoare-Laval pact, giving Mussolini a free fist in Ethiopia, put an effective end to the League's lone effort to apply not even military but economic force against an aggressor.

The Tools of Policing. Thus the best effort the world has yet seen toward establishing effective international policing was rendered worthless by the two unanswered questions: Who gives the cop his orders? What kind of order: are given--or not given? These questions involve far tough er problems than do questions of the structure, mechanics and make-up of the police force itself. But the mechanical problems have most fascinated planners, and they are not to be ignored.

Roughly speaking, international police schemes come in three basic models:

> No. 1 is a police force made up exclusively of national military units which either take orders directly from an international boss, or else take such orders in directly, through their own national governments acting as agents of the international boss. (Much the same thing, since no national army or navy would ever march off or sail off without the consent of its national government.) This was the League of Nations model which failed, although not because of its mechanical setup. This is the model, if any, which the world is likely to see again after the present war. Mechanically, it varies little from an old-fashioned multipartite military alliance.

> No. 2 is a world police consisting of a truly international force, recruited or drafted from different nations and owing allegiance, in theory at least, to none. Obviously, it would have to be Samson-strong, or else its establishment would have to be linked with a program of general national disarmament.

> No. 3 is a world police that is a combination of the two, with an international force, supplemented by national armies and navies, as reserves. This is the kind of plan which is today setting the conversational tone of most talk about policing the world.

Among planners, No. 1 is usually quickly dismissed as a proved failure--and also because it offers little stimulus for parlor ingenuity. No. 2 still has its backers. But No. 3 probably now has most popularity. No less than three times since World War I, strong proposals for a police force, truly international in whole or in part, have come from the nation that made the Foreign Legion famous.

Popular Models. On three occasions, first at the Versailles conference, again before the League in 1923, and finally at the Disarmament Conference of 1932, the French submitted carefully worked out proposals for an international police force. The other nations were officially uninterested. But in England Lord Davies paid attention to the French. His brainchild, the New Commonwealth Society, of which Churchill became British Section President in 1936, stressed an international air police, to be twice as strong as the strongest national air force. Its unique feature was an international intelligence service.

More recently Bridge Expert Ely Culbertson has come forward with a "quota force principle," which bids fair to match in popularity his forcing two-bid in contract bridge, if somewhat similar publicity methods can persuade a somewhat similar audience. The most seductive and sales-stimulating feature of the Culbertson scheme is its painstaking, pinpoint detail. With a thoroughness to delight and challenge any addict of mental games, he lists the precise size and make-up of each of the "national contingents" that are to be part of his world police force.

The international "special corps" of the French plan has become a "mobile corps," recruited from all the smaller nations; and Culbertson has picked the strategic bases they are to occupy. Inasmuch as the mobile corps is to comprise 22% of the world police force, it could presumably, in case of trouble, beat even the kingpin of the "national contingents," the U.S. with 20%. And it could join with other national contingents to take on a combination of aggressors.

Culbertson has had Bertrand Russell check and approve his mathematics, but apparently no one has checked his logistics. Factors of transportation and supply, not to mention the geography of achieved defensive positions, might weigh heavily against the mobile corps and its allies after Russia, say, had blitzed Poland or the U.S. had blitzed Mexico.

Who Runs the Force? Culbertson does not--as do many of his admirers--fall into the too easy trap of supposing that a world police force, no matter how carefully constituted, could keep the peace of itself. He knows that a cop acts only under orders. Hence his World Federation--complete with legislature (two branches), executive and judiciary--to govern the whole globe.

His World Federation Plan, for all its fine phrasing, boils down to domination of the globe by the four victorious major powers. In making the U.S. and Britain top dogs, even over Russia and China (the first world president, term six years, is to be American, the second British), the Plan verges slightly towards Clarence Streit's Union Now. Still, Culbertson is to be credited, as most of his critics have not credited him, with thinking his world police idea right through to a world government. For without some sort of world government to tell the cop what to do and when to do it, any kind of world cop would be a fist without a brain.

Law Is Behind Order. The simplest kind of world government from which a world police force might conceivably take its orders is a world court, acting on its own, without benefit of legislature or executive (other than the police force). Presumably such a court, in the absence of legislation, would have to base its decisions on that disputed mass of principles known as "international law." Could an effective war-preventing police system, then, be founded merely on enforcement of those principles?

In certain specialized peacetime fields such as regulation of the mails, control of the opium traffic and the white slave traffic, and salvage and safety at sea, international law has worked well for years. But international law, far from frowning on war, has built a good third of its rules around the assumption that war is neither avoidable, nor, per se, improper--rules about neutrals, rules about the Red Cross, rules about the treatment of prisoners, rules about poison gas and poisoned wells. In actual fact, before the League of Nations, international law did not even try to distinguish between war that was legal-and-right and war that was illegal-and-wrong.

Force Must Support Law. Treaties, including peace treaties, were--and are--supposed to be respected. These contracts between nations are not considered in valid (as any private contract would be) if signed at the point of a gun. Because almost every peace treaty is so signed, a recognized principle of international law allows a nation to welch on its promises in the light of changed conditions. And even without this amorphous excuse, many a treaty-breaking act has been accepted with a shrug by other nations, as when Germany remilitarized the Rhineland. The shrug literally makes the act legal. In short, international law is not law in the ordinary sense, but a collection of contracts and conventions agreed on by various nations who have a de facto right to alter them or break them as they will.

The League of Nations tabooed aggressive war but found it impossible to define "aggression"; to Germany, Czecho-Slovakia was the aggressor (or at least, any German aggression was "provoked," making it proper); to Russia, Finland was the aggressor. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of Paris to outlaw war was immediately emasculated to permit war in "self-defense." Japan is still defending herself in China--and might still be doing it unharried by other nations had she not attacked Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong.

The words of international law, where they touch on war, can be run both ways. A world court might define "aggression," "provocation," "self-defense," and even rule on specific cases; but no court was needed to tell the League or the signers of the Kellogg-Briand Pact who was the aggressor in Manchuria, in Ethiopia, in the Sudeten.

Unbolstered by global legislation, international law has worked, and can only work, as applied to those comparatively minor matters about which practically all the nations of the world are already in genuine agreement--such matters as the prohibition of piracy or the protection of diplomats and migratory birds. Not only is the prevention of immediately impending war well beyond its power and its ken, but such vital and war-provoking problems as colonies, raw materials, tariffs, and foreign markets are said to lie "outside the scope of international law."

No State, No Law. These are political problems. They can be resolved only by power politics, with war as its ultimate weapon, or by legislation. They cannot be reduced to a legal enigma nor balanced by a judge on the scales of justice. For, as George Bernard Shaw once made clear, the functions of judge and legislator are mutually exclusive; the former must ignore every interest, the latter take every interest into account.

And precisely because the world's political problems must be solved by legislation if they are not to be solved by force, a world cop attached to a world court, standing alone, could never serve to keep the peace of the world. To achieve this end, the world cop would have to be backed by a full-fledged world government--by a legislature to translate political decisions into written laws and an executive to give such laws substance in action.

John Citizen may not have contemplated any such far-flung scheme when he upped with a Yes to the notion of an international police force, providing a pat example of one of the dangers of polls: an opinion offered on an isolated proposal without taking account of its implications. Yet the whole idea of establishing such a force inexorably raises all the problems connected with the creation of a complete world government.

Since a mere world court would not be enough, what sorts of world government are left, from which a world police force might take its orders?

Experts in the field use two confusingly like-sounding names to describe the two very different kinds of organization that can be established by a group of states or nations. One is a "federation"--a real union like the United States today. The other and far looser kind of group government is called a "confederation."

State Made of States. In a confederation, states are represented as states, rather than citizens as citizens. So in a confederation the real sovereignty, the ultimate power, remains in the national governments, which give up little or none of their own sovereignty in the process of uniting. A confederation never acts directly on the people; it cannot tax them or jail them or regulate them or protect them, it cannot give them citizenship or passports, except through the medium of their own national government.

This country was a confederation--and as such was fast falling apart--during the few years that intervened between the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. The League of Nations was a confederation. And despite the name, Culbertson's World Federation Plan is another.

Relative influence is one of the biggest bugs that would beset both the construction and the smooth operation of a confederated world government. Since confederated governments are made up of nations, not of people, small nations are always demanding equality with large ones--just as the poor man has a vote equal to the rich man's in the U.S. Government.

Yet regardless of voting rights as between nations, a world confederation would constantly be at the mercy of its strongest members. Such a government, if set up after the war, would be completely dominated at the start by the U.S., Great Britain and Russia; it would collapse if they withdrew--as any one of them could and would if its own national interests should ever be seriously compromised or endangered by world government action.

Thus a confederation is forever the creature, never the master of its members. It amounts to little more than an intricately formulated war-&-peace alliance. Its fatal flaw is that its strength is entirely borrowed--and on a demand note at that--from the nations that compose it. Either it acts as a vigilante committee for its strong members or, as in the case of the League, it does not act at all.

State Made of Citizens. A world government, to be strong in its own right, would have to be the master of its members. It would have to be granted by the separate nations a sizable chunk of their sovereignty. It would have to be able to deal directly with people--to tax them, jail them, regulate them, protect them. It would have to be a federation, a genuine union.

The most obvious example of a federal government formed out of a group of sovereign states is provided by the U.S. itself.

By the adoption of the Constitution the states (or, technically, their citizens) gave up the bulk of their sovereignty; they agreed to share with the national government some of their most vital powers and to endow it exclusively with others. Even so, it took a bloody Civil War--a type of threat to future world peace too often overlooked by planners of world governments--to convince some of the states that the nation was more sovereign than they.

It is highly unlikely that a world government could stand in time of trouble with less sovereignty, less governing power, than the states once gave to this nation.

Says the U.S. Constitution: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes . . . to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States . . .

"To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

"To regulate commerce . . . among the several states . . .

"To coin money, regulate the value thereof . . .

"To raise and support armies . . .

"To provide and maintain a navy . . .

"To provide for calling forth the militia. to execute the laws of the Union . . .

"To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers. . . ."

It would be virtually impossible for the U.S. to make war, or to prevent war between the states without these powers. The same holds for a world federation. The other side of the coin can also be read in the Constitution:

"No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation . . . coin money . . . lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports. . . .

"No state shall, without the consent of Congress . . . keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state. . . .

"The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states."

Finally,

"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States . . . shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby; anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding."

A global government could scarcely begin to solve the big problems that lead to war--to tackle the clash of national interests concerned with the wealth of the earth, and the efforts men make to own or use or exploit or develop that wealth--with less powers in itself than are listed in these few extracts from the U.S. Constitution. A global government could not make effective such laws as it might pass, with fewer restrictions on the now sovereign nations.

Are Men Ready? Merely to read these powers and restrictions, and project them in imagination on a world scale, is to make it clear that the U.S. citizen is far from ready for anything remotely resembling a federated world government.

He wants no such government taking over the U.S. fleet and the U.S. air armada.

He wants no such government, in the course of regulating commerce between the nations, to internationalize the Panama Canal--and perhaps to send its police force down there, aboard bombing planes and battleships, to see that the U.S. clears out quietly.

He wants no such government to tax him heavily and spend the money wherever it please at the far ends of the earth.

He wants no such government, in the course of raising an army, to draft his son for service, say, under a Polish general who is trying to keep peace in the Balkans.

He wants no such government, in the interest of equal world citizenship, to force the U.S. to open its doors to immigrants from all nations, be they Japs or headhunters from Borneo.

He wants no such government making and enforcing laws that conflict with and supersede his sacred U.S. Constitution.

And in matters of trade and commerce, he wants no such government turning the borders of the U.S. into mere lines on a map, as the borders of the separate states have become.

Yet if John Citizen, U.S.A., is far from ready for a real world government, he is not alone. For neither is John Bull Citizen ready--nor Ivan nor Juan nor Jean nor Jan nor Hans.

The hold of nationalism is still deep in the people. In no nation on earth--least of all in any powerful nation--are the people yet prepared to trade their precious nationality for true world citizenship, to trust their welfare to the other peoples of the globe.

Peace by Toil. These are the hard facts which all men who like the safe and solid sound of the phrase "international police force" will have to face when the making of the peace is at hand. The seemingly easy way of providing good citizens of the world with security from outside violence is not within reach for the present.

But the fact that the easy answer does not solve the problem does not mean that the problem is insoluble. It means that the problem will require more thought, that the U.S. will have to put considerably more effort into working out the solution.

The U.S. will need to realize that it cannot safely relax into a simple alliance or loose confederation, made holier by lip service to democracy and dedicated to the maintenance of the status quo. It will have to find a framework for world order which, while keeping the peace better than before, permits change. It will have to find a framework which will make allowance for the fundamental U.S. bias toward freedom and growth for itself and for others.

The U.S. people will have to recognize that the peace of the world, after the war, will depend on the good will and the good sense of the dominant nations on earth and that for the U.S. this will have to be a continuing exercise. For peace on earth is not attainable by a single act of will, after which men can lazily forget their task. It is attainable only by degrees, only by constant attention. Wars can be begotten without effort. Peace can be reared only by toil.

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