454 The Drawbacks of the League

Thus the League as an instrument of international

if
icgarded as partisan from beginning to end, andthat
a time to use it she came also to realize its
aciocame
Germany n wasfor
machinery, its difused responsibility,
be turned (as
its delayed
cumbersome
Hitler's action, and its
pacifistic professions might purposes. inWhether
of the Rhincland) to her own
basis is arguable, but it could only be a drag on
remiitarization
the Leaguc
could
have become the proper instrument or a ermat recovery on a liberai
national destiny
as it began to be shapedl by Hitler. To nonc of the ambitious
aggr
who arose in the thirties did the Lcaguc commend itseli, either in:es
bias towards the status quo, or in its Anglo-French association with t
ors
Versailles system, or in its disinterested concepts.
The League had also other drawbacks which impaired its chanra
of success. Its machinery, like its power, was also based in subtle a
well as in obvious ways upon Anglo-French principles. As the con
gressional system of 1815-22 was closely associated with the autocrat:.
principles favoured by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, so the League of
Nations system was based on democratic practices and Parliamentary
traditions familiar enough to France and Great Britain, but wholly or
partially alien to states which had only a short or no cxperience of
real democratic government. Such states were unversed in the habits
of Parliamentary compromise and unaccustomed to the authority of a
majority vote.
Finaly, the League of Nations had no military and administrative
power to cnforce its will upon recalcitrant states, and the implementa
tion of its decisions rested upon individual nations who could not afford
to take the risks or pay the costs involved, and were not wholly per
suaded that the quarrels were their own.
The League has now come to be discredited on all sides--unjustly,
perhaps, for its "immenscly benehcent secondary functions" havé ben
overlooked. In the League an idea was again incorporated in a political
organization, and another cxperiment in international co-operation
was made. The tradition of the Europcan concert was strengthened,
and, in spite of failure, it is upon this tradition only that in the long
run the reconstructors of the world can safely build. The International
Court of Justice has acquired a high reputation; the work of the expert
committees in matters of health, social hygiene, economic questions.
and acute refugee problerms has been of great value. A clearing-house
for international projects, and a meeting-place for the statesmen, legis
lators, and thinkers of the world, still cxists in the Palais des Nations.
It is on the foundations of the League that ater the Second World War
another international structure was crected, and it is by the history of
its failure that the United Nations is trying to learn.
 Internal Problems 455
External problems were in many casces closcly linked with, and com
plicated by, internal problems. There is hardly a state of importance
that did not sufler serious internal disturbances during those years,
somc cxperiencing one or more violent revolutions, others long periods
of chronic disorder. A revolution of extreme violence had overthrown
the Tsarist régime of Russia in 1917. On the defcat uf the Central
Powers revolutions broke out all over Germany and Austria, over
turning the ancient Hohenzollern and Habsburg dynasties as well as
the princes of the smaller German states. Serious Communist move
ments gained temporary successes there andin
Hungary. In Italy the
house of Savoy survived for a time, though it was completely eclipsed
by the revolutionary Fascist triumph of 1922. The Balkan states were
shaken by recurring agitations; the Greek monarchy, which, like the
monarchics of Russia, Germany, and Austria, was made the scapegoat
of national defeat, was overthrown in 1g24' after the disastrous
Anatolian war with Turkey. In Turkey a spectacular Westernizing
revolution, comparable to the Japanese revolution of I867, abolished the
Sultanate and the Caliphate, established a republican dictatorship, and
introduced the Latin alphabet, the admission of women to public life,
and other Western measures. In Spain chronic disorder
found a
temporary remedy in the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-30),
but his fall in r930, a prelude to the downfall of the monarchy in r931,
accentuated the divisions and conflicts of Spanish political life. Pro
vincial nationalism, native and imported anarchy, Communist and
Fascist intervention, prepared the bitter and brutal civil war of 1936-39
from which the Nationalist forces, under the "Caudillo," General
Franco, with Fascist and Nazi help, emerged victorious. In China war
and revolution went hand in hand. Civil war in Ireland, violence and
agitation in India and Palestine, broke the peace of the British Empire,
while serious strikes and Labour or Communist movements shook or
threatened the stability of Governments in France and Britain.
It was by no means clear in what interest these
revolutions were being
formed and agitations conducted, what was the predominant
behind them, or whether the immediate was also to be the influence
ultimate
beneficiary. Was it to secure nationalism or provincialism, democracy
or despotism, secular materialism or freedom of thought, social welfare
or predatory proletarianism, that empires were being shaken,
overturned, civil and international law defied, altars degraded, thrones
priests
murdered, properties confiscated, order and confidence and security
'In 1g23 King Constantine was deposed in favour of George II.
republic was declared, but George Il was restored after a plebiscite in In 1924 a
I935 November
 Revolutionary Communism
456 was seen in the new
answer
shattered? Part of the
them of unexampled
ruthlessness.
emerged,some ofrevolution gathered and marched from the
The forces of though the interests they came to
despoüsms that
fromthe Right, ideological. represent Let and
haps in the more
cnd national
camc
than
all the influences which may be
were per
From the Left
Communism,
the heading ofdestruction of a whole civiilization and its
grouped
comprehensive in their bearing (for
underthey
aimed at therevolutionary in their intention, theoretical
new basis), objective, instinctive, predatory, and, reshaporinigginally,
on a
emancipating in their
tvrannical in their
operation.
reply to the ter oristic,
and
From the Right came,
a number of
largely in
challenge
counter-revolutionary movements which.of Com
munism,
they all had national integration as a common factor, cannot
single name. They included the comparatively
though
bemoderate under a of
groupedmovement Italian Fascism and the extreme manitestations
were comprehenei
of German National Socialism. They too
in their bearing, disciplinary and unifying in their int
'totalitarian,'
tion, highly practical in their objective, opportunist, expedient, or pier
meal in their and policy, dynamic in their characte.
revolutionary, pr
Pntly instinctive, often predatory, terroristis,
and tyrannical in their operation. Though these two movements wer
professedly antagonistic to cach other, and difered in their ostensihle
methods, bore
economic and political aims, they adopted similar tactical
similar tyrannical characters, and produced closely resembling tozal:
tarian despotisns. in the
Revolutionary Commurism, though finding its rationalization
impetus and
teachings of the German Jew Karl Marx, derived initsRussia in 1g7
character from the successful Bolshevik Revolution
overthrown in March
and the following ycars. When Tsardom wasinstalled which oscillatcd
I917 a moderate democratic Government was betwee
uncertainly between Marxism and constitutional democracy,
Utopianism and opportunism, between militarism and pacifism. Ater
a vain attempt to conduct a war and a revolution at the same ti
Kerensky's moderates were overthrown in November 1917 by, te
Bolshevist party under Lenin and Trotsky, a party which, thoug
aminority, was, like the Jacobins of France, one of actionhimselt
and to te
Lenin quite definitcly abandoned the War and devoted of extremt
Revolution. He at t once turned all the doctrines andtheories
with German;
socialisn into legislative
on the idealistic basis ofdecrees. He declared for peace
no annexations and no indemnities.
October
2
by the Russian calendar. 1917.
193 decrces were passed between December 31,
November 8 and