The United Nations Organization! Can It Prevent War?

It is doubtless hard for the readers of "The Woman's Voice," who passed the war years in a fortunate land far from the fields of battle, to picture the conditions through which their sisters, the women and girls of the West, have passed in the seven years just gone. Tens of millions of them were bereaved of a kinsman or a beloved; they watched their families break apart and their homes come crashing down, their children waste with hunger, suffer the pains of cold and sickness, and die a slow death. Tens of millions of women spent a great part of their lives hiding, terror-stricken, in the shelters, or wandering homeless along the roads or in remote villages, feeling that their present and their future lay exposed to every danger, a plaything in the hand of brute fate. And today, the war ended but the political problems not ended, they watch with fear the course of the new world crisis, dreading lest a third world war break forth from it and put a final end to the few hopes that remain to them and to all mankind.

It behooves the women and girls of the East to give this question — the question of war or peace — the greatest part of their attention. For should a new war break out, God forbid, it may this time break out in the East or spread to it; and our women, who are the cornerstone of our social edifice, resting as it does upon the family and the household, would then suffer many times over what the women of the West suffered in the last war. For peace must be a vital question in woman's eyes, as it is a vital question in man's; and it is the right of every woman and every man — indeed it is their duty — to search diligently for the effective means that may be employed to consolidate peace and drive away the specter of war.

Thinkers have searched in the past, and search still, for the pillars and foundations of peace. Some of them thought to prevent war by preaching peace and persuading people of its benefits and blessings — and failed; for people are convinced of the benefits of peace, they preach it and call for it, and no one goes to war by choice. Some believed that the spread of learning and culture would suffice to establish peace — and were mistaken; for wars are not kindled by ignorance: they spring rather from countries that hold the first rank on the ladder of civilization, while the backward peoples are as innocent of them as the lamb is of the raids of wolves. Some thought of limiting armaments or abolishing them, and so ignored the facts of the case: states do not fight because they are armed; they arm because they mean to fight. Were the use of airplanes and armored cars forbidden them, for example, they would make do with cannon and rifles; were cannon and rifles forbidden them, they would make do with swords and knives; and were swords and knives forbidden them, they would invent some other weapon with which to fall upon their neighbors, to usurp a right or to defend one. Arms are not the cause of wars; they are but the instrument of war, which its owner whets to secure the upper hand over his opponent. Some counseled that the great powers conclude among themselves treaties of alliance to preserve the world 'balance'; and such treaties were indeed concluded, and are still being concluded — only they yield a result contrary to what certain visionaries imagined: they divide the world into warring camps, they register the disputes existing between states and clothe them in an official legal form, and they hasten the appointed hour of war and make it a foregone thing. And some wished the states to pledge themselves 'upon their honor,' in writing, sealed with the signatures of their representatives, not to resort to means of violence for settling the disputes that arise among them — and so deceived the people and deceived themselves; for war is not bound with bonds of paper. Only yesterday, in the year 1928, all the states of the inhabited world pledged themselves, in the 'Pact of Paris,' to settle their problems by peaceful means alone, and 'declared war upon war,' in the phrase of Briand, France's foreign minister; yet their pledge remained ink on a scrap of paper, and did not delay the coming of war by a single second.

All the attempts just recited came to utter failure — and it was natural that they should fail utterly — because there lies in them an error of thinking that vitiates them in root and essence. Wars are not prevented by arbitrary, improvised devices, nor bound with bonds of words. Political and social questions are not treated by literary and poetic methods, nor do they suffer the meddling of meddlers: they have their rules and their own principles, which set them apart from literature and poetry and bring them near to the 'sciences.' Had people been able to free themselves from the various bondages that press upon their minds and souls, and taken the straight road of treating the question of peace in a detached, scientific manner, it would not have been beyond them to discover the root of the disease and to strive for its extirpation.

The great self-evident truth which must be adopted, and by whose light one must proceed in such inquiries, is that war will not disappear unless its causes disappear. In vain do we try to mislead ourselves and mislead others by saying that this greatest of social diseases can be cured by a superficial, external remedy. The disease is deep and deep-rooted, and it will not be destroyed unless its roots are cut and its causes removed.

The causes of wars in this age of ours, as bare historical and social reality shows them, are of two principal kinds: the first political, the second economic and social:

External Sovereignty

First — The world is divided into political blocs called 'states,' independent one of another, each bearing the responsibility of defending its own existence and survival, and the interests of the human groups gathered under its banner. Each of these blocs has the right to form a military force, to be used in attacking others or in warding off attack from itself, and the right to pursue a foreign policy drawn from its own particular interests, not from the interests of human society at large. If, then, one of these states attains a degree of strength that matches or surpasses the strength of the rest, its soul tempts it to aggression against them, and its neighbors think of breaking its power before the matter grows too grave. This is what happened in 1914 and in 1939, and what had happened in the wars before them: one state threatening to dominate, and other states fearing for their dominance. Certain philosophers have given this political occurrence the name 'the struggle for survival,' supposing it a natural law among human groups as it is a natural law in the life of individuals. The truth is that this 'struggle for survival' is, up to a point, a desirable thing; and in the life of individuals it has been regulated, thanks to the courts, the administration, and the forces of order, so that most of its evil consequences have vanished, and it has become forbidden to individuals to trespass upon the rights of others, on pain of punishment. But in international relations it has not yet been regulated. External sovereignty is a fundamental principle among those on which the present order of the world rests. It is, no doubt, a progressive principle if measured against the past and viewed from its negative side, its intent being that no nation should be placed under the rule of another. But it is a very dangerous principle if viewed from the positive side — namely, that every state on earth, and their number runs above sixty, should pursue whatever foreign policy it pleases, without being bound by the interests of human society at large. To acknowledge in every 'independent' state the right to form military forces of its own is nothing else than to concede to it the right to back its 'independent' foreign policy with force, and the right to resort to violence to impose that policy upon others. Were there in the world a supreme political body, fortified with mighty military forces, to which the states might bring their causes as individuals bring theirs to the ordinary courts for the settlement of the disputes that arise among them, war would not occur.

Individual external sovereignty is therefore the first of the obstacles that must be surmounted if peace is to be secured — an obstacle never yet surmounted in the history of mankind since its beginning. Yet the modern world is moving toward surmounting it, and will doubtless surmount it in the future. The only two attempts worthy of mention that have been made to establish a supreme international body, to oversee world politics and prevent resort to war, are both of recent date: the first is the 'League of Nations,' founded in 1919, which failed utterly because it was not a serious attempt; the second is the 'United Nations Organization,' founded at the 'San Francisco' conference last year.

The compass of this issue of "The Woman's Voice" is too narrow for us to speak of the 'United Nations Organization,' to see what hopes we may pin upon it and what fears it stirs, and to pursue the inquiry into the economic and social causes of wars; so we defer their consideration to the coming issue.