Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Marcel Hoden
Volume 18 • Number 1
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EUROPE WITHOUT THE LEAGUE
By Marcel Hoden
? ?
THE suggested epitaph "Died at the age of twenty!"
is not correct, for actually the League of Nations did not
live even that long. Born in 1919; denied at birth by the
United States; nevertheless flourishing for a time; but later
neglected by France and Great Britain, and then abandoned by
them outright, it finally succumbed at the end of September 1938
under the repeated and unresisted blows of the totalitarian ag
gressors. The destruction of the League signified more than the
decline of a political system in which Great Britain and France
had played the dominant part. That would have been dangerous
enough. But in addition itmeant the collapse, for the time being
at least, of the most men had ever
powerful barrier which sought
to erect against war. Without itEurope lacked itsmost promising
instrument for preventing the overthrow of civilization and a
return to chaos.
Some authorities, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, at
tribute the League's downfall to its weakness in the Manchurian
affair, or to its failure to solve the disarmament problem, or to its
lack of any effective procedure for the revision of treaties. These
were all important matters, though they were connected with im
perfections in methods of operation (responsibility for which lies
at the door of the Great Powers) more than in any basic
principle.
The writer gives it as his opinion, formed after in
participation
League activities from the very start, that its faults in
procedure
were far from it to death. As a matter of fact the
dooming
never seemed more or more
League flourishing powerful than it
did in 1934 and 1935.
The destruction of the League was an integral part, indeed the
most important and necessary part, in the deliberate
? design of the ?
totalitarian states and to divide,
Germany, Italy Japan
weaken and immobilize the peace forces in the world and thus to
open the door to domination of the world. In the following pages
the writer proposes to trace the origin, the causes and
underlying
the principal phases of this struggle ? which in less than three
years (1936-1938) brought the project of the totalitarian states
to success.