The value of international parleys

WALTER LIPPMANN

I am writing this on a day when the London Naval Conference has collapsed for the fifth or sixth time. For all I know it may really have collapsed finally and completely. At a distance of three thousand miles it is impossible to tell and I have attended enough international conferences in the last twelve years to know that a condition of chronic collapse is the normal state of conferences in which real interests are at stake. The perfectly smooth, the perfectly happy conference, is one in which nothing important is being discussed.

Therefore, even if the London Conference really collapses in whole or in part, even if, as is possible, it creates more problems than it solves, I do not intend to be cynical about the value of international conferences. The temptation may be very great. I am going to try to remember that in the perspective of fifty years what is almost certain to count is not the successes or failures of a particular negotiation but the sheer fact that in the decade after the World War the great powers tried again and again to adjust their real conflicts by the method of general consultation. In any view of history which is longer than the view of this morning's headlines that is a stupendous event. It will, I think, seem to the historian as something comparable to the birth of representative government, the development of the national state, the arrival of constitutional order. If I am right, then in the longer view, the details of one conference, its blunders and its selfishness, will seem as unimportant and will be as completely forgotten as the actual record of the first session of the Congress of the United States. There are few men living who know what the first American Congress did. The important thing now about the first Congress is that it met.

For more than four hundred years the drift of affairs has been in the direction of separate, arbitrary sovereignties. In these four hundred years we had almost lost the conception which Catholic Europe brought down from the Roman world, that there is some sort of common law for all civilized mankind. The loyalties of the ordinary man had become increasingly absorbed in isolated and competitive aggregations of power. In the Nineteenth Century the system was in continual disorder owing to the conflicts between strong states seeking imperial conquest and of weak states seeking to become free. The period culminated in the World War which was at once a gigantic clash of imperial alliances and an enormous eruption of submerged nationalities. The one indisputable lesson of the war was that a tolerable civilized life was impossible in a world where each national sovereignty used its power arbitrarily for its own ends.

The series of international conferences

which have assembled since the Armistice all rest upon the premise, consciously or unconsciously realized, that the world is too small to contain fifty arbitrary and absolutely independent sovereignties. Independent and self-governing they may remain, but somehow they must march in some kind of order. They cannot be allowed to consult their own whims alone. There is a society of which each nation, however great, is only a member, and that society must in one way or another be embodied in human affairs. The succession of international conferences is the embodiment of the society in which each nation is only a member.

These long-winded affairs conducted in hotels and offices and occasionally in splendid halls, with their interminable production of memoranda, rumors, and equivocal announcements, their retinues of correspondents and homesick attaches and secretaries, their devastating dinners and resonant speeches, are the immediate actuality of what in the perspective of time will almost certainly appear like the resumption of the ecumenical ideal. Great things rarely seem great at the moment when they occur. The actuality has a way of being prosaic and tedious, and it is only by an effort of the imagination that the immediate spectator can feel the greatness of great events. Greatness is a quality which emerges in memory and reflection rather than in perception, and our first feeling of what is thrilling and stupendous is an entirely unreliable forecast of what we shall think of it later. For that reason we have cause to discount the fact that the people at large are rather thoroughly bored with international conferences. The youngest of them may live to see the day when they will boast about how in their youth mankind took the first practical steps to re-establish a universal human society. And they will almost certainly tell their grandchildren how with beating hearts and breathless interest they watched the unfolding of history.

I hope I have not given the impression that because the process of conference is so great a thing each conference and each move in a conference is entitled to unreserved enthusiasm. On the contrary no real progress is possible unless the public judgment on this historic novelty is at once extremely critical of the detail and imperturbably convinced and loyal to the principle. That is not an impossible combination of attitudes. Most men have achieved it in their judgment of domestic politics.

They look, for example, at the government of the United States, say at a Presidential election. No man who has ever seen how a campaign is actually conducted, how issues are posed, how speeches are concocted, how candidates are stage-managed, can retain any romantic illusion about the process of popular government. And yet the scene which ensues at Washington on March fourth when the largest political power on earth is peaceably transferred from one party to another is an enormous vindication of human dignity. The tranquil surrender of great power, the substitution of peace for civil war, is the wonderful outcome of a shabby and rather dishonest bawling match. It is unreasonable, therefore, to have a simple emotion about popular government: to be completely cynical because its detail is so sordid or to be completely exalted because the end is so great. It is not necessary to choose between deciding to admire the working of popular government and deciding to abolish it. It is not only perfectly possible, but in fact necessary, in a modern state, to look brutally at the immediate facts and to look affectionately at their ultimate significance.

Without some such mixture of emotions the citizen of a modern state would go completely off his head. How else, for example, could a citizen of Chicago contemplate Big Bill the Builder and still want to live in Chicago? In the immediate present William Hale Thompson and his gang are the government of Chicago. There are no words to express the indignity of that fact. Yet in another sense he is not the government of Chicago, for Chicago existed before Thompson and will exist after him, and it is to that Chicago that the decent man is loyal.

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In any long view of international affairs the truest measure of progress is the degree in which the nations accept the principle of consultation. There are many different kinds of machinery for preserving the peace. They are all more or less debatable. Some prefer the League and some the Kellogg Pact, some prefer this treaty and some that one. The essence of the matter lies, I think, elsewhere. It lies in the acceptance of the idea, in the establishment of the assumption, in the growth of the habit, of resorting to conference in order to settle the conflicts of nations. Covenants and pacts derive whatever value they may have from the underlying will to consult. Without that will to consult the whole grandiose machinery is either empty piety or a snare and a delusion.

All particular solutions of international problems are more or less temporary. The wisdom and justice and permanence of each is open to question. In the nature of things, since this is a world where nothing stands still very long, there can be no such thing as a final settlement. The only permanent thing that men can attain is the habit of settling, of sitting, and talking, and arguing until they have settled. Were that habit deeply ingrained, we should be living in an ordered world.

We do not live in an ordered world. We live in a disordered and dangerous world and amidst the tentative and feeble beginnings of something better. In the actual work of these conferences we can see disclosed quite clearly the appalling amount of disorder and danger which lie under the surface of modem life. It is only in the willingness to continue the process of consultation that we can honestly discern the signs of something better.