The United Nations as Viewed From Geneva

The United Nations Organization is an essentially American product, as the jeep or the atomic bomb. Conceived at Dumbarton Oaks near the American Capitol, inspired by American ideas, born under American chairmanship on the American West Coast, having decided on a permanent site in America, it is even endowed with an American surname. In fact as in word, there would be no United Nations were there not a United States. It is therefore very generous of an American body to ask me, as a foreign visitor to your shores, what I think of this American product. But it is correspondingly embarrassing for me to attempt to tell you. When one is invited out to dinner, it hardly does to comment, except in terms of the highest enthusiasm, on the cuisine of your host or on the beauty of his daughter. Your invitation to this intellectual feast therefore obliges me to choose between politeness and sincerity. As I am speaking here at your request, not in any diplomatic capacity whatever, but solely as a friend among friends and as one man of science to a host of academic colleagues, known and unknown, I unhesitatingly opt in favor of complete frankness. I venture to trust that our common ideals of scientific freedom will assure my impunity from any reproach of indiscretion or of impertinenc

Nationalism and the League of Nations Today

The world today is appallingly interesting. It is interesting, because it is changing so fast. It is appalling, because almost every change we have witnessed in the course of the last years has been a change for the worse. As mankind is ever proceeding from the past, through the present, toward the future, all change may, in the purely dynamic sense of the term, be called progress. If, however, we seek to estimate the value of change in terms of human welfare, as also if we consider it in the light of the goals pursued, the most significant recent changes in the political and economic spheres are clearly reactionary. For generations, and in some cases for centuries, ail nations within the orbit of our Western civilization have, through wars and revolutions, been striving to secure for all their members greater physical and moral security, greater political equality, greater individual freedom. Greater security—that is, more assured protection against the violence of their fellow-citizens and against the arbitrary oppression of their governments. Greater equality—that is, less discrimination on grounds of race, of sex, of religious and philosophical creed and of social position. Greater freedom—that is, more latitude for the self-expression and self-assertion of the individual in the face of the authority of tradition and of the state. Guarantees for the protection of the fundamental rights of man, the abolition of arrest without trial and of imprisonment for debt, the suppression of slavery, the extension of the suffrage to all and thereby the subordination of the government to the will of the people (that is, of the majority of all the people), parliamentary control of the budget (that is, no taxation without representation), the recognition of freedom of thought, of speech, of assembly, of the press, the independence of the judiciary and the autonomy of the university—such are some of the ideals for which our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers fought, bled, and died. Such are some of the conquests of human dignity over barbarism, of knowledge over ignorance, of right over might, which they triumphantly achieved and which they proudly bequeathed to u

The Evolution of the League of Nations

All living organisms, no matter how minute or insignificant, when examined through the microscope, appear enormous, intricate, and extraordinarily active. Similarly, the world at large, when considered through the microscope of contemporary analysis, has no doubt, at all historical periods, struck its immediate witnesses as being infinitely complex and eventful. Is it, then, a mere delusion if the flow of recent and current happenings impresses us as being exceptionally uneven and rapid in its course, as resembling indeed a swollen Alpine torrent at the melting of the snow in the spring? I believe not. I believe that, even viewed in the perspective of centuries, the last ten years will be characterized by the future historian as an epoch of extraordinarily numerous and radical changes. To consider the world in its political aspects only, what previous decade has witnessed as many momentous events as the last? The final, decisive struggle and the end of the greatest war that has ever taken place. In Europe alone, the crumbling of four of the most powerful monarchies. The setting up or resurrection of seven or eight new or reborn sovereign entitie

La Conversion de Sismondi

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