Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1939, Page 390
380
LE NORD
central chapters: “The Organiza-
tion of the League’s Machinery”
and “the Organization of Peace and
Justice”. The question of the com-
position of the Council, its compe-
tence and procedure, the relation
between the Council and the As-
sembly, the Assembly as an instru-
ment of control, the problems of
conciliation, arbitration and judi-
cial procedure, disarmament and
security a. s. o. are thoroughly
treated. Chapter IX (Permanent
Officials of the League), in which
the author gives a very interesting
description of the great fight for a
reorganization of the Secretariate,
merits special appreciation. The im-
portance of this problem for the
development of a really indepen-
dent international spirit and thus
for the treatment of the different
questions in the various stages, is
elucidated with great perspicuity.
This holds good especially of the
vivid statement of the president of
the Norwegian Storting, Mr. Ham-
bro’s untiring fight in this field,
from the moment when he for the
first time made his appearance as
a member of the Norwegian dele-
gation in 1926. The author is cer-
tainly right in his saying “that he
changed the atmosphere of the
Fourth Committee”. AScandinavian
reader will appreciate several re-
flections on the different mentality
of the Northern people and its in-
fluence on their methods in Geneva.
Mr. Shepard Jones’s book shows
that the special “neutral” mentality,
which the Scandinavian States re-
presented in Geneva, constantly has
stamped their policy within the
League. “Throughout the League’s
history no member have been more
active and determined in their
loyalty to this Assembly than the
Scandinavian States. To safeguard
the rights of this body and to effect
its constitutional supremacy over
the work of the League have been
the foundation-stone of Scandi-
navian policy,” says the author
(page 96). Even if these words have
been formulated with regard to the
Scandinavian perception of the cen-
tral position of the Assembly within
the organization of the League, they
may stand as a motto of the general
policy of the Northern countries
against the League of Geneva. It
may be said that this policy has not
been marked by any great sense of
reality, that it has been an ideologic
and not a praetical policy. And it
must be admitted that the whole
period, which the author is treating
in his book, to-day appears as pic-
tures from a dead world. But the
conviction that the time must come,
when the idea of justice in the re-
lation between nations must be vic-
torious, has its roots so deep in the
Scandinavian minds that not even
the present lawless conditions m
Europe will be able to eradicate
that belief. The present book is a
memorial of twenty years’ fight f°r
this dream of the North within a
world of hard realities.
Holger Andersen.