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Crisis in the World Order
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19790 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
4,093 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
We are living at a time in which crucial choices confront us. The choices that we make now will determine whether the twenty-first century permits the concept of human freedom to emerge more meaningfully than ever before in history, or whether it will eventually impose new forms of authoritarianism and thought control on mankind.
There have been other presumed turning points in this century. World War I was the "war to end wars." And Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations was the presumed key to that denouement. The old policy of alliances would be replaced by collective security, and the secret treaties that produced the alliances would be replaced by open treaties openly arrived at.
Unfortunately, World War I was not a turning point in the history of international relations, and Wilson's ideas were more suited to the ivy-coated walls of Princeton University than to the rough and tumble of world politics. World War I had been produced by a combination of factors, including Prussia's seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, which prevented the normal shifting of alliances that characterize a "balance of power" system; the dilemmas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German "blank check" to the empire; and Russian pan-Slavism. Entirely overlooked was the fact that the Concert of Europe had prevented major war for roughly one hundred years.
If there had been no League of Nations, the normal pattern of alliances might have prevented World War II, and would have done so anyway had the British not used the League as an excuse to refuse the French request for alliance. A military response surely would have brought Hitler down at the time of the Rhineland move in 1936 and likely would have done so in the autumn of 1938. Almost as counterproductively, the League's sanctions against Italy in the case of Abyssinia were sufficient to drive Mussolini into the arms of Hitler, but not to prevent the conquest of Abyssinia.
Wilson had prescribed incorrectly. The world was not at a turning point in respect to international systems. But his reforms were to play a not insignificant role in driving the world to a real turning point. At fault also were the other erroneous lessons we learned from World War I. The pacifism that led Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain to fear the political consequences of a rearmament program, the blindness to the revolutionary challenge of Hitler, and the problem posed by Stalinist Russia all assisted in the dance of death toward which the gods drove the leaders of the Western
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