THE NATURE OF WAR
by Harold S. BIDMEAD
A disease cannot be cured until the doctor understands its nature. War will not be eliminated (i.e. made unnecessary) until we fully understand its true character. War is regarded as a last resort for the settlement of disputes.
For that reason, not everyone considers it an unmitigated evil. But as a means of settling disputes it is no more equitable than the age-old method of trial by ordeal - you were innocent if you could hold your hand in a flame without flinching. Trial by combat, the method employed today, is no better. It merely decides who has the smartest missiles, the most expensive bomb sights.
The self-styled statesmen, with their Leagues of Nations and so-called "United" Nations are still living in the middle ages, still relying on gunboat diplomacy and the impossible device of trying to give every nation sufficient destructive power to overwhelm every other nation or combination of nations. Recognizing that war is an attempt to settle (not merely "decide") disputes leads to the realization that war could be made redundant if we could devise a means of settling disputes and enforcing the settlement peacefully. No device for deciding disputes has ever succeeded unless there was also mechanism for enforcing the settle-ment peacefully. The sovereign provided that power. But sovereignty has so far never been allowed to transcend national frontiers.
To enforce the settlement of international disputes an international sovereignty is required.
The 1919 League of Nations and its mirror image the so-called "United" Nations were attempts to legalize and constitutionalize world anarchy. Anarchy means without a head, i.e. without a sovereign, without a government. The cure for anarchy is government; ergo, the cure for international anarchy is international government. Such a government would of necessity be federal, since all Member States would naturally insist on guarantees against interference by the general government in those affairs that were agreed to be of purely legitimate national concern. (Contrary to the belief encouraged by dishonest politicians, "federal" is not a dirty word; it merely denotes the best known way to divide the powers between the general government on the one hand and the particular member governments on the other).
The UN has machinery for deciding disputes (e.g. the International Court of Justice) but no means of enforcing the settlement by peaceful methods. Nor is appearance before the Court compulsory. The UN consists of puppets nominated by the States Members, no opposition party being represented. Its voting system is so unfair and unjust that no self-respecting democrat in his right mind would swear unquestioning obedience to its decisions. Fortunately, its Charter ensures that such decisions are not mandatory, being mere "recommendations", the sensible ones to be respected, the others to be ignored by any Member State that disapproves of them.
Moreover, the UN consists of a mere handful of democracies, outnumbered and outvoted by regimes whose concern for human rights is expressed rarely in words and almost never in deeds.
The establishment of an international sovereignty solves the problem of how to make the law stronger than any possible delinquent or combination of delinquents. Men will not surrender their arms except to an authority they can trust to defend them and their interests more efficiently and economically than the present system of trying to keep the peace by warlike means, including sanctions which punish the poor, the weak and innocent rather than the guilty. The League of Nations and the UN have thus for the greater part of this century delayed the creation of a genuine peacekeeping body for the world, based on the principles of democratic government.
World federal government may be a distant Utopia, but we must make a start in the right direction. The democracies are the most likely recruits for an interpopular government based on the rule of law. They should lead the way by creating a federal union that is so powerful that none will dare to hallenge it, so just than none will wish to oppose it, and so successful that all outside will clamour to join.
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