Economic Foundations of the League of Nations

Abstract

THE economic collapse which has come to Russia, AustriaHungry, Germany, Belgium, and in only lesser degree to England, France, Italy and the neutral countries of Europe, is forcing on the attention of the peace conferees in Paris the extent to which the world has been internationalized during the last halfcentury, and the necessity for a new kind of peace if the world is speedily to come to life again. We are accustomed to think of international questions in exclusivelypolitical and territorial terms. This is one of the heritages of the dynastic and military order, which puts emphasis upon enlarged boundaries, a big population, and the other emblements of the purely political state. Such have been the political concepts for hundreds of years, and it is not surprising that the representatives of all the powers at the Peace Conference should have brought to their task traditions of a peace based upon political and territorial adjustments. Fifty years ago nations were largely self-sufficient. They produced for their own consumption. Iron, steel, copper, rubber, cotton, wool, silks and the products of the tropics had not entered into the lives of all peoples as they have at the present time. The twenty years which preceded the war was a period of colossal international expansion and in 1914 the foreign trade of the world exceeded $40,000,000,000. Of this, one-fourth was in the hands of Great Britain and Germany. Surplus wealth had ventured out from creditor countries, especially England, France, Germany and Holland, in search of trade and commerce, for the development of resources in backward countries, the building of railroads, and the making of loans in backward states. Upwards of $40,000,000,000 had been so invested by the great creditor nations of the world. These are but suggestive of the extent to which the world was interlaced by economic connections. Branch banks radiated from London, Paris and Berlin. The ports of Great Britain, as well as Hamburg, Bremen, Antwerp and Rotterdam, were entrepots for the wealth of all the world. Explorers were followed by traders 813