CHAPTER XX INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES IN TIME OF PEACE; THE HAGUE CONFERENCES HE most valuable feature of the League of Nations as organized in 1919 is felt to be its provision for a continuous series of international conferences. It was the failure of the efforts of Sir Edward Grey in July and August, 1914, to secure the consent of Germany, Austria, and Russia to the holding of an international conference on the Serbian question that finally allowed the great catastrophe to come upon Europe. The most vital defect in the international organization of the past has been the difficulty of securing international conference where, and especially when, it was needed. This form of world government will therefore demand our best attention. International conference may be defined as joint consideration and discussion by representatives of two or more states of matters of interest common to both. Whenever the representatives of two states meet together to settle an international difference, not by the arbitral or judicial process but by discussion and mutual agreement, we have the phenomenon for which we are now looking. Conferences of two nations, however, naturally give way to conferences of several nations, as the problems of international life become generalized and expanded so that they affect more than two states. Eventually we reach the conference in which thirty or forty independent nations, perhaps the states of the whole world, participate. Bi-party conferences become tri-party and multi-party conferences as the interests of all states become further and further interwoven. International conference in its simplest form is merely personal diplomacy as already studied. Whenever the Ambassador of a foreign state visits for business purposes the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the capital where he is stationed we have an international conference. The action takes on its full significance, however, when the confer-1. ence is specially arranged before it takes place, when the questions for discussion are previously defined, and when ✨. the discussions in conference are conducted by representatives specially named for the purpose. If, in addition, the conference includes several nations, as just described, the action is still more significant. Like personal diplomacy of the simpler form, the international conference may end in one of two ways. A formal international treaty of one type or another may be signed; or the results may be left in the form of memoranda or minutes of the discussions. The more important the conference and the questions there discussed, the more likely is it that a formal treaty will be drawn up and signed. Likewise, where extensive agreements are reached in conference and definite decisions are taken, the results will be put in treaty form. Inconclusive conferences on unimportant topics are recorded only in minutes or memoranda of discussions. When the treaty form is adopted for expressing the result, the conference reaches its highest point of significance, and also the highest point of development possible for any of the special forms of international organization. For this is legislation, constituent or statutory. It is lawmaking. The adjustment of differences by personal negotiations and bargains and compromises is a comparatively simple thing; the conclusion of special contractual agreements regarding international relations, and the development of customary law, carry us but little further; the settlement of disputes by arbitration on the basis of existing law, and the administration of international business according to existing law, are not revolutionary, as far as the substance of international rights is concerned. But the revision and amendment of international constitutional and statutory law by deliberate discussion and agreement reaches the most vital point of world government. Petty law-making is to be found in all of the other special fields of international government; here legislation is the principal business, and the practice of diplomacy, the negotiation of treaties, the development of the law of nations, and international arbitration and administration are all, in turn, amenable to its control. The subjects dealt with by international conferences range over the whole field of international relations. The decisions taken may relate to constitutional questions of deep and lasting moment to all nations, such as the decision to establish a compulsory court of arbitration. At times they relate to comparatively trivial concrete questions affecting two states only, such as the cession of a bit of territory by one state to another. The more important questions, both constitutional and practical, arise in conferences held at the termination of wars, and we shall encounter at that point the whole general problem of peace and war and of the relation between peace and international organization. No distinction need be made, probably, between the terms "conference" and "congress." It was once felt that a "congress" must be more formal, more important, and more general, than a "conference." But in view of the practice of speaking of the gatherings at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 as the "Hague Conferences" and of the gathering in Paris in 1919 as the "Peace Conference of Paris,' this distinction vanishes. No international meetings were ever more formal, more important, or more general than 1Satow, §§ 439, 463, 468. |