Читать книгу The League of Nations and Its Problems: Three Lectures - Lassa Oppenheim - Страница 2

I. The purpose of the three Lectures is to draw attention to the links which connect the proposed League of Nations with the past, to the difficulties involved in the proposal, and to the way in which they can be overcome.

II. The conception of a League of Nations is not new, but is as old as International Law, because any kind of International Law and some kind of a League of Nations are interdependent and correlative.

III. During antiquity no International Law in the modern sense of the term was possible, because the common interests which could force a number of independent States into a community of States were lacking.

IV. But during the second part of the Middle Ages matters began to change. During the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries an International Law, and with it a kind of League of Nations, became a necessity and therefore grew by custom. At the same time arose the first schemes for a League of Nations guaranteeing permanent peace, namely those of Pierre Dubois (1305), Antoine Marini (1461), Sully (1603), and Emeric Crucée (1623). Hugo Grotius' immortal work on 'The Law of War and Peace' (1625).

V. The League of Nations thus evolved by custom could not undertake to prevent wars; the conditions prevailing up to the outbreak of the French Revolution made it impossible; it was only during the nineteenth century that the principle of nationality made growth.

VI. The outbreak of the present World War is epoch-making because it is at bottom a fight between the principle of democratic and constitutional government and the principle of militarism and autocratic government. The three new points in the present demand for a League of Nations.

VII. How and why the peremptory demand for a new League of Nations arose, and its connection with so-called Internationalism.

VIII. The League of Nations now aimed at is not really a League of Nations but of States. The ideal of the National State.

IX. The two reasons why the establishment of a new League of Nations is conditioned by the utter defeat of the Central Powers.

X. Why—in a sense—the new League of Nations may be said to have already started its career.

XI. The impossibility of the demand that the new League of Nations should create a Federal World State.

XII. The demand for an International Army and Navy.

XIII. The new League of Nations cannot give itself a constitution of a state-like character, but only one sui generis on very simple lines.

XIV. The three aims of the new League of Nations, and the four problems to be faced and solved in order to make possible the realisation of these aims.