RE-SHAPING THE NEAR EAST.

Hokitika Guardian, 28 April 1921, Page 3

RE-SHAPING THE NEAR EAST.

(By Valentine Williams). LONDON, Feb. 2(5. In the coming week the whole attention of international diplomacy will he focused upon the capital. In (lie stately and picturesque setting of St James’s Palace two Conferences are to be staged, each of them in itself a diplomatic event of the first magnitude. The Near Eastern Conference, whose decisions "ill make history in the swarming cities of the East, is, leaving out of the reckoning the Paris Peace Conference as an event of a different order, the biggest tiling of its kind since the famous Congress of Berlin of 1878. Of the Reparations Conference, which will follow it, let it suffice to say that it deals with the hub of modern statesman-

ship, to wit, finance, and that it aims at accomplishing the supremely difficult task of putting into concrete shape the financial clauses of the Versailles Treaty. We are supposed to have arrived at the age of open diplomacy. But in diplomacy as in business great decisions arc only arrived at as the fruit of long and intricate negotiations behind the scenes. At these, as at former conferences, the decisions arrived at will not have been reached, whatever the communiques may announce, at the green table of St James’s. Here they will be ratified, it is true, but the knotty points will have been unravelled, the inevitable 1 compromise effected, over a chop, maybe, in some wliite-and-gold grill-room or else during a tete-a-tele stroll in the winter greyness of the park. The crowd will see the plenipotentiaries, the men bowed down with the responsibilities of office, whose names will stand beneath the protocols of the conferences of London. But in their train come those who, hardly known to the great public, scarcely visible in the brilliance emanating from their chiefs, will surely play in London, as at other great conferences, the role of the Men Who Got Things Done, the inventors of formulae, the architects of compromise. And so in the shadows of the Conference will swarm a host of permanent officials, of experts, of secretaries, of gobetweens, and here, behind the scenes, the real work of.the Conference will be accomplished. In the eyes of foreign diplomacy London ranks high in prestige. “Go to Paris to listen,” the old diplomats used to say, “to Berlin to work, to St Petersburg to learn, to Vienna to observe.” But to London no catchword is attached —perhaps because it was held that the Court of St James’s was a school which offered tuition in all the attributes of diplomacy enumerated The reality was, I think, that, the great and many-sided social life of London absorbed the foreign Diplomatic Body so that here it was much les* segregated than in other capitals.

The Diplomatic Body in London lias always found, and has, consequently, always set, a high social tone. Thcio are no scandals and, thanks in no small measure to the honourable good sense of the newspapers, no indiscretions. International diplomacy sends its Lest men to London. The p'root of tlieii success in adapting themselves to that curious medley of rigorous etiquette and pleasing informality of which the modern diplomatic life o! London is composed is seen in the long term ol wars which so many foreign diplomatic representatives have spent at the London post.