SMALL NATIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 November 1943, Page 4

SMALL NATIONS

IN A SMALL WORLD PROBLEMS OF POST-WAR SECURITY. POSSIBLE DEVELOPMENTS. * (By Carlyle Morgan, in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) The small nations seem to have known longer than some large nations that this is a small world. They know it will be even smaller after the war. They are aware that some theorists think it is becoming too small for small nations. For example, one may sometimes hear it said that small nations have been tolerated chiefly because they provided buffers between big ones—making it harder for the big ones to get at each other for a fight. Have small nations, then, outlived their usefulness? When the main immediate threat which one big State could hold up to another was its land forces, the fact of a neutral country blocking the line of march was an important political as well as geographic fact. Now that air power is the factor to be considered, the value of small States as buffers has declined. STANDARDS OF VALUE. Fortunately this value is not the only one to be found in small nations. The people who live in them value them for other reasons—very similar to the reasons for which people who live in big nations value their homelands. Citizens of small countries are no more prone than are citizens of large ones to admit that the only reason for their existence is somebody’s else's convenience. There are elements in the position of small States which do make it different from the position of large Powers. If the big States decided that the little ones were in the way, to remove them would not take long. Sufferance is not, however, something that big States exercise toward little ones out of pure charity. If it were, the little States could not feel even such security as they have. Nor could they preserve self-respect. The sense of security and self-respect is maintained otherwise. For small States it rests in part on a knowledge that the Great Powers could never agree as to which of the small ones to do away with. In part also it rests on a genius for constructive service to the community as a whole. It rests as well on a considerable skill in statecraft, which has to be the keener because the physical weapons to back it up are not so heavy. But beyond this manifestation of ability to survive, .small nations have shown a striking capacity for makingpositive contributions to international society. SCANDINAVIAN LEAD. It is no new thing among Scandinavian States, for example, when legislators from several of them get together to draft virtually identical laws which shall apply in each country. Sometimes a court case in one country may be decided with the aid of citations from cases tried under similar laws in another. Here is a lead that great powers might well develop. And even on that most delicate of subjects—national history—the Scandinavians have managed to work together so that the textbooks of one country avoid unbearably offensive statements about another. Doubtful questions are covered in a separate book as points of honest difference. Suppose history had been so studied by the peoples of the Great Powers! The future of the small nations is not clear from this point-in-chaos. The outlook for some of them is not sc bright as for others. In a world-wide system of collective security in which all Great Powers could feel safe, the independence of small States could hardly be a question. But short of that, some bigpowers, Russia in particular, are likely to demand defensive outposts which will infringe upon or absorb some of the very smallest of the States. The claims to statehood among these units are not uniformly strong And cultural and other rights may be safeguarded for them by treaties guaranteeing selfgovernment in local affairs. As one spokesman for small nations: has put it, “The real and lasting solution is a world organisation, with certain subgroupings.” Those citizens of big powers who do not wish to see any big Power, even their own country, absorz small nations can follow their position to a logical conclusion by working with all their might for an effective organisation of international security.