Germany's Withdrawal From Geneva Does Not Mean War--No Gain for France; Germany Weak

The following interview with Arthur N. Holcombe '06, is the sixth in the Crimson's regular series of interviews and articles by members of the Faculty upon important trends and crises in current national and world affairs.

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"Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations does not mean War in Europe. The vastly superior military power of France precludes the possibility of aggression by Germany. And a war of punishment on the part of France would simply mean another invasion of Germany, like that of 1923, through which France lost several million francs and immeasurable goodwill, and gained nothing of lasting importance. France will fight now only to maintain the status quo if that is threatened by an aggressively arming Germany. And Germany is not arming. England is, of course, as anxious to avoid a world conflict as is the United States.

"What Germany's withdrawal from the League does mean is that the first class powers which oppose the status quo are beginning to negotiate matters of high policy directly with the nations concerned instead of through the League. This movement is traceable to the fact that the organization of the League is such as to give undue prestige, if not power, to second-class member nations which are, almost without exception, unqualified supporters of the status quo.

"Although France alone can prevent important revisions of the Versailles Treaty in the League Council by making use of the unanimity rule, she has always been able to justify her position in the public eye by mustering to her support the smaller powers which depend for their very existence upon a preservation of the status quo. In the eyes of the World, France naturally is in a more favorable position as one of several nations opposing revision rather than as a single power refusing to be budged from the top of the pile. It is the necessarily stand-pat atmosphere at Geneva which this situation implies that has driven Germany from the League, and has reduced the League to a mere machine for the arbitration of second magnitude problems."