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The League of Nations refused to use its teeth simply because the two nations which dominated the League had no will to use them. Those nations were Great Britain and France. European politicians came to believe that the League was no more than an alternate tool of the Franco-British balance of power—a belief that was ignobly confirmed when the Hoare-Laval pact, giving Mussolini a free fist in Ethiopia, put an effective end to the League's lone effort to apply not even military but economic force against an aggressor.
The Tools of Policing. Thus the best effort the world has yet seen toward establishing effective international policing was rendered worthless by the two unanswered questions: Who gives the cop his orders? What kind of order: are given—or not given? These questions involve far tough er problems than do questions of the structure, mechanics and make-up of the police force itself. But the mechanical problems have most fascinated planners, and they are not to be ignored.
Roughly speaking, international police schemes come in three basic models:
> No. 1 is a police force made up exclusively of national military units which either take orders directly from an international boss, or else take such orders in directly, through their own national governments acting as agents of the international boss. (Much the same thing, since no national army or navy would ever march off or sail off without the consent of its national government.) This was the League of Nations model which failed, although not because of its mechanical setup. This is the model, if any, which the world is likely to see again after the present war. Mechanically, it varies little from an old-fashioned multipartite military alliance.
> No. 2 is a world police consisting of a truly international force, recruited or drafted from different nations and owing allegiance, in theory at least, to none. Obviously, it would have to be Samson-strong, or else its establishment would have to be linked with a program of general national disarmament.
> No. 3 is a world police that is a combination of the two, with an international force, supplemented by national armies and navies, as reserves. This is the kind of plan which is today setting the conversational tone of most talk about policing the world.
Among planners, No. 1 is usually quickly dismissed as a proved failure—and also because it offers little stimulus for parlor ingenuity. No. 2 still has its backers. But No. 3 probably now has most popularity. No less than three times since World War I, strong proposals for a police force, truly international in whole or in part, have come from the nation that made the Foreign Legion famous.
Popular Models. On three occasions, first at the Versailles conference, again before the League in 1923, and finally at the Disarmament Conference of 1932, the French submitted carefully worked out proposals for an international police force. The other nations were officially uninterested. But in England Lord Davies paid attention to the French. His brainchild, the New Commonwealth Society, of which Churchill became British Section President in 1936, stressed an international air police, to be twice as strong as the strongest national air force. Its unique feature was an international intelligence service.