The Dumbarton Oaks proposals of October 7, 1944, reflect a development of ideas concerning international political and judicial organization in which the Section of International and Comparative Law of the American Bar Association has played a significant part. Its recommendations calling for the establishment of an international organization, including an improved system for settling justiciable disputes, have found their way into resolutions of the Association, composed of some thirty thousand lawyers. These resolutions preceded the joint projects of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China for an international organization for the maintenance of peace and security.

The procedural aspects of international arbitration have largely been neglected. Tribunals are prone to borrow their rules of procedure from one another without considering their suitability for the particular arbitration at hand. Time rarely permits then to act otherwise in the hurry and pressure attendant upon the opening of an arbitration. Agents and counsel are anxiously preparing their cases and awaiting the opening of oral arguments. During the course of the arbitration the ever-nearing date fixed for its completion, the mounting expense of maintaining the staffs, and the burdens of other official duties awaiting the arbitrators and advocates upon the completion of their tasks all tend to discourage the deliberate consideration of procedural problems.Though the need for procedural reform was long ago recognized, the problem has received relatively little attention from writers.

For the first time in over one hundred years the American public has large numbers of foreign prisoners of war in its midst. While German naval prisoners were held in the United States during the last World War they numbered only a few thousand men, as compared with the total today of over three hundred thousand Germans with additional numbers still pouring into our ports. The task of housing and feeding these prisoners, of providing for their other needs as well as of guarding them and putting them to work at productive labor, has been the responsibility of the War Department. With few precedents and practically no experience to fall back upon, it has done and is doing an enormous job with results that, as a whole, are a credit to the good name of the United States.

International law was no more prepared for the dynamics of the present war than was the Maginot school of military strategy. International lawyers had given little serious thought to the legal problems which total war would bring. Consequently, while international arrangements were concluded on special questions (e.g. on aerial warfare), the main body of the 1907 Hague Convention, including the section dealing with military occupation,remained unchanged. Military occupation was still conceived of as a temporary phenomenon with limited objectives. But totalitarian warfare as waged by the Axis powers has had unlimited objectives, aimed at nothing less than the complete political and economic subjugation of the occupied territory. In practice the enemy has recognized no restraints of either law or custom save the threat of immediate retaliation. Far from “respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country,” as the Hague regulations require, the Axis has systematically destroyed the political and legal order in the occupied territories. It has substituted quislings in the place of duly constituted local authorities, and has employed them for economic as well as political ends.

The U.S.S.R. is destined to play a decisive role in establishing an effective international organization of security. Therefore a summary of current trends of thought and attitudes in the Soviet Union is here presented, reflecting its foreign policy and its views on the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals, the Bretton Woods Articles of Agreement, the legal status of the Polish Govemment-In-Exile, the treatment of Germany, the Chicago Civil Aviation Conference, the legal status of the Atlantic Charter and the situation in the Far East.

In the discussion of current problems of international organization frequent reference is being made to the action taken by the Council of the League of Nations in 1939 with reference to the membership of the Soviet Union. While the matter may be thought to have interest chiefly for historians, it might serve a useful purpose to reexamine the action taken in 1939 from a legal point of view. It is conceivable that a conclusion on the legal points involved might serve as a basis for removing some of the untoward features of the existing situation.

As the first working agency of the United Nations, already almost two years old, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration is of special interest to students of international organization. Despite its unique features it has already grappled with many of the problems that will confront all future international organizations. Its financial experience is particularly interesting because all such organizations, whether dealing with political, judicial, or economic subject matter, have very early in their history to go through the difficult process of collecting funds from resolutely sovereign-minded member governments. The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, in view of its coordinating authority over all international specialized agencies, cannot fail to be guided by the results of the financial experience of UNRRA. The International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development can be expected to be especially attentive to UNRRA's experience because, like it, they require the collection of vast funds for more than administrative purposes.

The result of the conversations between the delegations of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, in the Autumn of 1944, is not a Charter for the international organization to be established after the war. It is only Proposals for such a Charter; these Proposals are, moreover, as Secretary of State Cordell Hull pointed out, neither complete nor final. They do not concern all subject matters to be regulated by the future Charter and do not present precise formulations of legal rules to be binding upon contracting parties. This work still remains to be done. Hence it may seem to be premature to compare the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals with the Covenant of the League of Nations. Such a comparison cannot do justice to the achievements at Dumbarton Oaks; it is justifiable only as an attempt to contribute some suggestions for the great task of drafting the definitive text of the future charter; it must not be taken as a conclusive criticism.

Since the collapse of the European system of the Middle Ages and the birth of modem international law most jurists have worked on the assumption that the principles underlying the international legal order are radically different from those that lie at the base of national law. With the disintegration of the authority of the Pope and the Emperor there had come into being a number of independent states that recognized no political superior and hence considered themselves as equals. In their relations with each other, at least, these states acted like the sovereign bodies which in fact they were. In so far as international relations were concerned the world had returned to a condition of complete anarchy. The states of the world lived in that condition of natural equality described by Hobbes where each was the potential enemy of every other. In the formulation of their policies and in their acts each state took into account its own interests only and when these interests came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the only arbiter was brute force.

In the course of the last fifty-five years the countries of the Western Hemisphere have developed effective instruments and procedures for cooperative action in many fields of common interest. There is, in the first place, the official governmental machinery for hemispheric cooperation—the Inter- American system—which operates through thirty permanent agencies. There are, furthermore, some thirty-nine semi-official and private agencies (Inter-American, Caribbean, Latin American, and South American regional, as well as bipartite) which have been established in response to recommendations of general or special Inter-American conferences, under the auspices of the government of some one American state, or by private initiative. And, finally, there are seventeen official agencies created by joint action of two states to deal with problems of special interest to them. In all, there are now eighty-six international agencies in the Americas, over half of them governmental. An adequate presentation of this very extensive machinery for collaboration would exceed the scope of an article. We shall only attempt here to show the variety of common interests now served by international agencies in the Western Hemisphere. Of necessity, the description of individual agencies must be rather sketchy but detailed information concerning the history, purposes, internal administration, and accomplishments of all agencies here mentioned may be found in a volume which has just been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

If a defeated Japan is to be “ pared back to her volcanic core,” China will be a prime beneficiary. The Cairo Declaration promised to return to her Formosa, the Pescadores, and Manchuria. But what of those parts of the Japanese colonial empire which were not Chinese? Some other arrangements must be made for Korea and the Japanese mandated islands. Liquidation of Italy's African empire raises similar questions.