The Hague Conference of 1907 is over and the delegates return to their respective countries. Aspirations for the pacific settlement of international disputes have been voiced and a list of possible arbitrators has been drawn up described by the formal name of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Well and good! No obligation was accepted to have recourse to the Court, but at least the Conference went so far as to declare its acceptance of “the principle of compulsory arbitration” and its applicability to international agreements. At the same time the Conference declared that the divergencies of opinion in respect to compulsory arbitration “have not exceeded the bounds of judicial controversy,” and that the delegates, in the course of their long collaboration, had succeeded “in evolving a very lofty conception of the common welfare of humanity.”

Some sixty-five years ago, when on April 14, 1890, the Union of American Republics was established, the great hope for world peace, the great promise of bringing international relations under the rule of law, lay in the development of arbitration. The Plan of Arbitration proposed by the Conference was for its time a radical one. Arbitration was to be obligatory for all disputes except those which in the judgment of a state might peril its independence; and the example thus set by the American States was not without its effect at the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. The limitation of armaments was obviously beyond the plans of practical statesmen. But even so, that was not ground for discouragement. If only the procedure of arbitration could be given greater authority and extended into ever-widening fields, it might be possible to look forward to an agreement upon the limitation of armaments when there was no longer the same need of them.

So great has been the progress of the inter-American regional system over the past fifty years that it is difficult for a later generation to understand how hesitant and faltering the statesmen of an earlier day could have been in their approach to problems for which we have now found, if not the solution, at least the basis upon which to construct a solution. States were sovereign then, and sovereignty, as the term was practically applied, meant that states were not so much above the law but rather outside its scope in respect to the fundamental and recurrent issue of the defense of national interests.

The order of the International Court of Justice, under date of July 5, 1951, in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Case, has raised a number of interesting questions of law and procedure in respect to which there appears to be considerable controversy.

When the Eighth International Conference of American States met at Lima in 1938 it was planned that the Ninth Conference should meet at Bogotá, Colombia, in 1943. The outbreak of the war in 1939, however, called for emergency measures in the form of three consultative meetings of Foreign Ministers and a special conference held at Mexico City in 1945. The First Meeting of Foreign Ministers at Panama in 1939 laid the basis for the maintenance of continental neutrality in accordance with standards of neutral conduct formally set forth in the Declaration of Panama. The Second Meeting of Foreign Ministers, held at Habana in 1940, proclaimed the principle of mutual defense against an attack by a non-American State and adopted measures to prevent the transfer of territory in the Western Hemisphere from one non-American State to another. The Third Meeting of Foreign Ministers, called in January 1942 after the entrance of the United States into the war, called for the breaking of diplomatic relations with the Axis Powers and for other measures of continental defense against the subversive activities of agents of tbp Axis Powers. In 1945, a special conference assembled in Mexico City to consolidate the defensive measures of the American States and to make pla is in anticipation of the conference to be held at San Francisco for the establishment of a general international organization for the maintenance of peace. This was followed by another special conference held at Rio de Janeiro in 1947 in which the collective security provisions adopted at Mexico City were given permanent form in the Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance.

Of all the terms in general use in international law none is more challenging than that of “ intervention.” Scarcely any two writers are to be found who define this term in the same way or who classify the same situations under it. To one writer it is the interference of one state in the affairs of another; to a second writer it is “ unwarranted” interference; to a third it is interference in the domestic or internal affairs of the state; to a fourth it is interference in external as well as internal affairs. Some writers include interference of a third state between two belligerents in time of war, by taking sides with one against the other; others include only interference between the parties to a civil war. Some include “ diplomatic intervention,” where the intervening state interferes in behalf of its citizens in cases of alleged denial of justice by the other state; others regard such interference merely as “ interposition,” since it does not involve an attempt to control the character of the foreign government but merely to influence its conduct. Many jurists regard all intervention as illegal; an American jurist constructs an entire volume on international law around the central theme of the right of intervention.