How this international organ would function.
Our international organ can handle no more than a fraction of this world-wide interchange.
(i.) We may exclude at once from its competence every interaction that is confined within the limits of a single sovereign unit. Within the British Empire, for example, it is patently impracticable to “internationalize” the problems of Indian emigration to Vancouver or the Transvaal, of the closure of the Australian labor-market against labor from the British Isles, of commercial exploitation in Nigeria or Rhodesia, of autonomy in Ireland or the Asiatic Dependencies. The Empire may handle its own problems well or ill, but it will never consent to waive its sovereignty in respect of them. We should regard the proposition of international intervention as a menace to the Empire’s existence. We should undoubtedly fight rather than submit to it, and every other sovereign State would do the same under similar circumstances. In purely internal affairs international authority will never obtain a footing at the expense of the individual unit.
(ii.) We may likewise exclude interactions between two or more sovereign States in spheres that fall entirely within their respective sovereignty. The Dominion of Canada or the U. S. A. would never submit to international regulation the question of Japanese immigration along their Pacific seaboard. If Russia wished to float a loan, she would never allow our international organ to decide where and in what proportions it should be placed: she would insist on keeping her hands free, and making the best bargain for herself both from the financial and the political point of view. Italy and the Argentine would never relinquish their respective sovereign rights over the Italian laborers who cross the Atlantic every year to reap the South American harvests. International authority would be flouted as uncompromisingly in these instances as in the former.
Control of weak States, and of immigration.
(iii.) There are some units, however, so raw in their growth or so deeply sunk in their decay as to lack the attribute of sovereignty altogether—units which through want of population, wealth, spiritual energy, or all three together are unable to keep the spark of vitality aglow. Such dead units are the worst danger that threatens the peace of the world: each one of them is an arena enticing the living units around to clash in conflict, a vacuum into which the current of life swirls like a maelstrom. In these “no-man’s-lands” where no sovereignty exists, our international organ can and must assert its own sovereignty against the sovereign States outside.
(a) In every such area the standing international executive should regulate immigration from over-populated sovereign units—German colonization, for instance, in Anatolia, or Indian settlement on the alluvium of Irak.
(b) It should likewise regulate the inflow of capital....
(c) In areas where the pressure of spiritual energy is so low that the population cannot save itself by its own efforts from political anarchy, the international executive should be prepared to step in and organize “strong government.”...