Their cooperation can solve the very difficult problems pending between the Soviet Union and her western neighbors, or between her and China; it can oppose aggression from wherever it comes, and thus create the atmosphere in which mutual distrust will dwindle and new avenues will be opened for free economic intercourse, for rising standards of living in Ibero-America, Africa, and Asia, for greater and more universal concern for public welfare.
The organization of the United Nations will have to elaborate and to enforce a universal bill of rights, guaranteeing in the constitutions of all countries equality before the law and respect for human personality. Impossibility of aggression and total demilitarization will also produce a change of heart in Germany and Japan and assure their cooperation in peaceful progress under law.
To Achieve a Good World
The peace treaties will not create a good world by themselves. Injustice and exploitation will remain with us internationally, as they remain with us nationally. The steadfast fight against them will have to continue for many generations to come.
But as preceding generations have succeeded, nationally, in regulating and inspiring the continuous struggle for greater freedom and justice, with its concomitant conflicts and tensions, by a framework of peace under law, so can this generation create a similar framework internationally by collective responsibility for, and enforcement of, peace by the United Nations, which include representatives of all climates and all races, China and Brazil, France and Norway, Iraq and Ethiopia.
That will demand mutual adjustments and compromise. Many of us may not like, for different and contrary reasons, the present administrations of the United States, of the British Empire or of the Soviet Union, but they are the only available cornerstones upon which peace can be actually built. Peace under law was established nationally, without waiting for ideal conditions, in all the imperfection of human nature and human institutions. It has worked on the whole well. The same task is before us internationally. It is the only alternative to lawlessness and chaos.
Hans Kohn, distinguished historian and authority on nationalism, was born in Prague and educated at the university there. During the first World War he served as an officer in the Austrian army and was taken prisoner by the Russians. There he received his first teaching experience in a minature university organized within the prison.
Kohn came to the United States in 1931 and has since been associated with such institutions as the New School of Social Research, the University of California, the University of Colorado, Dartmouth College, Grinnell College, and Smith College, where he heads the history department.
During this period he has conducted courses in history and international relations, always attacking the rampant nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Author of many books, he has traveled extensively throughout the world.