1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 79universal in character: the British member’s plan involved the decentral-
isation of the system of security in respect to the imposition of military
sanctions. The reason for the British member’s advocacy of a decentral-
ised approach to security concerned the view that it was impractical to
expect states to accept an ‘unlimited liability’ to employ force in distant
regions: ‘What can Ecuador know or care about affairs in Manchoukuo?
Why should the United States be implicated in the domestic squabbles of
Europe? How can Japan take a hand in the settlement of a dispute in the
Dardanelles?’^239
At the same time, the British member suggested that the regional
leagues he proposed should be affiliated with Geneva in order to ensure
that in the event that any one of them ‘should see fit to name an aggres-
sor and impose sanctions,’ they would have the support of the rest of the
international community, a key manifestation of that support according
to the British member’s plan being the imposition of economic sanctions
which would be obligatory for all.^240
Quincy Wright, an international legal expert and a member of the
American delegation, expressed scepticism about the idea of establish-
ing regional machinery for the maintenance of peace and stability in
the Pacific area. In a paper submitted to the conference entitled ‘The
Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ he observed that in
order for such machinery to be really effective it would have to be based
in a balance of power and that such a balance could not be realised at
that time unless ‘Powers whose major interest is not really in the region
are brought it,’ in which case, he pointed out, the machinery would
hardly be regional.^241 The treaties issuing from Washington Conference,
Wright observed, while providing for regional cooperation and the reso-
lution of certain regional differences, were never in any authentic sense
an attempt at the regional organisation of the Far Eastern powers.^242
In any case, he observed, these treaties had been ‘morally weakened
soon after their conclusion’ by the passage of the American Immigration
Act of 1924, had been ‘further weakened by their failure to function in
(^239) Ibid.
(^240) Ibid.
(^241) Quincy Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ in Holland
and Mitchell, Problems of the Pacific, 1936 , 425–6.
(^242) Ibid., 409, 425.