INTERNATIONAL “Who Rules the
World?” Opens, most auspiciously, the political New Year
1928. Not since the World War has a twelvemonth commenced with all
nations so substantially at peace, with all major governments so
markedly stable. While this unusual global calm prevails, it becomes
possible and prudent to scan certain key nations and their great men,
asking and answering a crisp, significant question: “Who rules the
World?” British Empire. The strong trend of the Dominions is
toward increasingly autonomous minor-nationhood, but the Empire
continues to be wielded from London by the British Parliament and the
Cabinet of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. He, moderate by nature,
Conservative by party, is constantly swayed toward reactionary measures
by the overwhelming Conservative majority in the House of Commons,
and by three dynamic reactionaries in his Cabinet: 1> Chancellor of
the Exchequer Winston Churchill; 2> Home Secretary Sir William
Joynson-Hicks; 3> Secretary of State for India the Earl of Birkenhead.
The foreign policy of the Empire is at bottom tough and
rational; but a great swath is cut among League idealists by British
Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain, a weak antidote to Churchill
and Birkenhead. Soviet Union. The nominal parliamentary and
executive bodies of the Soviet Union are actually controlled by the
Communist party—the only one permitted to exist—and this is directed
by a “political boss,” Josef Vissarionovitch Stalin, who
abstains from exercising public office but is the all-powerful Dictator
of Russia. The Soviet Union is technically “a federation of
constituent republics,” and its far flung administrative network
is exceeded in scope only by that of the British Empire. At present
Dictator Stalin is pursuing a moderate and conciliatory foreign
policy. French Republic. The fluid, radical republicanisms of the
French Parliament are now harmonized and harnessed by the
“Sacred Union Cabinet” of Premier Raymond Poincare. Because
he averted a national panic in 1926 by rescuing the franc from what
seemed a bottomless decline, the Chamber now allows him the authority
of an absolute dictator over French finance. His reactionary ideas of
foreign policy are not, however, stomached by the Chamber, which
gives loose rein to that great, constructive pacifist, Foreign Minister
Aristide Eriand. The Senate is always ready to follow M. Poincare’s
conservative financial policies and ever suspicious of M. Briand’s
peace innovations. Italy & Spain. Both these “constitutional
monarchies” have relinquished the once democratic form of their
parliaments and reduced to a mockery the prerogatives of their kings.
Signer Benito Mussolini, as Dictator of Italy, and General Don Miguel
Primo de Rivera, his prototype in Spain, have now so claw-hooked their
authority into the texture of law and politics that the only
combative weapons left to their enemies are assassination and revolution.
Both statesmen have successfully spurred their countrymen to strides
and leaps in material progress. They are the fashion plates aped by all
modern personal autocrats. Examples: President Mustafa Kemal Pasha of
Turkey; Dictator Marshal Josef Pilsudski of Poland; Dictator General
Carlos Ibanez of Chile. . . .
