Date of Award

5-1931

Degree Type

Bachelors Essay

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

John A. Laff

Second Advisor

William J. Grace

Abstract

This thesis represents an effort to discover a way for the nations of the world to cooperate in the prevention of economic depression. The author has studied the League of Nations with the purpose of finding out what it can do in the promotion of such cooperation and has discovered organic weaknesses which seem to him to bar effective action by the League as it is now organized. He has recommended in the final chapter the organization of two new conferences, one representing commerce and industry and the other representing finance, which he considers essential to a workable program of economic cooperation. As it is now organized the League is limited in its economic endeavors to the holding of conferences of experts who can do little but make recommendations, which the nations may or may not follow. Since the completion of the original draft of this thesis an event has occurred which conclusively demonstrates the weakness of this kind of economic control: Germany and Austria announced late in March 1931, that they had completed negotiations for a tariff union contemplating ultimate free trade between those two countries, thus directly following the recommendation of the League Economic Conference. Yet this announcement raised a storm of protest in other countries of Europe, and a large section of the European press even went so far as to predict that the proposed union would, if permitted to go through ultimately plunge Europe into another World War. As a result, according to the "Chicago Journal of Commerce" of April 18, 1931, plans for the union have been dropped. Because of this fundamental weakness the author can see little hope for any program of control until a reorganization of the League's economic machinery is affected along the lines indicated in Chapter IV of this thesis.

Comments

A thesis submitted to the College of Liberal Arts of Marquette University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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