This evening I am asking you to consider with me for a while the subject of international boundaries, which, by a process involving many forces, has come to have a very important position in international law. Ratzel, the great German authority in the field of political geography, said that “the mathematical precision of boundaries is a special characteristic of higher civilization; the progress of geodesy and cartography have permitted the making in Europe of political boundaries as well as geographical abstractions.” I employ the term “boundary” rather than the term “frontier,” for “frontier” is used in two senses: one, that of the boundary; the other, that of the zone, narrower or wider, where one state ends and another begins, in which sometimes the exact limit of that frontier has never been exactly fixed.

An editorial on the Turkish Institute of International Law by Professor Philip Marshall Brown, President of the American Peace Society, appeared in the October 1943 issue of this JOURNAL. I had the pleasure of publishing in the ULUS newspaper on the 23rd of February, 1944, a translation of this editorial, which contained the expression of many good wishes for our Institute no less than for Turkey itself and I was rewarded by seeing that it aroused great interest and profound gratification in learned and political circles in Turkey. Needless to say, this favorable comment on its inauguration and work, written by an authority in the most progressive country in the world, was recorded with deep gratitude and pride by our Institute.

The twenty-sixth session of the International Labor Conference—one of the more important in its history—was held at Philadelphia between April 20 and May 12, 1944. Forty-one countries were represented by official delegations and three by observers, making a total of forty-four countries represented. Twenty-eight delegations were fully tripartite while twentythree contained cabinet ministers and members of legislative bodies. If the size of the session was a noteworthy indication of interest in its agenda, the delegates’ national rank and experience—political and technical—was hardly less so.

The economic interdependence of the different countries of the world explains the great importance of international transportation and, consequently, of legal rules able to make sure that the transfer of goods with the utmost simplicity, safety, and speed will be practicable. If this is true for the world as a whole it is, obviously, even truer in the case of Europe, a densely populated area, divided among many sovereign states. Up to a certain point the purely national legislation of the different countries may be able to provide for international transportation as well, but this point is soon reached and then international cooperation becomes a necessity. This works, at first, through bipartite agreements—which also serve as stop-gaps when attempts at broader collaboration have failed—but the truly promising way to regulate international transportation is by multipartite conventions. In Europe agreements of this type have existed for a long time.

Upon the collapse of France and the signing of the Franco-German Armistice on June 22, 1940, there were rumors that military and naval bases in Syria and the Lebanon might be used by Germany against France’s former ally, Great Britain. In a broadcast from Beirut the French High Commissioner and the Commander-in-Chief of the French Forces in the Levant, General Mittelhauser, thereupon declared, that hostilities had ceased in Syria and the Lebanon and denied any thought of handing over bases to the Axis Powers.

The legality of the annexation of Austria by Germany under international law stems out from the peace treaties signed in the suburbs of Paris at the end of World War I. The Treaty of Versailles of June 28, 1919, between Germany and the Allied and Associated Powers.