296 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
sive financial backing are permitted to develop, the matter of resolu- 
tion will be infinitely more difficult. Experience has shown beyond 
a shadow of doubt that disputes involving important economic and 
political interests are far more difficult to solve than are those of a 
purely juridical nature. 
A series of multilateral air law agreements also will have to be 
decided upon, and it might be profitable if an international body 
were established to administer such problems as reconnaissance, the 
surveying and laying out of transport lanes, the allocation of fran- 
chises, the adoption and enforcement of administrative air regula- 
tions, and the like. But these suggestions can readily be agreed upon 
if the jurisdictional issues are settled. 
On a number of occasions it has been proposed that’ remaining 
unoccupied polar territory be recognized as belonging to the Society 
of States (i.e., as res communis rather than as territory belonging to 
no state, res nullius). Then no state could legally acquire a valid 
title to the territory and no title of an individual state would be 
valid as against the others. Naturally this applies only to island 
territory, and does not include those islands already consigned to 
a particular state by international agreement—as was the case with 
Greenland and Spitsbergen—and those islands which can ‘be con- 
sidered as appertaining to a state by virtue of prescriptive rights. 
All remaining Arctic island territory should be internationalized, 
to be administered either by the League of Nations or its future 
counterpart, by some special international administrative agency, or 
by some qualified individual state as a mandate. 
