The New Outlook, by Nicholas Murray Butler 203
Above the Battle, by Romain Rolland 205
The New Idealism, by Rudolf Eucken 214
The Future of Patriotism, by Walter Lippmann 217
The Future of Civilization, by A. E. Zimmern 221
Towards the Peace that Shall Last, by Jane Addams and Others 230
APPENDIX: PEACE PROPOSALS AND PROBLEMS
I INTERNATIONAL
1. Ford Neutral Conference at Stockholm 243
2. Central Organization for a Durable Peace 247
3. Union of International Associations 248
4. International Bureau of Peace 249
5. International Congress of Women 250
6. Conference of Socialists of Allied Nations 259
7. Conference of Socialists of Neutral Nations 261
II UNITED STATES
8. League to Enforce Peace 264
9. National Peace Convention 264
10. World Peace Foundation 266
11. American School Peace League 267
12. Women’s Peace Party 268
13. New York Peace Society 270
14. Socialist Party of America 271
15. David Starr Jordan 273
16. Nicholas Murray Butler 275
17. Chamber of Commerce of the United States 276
III GREAT BRITAIN
18. Union of Democratic Control 277
19. Fabian Society 278
20. Independent Labor Party 296
21. National Peace Council 298
22. Women’s Movement for Constructive Peace 298
23. Australian Peace Alliance 300
24. Charles Roden Buxton 301
25. H. N. Brailsford 302
IV GERMANY
26. German and Austro-Hungarian Socialists 306
27. “Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft” 306
28. Manifesto by Eighty-eight Professors and Statesmen 308
29. South German Social Democrats 310
30. German Socialists 310
31. Peace Manifesto of Socialists 311
32. Dr. Bernhard Dernburg 314
33. Prof. L. Quidde 316
34. Ed. Bernstein 317
V FRANCE
35. General Confederation of Labor 322
VI SWITZERLAND
36. Swiss Peace Society 323
37. Swiss Committee for Study of Principles of Durable
Treaty of Peace 323
VII HOLLAND
38. Nederlandsche Anti-Oorlog Raad (Dutch Anti-War Council) 325
VIII Norman Angell on Differential Neutrality for America 326
INDEX 333
INTRODUCTION
When the storm has gone by and the skies after clearing have softened,
we may discover that a corrected perspective is the result of the
war that we are most conscious of. Familiar presumptions will appear
foreshortened, and new distances of fact and possibility will lie before
us.
Before the fateful midsummer of 1914 the most thoughtful part of mankind
confidently held a lot of agreeable presumptions which undoubtedly
influenced individual and collective conduct. The more intangible of
them were grouped under such name symbols as “idealism,” “humanitarian
impulse,” “human brotherhood,” “Christian civilization.” The workaday
ones were pigeonholed under the rubric: “enlightened economic interest.”
Between the practical and the aspirational were distributed all the
excellent Aristotelian middle course presumptions of the “rule of reason”
order.
And why not? The nineteenth century had closed in a blaze of scientific
glory. By patient inductive research the human mind had found out
nature’s way on earth and in the heavens, and with daring invention
had turned knowledge to immediate practical account. The struggle
for existence had become a mighty enterprise of progress. Steam and
electricity had brought the utmost parts of the world together. Upon
substantial material foundations the twentieth century would build a
world republic, wherein justice should apportion abundance.
Upon presumption we reared the tower of expectation.
Yet on the horizon we might have seen—some of us did see—a thickening
haze and warning thunderheads. Not much was said about them, but to some
it seemed that the world behaved as if it felt the tension of a rising
storm. With nervous eagerness the nations pushed their way into the
domains of the backward peoples. They sought concessions, opportunities
for investment, command of resources, exclusive trade, spheres of
influence. Private negotiations were backed by diplomacy, and year after
year diplomacy was backed by an ever more impressive show of naval and
military power.
But we did not believe that the Great War impended. There would still be
restricted wars here and there of course, but more and more they could
be prevented. The human mind that had mastered nature’s way could master
and control the ways of man. Economic interest would bring its resistless
strength to bear against the mad makers of the wastes of war. A sensitive
conscience would revolt against the cruelties of war. Reason, which had
invented rules and agencies to keep the peace within the state, would
devise tribunals and procedures to substitute a rational adjustment of
differences for the arbitrament of war between states.
The world has recovered from disaster before now, it will recover again.
Presumptions that disappointed have been reexamined and brought into
truer drawing. Expectation has been more broadly built, it will be more
broadly built again.
There is conscience in mankind, and the war has sublimely revealed it,
as it has revealed also undreamed of survivals of faithlessness and
cruelty. The presumption of rational control in human affairs has been
foreshortened, but not painted out. In the background stand forth as grim
realities, forces of fear, distrust, envy, ignorance, and hate that we
had thought were ghosts. Conscience is as strong and as sensitive as we
believed it to be; reason is as effective as we presumed; but the forces
arrayed against them we now see are mightier than we knew. So now we
ask, By what power shall conscience and reason be reinforced, and the
surviving forces of barbarism be driven back?
There is but one answer left, all others have been shot to pieces.
Conscience and reason are effective when they organize material energies,
not when they dissipate themselves in dreams. Conscience and reason
must assemble, coördinate, and bring to bear the economic resources and
the physical energies of the civilized world to narrow the area and to
diminish the frequency of war.
But how? General presumptions will not do this time. There must be
a specific plan, concrete and practical; a specific preparedness, a
specific method. And what is more, plan, preparedness, method must be
drawn forth from the situation as the war makes and leaves it, not
imposed upon it. They must be a composition of forces now in operation.
There were academic plans aplenty for the creation of pacific
internationalism before the war began. The bankers had invented theirs;
the socialists, the conciliationists, and the international lawyers
respectively had invented theirs. The free traders, first in the field,
had not lost hope.
It would be foolish to let ourselves think in discouragement that all
these efforts to organize “the international mind” were idle. They were
not ineffective. They did not organize the international mind adequately,
much less did they reform its habits, but they quickened it; they
organized it in part, they pulled it together enough to make it powerful
for the work yet to be done.
What we have to face, then, is not the extinction or abandonment of
internationalism, but the fact that the ideal, the all-embracing and
thoroughly rational internationalism lies far in the future, and that
before it can be attained we must have that partial internationalism
which is practically the same thing as the widening of nationalism that
is achieved when nations coöperate in leagues or combine in federations.
The league of peace may be academic or it may soon stand forth as a
tremendous piece of realism, we do not know which, but the forces that
are holding many of the nations together in military coöperation now are
present realities, and they will be realities after the military war is
over. There will still be tariffs, but the areas within which tariff
barriers will no longer be maintained will be immensely widened. Beyond
these areas will be, as now, various arrangements of reciprocity. In like
manner, there will be a determination on the part of the coöperating
nations to stand together for the enforcement of international agreements
and to discipline a law-breaking state that would needlessly resort to
arms. The internationalism of commerce, of travel, of communication, of
intellectual exchange and moral endeavor will continue to grow throughout
the world, but in addition there will be the more definite, the more
concrete internationalism of the nations that agree in making common
cause for the attainment of specific ends.
Within this relatively restricted internationalism there will be,
there is now, a certain yet more definite aggregation of peoples,
interests, and traditions upon which rests a great and peculiar moral
responsibility. The English-speaking people of the world are together the
largest body of human beings among whom a nearly complete intellectual
and moral understanding is already achieved. They have reached high
attainments in science and the arts, in education, in social order, in
justice. They are highly organized, they cherish the traditions of their
common history. To permit anything to endanger the moral solidarity
of this nucleus of a perfected internationalism would be a crime
unspeakable. To strengthen it, to make it one of the supreme forces
working for peace and humanity is a supreme obligation.
FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS.
CONCERNING THE AUTHORS QUOTED
Jane Addams has been head resident at Hull House in Chicago for many
years. She is widely known for her leadership in the social movement, and
particularly for her connection with the International Congress of Women
at The Hague.
Norman Angell is the author of “The Great Illusion,” and one of the most
brilliant of the workers in the cause of peace. He is also the author of
“International Polity,” “Arms and Industry,” and “The World’s Highway.”
Ed. Bernstein is one of the leaders of the German Social Democracy of the
revisionist wing.
H. N. Brailsford is a prominent English traveler, correspondent, and
essayist, and one of the most illuminating writers on world-problems. His
books include “The War of Steel and Gold,” “Shelley, Godwin and their
Circle.”
Nicholas Murray Butler is President of Columbia University, Acting
Director of the Division of Intercourse and Education of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and Chairman of the American
Association for International Conciliation.
Charles Roden Buxton is a prominent English Liberal, and member of the
Union for Democratic Control.
John Bates Clark is Director of the Division of Economics and History of
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Professor of Political
Economy at Columbia University.
Bernhard Dernburg is the German ex-Minister of Colonies, who spent some
time in America at the beginning of the war as semi-official spokesman
for German opinion.
Charles W. Eliot is President Emeritus of Harvard University, and a
leader in the peace movement.
Rudolf Eucken is one of the most widely-known of living German
philosophers. He visited America in 1913.
G. Lowes Dickinson of Cambridge University, England, is author of
“Letters of a Chinese Official,” “Justice and Liberty,” “A Modern
Symposium,” etc.
Franklin H. Giddings is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.
John A. Hobson is one of the best-known English economists, the author of
“The Rise of Modern Capitalism,” “The Science of Wealth,” “The Industrial
System,” “Towards International Government,” etc.
Hamilton Holt is managing editor of _The Independent_.
Paul U. Kellogg is an editor of the _Survey_ in New York.
Walter Lippmann is one of the most brilliant of the younger American
publicists, an editor of the _New Republic_, and author of “A Preface to
Politics,” “Drift and Mastery,” and “The Stakes of Diplomacy.”
A. Lawrence Lowell is President of Harvard University.
Romain Rolland is the author of “Jean-Christophe.” His attitude on the
war has forced his exile from France to Geneva. His eloquent book “Above
the Battle” expresses the emotion of a cosmopolitan soul confronted with
the madness of a world-war.
Prof. L. Quidde was one of the leading German pacifists before the war.
A. A. Tenney is assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.
Arnold J. Toynbee is the son-in-law of Prof. Gilbert Murray, and the
author of “Nationality and the War,” and “Greek Policy Since 1882.” He is
one of the most brilliant students of problems of nationality.
Lillian Wald is head-worker at the Henry Street Settlement in New York
City.
William English Walling is a prominent American Socialist, editor of the
_New Review_, and author of “Socialists and the War,” etc.
Alfred E. Zimmern is in the English Education service, and is author of
“The Greek Commonwealth.”
PREFACE
The aim of this book is to present a discussion of some of the most
hopeful and constructive suggestions for the settlement of the war on
terms that would make for a lasting peace. The selections are taken from
books, magazines, manifestoes, programs, etc., that have appeared since
the beginning of the war. Part I contains a discussion of the general
principles of a settlement, economic and political. Part II contains the
more concrete suggestions for the constitution of a definite League of
Peace. Part III presents some of the reconstructive ideals—“Towards the
Future”—as voiced by writers in the different countries. In the Appendix
are collected definite programs for peace put forward by associations and
individuals, international organizations, etc., in this country, Great
Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Denmark and Sweden, and Switzerland.
The books quoted form, it is believed, an indispensable library for the
understanding of international questions:
“Nationality and the War,” by Arnold J. Toynbee. New York: E.
P. Dutton and Co.
“Towards International Government,” by John A. Hobson.
“The Stakes of Diplomacy,” by Walter Lippmann. New York: Henry
Holt and Co.
“The Road Toward Peace,” by Charles W. Eliot. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co.
“The War of Steel and Gold,” by H. N. Brailsford. New York:
Macmillan.
“The War and Democracy,” by A. E. Zimmern and others. New York:
Macmillan.
“The World’s Highway,” by Norman Angell. New York: Geo. H.
Doran & Co.
PART I
PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT
PART I. PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT: ECONOMIC
PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY
[Sidenote: Most international quarrels have economic origin. The present
war produced by economic antagonisms.]
The growing dependence of modern civilized and thickly populated
countries for the necessaries of life and industry, for commercial
profits, and for gainful investments of capital upon free access to
other countries, especially to countries differing from themselves in
climate, natural resources, and degree of economic development, is of
necessity a consideration of increasing weight in the foreign policy of
to-day. Every active industrial or commercial nation is therefore fain
to watch and guard its existing opportunities for foreign trade and
investment, and to plan ahead for enlarged opportunities to meet the
anticipated future needs of an expanding trade and a growing population.
It views with fear, suspicion, and jealousy every attempt of a foreign
country to curtail its liberty of access to other countries and its equal
opportunities for advantageous trade or exploitation. The chief substance
of the treaties, conventions, and agreements between modern nations in
recent times has consisted in arrangements about commercial and financial
opportunities, mostly in countries outside the acknowledged control
of the negotiating parties. The real origins of most quarrels between
such nations have related to tariffs, railway, banking, commercial, and
financial operations in lands belonging to one or other of the parties,
or in lands where some sphere of special interest was claimed. Egypt,
Morocco, Persia, Asia Minor, China, Congo, Mexico, are the most sensitive
spots affecting international relations outside of Europe, testifying to
the predominance of economic considerations in foreign policy. The stress
laid upon such countries hinges in the last resort upon the need of “open
doors” or upon the desire to close doors to other countries. These keenly
felt desires to safeguard existing foreign markets for goods and capital,
to obtain by diplomatic pressure or by force new markets, and in other
cases to monopolize markets, have everywhere been the chief directing
influences in foreign policy, the chief causes of competing armaments,
and the permanent underlying menaces to peace. The present war, when
regard is had to the real directing pressure behind all diplomatic acts
and superficial political ferments, is in the main a product of these
economic antagonisms. This point of view is concisely and effectively
expressed in a striking memorandum presented by the Reform Club of New
York to President Wilson:—
Consider the situation of the present belligerents.
Serbia wants a window on the sea, and is shut out by Austrian
influence.
Austria wants an outlet in the East, Constantinople or Salonica.
Russia wants ice-free ports on the Baltic and Pacific,
Constantinople, and a free outlet from the Black Sea into the
Mediterranean.
Germany claims to be hemmed in by a ring of steel, and needs
the facilities of Antwerp and Rotterdam for her Rhine Valley
commerce, security against being shut out from the East by
commercial restrictions on the overland route, and freedom of
the seas for her foreign commerce.
England must receive uninterrupted supplies of food and raw
materials, and her oversea communications must be maintained.
This is true also of France, Germany, Belgium, and other
European countries.
Japan, like Germany, must have opportunity for her expanding
population, industries, and commerce.
The foreign policies of the nations still at peace are also
determined by trade relations. Our own country desires the open
door in the East.
South and North American States and Scandinavia are already
protesting against the war’s interference with their ocean
trade.
All nations that are not in possession of satisfactory harbors
on the sea demand outlets, and cannot and ought not to be
contented till they get them.
Nations desiring to extend their colonial enterprises entertain
those ambitions for commercial reasons, either to possess
markets from which they cannot be excluded, or to develop such
markets for themselves and be able to exclude others from them
when they so determine.
[Sidenote: Desire for commercial privilege is the primary cause of war.]
The generalization from these statements of fact is expressed in the
formula, “The desire for commercial privilege and for freedom from
commercial restraint is the primary cause of war.”
Now, that the foreign policies of nations are, in fact, determined mainly
by these commercial and financial considerations, and that the desire to
secure economic privilege and to escape economic restraints is a chief
cause of war, are indisputable propositions. So long as these motives are
left free to work in the future as in the past there will be constant
friction among the commercially developed nations, giving rise to
dangerous quarrels that will strain, perhaps to the breaking-point, any
arrangements for arbitration that may be made....
[Sidenote: International trade is restricted.]
Disputes arising from these economic causes are even deeper seated and
more dangerous than those connected with the claims of nationality and
autonomy. Indeed, political autonomy is shorn of most of its value
unless it is accompanied by a large measure of economic liberty as
regards commercial relations with the outside world. The case of Serbia,
liable at any moment to be denied access to the sea, or to be cut off
by Austria from her chief land markets, is a case in point. Or once
again, would the autonomy of such a country as Hungary, Bohemia, or
Poland, however valid its political guarantees, satisfy the legitimate
aspirations of its population if high tariff-walls encompassed it on
every frontier? Such instances make it evident that no settlement of “the
map of Europe” on lines of nationality can suffice to establish peace.
The effective liberty of every people demands freedom of commercial
intercourse with other peoples. A refusal or a hindrance of such
intercourse deprives a people of its fair share of the common fruits of
the earth, and deprives the other peoples of the world of any special
fruits which it is able to contribute to the common stock.
If any international Government existed, representing the commonwealth of
nations, it would seek to remove all commercial restrictions which impair
the freedom of economic intercourse between nations.
These restrictions are placed by the Reform Club Memorandum under the
four following categories:—
First. There is the restriction of tariffs imposed by nations.
Second. There are restrictions upon the best uses of
International commerce, of the terminal and land transfer
facilities of the great trade routes and seaports of the
world. A few such ports command entrance to and exit from vast
continental hinterlands. It is vital to these interior regions
that their natural communications with the outside world should
be kept widely open, and this is equally vital to the rest of
the world. Obstructive control of such ports and routes to the
detriment of the world’s commerce cannot and should not be
tolerated by states whose interests are adversely affected.
But routes and ports are needed for use, not government; and
port rivalries constantly tend towards offering the best and
equal facilities to all. The swelling tides of commerce are
clearing their own channels, and mutual interests will more and
more prompt the states through which the principal trade routes
pass to facilitate the movement of commerce.
Third. There are restrictions upon opportunities to trade with
territories ruled as colonies or being exploited within spheres
of influence. This is what now remains of the old mercantile
system which flourished before our Revolutionary War, and
which has been weakening ever since. Great Britain claims no
preference for herself in her colonies. Other states have been
less liberal. The fear of such restrictions being applied
against them is to-day the main motive for a policy of colonial
oversea possessions. If industrial states could be assured of
the application of the open-door policy, no state would envy
another its colonies. Colonies should be the world’s.
Fourth. There are restrictions in the free use of the sea.
Unlike land routes, ocean routes are offered practically
without cost to all, whithersoever the sea runs. Over these,
however, until modern times commerce has been subject to
pillage by regular warships as well as by pirates. The claims
of commerce have been more slowly recognized on the sea than on
the land; and, to an extent now unthinkable on land, warring
states still feel free to interfere with neutral traders....
[Sidenote: National financial groups control foreign policy. Economic
oppositions determine foreign policy.]
Another factor of increasing importance in the recent conflict of
nations has been the competition between groups of financiers and
concessionaires, organized upon a “national” basis, to obtain exclusive
or preferential control in the undeveloped countries for the profitable
use of exported capital. Closely related to commercial competition, this
competition for lucrative investments has played an even greater part in
producing dangerous international situations. For these financial and
commercial interests have sought to use the political and the forcible
resources of their respective Governments to enable them to obtain
the concessions and other privileges they require for the security
and profitable application of their capital. The control of foreign
policy thus wielded has been fraught with two perils to world-peace.
It has brought the Governments of the competing financial groups into
constant friction, and it has been the most fruitful direct source of
expeditionary forces and territorial aggressions in the coveted areas.
As the struggle for lucrative overseas investments has come to occupy a
more important part than the struggle for ordinary markets, the economic
oppositions between European Governments have become more and more
the determinant factors in foreign policy, and in the competition of
armaments, upon which Governments rely to support and to achieve the aims
their economic masters impose upon them.
_John A. Hobson, “Towards International Government,” pp. 128-139._
TRADE AS A CAUSE OF WAR
[Sidenote: Idealism hides real causes of war.]
Decent men in the belligerent countries feel a natural repugnance in
time of war to any discussion of the economic bearings of the struggle.
If nations are to fight with clear consciences and single hearts,
they must fight on in the belief that any objects which concern their
statesmen beyond the objects of defense and national security are
purely idealistic. We are all pragmatists in wartime; we believe what
will conduce to victory. Cool observers see clearly the widening out
of an immense range of colonial, imperial, and economic issues which
will confront us at the settlement and after it. But these things are
not debated as we debate the issues of nationality in this war. One
might suppose from a study of our press that we are much more vitally
interested in the fate of the Slovenes than we are in the trade of China.
This idealism is absolutely sincere, and a natural consequence of the
exaltation of emotion which belongs to any war of nations. We can endure
the thought that our young men are falling in many thousands for the
liberties of little peoples. That brief statement of our aims would end
in bathos if we were to add to it the subjection of China to Japanese
suzerainty, the partition of Turkey into spheres of influence, the
acquisition by the Allies of the German colonies, and the setting up of a
Russian customs house at Constantinople. The mischief of this obsession
is that the very field which stands most in need of illumination from
critical yet idealistic thinking is left in a half light of semi-secrecy,
and the will of democracies hardly dreams of intervening in the clash of
the interests which divide it. Public opinion and the fortunes of war
will govern the settlement of Belgium and Alsace, but in our present
temper it is only too probable that all the colonial and economic issues
involved in it will be left to the diplomatists with only the interests
behind them.
[Sidenote: Our need is organization to make international change without
war.]
The penetrating memorandum addressed by the New York Reform Club
to President Wilson has sketched broadly but with sure insight the
commercial and colonial questions which helped to lead up to this war.
None of these issues appeared in the negotiations which preceded the war,
but most of them were latent in the consciousness of the statesmen and
even of the peoples. The curse of our unorganized Europe has been that
fundamental change has rarely been possible save as a sequel of war.
Diplomacy was always busied with a pathetic conservatism in bolstering up
the _status quo_, or in arranging those little readjustments which might
just avail to stave off war. We shall not banish war from Europe until we
are civilized enough to create an organization that can make and impose
fundamental changes without war. The best we can do in the meantime is
to prepare to avail ourselves of the brief moment of settlement during
which the structure of Europe will still be fluid under the shock of war,
to bring our idealistic and democratic forces to bear upon these larger
issues.
[Sidenote: Free trade would remove incentive for colonies—and for
concessions and monopolies.]
The Reform Club’s memorandum deals with three of these questions: the
abolition of capture at sea in wartime, the freedom of the world’s
straits and highways in time of war, and the exploitation of colonies
under a system of protection. The system of legalized piracy which
permits navies to prey on commerce in wartime is undoubtedly the most
potent incentive to swollen armaments at sea. So long as it survives,
the opinion of the mercantile classes will never effectively back the
demand for economy in armaments, for it is bound to regard navies as an
insurance. The question of the ownership of straits stands high among the
many competing causes of bloodshed. It explains the German struggle for
Calais no less than the Allied expedition to the Dardanelles. One may
doubt, however, whether a proposal to neutralize any of the more vital
of these straits—the Straits of Dover or Gibraltar, for example—would
stand a chance of calm consideration on the morrow of such a war as
this. It will be feasible when war is no longer an ever-present terror;
and when that day comes it will have lost its importance. Far more
central in our problem is the general question of colonialism. It is a
commonplace to say that modern industrial peoples desire colonies almost
solely for economic reasons, and that one of the chief motives for this
expansion would disappear with any approach to free trade. If the British
colonies had not granted a preference to the mother country, and if
French colonies were not hedged about with an impenetrable tariff wall,
the feeling among German industrialists that their expansion was “hemmed
in” would have been less acute, and the pressure for “places in the sun”
would have been less powerful.
But it is doubtful whether the question of markets is as potent a
cause of armaments and war as the competition to secure concessions,
monopolies, and spheres of influence. The export of capital means
much more for the modern politics of imperialism than the export of
manufactured goods. The _conquistador_ of to-day is the financier who
acquires mining rights in Morocco, loan privileges in Turkey, or railway
concessions in China. The foreign policy of Great Britain and our
place in the European system has been governed for a generation by the
occupation of Egypt, whither we went in the wake of the bond-holders.
It explains our long bickerings with France; it helped to fling an
isolated France into the arms of Russia; it brought us finally into the
disastrous bargain over Morocco which underlay our feud with Germany.
The competition of national financial groups for concessions in Turkey
or China is not the competition of the market-place at home. Behind the
financier stands the diplomatist, and behind the diplomatist is his navy.
There is a clash of armor-plates when these competitors jostle. The
struggle for a Balance of Power in Europe has often seemed little more
than a race for the force and prestige which would enable the dominant
Power or group of Powers to secure the concessions of the monopoly
spheres which it coveted in the half-developed regions of the earth. No
modern nation would openly make war to secure such ends as these, for no
democracy would support it. Even the half-evolved democracy of Russia
recoiled from the Manchurian War. But every nation, by pursuing these
ends, makes the armed peace and the unstable equilibrium which prepares
our wars.
[Sidenote: Colonial free trade must be declared by international
agreement, and the export of capital internationalized.]
The remedy is so simple that only a very clever man could sophisticate
himself into missing it, and it is as old as Cobden. It is not necessary
to establish universal free trade to stop the rivalry to monopolize
colonial markets; it would suffice to declare free trade in the colonies,
or even in those which are not self-governing. To deal with the evil
of “concessions” all that is required is a general understanding that
financiers must win their own way, by merit or push or bribes, and that
the doors of the embassies will be banged in their faces when they seek
support. These sentences are easily written, but they would involve the
democratization of diplomacy everywhere, the overthrow of the colonial
group in France, and the confounding of the national economists in
Germany. The force which might work such miracles is nowhere mobilized,
for, with all their will to peace, the democracies nowhere understand the
bearings of these colonial and commercial issues on war and armaments.
It requires some imagination to understand that when two embassies
compete in Peking for a railway concession, the issue may be determined
by the balance of naval power in the North Sea. It requires some habit
of observation to realize that because this may happen in Peking, the
investing and governing classes are bound to keep up the balance in the
North Sea. The nexus is none the less simple and clear, and it will hold
as long as diplomacy continues to engage in this disguised imperial
trading, so long as capital possesses nationality and regards the flag as
an asset.
There are none the less ways of escape which are neither Utopian nor
heroic. It ought not to be utterly beyond the statesmanship of Europe to
decree some limited form of colonial free trade by general agreement—to
apply it, for example, to Africa. France would oppose it, but what if
Alsace were to be restored on this condition? To open a great colonial
market to Hamburg, while ending the dream of _revanche_, would be
to remove the two chief causes of war in western Europe. American
statesmanship may ere long have the power to propose such a bargain as
this. For the plague of concession-hunting the best expedient would
probably be to impose on all the competing national groups in each area
the duty of amalgamating in a permanently international syndicate. If
one such syndicate controlled all the railways and another all the mines
of China and Turkey, a vast cause of national rivalry would be removed.
The interests of China and Turkey might be secured by interposing a
disinterested council or arbitrator between them and the syndicate to
adjust their respective interests. Short of creating a world state or
a European federation, the chief constructive work for peace is to
establish colonial free trade and internationalize the export of capital.
_H. N. Brailsford, “Trade as a Cause of War,”
The New Republic, May 8, 1915._
ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM
[Sidenote: Evil of “spheres of influence.” “Spheres” become
“dependencies.”]
The evils of an unrestricted competition for concessions and monopolies
between rival financial groups backed by their Governments, are so
notorious that diplomacy has found several typical formulæ for bringing
them to an end. The obvious method of resolving such conflicts is the
demarcation of spheres of “influences,” “interest” or “penetration”
within which each of the competing Powers enjoys a monopoly respected by
the others. This method is open to two grave objections. In the first
place, it is rarely adopted before a ruinous conflict has exhausted the
competitors. For years or decades they carry on a trial of strength
which affects not merely their local relationship, but their attitude to
one another in Europe, and is measured year by year in their military
and naval estimates. If we were to take the sum by which British and
German armaments have increased in the present century, it would be
possible to allocate the increase, roughly, somewhat as follows: 50 per
cent. or less for the settlement of the question, Who shall exploit
Morocco?; 25 per cent. or more for the privilege of building a railway to
Bagdad and beyond it; 25 per cent. or more for the future eventualities
which remain unsettled—the fate of the Portuguese colonies in Africa,
and the destinies of China. In the second place, the delimitation of
spheres of interest is almost inevitably fatal to the national existence
of the country partitioned, and as inevitably adds a vast burden to
the commitments of the Imperial Power. Persia furnishes the obvious
illustration. Sir Edward Grey is clearly resolved that he will not allow
himself by the march of events to be drawn into the assumption of any
direct responsibility for the administration of the British sphere. It is
a laudable resolve, but Russia may at any moment frustrate it. She deals
with her own sphere on the opposite principle, and her sphere happens to
include the seat of the central government. That government is already
a puppet of Russian policy, enjoying only a simulacrum of independence.
How much longer can a government which is not a government continue
to rule the southern sphere? Sooner or later a choice must be made.
Either Russia must withdraw, or some separate government under British
protection must be created for the south. Turkey is drifting rapidly
towards a dissolution in which the spheres which the Great Powers already
claim will be formally delimited. It is easy to predict what that will
mean. There will be first provincial loans, then provincial advisers,
and finally a military control, under which each of these “spheres” will
become what Egypt already is, a dependency of a European Power.
[Sidenote: How to avoid the evil. Must preserve peace without destroying
victim nationality.]
The method of avoiding financial competition by marking off zones
of monopoly, is clearly the worst which can be pursued. There are
alternatives. Let us consider what methods might be followed if the
Powers were sage enough to shrink from the terrific conflict which may
one day overtake them for the partition of China. China is so thickly
peopled that crude conquest presents few attractions. Even Japan could
not settle her surplus population in a country where every hill is
terraced and every field subjected to intensive cultivation. But there is
here a field which capital is already eager to exploit, and every year
diminishes the resistance of prejudice and inertia to its ambitions. The
attempts to mark out spheres of influence have so far been tentative
and unsuccessful. Our own claim to the lion’s share, the Yangtse Valley,
is admitted by no other Power, and it is doubtful whether the Foreign
Office still maintains it. There are several principles which might
be adopted if the Powers desired to avoid the jealous and dangerous
struggle for concessions. In the first place, the simplest plan and the
best would be the adoption of a self-denying ordinance by all the chief
competitors. Let it be understood that British, French, and German banks
may compete among themselves for railways and loans, but that none of
them shall receive any aid or countenance whatever from the embassies
or consulates of their respective countries. If that could be decided,
the allotment of concessions would be settled either by the merits of
the competitors or more probably by their skill and audacity in bribing
Chinese officials. One may doubt, however, whether any of the Powers
has sufficient faith in the honor of its competitors to enter on such
an undertaking. A second and more hopeful plan might be borrowed from
the undertaking negotiated by France and Germany over Morocco. They
agreed to promote cooperation among their subjects, who were to share
in agreed percentages in the coveted opportunities for public works. A
vast “pool” or syndicate in which all the rival financial groups were
represented, might be left to internationalize all the opportunities of
monopoly in China on a plan which would give to each its allotted share
in the risks and profits. The scheme worked badly in Morocco, and indeed
created the friction which led to the Agadir incident. Something of the
kind existed in China while the alliance of the banks of the Six Powers
subsisted, and it eventually broke down. By this method friction may
be avoided among the Great Powers, but China would be subjected to an
intolerable financial dictation, which would be none the less oppressive
because it was cosmopolitan. There exists, however, in the Ottoman Public
Debt, a model which might be followed elsewhere. Its council represents
all the bondholders of every nationality, and usually maintains good
relations with the Porte. If the railways of Turkey, China, and Persia
could be amalgamated, each in a single system under a cosmopolitan
administration, the risk of partition and all the danger to peace, which
this risk entails, might be removed. The obvious step is to confer on
these syndicates of capitalists an international legal personality,
which would enable them to sue or be sued before the Hague Tribunal.
Some disinterested council nominated by The Hague should be interposed
between the syndicate and the State in which it operates, so that the
intervention of diplomacy may be as far as possible eliminated.
[Sidenote: The Drago Doctrine.]
The problems raised by the export of capital have been considered in this
chapter mainly from the standpoint of the creditor State, which sees its
diplomacy involved in the process. We have found, so far, no solution
which is satisfactory from the standpoint of the debtor nation. The
inroad of foreign capital always means for it some loss of independence,
and it has nothing to gain by agreements among competing Empires. It
may, indeed, keep its independence by playing on their rivalries. Its
shadowy autonomy vanishes when they come to terms. The pacifist and the
nationalist are here divided in their sympathies. The former, thinking
only of European peace, rejoices when Russia and Britain end their
differences by the partition of Persia. The latter, seeing only that a
nation has been destroyed, regards the agreement as a peculiarly evil
development of Imperialism. Both are right, and both are wrong. The
ideal expedient would preserve European peace without destroying the
victim nationality. To propose that expedient requires an excursion into
the realms of Utopian construction. We can propose nothing which seems
feasible to-day, but a solution is conceivable which requires only an
easy step in the organization of the civilized world for peace. The
motives for the partition of Persia were rather political than financial.
The object-lesson of Egypt, where the occupation had its origin in debt,
is a more typical instance of modern processes. It happens that the
Hague Conference has laid down a principle which is capable of fruitful
extension for dealing with such cases as these. The Drago Doctrine, put
forward by Señor Drago, a jurist and statesman of the Argentine Republic,
supported by the United States and eventually adopted by all the Powers,
provides that no creditor State may use arms to enforce a liability upon
a debtor State, unless a decision of the Hague Tribunal has recognized
the liability and prescribed the method of payment. This doctrine, even
as it stands, is of immense value to minor but civilized States like the
South American republics, Portugal and Greece, which may find themselves
obliged to defer payment of an external debt. The Hague Tribunal would
in such a case, if it realized its opportunities, act as a good County
Court Judge would do at home—refuse to admit a merely usurious claim, and
lay down terms and dates of payment which would admit of the debtor’s
recovery from any temporary difficulty.
[Sidenote: Permanent Credit Bureau.]
But to defeat the more unscrupulous methods of the international
usurer, this idea requires some amplification. It may be necessary for
a debtor State, some grades below the level of Portugal and Greece in
civilization, to mortgage some part of its revenues, and to accept, at
least over part of them, some degree of foreign control. That means, if
the creditor country has also political ambitions, the almost certain
loss of its independence. There are also States like Turkey which stand
in need of expert advice for the reorganization of their finances, but
dread the consequences of admitting any foreigner, who may perhaps think
more of the interests of European finance and of his own motherland, than
of those of the country which employs him. To draw the full advantage
from the international machinery at The Hague, there ought to be evolved
a permanent Credit Bureau to which weak and timid States might apply.
It might conduct enquiries into their solvency, lend them experts to
reorganize their finances, help them to negotiate loans in neutral
markets on fair terms, and in case of need provide the commissioners who
would control their mortgaged revenues. It would act as a trustee or as a
Court of Chancery towards its wards. It could have no political ambitions
to further, and the country which applied to it need not tremble for
its independence. Persia or Egypt, had this Bureau existed, might have
turned to The Hague for help. If, in the end, owing to civil war, or the
hopeless incapacity of native statesmen, forcible intervention became
inevitable, it would lie not with any interested Power, but with The
Hague itself, to take the initiative of summoning a European Conference
to prescribe the nature and limits of the interference. It is even
possible that the Bureau might be used as an arbitrator at the request of
a State like China, hard pressed by the rivalry of Empires competing for
concessions, to decide between them in its name, and to appoint a neutral
adviser or board of advisers, who would stand between it and the greedy
Powers in the allotment of its financial patronage.
[Sidenote: Export of capital must be made servant of humane diplomacy.]
A Europe which has organized itself for peace will be at no loss for
expedients wherewith to reconcile the appetites of capital with the
rights of nationality. A spectator of the moving cosmopolitan drama which
is played, the world over, around this central motive of the export
of capital, can readily invent attractive schemes for the regulation
of the process. But such exercises tempt one to ignore the dynamics
of the problem. The same primitive forces of greed which in earlier
centuries inspired conquests and migrations are still strong enough to
grip diplomacy and build navies. Our first task is to win at home the
power to control this export of capital, to check it where it disregards
the current ethical standards, to rebuff it where it would lead us into
international rivalry, and at last to use it as the potent servant of
a humane diplomacy. It can be forbidden to carry the devastations of
slavery into distant continents. It can be checked in its usurer’s
practises upon simple States. It can be used, if it be firmly mastered,
to starve into submission a semi-civilized Empire which meditates
aggressive war, or draws from Western stores the funds to finance its own
oppressions.
_H. N. Brailsford, “The War of Steel and Gold,” pp. 241-253._
THE PROBLEM OF DIPLOMACY
[Sidenote: The chief problem of diplomacy is the weak State.]
This whole business of jockeying for position is at first glance
so incredibly silly that many liberals regard diplomacy as a cross
between sinister conspiracy and a meaningless etiquette. It would be
all of that if the stakes of diplomacy were not real. Those stakes
have to be understood, for without such an understanding diplomacy is
incomprehensible and any scheme of world peace an idle fancy.
The chief, the overwhelming problem of diplomacy seems to be the weak
state—the Balkans, the African sultanates, Turkey, China, and Latin
America, with the possible exception of the Argentine, Chile, and Brazil.
These states are “weak” because they are industrially backward and at
present politically incompetent. They are rich in resources and cheap
labor, poor in capital, poor in political experience, poor in the power
of defense. The government of these states is the supreme problem of
diplomacy. Just as the chief task of American politics to the Civil War
was the organization of the unexploited West, so the chief task of world
diplomacy to-day is the organization of virgin territory and backward
peoples. I use backward in the conventional sense to mean a people
unaccustomed to modern commerce and modern political administration.
This solicitude about backward peoples seems to many good democrats a
combination of superciliousness and greed....
And yet the plain fact is that the interrelation of peoples has gone
so far that to advocate international laissez-faire now is to speak a
counsel of despair. Commercial cunning, lust of conquest, rum, bibles,
rifles, missionaries, traders, concessionaires have brought the two
civilizations into contact, and the problem created must be solved, not
evaded.
[Sidenote: Economic imperialism and the weak State.]
The great African empires, for example, were not created deliberately by
theoretical imperialists. Explorers, missionaries, and traders penetrated
these countries. They found rubber, oil, cocoa, tin; they could sell
cotton goods, rifles, liquor. The native rulers bartered away enormous
riches at trivial prices. But the trading-posts and the concessions were
insecure. There were raids and massacres. No public works existed, no
administrative machinery. The Europeans exploited the natives cruelly,
and the natives retaliated. Concession hunters and merchants from other
nations began to come in. They bribed and bullied the chiefs, and created
still greater insecurity. An appeal would be made to the home government
for help, which generally meant declaring a protectorate of the country.
Armed forces were sent in to pacify, and civil servants to administer
the country. These protectorates were generally sanctioned by the other
European governments on the proviso that trade should be free to all....
It is essential to remember that what turns a territory into a diplomatic
“problem” is the combination of natural resources, cheap labor, markets,
defenselessness, corrupt and inefficient government. The desert of
Sahara is no “problem,” except where there are oases and trade routes.
Switzerland is no “problem,” for Switzerland is a highly organized modern
state. But Mexico is a problem, and Haiti, and Turkey, and Persia. They
have the pretension of political independence which they do not fulfil.
They are seething with corruption, eaten up with “foreign” concessions,
and unable to control the adventurers they attract or safeguard the
rights which these adventurers claim. More foreign capital is invested
in the United States than in Mexico, but the United States is not a
“problem” and Mexico is. The difference was hinted at in President
Wilson’s speech at Mobile. Foreigners invest in the United States, and
they are assured that life will be reasonably safe and that titles to
property are secured by orderly legal means. But in Mexico they are given
“concessions,” which means that they secure extra privileges and run
greater risks, and they count upon the support of European governments or
of the United States to protect them and their property.
[Sidenote: Economic penetration into weak States is protected only
through order and political control.]
The weak states, in other words, are those which lack the political
development that modern commerce requires. To take an extreme case which
brings out the real nature of the “problem,” suppose that the United
States was organized politically as England was in the time of William
the Conqueror. Would it not be impossible to do business in the United
States? There would be an everlasting clash between an impossible legal
system and a growing commercial development. And the internal affairs of
the United States would constitute a diplomatic “problem.”
This, it seems to me, is the reason behind the outburst of modern
imperialism among the Great Powers. It is not enough to say that they
are “expanding” or “seeking markets” or “grabbing resources.” They are
doing all these things, of course. But if the world into which they are
expanding were not politically archaic, the growth of foreign trade would
not be accompanied by political imperialism. Germany has “expanded”
wonderfully in the British Empire, in Russia, in the United States, but
no German is silly enough to insist on planting his flag wherever he
sells his dyestuffs or stoves. It is only when his expansion is into
weak states—into China, Morocco, Turkey, or elsewhere that foreign trade
is imperialistic. This imperialism is actuated by many motives—by a
feeling that political control insures special privileges, by a desire
to play a large part in the world, by national vanity, by a passion for
“ownership,” but none of these motives would come into play if countries
like China or Turkey were not politically backward.
Imperialism in our day begins generally as an attempt to police and
pacify. This attempt stimulates national pride, it creates bureaucrats
with a vested interest in imperialism, it sucks in and receives added
strength from concessionaires and traders who are looking for economic
privileges. There is no doubt that certain classes in a nation gain by
imperialism, though to the people as a whole the adventure may mean
nothing more than an increased burden of taxes.
Some pacifists have attempted to deny that a nation could ever gain
anything by political control of weak states. They have not defined the
“nation.” What they overlook is that even the most advanced nations are
governed, not by the “people,” but by groups with special interests.
These groups do gain, just as the railroad men who controlled American
legislatures gained. A knot of traders closely in league with the
colonial office of a great Power can make a good deal of money out of
its friendships. Every government has contracts to be let, franchises to
give; it establishes tariffs, fixes railroad rates, apportions taxes,
creates public works, builds roads. To be favored by that power is to be
favored indeed. The favoritism may cost the motherland and the colony
dear, but the colonial merchant is not a philanthropist....
[Sidenote: The backward States are the arenas of international friction.]
The whole situation might be summed up by saying that the commercial
development of the world will not wait until each territory has created
for itself a stable and fairly modern political system. By some means
or other the weak states have to be brought within the framework of
commercial administration. Their independence and integrity, so-called,
are dependent upon their creating conditions under which world-wide
business can be conducted. The pressure to organize the globe is
enormous....
Out of this complexity of motive there is created a union of various
groups on the imperial program: the diplomatic group is interested
primarily in prestige; the military group in an opportunity to act; the
bureaucratic in the creation of new positions; the financial groups in
safeguarding investments; traders in securing protection and privileges,
religious groups in civilizing the heathen, the “intellectuals,” in
realizing theories of expansion and carrying out “manifest destinies,”
the people generally in adventure and glory and the sense of being great.
These interested groups severally control public opinion, and under
modern methods of publicity public opinion is easily “educated.”
Who should intervene in backward states, what the intervention shall
mean, how the protectorate shall be conducted—this is the bone and
sinew of modern diplomacy. The weak spots of the world are the arenas
of friction. This friction is increased and made popular by frontier
disputes over Alsace-Lorraine or Italia Irredenta, but in my judgment
the boundary lines of Europe are not the grand causes of diplomatic
struggle. Signor Ferrero confessed recently that the present generation
of Italians had all but forgotten Italia Irredenta, and the Revanche has
been a decadent French dream until the Entente and the Dual Alliance
began to clash in Morocco, in Turkey, in China. Alsace-Lorraine has no
doubt kept alive suspicion of Germany, and predisposed French opinion
to inflicting diplomatic defeats in Morocco. But the arena where the
European Powers really measure their strength against each other is in
the Balkans, in Africa, and in Asia....
[Sidenote: War is for sake of prestige in undeveloped countries.]
This war is fought not for specific possessions, but for that diplomatic
prestige and leadership which are required to solve all the different
problems. It is like a great election to decide who shall have the
supreme power in the Concert of Europe. Austria began the contest to
secure her position as a great Power in the Balkans; Russia entered it
to thwart this ambition; France was engaged because German diplomatic
supremacy would reduce France to a “second-class power,” which means a
power that holds world power on sufferance; England could not afford
to see France “crushed” or Belgium annexed because British imperialism
cannot alone cope with the vigor of Germany; Germany felt herself
“encircled,” which meant that wherever she went—to Morocco, Asia Minor,
or China—there a coalition was ready to thwart her. The ultimate
question involved was this: whenever in the future diplomats meet to
settle a problem in the backward countries, which European nation shall
be listened to most earnestly? What shall be the relative prestige of
Germans and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Russians; what sense of their
power, what historical halo, what threat of force, what stimulus to
admiration shall they possess? To lose this war will be like being a
Republican politician in the solid South when the Democrats are in power
at Washington. It will mean political, social, and economic inferiority.
[Sidenote: World problem is due to competition for unorganized territory.]
Americans have every reason to understand the dangers of unorganized
territory, to realize clearly why it is a “problem.” Our Civil War was
preceded by thirty or forty years of diplomatic struggle for a balance of
power in the West. Should the West be slave or free, that is, should it
be the scene of homesteads and free labor, or of plantations and slaves?
Should it be formed into States which sent senators and representatives
to support the South or the North? We were virtually two nations, each
trying to upset the balance of power in its own favor. And when the South
saw that it was beaten, that is to say “encircled,” when its place in the
Western sun was denied, the South seceded and fought. Until the problem
or organizing the West had been settled, peace and federal union were
impossible.
The world’s problem is the same problem tremendously magnified and
complicated.
The point I have been making will, I fear, seem a paradox to many
readers,—that the anarchy of the world is due to the backwardness of
weak states; that the modern nations have lived in an armed peace and
collapsed into hideous warfare because in Asia, Africa, the Balkans,
Central and South America there are rich territories in which weakness
invites exploitation, in which inefficiency and corruption invite
imperial expansion, in which the prizes are so great that the competition
for them is to the knife.
This is the world problem upon which all schemes for arbitration, leagues
of peace, reduction of armaments must prove themselves. The diplomats
have in general recognized this. It was commonly said for a generation
that Europe would be lucky if it escaped a general war over the breakup
of Turkey in Europe. The Sick Man has infected the Continent. Our own
“preparedness” campaign is based on the fear that the defenselessness of
Latin America will invite European aggression, that the defenselessness
of China will bring on a struggle in the Pacific. Few informed people
imagine for a moment that any nation of the world contemplates seizing
or holding our own territory. That would be an adventure so ridiculous
that no statesman would think of it. If we get into trouble it will be
over some place like Mexico, or Haiti, or the Philippines, or the Panama
Canal, or Manchuria, or Hawaii....
[Sidenote: Need of European legislatures to deal with problem.]
Europe has also recognized that some kind of world government must be
created. The phrase world government, of course, arouses immediate
opposition; the idea of a European legislature would be pronounced
utopian. Yet there have been a number of European legislatures. The
Berlin Conference of 1885 was called to discuss “freedom of commerce in
the basin and mouths of the Congo; application to the Congo and Niger
of the principles adopted at the Congress of Vienna with a view to
preserve freedom of navigation on certain international rivers ... and a
definition of formalities to be observed so that new occupations on the
African coasts shall be deemed effective.” The Powers represented made
all sorts of reservations, but they managed to pass a “General Act of the
West African Conference.” The Congo Free State was recognized. As Mr.
Harris says: “Bismarck saw in this a means of preventing armed conflict
over the Congo Basin, of restricting the Portuguese advance, and of
preserving the region to free trade.” What was it that Bismarck saw? He
saw that the great wealth of the Congo and its political weakness might
make trouble in Europe unless the Congo was organized into the legal
structure of the world.
[Sidenote: Example of Algeciras.]
The Conference at Algeciras was an international legislature in which
even the United States was represented; the London Conference after the
Balkan wars was a gathering of ambassadors trying to legislate out of
existence the sources of European trouble in the Balkans. But all these
legislatures have had one great fault. They met, they passed laws, they
adjourned, and left the enforcement of their mandate to the conscience
of the individual Powers. The legislature was international, but the
executive was merely national. The legislature moreover had no way of
checking up or controlling the executive. The representatives of all
the nations would pass laws for the government of weak territories, but
the translation of those laws into practise was left to the colonial
bureaucrats of some one nation.
If the law was not carried out, to whom would an appeal be made? Not to
the Conference, for it had ceased to exist. There was no way in which
a European legislature could recall the officials who did not obey
its will. Those officials were responsible to their home government,
although they were supposed to be executing a European mandate. Those
who were injured had also to appeal to their home government, and the
only way to remedy an abuse or even sift out the truth of an allegation
was by negotiation between the Powers. This raised the question of their
sovereignty, called forth patriotic feeling, revived a thousand memories,
and made any satisfactory interpretation of the European Act or any
criticism of its administration a highly explosive adventure.
Suppose, for example, that Congress had power to pass laws, but that
the execution of them was left to the States. Suppose New York had its
own notions of tariff administration. How would the other States compel
the New York customs officials to execute the spirit and letter of
the Federal law? Suppose every criticism by Pennsylvania of a New York
Collector was regarded as an infringement of New York’s sovereignty, as
a blow at New York’s pride, what kind of chaos would we suffer from? Yet
that is the plight of our world society.
[Sidenote: An international Senate for each arena of friction.]
The beginnings of a remedy would seem to lie in not disbanding these
European conferences when they have passed a law. They ought to continue
in existence as a kind of senate, meeting from time to time. They ought
to regard themselves as watchers over the legislation which they have
passed. To them could be brought grievances, by them amendments could be
passed when needed. The colonial officials should at least be made to
report to this senate, and all important matters of policy should be laid
open to its criticism and suggestion. In this way a problem like that of
Morocco, for example, might be kept localized to a permanent European
Conference on Morocco. Europe would never lose its grip on the situation,
because it would have representatives on the spot watching the details
of administration, in a position to learn the facts, and with a real
opportunity for stating grievances.
The development of such a senate would probably be towards an increasing
control of colonial officials. At first it would have no power of
appointment or removal. It would be limited to criticism. But it is
surely not fantastic to suppose that the colonial civil service would in
time be internationalized; that is to say, opened to men of different
nationalities. The senate, if it developed any traditions, would begin to
supervise the budget, would fight for control of salaries, and might well
take over the appointing power altogether. It would become an upper house
for the government of the protected territory, not essentially different
perhaps from the American Philippine Commission. The lower house would
be native, and there would probably be a minority of natives in the
senate....
An organization of this kind would meet all the difficulties that our
Continental Congress or that any other primitive legislature has had to
deal with. There would be conflicts of jurisdiction, puzzling questions
of interpretation, and some place of final appeal would have to be
provided. It might be the Senate of European representatives; but if the
Senate deadlocked, an appeal might be taken to The Hague. The details of
all this are obviously speculative at the moment.
[Sidenote: Prevention of war by international commissions for unorganized
regions.]
The important point is that there should be in existence permanent
international commissions to deal with those spots of the earth where
world crises originate. How many there should be need not be suggested
here. There should have been one for Morocco, for the Congo, for the
Balkan Peninsula, perhaps for Manchuria; there may have to be one for
Constantinople, for certain countries facing the Caribbean Sea. Such
international governing bodies are needed wherever the prizes are great,
the territory unorganized, and the competition active.
The idea is not over-ambitious. It seems to me the necessary development
of schemes which European diplomacy has been playing with for some time.
It represents an advance along the line that governments, driven by
necessity, have been taking of their own accord. What makes it especially
plausible is that it grasps the real problems of diplomacy, that it
provides not a panacea but a method and the beginnings of a technique.
It is internationalism, not spread thin as a Parliament of Man, but
sharply limited to those areas of friction where internationalism is most
obviously needed.
_Walter Lippmann, “The Stakes of Diplomacy,” pp. 87-135._
SOCIALISTS AND IMPERIALISM
[Sidenote: Peace impossible without solution of economic conflicts.]
Possibly we shall learn nothing from the war; at the present moment it
looks that way. For all the world, including Socialists, seem to be
divided between militarists and pacifists. By pacifism I mean of course
the movement Socialists have attacked for fifty years—up to the present
war—under the name of “bourgeois pacifism,” the idea that disarmament,
the Hague Tribunal, and similar devices could put an end to militarism
and war.
In one sense of course every internationalist, whether Socialist or
Democrat, is a pacifist. Every internationalist is opposed to war. But
from the days of Marx and before, up to the present time, all Socialists
have been prepared for certain war-producing contingencies which can
be abolished neither by calling them “illusions,” as Norman Angell
has done, nor by any other phrases or exorcisms. Nor can the economic
causes of national conflict be avoided by disarmament, Hague tribunals,
international police, or abolition of secret diplomacy, as proposed by
the Women’s Peace Party, the British Union of Democratic Control, the
Independent Labor Party, etc. In a word, no measure dealing with military
affairs or with mere political forms can _in the long run_ have any
effect whatever—as long as the present conflict of economic interests
between the nations remains. The whole effort of the bourgeois pacifist
from the Socialist standpoint is to attempt—in spite of the horrible and
tremendous lessons of the present war—to close our eyes resolutely to the
great task that lies before us, namely, to find a way either in the near
future or ultimately to bring the conflict of national economic interests
to an end.
[Sidenote: Interests of nations do conflict.]
There are two economic forces in the world which can not be conjured
away either by words, by mere political rearrangements, or by any
action whatever with regard to arms—whether making for more armament or
less armament. There is no power at present which can prevent a great
independent nation like Russia or Japan, Germany or Austria, where the
political conditions are in whole or in part those of the eighteenth
century, from declaring wars of conquest either against helpless,
backward or small countries, or against the economically more advanced
and more democratic countries like England, France, or the United States.
It is true that industrial capitalism now preponderates in Germany,
but no German publicist has ever denied the tremendous influence of
the landlord nobility, both over the government and over the economic
and political structure of German society. It is true also that these
great agricultural estates are partially operated under capitalistic
conditions, but the position of agricultural labor throughout enormous
districts of Prussia is certainly semi-feudal. This is equally true of
Austria, and the landlord nobility is perhaps even more predominant in
Hungary than in Prussia.
The second fact which can not be conjured away by phrases or mere
political rearrangements is that—under the present system of
society—there is a direct conflict of interests between all nations, even
the most civilized. This is why Norman Angell, in his new book (“Arms and
Industry”), is at such great pains to deny that nations are economic
units and “competing business firms.” His denial is futile.
[Sidenote: Even workers gain from successful imperialism.]
Even under individualistic capitalism all elements of the capitalist
class have a greater or less interest in the business of the nation to
which they belong; under the State Socialist policy, which is spreading
everywhere, this community of interests is still closer. Moreover, under
State Socialism even the working classes gain a share (of course, a small
one) of whatever profits accrue from the successful competition of one’s
own nation with other nations, and especially from such competition in
its aggressive form, “imperialism.”
Socialists have sometimes denied that the economic interests of the
working people of the various nations conflict.
Otto Bauer, of Austria, the world’s leading Socialist authority on
Imperialism—who was to report on the subject for the International
Socialist Congress to have been held in Vienna last summer—is of the
contrary opinion. He believes that one of the worst features of the
present system is that, under capitalism, the immediate economic
interests of the working people of the various nations _do_ conflict.
Only in so far as the working people attach greater importance to
attaining Socialism than to anything they can gain under the present
society, are their interests in all nations the same. In so far as the
working people aim at an improvement of their condition _this side of
Socialism_ their economic interests are often in conflict.
Moreover, State Socialism, political democracy, and social reform,
since they tend to give the working people a slightly greater share in
the prosperity of each nation, intensify the workers’ nationalism and
aggravate the conflict of immediate economic interests. This is why all
the labor union parties of the world are tending in the same direction
as that in which the German Party has been so clearly headed since the
war—a tendency very clearly formulated by _Vorwaerts_ when it recently
asked whether the German Party was not becoming a “nationalistic social
reform labor party.”
The bourgeois pacifists consider war to be the “great illusion.” In
favoring war, under any conditions, they say, the capitalists, the middle
classes, and the working classes are all mistaken. The only people that
gain are the officers of armies and navies, and armament manufacturers.
It is needless for Socialists—believers in the economic interpretation of
politics—to point out that such a conclusion can only be reached by an
abandonment of the economic point of view.
[Sidenote: Only solution is industrial and financial
internationalization.]
In the opinion of internationalists, war can be abolished neither by
armament or disarmament, nor by any measures leading in either direction.
War can be abolished only by abolishing the causes of war, which every
practical man admits are economic. By strengthening already existing
and natural economic tendencies which are slowly bringing the nations
together, the causes of war may be gradually done away with.
The outlook therefore is very hopeful—provided the intelligent (if
selfish) ruling classes of the great capitalistic nations (England,
France, America) decide once and for all to place no hopes either
on militarism or pacifism. These natural economic tendencies indeed
would already have made war impossible if they had not been impeded by
artificial obstacles, such as tariff walls, immigration restriction,
financial concessions to favored nations, etc.
[Sidenote: And the modernization of undemocratic countries.]
Socialists relied upon natural economic forces to abolish competition,
establish the trusts, bring about government ownership, and prepare the
way for democratic ownership. They rely upon similar economic forces
to bring the nations together; reciprocal lowering of tariffs, the
common development of the backward countries by the leading nations,
the neutralization of canals—and last but not least, the modernization
of Russia, Japan, Prussia, and Austria, that is, the full establishment
in these countries of industrial capitalism and the semi-democratic
political institutions that accompany it—as we see them in Great Britain,
France, and America.
_William English Walling, “The Great Illusions,”
The New Review, June 1, 1915._
THE HIGHER IMPERIALISM
[Sidenote: Cause of all wars found in economic motives:—that is, in
competition of nationalist capitalistic groups.]
When the Socialists in the belligerent countries voted for the war
budgets and took their seats in the war cabinets, their whole attitude
towards war underwent a fundamental change. It is true that in Germany
and elsewhere the Socialists berated the capitalists and militarists
for bringing on the conflict, but having made this protest, they acted
exactly as did every one else. They excused themselves on the ground that
the war was defensive. But the Kaiser and the Czar and the President
of the French Republic all made the same excuse. It was not that the
Socialists did not have power to put obstacles in the way of their
governments. They did not have the will. They were forced into a painful
position, where their love of country struggled against their adherence
to the proletariat of the world. Despite themselves they were moved by
idealistic considerations, which according to their theory should have
had no weight.
For according to socialist doctrine the great events of the world are
determined by economic factors. The idealists may speak of national honor
and national duty, of the inviolability of treaties and the sacred rights
of small nations, but the cause of all wars is really to be traced to
the clash of economic motives. If we are to establish peace, we must
found it on the customary reactions of selfish men, who want things and
are willing to fight for them. Peace must be a peace between men as
they are. It will not come by preaching, nor by nations surrendering
their ambitions. It will not come through non-resistance, through the
submission of the meek to the overbearing. It will not come through
the nations joyously disarming as the light of reason breaks through
the clouds. Reason is not so simple nor so unrelated a thing, for the
material things that each nation wants, and the means by which the nation
gets them, seem to the nation preeminently just and reasonable. However
pompous the superstructure of ethics and ideals, the solid foundation of
war, as of other social developments, is economic. So long as nations, or
at all events their ruling groups, have conflicting economic interests,
war is inevitable.
According to the Socialist, therefore, war and capitalism were
inseparable. War must continue so long as the wage-system continued.
The argument was simple. The great owners of capital, earning more
than they could consume or profitably invest in home industries, were
compelled to send their surplus to colonies and dependencies, where a new
profit could be made. With the rapid increase of capital, however, the
competition between the industrial nations for the possession of these
agricultural dependencies became keener. Such competition meant war. As
capitalism approached its climax wars were bound to become more frequent,
destructive, and violent.
[Sidenote: But now competitive imperialism makes way for imperialism by
combination.]
If this theory had been true it would have followed that the interests
of capital would make for war and the interests of labor would make
for peace. The day laborer, with no money in the bank, would not be
interested in capital investments in Morocco, Manchuria, or Asia Minor.
He would have no national interests whatever. But, as we may read in
the admirable book on “Socialists and the War,” by William English
Walling, a few Socialists have for some time begun to recognize that
wage-earners do have special national interests and that these interests
may be directly opposed to the interests of wage-earners in an adjoining
country. If Serbia is completely shut off from the sea, her wage-earners
suffer as acutely as do her peasants. If Switzerland is surrounded by a
wall of hostile tariffs, if Holland and England are deprived of their
colonies, the loss is felt not only by great capitalists but by the man
who works with a trowel or a lathe. The ultimate interests of German and
British wage-earners are identical, but if their immediate interests
conflict, there will grow up a spirit of nationalism in both countries,
and wage-earners will clamor for a national policy which may lead to war.
This seems to shut a door that leads to peace. But in shutting this
door the newer Socialist thought has opened another. It assumes that
the capitalists themselves are increasingly likely to profit by
peace, to desire peace, and to achieve peace. According to the German
Socialist, Karl Kautsky, we are approaching a new stage in the industrial
development of the world. At first capitalists exploited the resources
of their own country. Then they competed nationally for the exploitation
of colonies and dependencies, and this policy led to imperialism and
war. Now they are beginning to unite for the joint exploitation of all
backward lands. Competitive imperialism is making way for imperialism
by combination, just as competitive industry gave way to the trust.
English, French, German, and Belgian capitalists will unite to exploit
dependencies, will have joint spheres of influence, and the result will
be peace with profits. Imperialism in the old sense will die out, and its
place will be taken by a pacific super-imperialism, a higher imperialism.
[Sidenote: This higher imperialism fraught with dangers.]
What this theory actually means is that the normal development of
industry and finance will automatically bring about international peace,
and that socialism and even democracy are quite unessential to that end.
Socialists may cry for peace, but they might as well cry for free air.
But the theory concedes too much and goes too far. It is tainted with the
same ultra-rationalistic spirit as is the earlier socialist theory, from
which it is a reaction. War is not fought for economic motives alone,
although these are important. Serbia would have been less vindictive had
Austria conceded her an outlet for her trade, but in any case Serbia
would not willingly be ruled by Austria, nor Bulgaria by Greece. Racial
pride, religious prejudice, ancient traditions of all sorts still divide
nations irrespective of economic interest. You cannot reduce a nation to
a single unit thinking only in economic terms.
Moreover, even on the purely economic side there are infinite chances
for war in the distribution of the profits of joint enterprises among
the capitalists of the various nations. We all know how “gentlemen’s
agreements” are broken as soon as it is profitable for the gentlemen to
break them, and we cannot wholly trust irresponsible magnates, whether
industrial or political, to be even intelligently selfish. Moreover,
in the present state of the world the higher imperialism is a policy
fraught with the very dangers and difficulties which it seeks to evade.
If the capitalists of Europe were determined to exploit South America
under a joint European control, the decision might directly lead to war.
There are too many vested national interests in colonies, dependencies
and spheres of influence to make internationalization of investment an
immediate specific against war.
[Sidenote: Internationalization of investment is only one step towards
peace.]
But in this matter of the higher imperialism we are less concerned to
know how false than how true it is. It is a thing to be desired if it
circumscribes war, even though it does not end war, if it tends towards
peace, even though it does not by itself alone assure peace. We believe
that this present war is not unlikely to end in a combination of great
nations with enormous capital, willing to enter upon foreign investments
jointly. The great capitalists, who influence if they do not rule our
modern industrial nations, will often discover that it is cheaper to
divide than to fight. It will be better to have twenty per cent. of a
Chinese loan without going to war than thirty per cent.—or nothing at
all—after a war. They will strive for the peace of “understanding”—the
peace of give and take.
If the big speculators can thus merge their interests and deal across
national boundaries, the little investors who have less to gain and more
to lose by war will be even more pacific. Farmers and wage-earners have a
still more attenuated interest in war, and a still more obvious interest
in peace. Once great liens of peace are established, moreover, many of
the incitements to war will of themselves disappear....
In the end, however, any internationalization of investment will be only
a single step in the direction of peace. There are many other steps to be
taken. Education, commerce, the development of an international morality,
the creation of machinery for dealing with international disputes,
are all essential to the evolution of peace. Industrial and political
democracy are above all necessary. Men must be given a full life and
a real stake in the wealth that peace provides, and they who bear the
burdens of war must actually determine the national policies which make
for war or peace.
_The New Republic, June 5, 1915._
PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT: POLITICAL
NATIONALITY AND THE FUTURE
[Sidenote: War has shattered our constructive effort.]
For the first time in our lives, we find ourselves in complete
uncertainty as to the future. To uncivilized people the situation is
commonplace; but in twentieth-century Europe we are accustomed to look
ahead, to forecast accurately what lies before us, and then to choose
our path and follow it steadily to its end; and we rightly consider that
this is the characteristic of civilized men. The same ideal appears
in every side of our life: in the individual’s morality as a desire
for “Independence” strong enough to control most human passions: in
our Economics as Estimates and Insurances: in our Politics as a great
sustained concentration of all our surplus energies (in which parties are
becoming increasingly at one in aim and effort, while their differences
are shrinking to alternatives of method), to raise the material, moral,
and intellectual standard of life throughout the nation. From all this
fruitful, constructive, exacting work, which demands the best from us
and makes us the better for giving it, we have been violently wrenched
away and plunged into a struggle for existence with people very much like
ourselves, with whom we have no quarrel.
We must face the fact that this is pure evil, and that we cannot escape
it. We must fight with all our strength: every particle of our energy
must be absorbed in the war: and meanwhile our social construction must
stand still indefinitely, or even be in part undone, and every class
and individual in the country must suffer in their degree, according to
the quite arbitrary chance of war, in lives horribly destroyed and work
ruined....
The psychological devastation of war is even more terrible than the
material. War brings the savage substratum of human character to the
surface, after it has swept away the strong habits that generations of
civilized effort have built up. We saw how the breath of war in Ireland
demoralized all parties alike. We have met the present more ghastly
reality with admirable calmness; but we must be on our guard. Time wears
out nerves, and War inevitably brings with it the suggestion of certain
obsolete points of view, which in our real, normal life, have long been
buried and forgotten.
[Sidenote: It has roused the instinct of revenge.]
It rouses the instinct of revenge. “If Germany has hurt us, we will hurt
her more—to teach her not to do it again.” The wish is the savage’s
automatic reaction, the reason his perfunctory justification of it: but
the civilized man knows that the impulse is hopelessly unreasonable. The
“hurt” is being at war, and the evil we wish to ban is the possibility
of being at war again, because war prevents us working out our own lives
as we choose. If we beat Germany and then humiliate her, she will never
rest till she has “redeemed her honor,” by humiliating us more cruelly in
turn. Instead of being free to return to our own pressing business, we
shall have to be constantly on the watch against her. Two great nations
will sit idle, weapon in hand, like two Afghans in their loopholed
towers when the blood feud is between them; and we shall have sacrificed
deliberately and to an ever-increasing extent (for the blood feud grows
by geometrical progression), the very freedom for which we are now
giving our lives.
[Sidenote: And of plunder.]
Another war instinct is plunder. War is often the savage’s profession:
“‘With my sword, spear and shield I plow, I sow, I reap, I gather in the
vintage.’ If we beat Germany our own mills and factories will have been
at a standstill, our horses requisitioned and our crops unharvested, our
merchant steamers stranded in dock if not sunk on the high seas, and our
‘blood and treasure’ lavished on the war: but in the end Germany’s wealth
will be in our grasp, her colonies, her markets, and such floating riches
as we can distrain upon by means of an indemnity. If we have had to beat
our plowshares into swords, we can at least draw some profit from the
new tool, and recoup ourselves partially for the inconvenience. It is
no longer a question of irrational, impulsive revenge, perhaps not even
of sweetening our sorrow by a little gain. To draw on the life-blood of
German wealth may be the only way to replenish the veins of our exhausted
Industry and Commerce.” So the plunder instinct might be clothed in
civilized garb: “War,” we might express it, “is an investment that must
bring in its return.”
The first argument against this point of view is that it has clearly been
the inspiring idea of Germany’s policy, and history already shows that
armaments are as unbusinesslike a speculation for civilized countries as
war is an abnormal occupation for civilized men. We saw the effect of
the Morocco tension upon German finance in 1911, and the first phase of
the present war has been enough to show how much Germany’s commerce will
inevitably suffer, whether she wins or loses.
It is only when all the armaments are on one side and all the wealth is
on the other, that war pays; when, in fact, an armed savage attacks a
civilized man possessed of no arms for the protection of his wealth. Our
Afghans in their towers are sharp enough not to steal each other’s cows
(supposing they possess any of their own) for cows do not multiply by
being exchanged, and both Afghans would starve in the end after wasting
all their bullets in the skirmish. They save their bullets to steal cows
from the plainsmen who cannot make reprisals.
If Germany were really nothing but a “nation in arms,” successful war
might be as lucrative for her as an Afghan’s raid on the plain, but she
is normally a great industrial community like ourselves. In the last
generation she has achieved a national growth of which she is justly
proud. Like our own, it has been entirely social and economic. Her goods
have been peacefully conquering the world’s markets. Now her workers
have been diverted _en masse_ from their prospering industry to conquer
the same markets by military force, and the whole work of forty years is
jeopardized by the change of method.
[Sidenote: But to fight for trade no longer pays.]
Fighting for trade and industry is not like fighting for cattle. Cattle
are driven from one fastness to another, and if no better, are at
least no worse for the transit. Civilized wealth perishes on the way.
Our economic organization owes its power and range to the marvelous
forethought and cooperation that has built it up; but the most delicate
organisms are the most easily dislocated, and the conqueror, whether
England or Germany, will have to realize that, though he may seem to have
got the wealth of the conquered into his grip, the total wealth of both
parties will have been vastly diminished by the process of the struggle.
[Sidenote: Germany’s economic ruin would compromise world-prosperity.]
The characteristic feature of modern wealth is that it is international.
Economic gain and loss is shared by the whole world, and the shifting of
the economic balance does not correspond to the moves in the game of
diplomatists and armies. Germany’s economic growth has been a phenomenon
quite independent of her political ambitions, and Germany’s economic
ruin would compromise something far greater than Germany’s political
future—the whole world’s prosperity. British wealth, among the rest,
would be dealt a deadly wound by Germany’s economic death, and it would
be idle to pump Germany’s last life-blood into our veins, if we were
automatically draining them of our own blood in the process.
But issues greater than the economic are involved. The modern “Nation”
is for good or ill an organism one and indivisible, and all the diverse
branches of national activity flourish or wither with the whole national
well-being. You cannot destroy German wealth without paralyzing German
intellect and art, and European civilization, if it is to go on growing,
cannot do without them. Every doctor and musician, every scientist,
engineer, political economist and historian, knows well his debt to the
spiritual energy of the German nation. In the moments when one realizes
the full horror of what is happening, the worst thought is the aimless
hurling to destruction of the world’s only true wealth, the skill and
nobility and genius of human beings, and it is probably in the German
casualties that the intellectual world is suffering its most irreparable
human losses.
With these facts in our minds, we can look into the future more clearly,
and choose our policy (supposing that we win the war, and, thereby,
the power to choose) with greater confidence. We have accepted the
fact that war itself is evil, and will in any event bring pure loss to
both parties: that no good can come from the war itself, but only from
our policy when the war is over: and that the one good our policy can
achieve, without which every gain is delusive, is the banishing of this
evil from the realities of the future. This is our one supreme “British
interest,” and it is a German interest just as much, and an interest of
the whole world.
This war, and the cloud of war that has weighed upon us so many years
before the bursting of the storm, has brought to bankruptcy the “National
State.” Till 1870 it was the ultimate ideal of European politics, as it
is still in the Balkans, where the Turk has broken Time’s wings. It was
such a fruitful ideal that it has rapidly carried us beyond itself, and
in the last generation the life of the world has been steadily finding
new and wider channels. In the crisis of change from nationalism to
internationalism we were still exposed to the plague of war. The crisis
might have been passed without it, and war banished for ever between the
nations of civilized Europe. Now that the catastrophe has happened (it
is childish to waste energy in incriminations against its promoters) we
must carry through the change completely and at once: we cannot possibly
afford to be exposed to the danger again.
[Sidenote: The bases of true nationality must be laid.]
No tool, machine, or idea made by men has an immortal career. Sooner or
later they all run amuck, and begin to do evil instead of good. At that
stage savage or unskilful men destroy them by force and replace them by
their opposite: civilized men get them under control, and build them into
something new and greater. Nationality will sink from being the pinnacle
of politics only to become their foundation, and till the foundations are
laid true, further building is impossible. But the bases of nationality
have never yet been laid true in Europe. When we say that “nationality
was the political ideal of the nineteenth century,” and that 1870 left
the populations of Europe organized in national groups, we are taking
far too complacent a view of historical facts. The same century that
produced a united Italy and Germany, saw out the whole tragedy of Poland,
from the first partition in 1772 to the last revolt in 1863. Human ideas
do not spring into the world full-grown and shining like Athena: they
trail the infection of evil things from the past.
In the Dark Ages Europe’s most pressing need and only practicable ideal
was strong government. Strong government came with its blessings, but it
brought the evil of territorial ambitions. The Duke of Burgundy spent
the wealth of his Netherland subjects in trying to conquer the Swiss
mountaineers. Burgundy succumbed to the king of France. But the very
factor that made the French kings survive in the struggle for existence
between governments, the force of compact nationality which the French
kingdom happened to contain, delivered the inheritance of the kings to
the Nation.
[Sidenote: Nationalism has perpetuated violence.]
The French Nation in the Revolution burst the chrysalis of irresponsible
government beneath which it had grown to organic life, but like a true
heir it took over the Royal Government’s ideal: “Peace within and
piracy without.” France had already begun aggression abroad before she
had accomplished self-government at home, and in delivering herself to
Napoleon she sacrificed her liberty to her ambition. Napoleon’s only
enduring achievements outside France were the things he set himself to
prevent, the realization, by a forceful reaction against force, of German
and Italian nationality. Nationalism was converted to violence from the
outset, and the struggle for existence between absolute governments has
merely been replaced by a struggle between nationalities, equally blind,
haphazard, and non-moral, but far more terrific, just because the virtue
of self-government is to focus and utilize human energy so much more
effectively than the irresponsible government it has superseded.
Naturally the result of this planless strife has been no grouping of
Europe on a just and reasonable national basis. France and England,
achieving racial frontiers and national self-government early, inherited
the Earth before Germany and Italy struggled up beside them, to take
their leavings of markets and colonial areas. But the government that
united Germany had founded its power on the partition of Poland, and in
the second Balkan War of 1913 we saw a striking example of the endless
chain of evil forged by an act of national injustice.
[Sidenote: Intranational oppression has been a chief cause of war.]
The Hungarians used the liberty they won in 1867 to subject the Slavonic
population between themselves and the sea, and prevent its union with
the free principality of Serbia of the same Slavonic nationality. This
drove Serbia in 1912 to follow Hungary’s example by seizing the coast of
the non-Slavonic Albanians; and when Austria-Hungary prevented this (a
right act prompted by most unrighteous motives), Serbia fought an unjust
war with Bulgaria and subjected a large Bulgarian population, in order
to gain access to the only seaboard left her, the friendly Greek port of
Salonika.
Hungary and Serbia are nominally national states: but more than half the
population in Hungary, and perhaps nearly a quarter in Serbia, is alien,
only held within the state by force against its will. The energy of both
states is perverted to the futile and demoralizing work of “Magyarizing”
and “Serbizing” subject foreign populations, and they have not even been
successful. The resistance of Southern Slav nationalism on the defensive
to the aggression of Hungarian nationalism has given the occasion for the
present catastrophe.
The evil element in nationalism under its many names, “Chauvinism,”
“Jingoism,” “Prussianism,” is the one thing in our present European
civilization that can and does produce the calamity of war. If our object
is to prevent war, then, the way to do so is to purge Nationality of this
evil. This we cannot do by any mechanical means, but only by a change
of heart, by converting public opinion throughout Europe from “National
Competition” to “National Cooperation.” Public opinion will never be
converted so long as the present system of injustice remains in force, so
long as one nation has less and another more than its due. The first step
towards internationalism is not to flout the problems of nationality, but
to solve them.
[Sidenote: The map of Europe must be justly revised.]
The most important practical business, then, of the conference that meets
when war is over, will be the revision of the map of Europe....
[Sidenote: Otherwise no permanent settlement is possible.]
If we do not think about nationality, it is simply because we have long
taken it for granted, and our mind is focussed on posterior developments;
but it is increasingly hard to keep ourselves out of touch with other
countries, and though our blindness has been partly distraction, it has
also been in part deliberate policy. We saw well enough that the present
phase of the national problem in Europe carried in it the seeds of war.
We rightly thought that war itself was the evil, an evil incomparably
greater than the national injustices that might become the cause of
it. We knew that, if these questions were opened, war would follow.
We accordingly adopted the only possible course. We built our policy
on the chance that national feeling could be damped down till it had
been superseded in the public opinion of Europe by other interests, not
because Nationalism was unjustified, but because it endangered so much
more than it was worth. Knowing that we had passed out of the nationalist
phase ourselves, and that from our present political point of view war
was purely evil, we hoped that it was merely a question of time for the
Continental populations to reach the same standpoint. Notably in Germany,
the focus of danger, we saw social interests coming more and more to the
front at the expense of militarism. We threw ourselves into the negative
task of staving off the catastrophe in the interim, by a strenuous
policy of compromise and conciliation, which has been successful on at
least two critical occasions. Now that the evil has been too powerful
and the catastrophe has happened, the reasons for this policy are dead.
Nationalism has been strong enough to produce war in spite of us. It
has terribly proved itself to be no outworn creed, but a vital force to
be reckoned with. It is stronger on the Continent than social politics.
It is the raw material that litters the whole ground. We must build it
into our foundations, or give up the task, not only of constructive
social advance beyond the limits we have already reached, but even of any
fundamental reconstruction of what the war will have destroyed.
Perhaps we might have foretold this from the case of Ireland immediately
under our eyes. Failure to solve her national problem has arrested
Ireland’s development since the seventeenth century, and imprisoned her
in a world of ideas almost unintelligible to an Englishman till he has
traveled in the Balkans. This has been England’s fault, and we are now
at last in a fair way to remedy it. The moment we have succeeded in
arranging that the different national groups in Ireland govern themselves
in the way they really wish, the national question will pass from the
Irish consciousness; they will put two centuries behind them at one
leap, and come into line with ourselves. The Dublin strike, contemporary
with the arming of the Volunteers, shows how the modern problems are
jostling at the heels of the old. Although “Unionist” and “Nationalist”
politicians could still declare that their attitude towards the strike
was neutral, the parliament of the new Irish state will discuss the
social problem and nothing else.
[Sidenote: Nationality is subjective not material.]
Ireland, then, has forced us to think about the problem of nationalism;
and our Irish experience will be invaluable to us when peace is made,
and we take in hand, in concert with our allies, the national questions
of the rest of Europe. To begin with, we already have a notion of what
Nationality is. Like all great forces in human life, it is nothing
material or mechanical, but a subjective psychological feeling in living
people. This feeling can be kindled by the presence of one or several of
a series of factors: a common country, especially if it is a well defined
physical region, like an island, a river basin, or a mountain mass; a
common language, especially if it has given birth to a literature; a
common religion; and that much more impalpable force, a common tradition
or sense of memories shared from the past.
[Sidenote: “Historical sentiment” is largely factitious.]
But it is impossible to argue _a priori_ from the presence of one or even
several of these factors to the existence of a nationality: they may
have been there for ages and kindled no response. And it is impossible
to argue from one case to another: precisely the same group of factors
may produce nationality here, and there have no effect. Great Britain is
a nation by geography and tradition, though important Keltic-speaking
sections of the population in Wales and the Highlands do not understand
the predominant English language. Ireland is an island smaller still and
more compact, and is further unified by the almost complete predominance
of the same English language, for the Keltic speech is incomparably
less vigorous here than in Wales; yet the absence of common tradition
combines with religious differences to divide the country into two
nationalities, at present sharply distinct from one another and none
the less hostile because their national psychology is strikingly the
same. Germany is divided by religion in precisely the same way as
Ireland, her common tradition is hardly stronger, and her geographical
boundaries quite vague: yet she has built up her present concentrated
national feeling in three generations. Italy has geography, language and
traditions to bind her together; and yet a more vivid tradition is able
to separate the Ticinese from his neighbors, and bind him to people of
alien speech and religion beyond a great mountain range. The Armenian
nationality does not occupy a continuous territory, but lives by language
and religion. The Jews speak the language of the country where they
sojourn, but religion and tradition hold them together. The agnostic Jew
accepts not only the language but all the other customs of his adopted
countrymen, but tradition by itself is too strong for him: he remains a
Jew and cannot be assimilated.
These instances taken at random show that each case must be judged on
its own merits, and that no argument holds good except the ascertained
wish of the living population actually concerned. Above all we must be
on our guard against “historical sentiment,” that is, against arguments
taken from conditions which once existed or were supposed to exist, but
which are no longer real at the present moment. They are most easily
illustrated by extreme examples. Italian newspapers have described the
annexation of Tripoli as “recovering the soil of the Fatherland” because
it was once a province of the Roman Empire; and the entire region of
Macedonia is claimed by Greek chauvinists on the one hand, because it
contains the site of Pella, the cradle of Alexander the Great in the
fourth century B.C., and by Bulgarians on the other, because Ohhrida,
in the opposite corner, was the capital of the Bulgarian Tzardom in the
tenth century A.D., though the drift of time has buried the tradition
of the latter almost as deep as the achievements of the “Emathian
Conqueror,” on which the modern Greek nationalist insists so strongly.
[Sidenote: We must understand nationalistic aims and diversities.]
The national problems of Europe are numerous, and each one is beset
by arguments good, bad, and indifferent, some no more specious than
the above, some so elaborately staged that it requires the greatest
discernment to expose them. Vast bodies of people, with brains and money
at their disposal, have been interested in obscuring the truth, and have
used every instrument in their power to do so. It is therefore essential
for us in England to take up these hitherto remote and uninteresting
national problems in earnest, to get as near to the truth as we possibly
can, both as to what the respective wishes of the different populations
are, and as to how far it is possible to reconcile them with each other
and with Geography; and to come to the conference which will follow the
war and is so much more important than the war itself, with a clear idea
of the alternative solutions and a mature judgment upon their relative
merits.
To accomplish this we need a coordination of knowledge on a large scale,
knowledge of history, geography, religion, national psychology and public
opinion....
[Sidenote: Individuality and tolerance must be our international ideals.]
With the growth of civilization the human and the territorial unit
become less and less identical. In a primitive community the members
are undifferentiated from one another: the true human unit is the total
group, and not the individual, and the territory this group occupies
is a unit too, self-sufficing and cut off from intercourse with the
next valley. In modern Europe every sub-group and every individual
has developed a “character” or “individuality” of its own which must
have free play; while the growth of communications, elaboration of
organization, and economic interdependence of the whole world have broken
down the barriers between region and region. The minimum territorial
block that can be organized efficiently as a separate political unit
according to modern standards is constantly growing in size: the maximum
human group which can hold together without serious internal divergence
is as steadily diminishing.
This would look like an _impasse_, were it not corrected by the virtues
of civilization itself. We started with the fact that the essence of
civilization was “Forethought” and its ideal the “power of free choice”:
the complementary side of this ideal, on the principle “Do as you would
be done by,” is to allow free choice to others when they are in your
power. It is a virtue with as many names as there are spheres of human
life: “Forbearance,” “Toleration,” “Constitutionalism.”...
_Arnold J. Toynbee, “Nationality and the War,” chap. I._
NATIONALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY
[Sidenote: We must have new forms of guarantee.]
The old Europe is dead, the old vision vanished, and we are wrestling in
agony for new inspiration....
We must beware of putting our new wine into old bottles. While guarantees
hold, they conserve their charge: when they break, the destruction is
worse than if they had never existed. Unless we can ensure that the
sovereign States of Europe respect European guarantees hereafter in other
fashion than Germany at the present crisis, we must modify the formula or
else discard it altogether.
Can the mechanism of the European system be safeguarded against its
individual members?...
We have asked our question and must accept the answer. It is useless to
fortify our new European organism by guarantees of the old order, because
we cannot fortify such guarantees themselves against the sovereign
national State. Whenever it chooses, the sovereign unit can shatter the
international mechanism by war. We are powerless to prevent it: all we
can do is to abandon our direct attack, and look for the causes which
impel States to a choice as terrible for themselves as for their victims.
[Sidenote: The German position.]
“You ask,” the Germans say, “why we broke our contract towards Belgium?
It would be more pertinent to ask how we were ever committed to such a
contract at all.
“The heart of modern Germany is the industrial world of the Rhineland
and Westphalia. The Belgian frontier and the Belgian tariff-wall rob
this region of its natural outlet at Antwerp, yet the contract expressly
forbids us to right this economic and geographical wrong by uniting the
sea-port to its hinterland.
“The chief need of modern Germany is a source of raw produce and a market
for her finished products in the tropical zone. Belgium has staked out
for herself the one important region in Africa which was not already
occupied by France or Great Britain. She can do nothing with it, while
we—but this contract expressly forbids us to kick the Belgian dog out of
the manger.
“Because of this Belgian guarantee we must go in want of almost
everything we need, yet meanwhile our great neighbors on either flank
have conspired to take from us even the little we possess already. The
struggle with France and Russia on which we are now engaged has been
impending for years, and on our part it is a struggle for existence, but
even here the same remorseless contract operates to paralyze our efforts.
On the scale of modern warfare the Western battle-front must extend from
Switzerland to the North Sea, yet the greater part of this immense zone
is neutralized by natural and artificial obstacles on either side. From
Switzerland to the Ardennes there will be stalemate: the decision will be
reached in the open country between the Ardennes and the coast. Here, as
soon as war broke out, France and our own fatherland had to concentrate
the terrific energy of their armaments, yet we had contracted away our
initiative in this vital area, for it lies within the frontiers of the
Belgian State. The Government we had guaranteed might prepare the ground
for France and ruin it for ourselves, yet because of the guarantee we
must look on passively at the digging of our grave.
“Why, then, had we suffered ourselves to be bound hand and foot? We had
not: our grandfathers had entailed the bonds upon us. When they signed
the contract in 1839, they knew not what they did. At that time Germany
had no industry, Belgium had no colonies, and the Franco-German frontier
between the Ardennes and the Jura was not closed to field operations by
two continuous lines of opposing fortifications. Had their signature been
demanded in 1914, they would have refused it as indignantly as we should
have refused it ourselves. To us no choice was offered, and if we have
asserted for ourselves the right to choose, who dares in his heart to
condemn us? Who will impose a changeless law upon a changing world?”
[Sidenote: We must provide for national growth.]
This is Germany’s argument about Belgium. Her facts may be true or false,
the arguments she builds on them valid or fallacious. That is not the
point. Behind arguments and facts there looms an idea that can inspire an
individual nation to make war on Europe. We must do justice to this idea,
if it is not to play the same havoc again.
Humanity has an instinctive craving for something eternal, absolute,
petrified. This seems to be a fundamental factor in our psychology:
it has obtruded itself equally in spheres as diverse as religion and
politics, but it has been especially dominant in diplomacy.
Whenever the European organism proves its instability by breaking down,
we start in quest of a perfect mechanism, a “permanent settlement.”
We are invariably disappointed, but invariably we return to the quest
again. The Congress of statesmen at Vienna followed this will-o’-the-wisp
in 1814: in 1915 the belligerent democracies are preparing to lead
themselves the same dance. “Europe is in a mess,” we are all saying:
“Let us tidy her up ‘once for all,’ and then we can live comfortably ever
after.”
We might as well expect a baby to “live comfortably ever after” in its
swaddling clothes....
[Sidenote: The European organism is full of dynamic life.]
So it is with the European organism. It is as full of life, as
perpetually in transformation, as the individual national molecules of
which it is woven, yet we confuse it in turn with each of its transitory
garments. If we are to find a satisfactory issue out of the present
crisis, we must begin by correcting our standpoint.
The impending settlement will not be permanent, and the better it fits
the situation, the less permanent will it be....
Our real work will be to regulate this immediate settlement so that it
varies in harmony with the subsequent growth of Europe and modifies its
structure and mechanism to meet the organism’s changing needs.
We have now discovered the flaw in guarantees of the old order. They
were framed for rigidity, and therefore were doomed to crack. Our new
guarantees must be elastic: they must be forged of steel not cast in iron.
How can we frame guarantees of this malleable character?...
(i.) Firstly, we propose guarantees of political independence and
integrity in the case of the three Scandinavian States, the Slovene Unit,
the Greek islands off Anatolia, Persia, and the Sultanate of Oman. The
autonomy guaranteed to Poland within the Russian Empire comes under the
same head.
(ii.) Secondly, we propose to guarantee economic rights-of-way to one
State across the political territory of another. Instances of this type
are the Russian railway through Norway to the Atlantic and through
Persia to the Indian Ocean; Poland’s title to free trade down the
Vistula, and to the enjoyment of a free port at Danzig; and Germany’s
similar claim to an unhampered outlet at Trieste.
Both these classes of guarantee are adapted from the international
machinery invented during the nineteenth century. The first class is
an extension of the political guarantee given to Belgium in 1839, the
second of the economic right-of-way secured to her through Dutch waters,
in order to furnish the commerce of Antwerp with a free passage down the
estuary of the Scheldt to the open sea.
[Sidenote: No settlement can be permanent.]
Our standpoint towards these two classes is inevitably prejudiced
by their associations. We envisage them as embodied “once for all,”
like their nineteenth-century precedents, in a contract, and like
nineteenth-century diplomacy we tend to regard such contracts as so many
girders in a “permanent settlement.”
(iii.) There is a third class, however, which has no precedent in the
past, and which will react upon our standpoint in the very opposite
direction: our proposed guarantee of alien minorities within the national
State....
The German populations transferred with Schleswig to Denmark and with
the Eastern frontier-zone to Autonomous Poland; the Poles abandoned
to Germany in West Prussia; the Germans and Slovaks who cannot be
disentangled from Hungary; the Christian elements in Anatolia and
Arabia—these are a few out of many instances, and each one of them is a
refutation of “finality.”