In this chapter it is proposed to embark upon what may seem now, with
the Great War still in progress and still undecided, the most hopeless
of all prophetic adventures. This is to speculate upon the redrawing of
the map of Europe after the war. But because the detailed happenings and
exact circumstances of the ending of the war are uncertain, they need
not alter the inevitable broad conclusion. I have already discussed that
conclusion, and pointed out that the war has become essentially a war of
mutual exhaustion. This does not mean, as some hasty readers may assume,
that I foretell a "draw." We may be all white and staggering, but
Germany is, I believe, fated to go down first. She will make the first
advances towards peace; she will ultimately admit defeat.
But I do want to insist that by that time every belligerent, and not
simply Germany, will be exhausted to a pitch of extreme reasonableness.
There will be no power left as Germany was left in 1871, in a state of
"freshness" and a dictatorial attitude. That is to say they will all be
gravitating, not to triumphs, but to such a settlement as seems to
promise the maximum of equilibrium in the future.
If towards the end of the war the United States should decide, after
all, to abandon their present attitude of superior comment and throw
their weight in favour of such a settlement as would make the
recrudescence of militarism impossible, the general exhaustion may give
America a relative importance far beyond any influence she could exert
at the present time. In the end, America may have the power to insist
upon almost vital conditions in the settlement; though whether she will
have the imaginative force and will is, of course, quite another
question.
And before I go on to speculate about the actual settlement, there are
one or two generalisations that it may be interesting to try over. Law
is a thin wash that we paint over the firm outlines of reality, and the
treaties and agreements of emperors and kings and statesmen have little
of the permanence of certain more fundamental human realities. I was
looking the other day at Sir Mark Sykes' "The Caliph's Inheritance,"
which contains a series of coloured maps of the political boundaries of
south-western Asia for the last three thousand years. The shapes and
colours come and go--now it is Persia, now it is Macedonia, now the
Eastern Empire, now the Arab, now the Turk who is ascendant. The colours
change as if they were in a kaleidoscope; they advance, recede, split,
vanish. But through all that time there exists obstinately an Armenia,
an essential Persia, an Arabia; they, too, advance or recede a little. I
do not claim that they are eternal things, but they are far more
permanent things than any rulers or empires; they are rooted to the
ground by a peasantry, by a physical and temperamental attitude. Apart
from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. I
find it, too, in Europe; the monarchs splash the water and break up the
mirror in endless strange shapes; nevertheless, always it is tending
back to its enduring forms; always it is gravitating back to a Spain, to
a Gaul, to an Italy, to a Serbo-Croatia, to a Bulgaria, to a Germany, to
a Poland. Poland and Armenia and Egypt destroyed, subjugated,
invincible, I would take as typical of what I mean by the natural map of
mankind.
Let me repeat again that I do not assert there is an eternal map. It
does change; there have been times--the European settlement of America
and Siberia, for example, the Arabic sweep across North Africa, the
invasion of Britain by the Low German peoples--when it has changed very
considerably in a century or so; but at its swiftest it still takes
generations to change. The gentlemen who used to sit in conferences and
diets, and divide up the world ever and again before the nineteenth
century, never realised this. It is only within the last hundred years
that mankind has begun to grasp the fact that one of the first laws of
political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines
of the natural map of mankind.
Now the nineteenth century phrased this conception by talking about the
"principle of nationality." Such interesting survivals of the nineteenth
century as Mr. C.R. Buxton still talk of settling human affairs by that
"principle." But unhappily for him the world is not so simply divided.
There are tribal regions with no national sense. There are extensive
regions of the earth's surface where the population is not homogeneous,
where people of different languages or different incompatible creeds
live village against village, a kind of human emulsion, incapable of
any true mixture or unity. Consider, for example, Central Africa,
Tyrone, Albania, Bombay, Constantinople or Transylvania. Here are
regions and cities with either no nationality or with as much
nationality as a patchwork quilt has colour....
Now so far as the homogeneous regions of the world go, I am quite
prepared to sustain the thesis that they can only be tranquil, they can
only develop their possibilities freely and be harmless to their
neighbours, when they are governed by local men, by men of the local
race, religion and tradition, and with a form of government that, unlike
a monarchy or a plutocracy, does not crystallise commercial or national
ambition. So far I go with those who would appeal to the "principle of
nationality."
But I would stipulate, further, that it would enormously increase the
stability of the arrangement if such "nations" could be grouped together
into "United States" wherever there were possibilities of inter-state
rivalries and commercial friction. Where, however, one deals with a
region of mixed nationality, there is need of a subtler system of
adjustments. Such a system has already been worked out in the case of
Switzerland, where we have the community not in countries but cantons,
each with its own religion, its culture and self-government, and all at
peace under a polyglot and impartial common government. It is as plain
as daylight to anyone who is not blinded by patriotic or private
interests that such a country as Albania, which is mono-lingual indeed,
but hopelessly divided religiously, will never be tranquil, never
contented, unless it is under a cantonal system, and that the only
solution of the Irish difficulty along the belt between Ulster and
Catholic Ireland lies in the same arrangement.
Then; thirdly, there are the regions and cities possessing no
nationality, such as Constantinople or Bombay, which manifestly
appertain not to one nation but many; the former to all the Black Sea
nations, the latter to all India. Disregarding ambitions and traditions,
it is fairly obvious that such international places would be best under
the joint control of, and form a basis of union between, all the peoples
affected.
Now it is suggested here that upon these threefold lines it is possible
to work out a map of the world of maximum contentment and stability, and
that there will be a gravitation of all other arrangements, all empires
and leagues and what not, towards this rational and natural map of
mankind. This does not imply that that map will ultimately assert
itself, but that it will always be tending to assert itself. It will
obsess ostensible politics.
I do not pretend to know with any degree of certainty what peculiar
forms of muddle and aggression may not record themselves upon the maps
of 2200; I do not certainly know whether mankind will be better off or
worse off then, more or less civilised; but I do know, with a very
considerable degree of certainty, that in A.D. 2200 there will still be
a France, an Ireland, a Germany, a Jugo-Slav region, a Constantinople, a
Rajputana, and a Bengal. I do not mean that these are absolutely fixed
things; they may have receded or expanded. But these are the more
permanent things; these are the field, the groundwork, the basic
reality; these are fundamental forces over which play the ambitions,
treacheries, delusions, traditions, tyrannies of international politics.
All boundaries will tend to reveal these fundamental forms as all
clothing tends to reveal the body. You may hide the waist; you will only
reveal the shoulders the more. You may mask, you may muffle the body; it
is still alive inside, and the ultimate determining thing.
And, having premised this much, it is possible to take up the problem of
the peace of 1917 or 1918, or whenever it is to be, with some sense of
its limitations and superficiality.