Chapter VI: Part I: Principles of the Settlement: Economic (2)

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.”

The fact that such minorities must inevitably be left on our hands compels us to recognize that beyond a certain degree the economic and the national factor are not commensurable. Here is an essential imperfection in the best settlement we can possibly devise.

The fact that these minorities require a guarantee reveals a deficiency still more grave than the other, inasmuch as it is not environmental but psychological. It means that hardly a single national society in Europe has yet become capable of national toleration. Just as people were persecuted for their religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and for their political opinions in the nineteenth, so they are still in the twentieth century almost universally exposed to persecution for their national individuality. In this sphere the social evolution of Europe is exceptionally backward, and the problem of nationality will never be solved till this psychological incongruity is removed.

[Sidenote: But elastic guarantees will further racial toleration.]

This at once reduces to their proper proportion both the immediate geographical settlement of the problem which we have elaborated in this book and that guarantee of alien minorities which we have found to be its necessary supplement. In this light, the contracts in which such guarantees are enshrined appear as the transitory scaffolding they are. Weakened by the morbid hypertrophy of nationalism which has been preying upon her for years, exhausted by the convulsion of war in which the malady has culminated, Europe must walk on crutches now or else collapse; yet she will not be a cripple forever. Relieved by these guarantees from the immediate strain of unmitigated national friction, she will be able to concentrate all her energy upon her spiritual convalescence. As soon as she has trained herself to national toleration, she will discard the guarantees and walk unaided.

So far from constituting a “permanent settlement,” our third type of guarantee is an intimation that the problem still remains unsettled. The work will not be complete until we can dispense with the instrument, but the instrument will not accomplish the work unless it is wielded by a craftsman’s hand. Not only are guarantees of our third type merely the means to an end beyond themselves: the contract in which it is embodied is in this case the least important part of the guarantee.

When we guarantee a national minority we have of course to define certain liberties which it is to enjoy—liberties, for instance, of religion, education, local self-government—and all the parties to the Conference must contract responsibility for the observance of such stipulations; yet when we have done this, we cannot simply deposit our document in some international “Ark of the Covenant” and go our ways. The essence of the guarantee is its subsequent interpretation.

The relation between the different elements in a country is continually changing. One church dwindles while another makes converts; one race advances in culture while another degenerates; man’s indefatigable struggle to dominate his physical environment alters the natural boundaries between localities: a barrier that once seemed insurmountable is pierced, and leaves one formerly insignificant in relative prominence. Each of these modifications demands an adjustment of the guarantee, and since they are an infinite series, the guarantee itself requires ceaseless manipulation if it is to perform its function aright.

[Sidenote: The changing organism needs a new form of international executive.]

This need cannot be satisfied by the original _fiat_ of the International Conference: it can only be met by the appointment of a standing international committee with executive powers, empowered, that is, to administer and interpret the contracts to which the members of the Conference have originally subscribed. Our third type of guarantee has thus presented us with the clue we sought. The letter of international law has proved ineffective hitherto because it has lacked the inspiration of a living spirit, and this spirit can only be breathed into it by a human organ of international authority.

[Sidenote: The executive and the guarantees.]

Supposing that such an organ were called into existence, what kind of international relations would naturally fall within its scope? We can analyze its probable sphere of activity into several departments.

(i.) The first branch would of course be those guarantees of national minorities which have just taught us the necessity for its existence.

(ii.) The second branch would include the two subjects of guarantee we dealt with first, namely, “Political Independence” and “Rights of Way.” We can see now that their administration by a representative international executive would eliminate that defect of rigidity which has always proved fatal to them heretofore.

Between them these two branches would cover all the machinery we have suggested for our regenerated European organism. Are there any further spheres of national interaction over which our international organ might properly assume control? It would be logical to assign to it, if possible, all relations between sovereign national States which are peculiarly subject to change.

Change is a harmonization of two rhythms—Growth and Decay. Some sovereign units are continually waxing in population, material wealth and spiritual energy: such are Great Britain and Germany, France and the Russian Empire. Others, like the Ottoman Empire or Spain, are as continually waning in respect of the same factors.

This ebb and flow in the current of life causes, and must cause, a perpetual readjustment of the relations between units in the two complementary phases. Units in the positive phase inevitably absorb the fibers and trespass upon the environment of those which have passed over into the negative rhythm. We cannot arrest this process any more than we can abolish change itself: what we can do is to regulate it on the lines of civilization, instead of letting it run riot in a blind struggle for existence.