The New Imap of Europe

I

ON what general lines has the map of Europe changed since the Great War, and, on a long view, have the changes been for the worse or for the better? Such questions are bound to occur to our minds at a moment when the settlement agreed on at Locarno seems not unlikely to stereotype, at least for some time to come, the territorial provisions of the settlement imposed at Paris half a dozen years ago.

The first answer is that there are several maps of Europe between which we must distinguish. There are the political, the linguistic, and the economic, and — running through them all — there is the map of feeling, of those subjective sympathies and antipathies which often cut sharply across the maps based upon objective criteria. For practical purposes this map of feeling may be the most important, yet its subjectivity, complexity, and sensitive variability make it the most difficult of all to plot on paper or describe in words. Before attempting to appraise the political map of Europe which has resulted from the war, let us examine these other post-war maps and discuss the relation of the political map to each of them.

On the linguistic map—to consider that first — there is a marked contrast in degree of change between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. In the West, the linguistic map has not changed perceptibly since the late war, or indeed since the Dark Ages. In a general way it still displays the distribution of languages which prevailed in the last days of the Roman Empire. There are outlying exceptions, like Sicily at one extremity, where a Romance language superseded Greek and Arabic in the Middle Ages, or Ireland at another extremity, where English superseded a Celtic language in the nineteenth century; but mediæval Sicily was part of the Oriental world, and modern Ireland has many Near Eastern traits. These are exceptions that prove the rule; and in Western Europe for many centuries the rule has been that the peoples speaking different languages have been segregated in large, homogeneous, compact territorial blocks with sharp boundaries which have shown little if any tendency to vary.

In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the distribution of languages has changed enormously during the past century and a half, and during the last ten years this process of change has culminated in wholesale massacres of minorities and wholesale exoduses of populations: of Muslims from Europe into Asia, of Greeks and Armenians from Asia into Europe, of Bulgars from Macedonia into a truncated Bulgaria. This steeply rising curve of change in Eastern Europe has been leading toward a goal which substantially has now been attained: namely, the assimilation of the linguistic map in the East to that in the West of the continent. A hundred and fifty years ago the several linguistic groups in Eastern Europe were territorially intermingled. Their members lived, cheek by jowl, in the same districts and the same cities, and this intermingling was a fundamental principle in the structure of society, since each nationality was identified, often to the point of monopoly, with a particular trade or trades, so that the presence of each on the spot was indispensable to the economic well-being of the others. As a result of the changes which have culminated during and since the Great War, the East European peoples have been redistributed violently into more or less compact linguistic blocks on the West European model; and thus, on the linguistic map of Europe, where such a strong contrast between West and East displayed itself in A.D. 1775, the continent appears in 1925 as a single unit with a uniform structure.

In passing, it is interesting to note that, at the time when Eastern Europe has just completed the transformation of its linguistic map to the West European pattern, the United States — a country originally colonized from Western Europe and therefore substantially homogeneous in nationality, like the older countries of the western world — has developed a tendency (though it is, of course, no more than a tendency) toward the East European type of intermingling. During the last quarter of a century before the outbreak of the Great War, the shifting course of the stream of immigration brought into the United States great numbers of aliens who have not proved readily amenable to assimilation, but have continued to live their own lives and speak their own languages among themselves. They have even tended — again on the East European pattern — to economic specialization on lines of nationality. Greek immigrants have concentrated upon selling fruit and shining shoes; Italians upon spadework; Poles in the Connecticut Valley upon onion-growing; while Irishmen have almost monopolized the careers of policemen and politicians. This analogy is not fanciful; for the new immigrants into the United States who have behaved in this novel way actually came in large part from Eastern Europe, whereas their predecessors had mostly come from the northwest of the continent and had therefore arrived speaking English or kindred languages as their mother-tongue, and expecting to merge themselves in the national life of their new country, as they would have expected any immigrant into their old countries to merge himself in the national life of those.

II

To return to Europe, let us now consider how the new uniform linguistic map of the continent and its new political map are related to each other. In the redrawing of the political map, the declared principle of the statesmen who presided over the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was to make it coincide with the linguistic map of nationality in so far as the exigencies of the economic map permitted. The divine right of nationalities was a dogma which governed their decisions as powerfully as the divine right of dynasties had inspired their predecessors at the Vienna Conference a century before.

On the whole, considering that in 1919 the passions and prejudices aroused by four years of war were still unabated, it is remarkable that the Supreme Council of the Allies did not show more unfair discrimination than it did in applying its principle to exAllies and ex-enemies. At the same time, its practice, in doubtful cases, of giving the benefit of the doubt to its friends, and still more its tendency to substitute the economic map for the linguistic map, where the latter was economically impracticable, in favor of its friends and not of the defeated nations, have left a wide margin of difference between the new frontiers (professedly based in a general way upon the linguistic map) and the actual boundaries between the groups speaking the different languages. For example, on grounds of economic geography the 3,000,000 Germans of Bohemia have been included in Czechoslovakia, whereas the Slovaks have been detached from Hungary, although the economic arguments for retaining them within Hungary are just as strong as those for including the Bohemian Germans in Czechoslovakia. Thus different parts of the political frontiers of Czechoslovakia have been drawn on different principles, which, in the different cases, have invariably produced a result favorable to Czechoslovakia and unfavorable to Austria and Hungary. Again, Poland has been given territorial access to the sea by the creation of the so-called ' Polish Corridor’ and of the Free City of Danzig, whereas Germany’s equally strong claim, of the same order, for the maintenance of the previously existing territorial continuity between East Prussia and the rest of the Reich has been disregarded.

In fairness it must be said on the other side that, however impartially the new political frontiers had been drawn, a residuum of minorities would have been left, in any case, on the wrong side of the line, and would have found themselves in the power of alien majorities. This was inevitable because the economic map could not be left out of account, and, in most cases where it differs from the linguistic map, it possesses, in the last resort, a more compelling power, because the practical consequences of ignoring it are more inconvenient. It must be added that the Supreme Council foresaw that minorities would need protection and drafted treaties to this end, in which it laid down the rights of minorities and placed them under the ægis of the League of Nations. The newly created or enlarged states of Eastern Europe were compelled to sign these treaties as a condition of receiving recognition of their sovereignties over their new territories, and the Supreme Council showed patience and determination in overcoming their disinclination (which was especially strong in the case of Rumania) to bind themselves in this way. Nevertheless, the aggregate numbers of the minorities left on the wrong side of the line are greater than they need have been on purely economic grounds, and therefore greater than they ought to have been in a settlement professedly based on the principle of nationality.

The authors of the Paris settlement will reply that at least the number of millions in Europe under alien government has been vastly reduced by their labors, in comparison with the pre-war political map, under which not only minorities but entire nations were living in subjection. To this it may be retorted that, though the subject populations are certainly less numerous now than before the war, yet their condition is worse — partly because the passions aroused by the war are only slowly dying down, and partly because there has been not only a reduction in numbers but a reversal of positions. The ‘top dog’ of yesterday is the ‘under dog’ of to-day, and the former under dog, finding his old oppressor suddenly placed in his power, is likely, at the beginning, to take his revenge and to indulge to the full his long-repressed instinct to domineer; whereas the old masters, who had been in control for centuries, had no recent wrongs to avenge upon their subjects and had been sated with dominion too long to exercise it oppressively for the mere delight of tasting power.

These features in the new situation make the lot of the present minorities unenviable. All that can be said is that the passions aroused by the war and the desire of the under dog to ‘get his own back’ are presumably factors which will diminish as time goes on. Meanwhile, much depends on whether the Minority Treaties can be made effective. Twice-over the League of Nations, taking action in pursuance of the Polish Minority Treaty, has successfully intervened in favor of German minorities in Poland. One of these cases is noteworthy, in as much as the Germans concerned were colonists who had been settled, before the war, by the Prussian Government upon lands expropriated from their lawful Polish owners. Thus these Germans, though they were not personally blameworthy and though their acquired rights were undoubtedly safeguarded under the Minority Treaty which the Polish Government had signed, were in an invidious position, so that, if the League has been successful in this instance, it may reasonably be expected to succeed in less difficult cases.

On the other hand, another step on behalf of minorities, which would have created a valuable precedent, has proved abortive. During the Fifth Assembly of the League of Nations in the autumn of 1924, the Greek and Bulgarian representatives were each induced to initial two identic treaties drafted as between their respective Governments and the Council of the League, in accordance with which either Government was to place under the protection of League officials on the spot the members of the other nation who were permanently domiciled, as a minority, in its territory. The League officials designated for this task were a Belgian and a New Zealand officer, who were supervising the voluntary migration of Bulgars from Greek territory into Bulgaria and of Greeks from Bulgarian territory into Greece, under the terms of the Peace Treaty between Bulgaria and the Allies. The new draft treaties would have extended the protection of these officers to the members of both these minorities who elected to remain under alien rule, and would have made their new duties permanent. Unhappily the Greek Government repudiated the action of its representative at Geneva — partly because the mere news of the draft treaties produced an immediate slackening in the stream of voluntary intermigration, and this was not to the Greek Government’s taste; partly because Jugoslavia brought great pressure to bear upon Greece to repudiate the arrangement. The motive of Jugoslavia’s intervention is illuminating, while deplorable. One effect of the Græco-Bulgarian arrangement with the League, if it had been ratified, would have been the formal acknowledgment of a notorious fact — namely, that on Greek territory a Bulgarian minority existed. Now this Bulgarian minority in Greek Macedonia is linguistically and nationally part and parcel of the adjoining Bulgarian minority in Jugoslav Macedonia. The official Jugoslav view, however, regarding this latter Bulgarian minority is that it is nonexistent and that the people are Serbs. The acknowledgment of the Bulgarian nationality of the Macedonians on the Greek side of the frontier would have undermined Jugoslavia’s entrenched position, and might have opened the way for a demand that she render an account of how the Macedonians under her rule were faring. This illustrates the present maladjustment between the linguistic map and the political.

At present, the struggle between subject minorities and dominant majorities is being waged, in different parts of Europe, by very different methods. In Bohemia, as between the German minority there and the Czechoslovak Government, voluminous dossiers and counter-dossiers are filed with the Secretariat of the League by the disputants, without injury to life and limb. In Macedonia, as between the Bulgar minority and the Jugoslav Government, the argument is being conducted by battle, murder, and sudden death. A general solution of this problem can be brought, if at all, only by the hand of time. There is no solution to be found in a fresh change of frontiers tending toward a restoration of the political map as it existed before the war. Such a solution readily suggests itself to a detached observer’s mind, because the Unmerciful Servant is such an unsympathetic character that we should naturally be glad to see him receive his deserts. The punitive or vindictive temper, however, is not the atmosphere in which fair and stable solutions are discovered. The very reason why the present map is unsatisfactory is because that fatal spirit inspired its authors in too great a degree. The true solution does not lie in throwing the political map back into the melting-pot, with the fearful destruction and suffering which this violent process involves — as we know from our recent experience in the Great War. It lies in modifying, not the lines on the map, but the resentment, the vindictiveness, and, above all, the fear in the hearts of both parties to the controversy.

III

The economic map of Europe next claims our attention, and here we observe an increasing tension between two incompatible tendencies — a tension which has not yet been resolved, but which is bound to find its resolution sooner or later, and perhaps, in doing so, to revolutionize the European situation. The first of these two contrary forces is the tendency for the effective unit of economic activity in the modern world to increase in scale progressively. The second is the tendency for the acceptable unit of political life to decrease in scale under the influence of a more and more minutely articulated consciousness of nationality.

Before the war every independent state consciously aimed at economic self-sufficiency; and, as the scale of economic operations increased under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, the structure of the states at first adapted itself more or less successfully. Throughout the century preceding the war the general trend on the political map was for small states to be eliminated and for a few Great Powers to increase their domains, and in many cases — for example, the establishment and maintenance of the United States, the unification of Germany and of Italy, and the postponement of the breakup of the Hapsburg Monarchy — the Great Powers patently owed their creation and preservation to the fact that they, and no states of smaller calibre than theirs, were commensurate with the scale at that time attained by economic activities. During the last phase before the war, however, the scale of economic life continued to grow and the Great Powers began to be dwarfed by it. It was in vain that they partitioned Africa in the effort to acquire home-grown tropical raw materials. The increase in the scale of economic life persisted until the unit became nothing less than the world itself—leaving any state, short of a world-state, incapable of economic self-sufficiency.

Meanwhile, underground, even those aggregations of territory which the Great Powers had succeeded in amassing were being prized asunder by the leaven of nationalism at work among their component populations; and, under the impact of the war, one Great Power out of the eight was extinguished and two others were mutilated. The consequence is that, while the worldscale of economic life seems to have become established definitively, the independent states of Europe, on the present political map, are more numerous, and severally smaller on the average, — in other words, even less capable of economic self-sufficiency, — than before the war. Thus, while the new political map follows the linguistic map of Europe in its main outlines, so that the problem of minorities which arises from the remaining discrepancies is not insoluble, the new political map and the economic map are antithetic and irreconcilable. The present tension between them is so great that it cannot long continue. One or other map will have to adjust itself to the other; and, since the economic map is inexorable, or at least cannot be forced on to different lines without the permanent economic ruin of Europe, it is in the political map that the readjustment is to be expected.

The extent to which the political map of Europe has been broken up as a result of the war, in defiance of the economic factor, can be measured not only by the increase in the number of independent European states and the diminution in their average area and population, but by the increase in the number of small states without a seaboard. One of the most noteworthy features in the evolution of the political map during the nineteenth century had been the almost complete elimination of this class — a class which had been numerous in Europe in 1815 and at all previous times since the break-up of the Roman Empire. In 1914 only two completely landlocked independent states were to be found on the continent — namely, Switzerland and Serbia. Of these two, Switzerland alone was highly developed economically, and Switzerland had learned how to adjust her economic life to her position by long experience — aided by the fact that she marched with no less than four countries with seaboards, none of which was unfriendly to her. Serbia, though less dependent than Switzerland on foreign trade, was less fortunate in her economic relations with her neighbors, and her consequent desire for a seaboard of her own was one of the contributing causes of the general war of 1914-1918.

When we turn to the post-war political map, we find, it is true, that Serbia has secured her seaboard by expanding herself into Jugoslavia; but on the other hand we find that the total number of landlocked states has risen to four — namely, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Hungary — and that several other states are partially landlocked — Bulgaria being entirely cut off from the Ægean, and Russia almost entirely from the Baltic, while the access of Poland to the Baltic is inconvenient and precarious.

This means that there are many more states than before on the political map of Europe which are utterly incapable of economic self-sufficiency — a self-sufficiency which, already before the war, was ceasing to be possible even for a state of the calibre of AustriaHungary. The most significant example of this general fact is the economic consequence of the reacquisition of Alsace-Lorraine by France from Germany. Before the peace-settlement of 1919, the coördination of the iron-ores of Lorraine with the coal-fields of the Ruhr was one of the rare remaining instances in which all the necessary raw materials (though not all the necessary markets) for a first-class European industry were still contained within the frontiers of a single state. The political transfer of the Reichsland has temporarily broken up this economic combination, for the coal remains in German hands while the iron has passed into French hands. At present, when both parties, under the psychological influence of the war, are still thinking in terms of politics rather than of economics, each may dream of damaging her late opponent by refusing to go into economic partnership with her. With that half of the assets of the Ruhr-Lorraine coal-and-iron industry which they hold respectively, each has been scheming how to revive the industry for her own exclusive benefit; just as Czechoslovakia has been scheming how to recover the markets for her manufactures which she enjoyed before the war as a part of Austria-Hungary, while at the same time erecting high tariff walls against those other parts which have turned into separate ‘successor states.’ All these dreams are vain, and time is rapidly demonstrating that they are ruinous to those who harbor them. In the economic field, neither post-war Germany nor post-war France nor post-war Czechoslovakia is able ‘to stand alone under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.’

What is the solution here? Again it certainly does not lie in redrawing the political map on the lines which it followed before the war. The point has been emphasized already that to throw the political frontiers of Europe into the melting-pot for the second time within the space of a few years would be to court irretrievable disaster. Nor would this in any way solve the economic problem, since already before the war, as has been pointed out above, even the greatest in calibre among the Great Powers had become economically inadequate. Evidently the way to a solution is to be found, not in altering the new political frontiers, but in leaving them where they are and then gradually making them fainter. We can hardly expect that they will ever become so faint as are now the boundaries between the thirteen once sovereign states which were the historical nucleus of the present United States of America. In the New World, political unification on a continental scale has been made possible by the existence of a degree of political fluidity which in Europe is unattainable. Among a new population in a new environment there is a blessed absence of those ancient bitter memories which in Europe are graven deep on the face of the land and in the minds of the people. As far ahead as we can foresee, a United States of Europe cannot be discerned on the horizon; but a European Zollverein — or, short of that, a European economic entente, on a scale comparable to the economic unit constituted in America by the United States —seems much less unlikely to arise in a not too distant future. The Conference of Locarno has given greater hope of a political détente in Europe than we have had at any time since the outbreak of the Great War, or, indeed, since the last decade of the nineteenth century; and the objective necessity for a European economic entente is so urgent that, if once the political obstacles to it are removed, or even diminished, it is reasonable to expect that rapid and effective moves in this direction will be made. Otherwise Europe cannot possibly retain, or rather recover, her parity with the United States of America in the economic life of the world; and it is desirable in the economic interest of America, as well as in that of Europe herself, that this parity should be reëstablished, since the economic decline of Europe would deprive America of her chief natural field for foreign trade.

IV

We now come to the map of sympathies and antipathies, which is the least easy to visualize. We can catch the clearest glimpses of it in places where it runs counter to the linguistic and economic maps and produces instability or disturbance in their outlines. For example, the economic map, if left to itself, would have kept the Adriatic ports of Trieste and Fiume in political union with the countries of the Middle Danube Basin, which constitute the hinterland on which their commercial life depends. The natural economic map was expressed politically in the pre-war Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Yet the antipathy of the Italian inhabitants of the two ports toward Germans and Jugoslavs, and their sympathy for Italy, have resulted in their being cut off from their hinterlands by new political frontiers drawn a few miles inland, while they have been united politically with Italy — a country with which they have no natural economic connection. Again, the economic map would have kept Lorraine, and both the economic and the linguistic maps Alsace, in that political union with Germany which existed from 1871 down to 1918. Yet the antipathy of the Reichslanders toward Germany and their sympathy for France persisted so strongly for half a century that the counter-attractions of economic interest and linguistic affinity were eventually unable to prevail in Germany’s favor.

How is this powerful but elusive force of feeling likely to affect the evolution of the political map from now onward? It is not inconceivable that throughout Europe we may witness before long a sudden loss of interest in the dogma of nationality and in the effort to achieve national unity and uniformity by force. At any rate, this is suggested by the analogy of the Wars of Religion, which dominated the development of Modern Europe in her pre-nationalistic phase. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europeans fought one another to a standstill in order to bring about conformity, on rival lines, between the political map and the map of religion; and then suddenly, toward the end of the seventeenth century, they ceased to fight over religion and began to light over quite other things. So thoroughly noncontentious has the religious map become in Europe as a whole (with certain vanishing exceptions in Ireland and the Balkan Peninsula) that, though it can still be plotted out, it is now a curiosity of history and not an active factor which has to be taken into account in considering contemporary European affairs. The psychological reasons for the cessation of the Religious Wars seem to have been both negative and positive. On the one hand, the combatants at length learned from repeated experience that the results which they desired could not be achieved satisfactorily by force and that the efforts which they were making were bringing in diminishing returns. On the other hand, positive new interests, such as the rivalry for the economic control of India and North America, arose to occupy their attention.

In contemporary Europe the furore of nationalism may quickly be banished by similar psychological changes; and the most potent stimulant may well be the economic exhaustion which overindulgence in nationalism has produced. To a large extent the European nationalism which resulted in the general war of 1914-1918 can be interpreted as a luxury of those who have waxed fat, a precipitation of surplus energy during a period when Europe was accumulating raw energy faster than she was learning how to employ it constructively. Throughout the century ending in 1914 there is a significant correspondence of line between the rising curve of national fanaticism and the rising curve of industrial production. In the terrific explosion of the war, however, this head of steam was blown off; and the problem which faces postwar Europe is not how to dispose of surplus wealth and energy, but how to avoid a permanent restriction of economic opportunity and lowering of the standard of living. This change in the situation is likely to divert attention from conflicts of nationality to conflicts of class; for, if there is a serious permanent diminution in the total wealth, the different social classes will be driven to contend fiercely for the possession of what remains. In the class-struggle, so far as it has yet become a reality, there is a marked tendency for the forces of the proletariat throughout Europe to combine on international lines; and, if this Communist international offensive becomes formidable, presumably the European bourgeoisie and skilled artisan class will be forced in self-defense to build up a common international front in order to resist it.

In this way the shifting map of sympathies and antipathies may affect the political map profoundly; and here again the rise of new Powers beyond the borders of Europe may assist the process. It has been suggested above that an economic entente between the independent states of Europe may be stimulated by the economic pressure of the United States of America, where an economic unit of the calibre of the whole European continent has the advantage of being under one government. Similarly, a class entente of the entire European bourgeoisie may be stimulated by the sudden establishment, since the war, of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics on Europe’s eastern border. The U. S. S. R., as an aggregate of territory, natural resources, and population, is comparable in scale to Europe or to the United States; but like the United States, and unlike Europe, it possesses the additional asset of political unity. If Europe is to hold her own, not only in economic competition against the United States, but in the class-war against the Soviet Union, she will have to coördinate her forces. ‘United she stands, divided she falls.’

This leads us on, in conclusion, to consider the general position of postwar Europe in the contemporary world. The outstanding new fact is that the separate communities into which Europe has been divided hitherto, since the history of modern Western civilization began, have been dwarfed by the rise elsewhere of communities on a greater scale. Before the war of 1914—1918, the Great Powers of Europe were still the Great Powers of the World, even though only a fraction of the territory, resources, and population of the continent went to the making of each of them. Now, however, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy can no longer compete as separate units against the present strength of the United States of America and the potential strength of Russia, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil, not to speak of the latent possibilities in China and India. In fact, there has come upon the states of modern Europe the crisis that overtook the states of ancient Greece after the conquests of Alexander had suddenly enlarged the boundaries of the world and had thus increased the scale of political and economic activity. The ancient Greek states which, in isolation and rivalry, had yet dominated their world in the fifth century before Christ found themselves faced, in the second century before Christ, with the alternatives of coöperation among themselves or subordination to new Great Powers of larger calibre — the ‘successor states’ of the Persian Empire in the Levant, Rome and Carthage in the Western Mediterranean. In this crisis of her history, ancient Greece did not lack prophets or statesmen. There were constructive efforts at permanent political coöperation, like the Achæan and Ætolian Leagues; and in 217 B.C. there was an attempt to ‘outlaw war’ in Greece while Rome and Carthage were engaged in their life-or-death struggle for world power.

‘Behold the cloud in the West,’ said a speaker at a peace conference of Greek states which came together spontaneously in that year under the stimulus of the external menace. ‘The states of Greece,’ he added, ‘are like wayfarers in a wilderness who have to cross a river in flood, and may count themselves lucky if, by linking hands in chain, they struggle safely to the other side.’ In this crisis ancient Greece just failed to achieve unity, and immediately paid the penalty by falling under the dominion of the Roman conquerors of Carthage. The crisis with which modern Europe is confronted in 1926 is not dissimilar.