From Wilson to Hitler

I

THE current month of January will mark the fifteenth anniversary of two events — the coming into effect of the various treaties of the Paris Conference, and the coming into existence of the League of Nations. To-day, moreover, it is no longer the mere expression of congenital pessimism to assert that together these two grandiose undertakings have utterly failed to provide the world with that state of peace to which it looked forward not merely hopefully, but even confidently, half a generation ago, when Woodrow Wilson took ship for Paris.

If we look back over the history of the League of Nations during its fifteen years of existence, the explanation of its present plight is not difficult to discover. Originally the League represented an attempt to found a permanent political institution upon a temporary popular emotion. It was launched upon the assumption that because in 1919, when the Paris Conference met, peoples were still under the empire of the agonies of the preceding four years of war, they would always be prepared to subordinate national rights and interests to the larger necessities of world peace and order.

During the previous century, the masses in the three Western democracies — France, Great Britain, and the United States — had, after revolutions, civil wars, and endless failures, at last learned to accept as final the will of the majority, as expressed by Congress and Parliaments. Therefore it was imagined that peoples everywhere would similarly accept as definitive the verdict of an international parliament assembled at Geneva.

Not less vital to the success of the League experiment was the further assumption that all nations, beginning with the United States, would not alone submit to the authority of Geneva, but, in addition, contribute men and money to give effect to that authority if it were challenged. For unless the League was to have both authority and the means to render that authority effective, then, in the very nature of things, it was condemned in advance to futility and failure.

The design of the League thus constituted a direct break with the whole conception of the nation-state system, with its dogma of absolute sovereignty, and an instinctive reversion to the tradition of Rome. So far as history records, there has been only one era of general peace, and that was during the centuries in which the civilized world was included within the frontiers of the Roman Empire. The essential characteristics of the Pax Romana were laws, courts, and police sustained by the authority of Rome herself, and backed by the forces of the mighty empire. When that empire fell, there was an end of organized peace in the world. Nor was it restored with the rise of the modern state system, because at the bottom of that system lay the doctrine of sovereignty.

Woodrow Wilson’s League constituted an attempt to restore the Pax Romana by combining the older conceptions of authority and force which belonged to the Roman Empire with the modern system of nation states. Such combination was possible, however, only as the nations of the world were prepared to delegate to Geneva that authority and power which were prerogatives of Rome and the basis of her greatness. In a word, the League represented an effort to create a union of sovereign states in order to put a term to international anarchy both political and economic.

Always the success of the experiment depended upon the willingness of peoples everywhere to accept as definitive the will of the majority of nations precisely as those of the Western democracies had learned to accept as definitive the will of majorities within national frontiers. For under democratic forms there can be no other source of authority, and without authority there cannot be order.

II

It is essential to establish this primary truth, because otherwise the cause of failure at Geneva remains obscure. Thus it is customary to ascribe that failure to the nature of the peace treaties, the character of postwar policies of certain nations, the rise of dictatorships in Germany and Italy, the recrudescence of nineteenth-century imperialism in Japan, the onset of the Great Depression and the consequent rise of economic nationalism. Last of all, the refusal of the United States to join the League is estimated a cause of ultimate collapse at Geneva.

In reality all of these things are, themselves, no more than symptoms of the disease which has proved fatal to the League, and that disease is nationalism, itself inherent in the system of sovereign states. For what Wilson proposed was in effect a partnership of peoples — and primarily those of the Great Powers — to establish peace and order in the world. But it is a perfectly sound principle that at the basis of every partnership there must be a parity of interest. Men unite to do business together because there is the promise of greater profits in combination than in competition.

Between the seven Great Powers there was manifestly no parity in interest. On the contrary, thanks to the geographical position and their material resources, two — the United States and the British Empire — enjoyed complete security and all the essentials of prosperity. Two more — France and the Soviet Union — were completely satisfied with their economic circumstances, but, owing to their geographic position, did not possess security. As to the other three, — Germany, Italy, and Japan, — their economic circumstances were such that they were confronted by the prospect of declining standards of living, and therefore by the prospect of social upheaval, unless the more fortunate peoples were prepared to modify their policies in respect of tariffs, currencies, and immigration.

Thus, in the very nature of the situation, the two Anglo-Saxon nations were called upon to undertake responsibilities for the security of France and the Soviet Union, and to make sacrifices to ensure the prosperity of the Germans, the Japanese, and the Italians which were not to be balanced by any similar contributions of these other peoples. Together, Britain and the United States at Paris undertook to impose a new international organization upon the world, but quite obviously they could not expect the other nations to accept the programme unless it bestowed strategic security upon one group and economic security upon the other.

To the minds of both the American and the British peoples that constituted a prohibitive price to pay for a peace which in their own respective cases seemed little menaced at the moment. As a consequence, the United States Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and thus kept America away from Geneva. Somewhat later the British Parliament rejected the Protocol, which, in its turn, bound the British to defend the frontiers of the member nations against aggression and to mobilize their army and navy for that purpose on the call of Geneva.

Together these two actions plainly demonstrated that the two great English-speaking nations were unprepared to subordinate their sovereign rights to international control. Once Washington and London had spoken, the illusion of Geneva’s authority was shattered. No longer was it possible for the French and their allies in Europe, and for the Soviet Union when it eventually returned to international association, to discover in the League any resource to assure their patently threatened frontiers.

Nor for the Germans, Japanese, and Italians was there any promise that through Geneva they might obtain relief from their material circumstances, which were becoming progressively more intolerable since all were compelled to support great and growing populations upon an exiguous territory poor in natural resources. They were dependent upon the outside world for the raw materials essential to their industry, for food for their growing populations, for homes for their surplus numbers. But to meet these needs they had to sell their goods and export their labor. And if the tariffs and immigration laws of the more fortunate nations rendered this impossible, then, in Mussolini’s picturesque phrase, their choice was between suffocation and explosion.

After 1924, when the resolution of the American and British peoples was made clear, bases of association between the three groups of powers were nonexistent. For, while the AngloSaxons continued to press for peace, they were equally unready to meet the French requirements of security based upon the status quo, or the German demand for revision of that status quo, not merely territorial, but economic as well.

III

During the next few years the AngloSaxons undertook to substitute the principle of moral for physical guarantees of peace. There was, so the United States and Britain asserted, a force for righteousness resident in the public opinion of mankind which would rally to the cause of peace, were any nation to resort to violence. And that force would clothe the decisions of Geneva with irresistible strength, with a strength far more efficacious than that which could be provided by military, naval, or economic sanctions. Obviously this new doctrine of moral sanctions was conveniently calculated to permit the Anglo-Saxon countries to serve the cause of world peace inexpensively.

But did such a thing as world opinion actually exist? Or, even if it did, could it overleap national frontiers and rouse the conscience of a people whose government had resorted to violence to such a pitch that they would compel that government to change its policies and abandon its purposes? That question found definitive answer when Japan passed to the offensive in Manchuria and Geneva undertook to mobilize world opinion. Such mobilization did take place, but it utterly failed to penetrate beyond Japanese frontiers.

On the contrary, the press and public opinion of Japan rallied to defend their own government. Thus when, a year after the event, the League responded to a fait accompli of conquest by the Lytton Report, the Japanese Government, with indignant approbation of the public opinion of the nation, left the League. What, then, was left of the illusion of world public opinion as the sole and sufficient guarantor of world peace?

Simultaneously with the Japanese crisis the Disarmament Conference arrived. The issue there presented was simple. Every consideration of justice dictated that Germany should be permitted parity in means of defense with France and all other countries. On the other hand, every instinct of selfpreservation dictated that the French should refuse such parity as long as their own security was thereby certain to be compromised. Two rights were thus squarely in shock, and solution was, in practice, impossible save as the British and the Americans were prepared to invest the League with the means to guarantee French security, and therefore with the possibility of bestowing justice upon the Germans.

But Great Britain and the United States were not willing. No longer able to argue that world public opinion was a sufficient force to prevent aggression, the United States now substituted a proposal to come to conference in crisis. It would not send ships and men to meet aggression, but it would dispatch delegates to discuss aggression at Geneva. As a matter of fact, Britain and the United States had already done that much in the Manchurian crisis, and the Japanese troops still remained in Manchuria — now become Manchukuo. Obviously, then, what the American and British people were willing to do — all that they were prepared to do — was to talk. That was the limit of their undertaking.

France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and latterly Soviet Russia, were little impressed with such a pledge. All of them looked across disputed frontiers to gathering storms. The fate which had overtaken China might befall them at any moment. Accordingly, they were not satisfied with the prospect, for, while the British and Americans were doubtless ready to sign another Lytton Report, and perhaps even refuse to recognize annexations following invasions, they would do nothing to assist in the forcible expulsion of the invaders. Since, however, nothing more was obtainable, they rejected all proposals for parity and therefore justice for Germany. As a consequence, Germany quit Geneva.

IV

The last and in many ways the most devastating misfortune of the League was the Economic Conference. For that really marked the transition from one problem of peace to another, from the era of conflict which had been dominated by the spirit of ethnic nationalism launched by the French Revolution to an age of competition overshadowed by the spirit of economic nationalism which had its origin in the Industrial Revolution. The question of peace, with all its historic complexities, did not arise directly. But that of sovereignty did.

Woodrow Wilson had set out to make the world politically safe for democracy; at the London Conference the question was posed whether it could be made economically tolerable. The American President had built his structure upon the principle of ethnic selfdetermination, but now it was the question of economic self-sufficiency which was coming to the fore. The Great Depression had driven all nations to tariff, currency, and subsidy devices which in the aggregate had reduced the world alike to economic anarchy and universal prostration. Here was one final opportunity for Geneva to prove its efficacy. It had been unable to secure peace, could it now restore prosperity?

Inevitably the same old question arose, the question of the willingness of all peoples to subordinate their parochial interests and policies to a common end. And at London all the nations great and small, called in a conclave under the auspices of the League, were agreed upon a programme: for them stabilization of currency was the inescapable first step to recovery. The American delegation had come to London in the same belief. But suddenly, from beyond the Atlantic, the imperious voice of the American President proclaimed that for his country stabilization was impossible because it was likely to be disastrous to his domestic programme. As a consequence the London Conference collapsed.

What, then, was left? Like every other human institution, the League had been designed to produce certain results, to achieve a well-defined end. Like every other political instrument, it was, too, bound in the end to be subjected to the test of operation. It had to demonstrate its use or futility. Not forever could the annual assemblies meet in Geneva to adopt inspiring resolutions which were swiftly transferred from the platform to the archives without further effect. For eleven years it had been able to evade consideration of any of the great issues which divided the larger nations and continued to trouble the tranquillity of the world.

In 1931 the League had had to deal with the Manchurian crisis, and its action had ended in complete fiasco. In 1932 it could no longer dodge the disarmament issue, after seven years of fruitless discussion in commission. But, once assembled, the Disarmament Conference began in deadlock and died a little every day thereafter. Although Geneva could no longer escape the problems posed by the Great Depression, the Economic Conference called to solve them perished between night and morning as the result of a single transatlantic cable. Concomitantly the problem of Austria, having been considered as a juridical question and referred to a World Court to receive not a legal but a political judgment, flamed into the July Putsch in Vienna in the summer of 1934, and thereafter continued to scatter sparks among all the open powder magazines of a continent.

V

There is the record. Was a record ever clearer, or a failure more complete? What, then, we may ask, is wrong with the League of Nations? The answer is devastatingly simple. With the League itself nothing is wrong; with the assumptions upon which it was based, everything. Above all, the League crashed because it could not do justice, ensure security, provide prosperity; and it could do nothing in any of these directions because it lacked authority and force. And it lacked authority and force because the sovereign nations would not bestow them upon it. Deprived of them, it was condemned to the fate of the Continental Congress, the Aulic Council, the Polish Seym of the prepartition period, forever paralyzed by a liberum veto.

Precisely as long as the League lacked authority to do justice and to bestow security it became the instrument of the fortunate powers which had both security and prosperity, and the tool of those which, having the essentials of prosperity, sought security. It was offered to mankind as a substitute for war. As a consequence, it was obliged to provide the things which hitherto had been obtainable only by conflict. All history is the record of the rise of man from slavery to liberty, of nations from servitude to independence, of peoples from poverty to prosperity. The Settlement of Paris in 1919 was not a terminal station; at most it could be only a milestone. The march would be resumed.

Again and again in history the attempt has been made after war to abolish future war by freezing the status quo of victory for all future time. Always, moreover, the attempt is made in the name of peace. That was what was attempted at Vienna in 1815. But because the aspirations of many nationalities for liberty and unity were ignored, Slav, Latin, and Teutonic peoples after 1815 appealed from injustice to violence and obtained independence and unity by war. The argument for peace — for permanent peace — was no more cogent after 1919 than after 1815. Nor were the injustices and inequalities of the Conference of Paris less unmistakable than those of the Congress of Vienna.

To be sure, a new note was creeping into international relations. Woodrow Wilson had his eyes fixed upon the political issues of the past. His mind was concentrated on self-determination as a prescription for peace, and he did not even suspect that self-sufficiency would soon become a far more vital issue. He thought in ethnic terms in a world whose most vital problems had become economic. Nevertheless, the institution which he created was equally available to deal with ethnic and economic issues.

But in order to deal with the issues inherited from the past, and with those which the future was already pressing upon its notice, the League had to be a substitute for war. For untold thousands of years, men had been striving for certain things — for justice, equality, and prosperity. If now, at last, a now way had been found to reach the old goal, mankind, naturally hating war, would welcome it — but only as man had welcomed the substitution of the automobile for the chariot or the airplane for the locomotive, as something which made travel easier from starting point to destination. For man was bound to travel, to move forward, forever impelled by the desire for better things, material and otherwise.

The German, Italian, and Japanese peoples, patently unequally circumstanced in the resources of material prosperity, visibly confronted by a present which was economically precarious and a future fraught with disaster, would not accept their situation as definitive. For the moment, the effort to exploit fear of war as a means of coercion to persuade men to endure unjust and unequal circumstances might work, but it could not work indefinitely. The memory of past agony does not long survive the growth of a sense of present injustice.

Thus it is not an accident that the revolt against Geneva has been most violent in the countries whose economic resources are least considerable and whose material problems are most acute. Fascism, National Socialism, and Imperialism express the resolution of three great peoples in revolt against their economic conditions and destitute of every other resource save violence to amend them. To be sure, in Germany, Italy, and Japan the music is martial, the old ideology of nationalism persists; but the goals sought are material, the driving force is economic.

The League of Nations was dedicated to the proposition that peace had become the universal and unique concern of all peoples. But it was provided with no means to establish a condition in which this would be true, and in 1919 and the succeeding years it was not true. What could Geneva do, then? Pronounce war a crime and prepare legislation to outlaw it. But to make theft a crime by municipal ordinance and still permit starvation does not stop stealing, but simply populates prisons. Honest men will steal to feed their children, and no law can be effective that honest men refuse to obey.

Thus honest men who are German, Italian, or Japanese reject the public international law of to-day because it is the legal foundation for the status quo. They are, in fact, training their children from the very cradle to break that law, to resort to violence to compel its revision, because the alternative is material misery and national decay. They have discovered in the post-war years that Geneva could be employed against their ambitions but never for them. The lands and resources of the earth had been divided up, and a notrespassing sign guarded every parcel. If, however, the League of Nations was powerless to provide them with parity in opportunity with more fortunate peoples, it was also destitute of means to prevent them from trying to achieve it.

VI

To assert that the League of Nations is to-day dead is to say a silly thing. For, after all, machines do not live or die. At most they run or are idle, work or are discarded. A new machine invariably represents an attempt to provide a cheaper and more satisfactory product. In the same way the League of Nations was conceived as a substitute for war as a means to provide justice, to promote progress, to ensure both security and prosperity. It was designed to take the place of war, which was demonstrably a stupid, wasteful, terrible means for accomplishing these ends.

War, however, was not an inadequate means. Having no other instrument, mankind had seized upon it; by making war, nations had acquired liberty, prosperity, and unity. The long march had not come to a permanent halt in November 1918. The generation which had known the World War, since it was shell-shocked, might perhaps be dominated by fear; it might be willing to accept any inequality rather than go back to the trenches. But nothing was ever more certain than that the generation which succeeded it would not permit fears bom of a halfforgotten war to persuade it to surrender. If Geneva did not prove a substitute for war as a means to enable men and nations to better their conditions, then a new generation would return to the old instrument.

Geneva could only prove a substitute for war if the fortunate nations which had risen by war to their present circumstances were now prepared to share the profits of previous conquests with nations whom they were undertaking to persuade to refrain from further conquest. In fact, there never was any chance of success for the League when the most fortunate of all nations, the two English-speaking countries, declined to pool their resources with those of the rest of the world for the creation of a true partnership of peoples. The wisdom or folly of such a course does not need discussion here. What is pertinent is the effect of the British and American decisions.

To-day the League of Nations is reduced to the status of one of the many salients which used to dot the Western Front in the World War. Each of these constituted a grim memorial to an offensive once launched with high expectations of victory and eventually abandoned because the price of further progress was beyond the resources of the High Command to pay. Satisfied that Woodrow Wilson’s prescription for peace will not work, the German and Italian peoples have turned to the older instrument pressed into their hands by Mussolini and Hitler, since they will not resign their resolution to rise to levels which the British and American peoples have already attained.

VII

During recent years I have traveled about the United States a good deal speaking to audiences about international affairs. With few exceptions I find my hearers concerned with the question of how war is to be prevented. About the actual conditions of so-called peace they know nothing. Over ships, guns, and armies they are enormously concerned. To tell them that the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, the Japanese Exclusion Act, the American War Debt policy, may well prove to have been more potent in precipitating the next war than Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, or Japanese Imperialism is to leave them both incredulous and indignant, for they do not see the connection between American national policy and European and Asiatic material circumstances.

For them the alternative is narrowly limited to the choice between prosperous peace and destructive combat. They see war as a sin morally, a crime legally, a folly materially. They flame into indignation at the speeches of Hitler or Mussolini glorifying war; they are totally unaware of the disaster for world peace which was implicit in the message of the American President to the London Economic Conference. They close their eyes to the history of how the United States acquired the territories which are to-day the bases of its prosperity, but they roundly denounce the performance of Japan in repeating in Manchuria the performance of America in Mexico. They are completely blind to the naive hypocrisy disclosed in the assertion that war has become mere barbarism, because their own past conflicts have proved so profitable that they no longer have appetites which only war could satisfy.

Above all, they are blind to the fact that the supreme issue of the contemporary world is not political cooperation, but material; not military disarmament, but economic. They do not see that our contemporary civilization has become international in its economic and financial aspect, but remained national in its political forms. This is demonstrably the truth, and since it is the truth it follows that the political forms will be changed either by revolution or by evolution, either by wars or by collective reorganization.

Together, the American and French Revolutions released a new and dynamic spirit of political nationalism; peoples sought equality within national frontiers and unity within ethnic limits. Privileged classes were abolished and superior races restricted to their own ethnic frontiers. The World War was the latest and perhaps the last of the innumerable convulsions which had their origin in the example set by American farmers on Lexington Green and French volunteers at Valmy. And at the Paris Peace Conference the principle of self-determination was at last recognized.

But the Industrial Revolution in its turn released another spirit. For the consequent transition from an agricultural to an industrial era created a condition of privilege for those states which possessed upon their own territories an approximate monopoly of the essential raw materials of industry and within their national frontiers huge domestic markets. They were thus able to exercise an arbitrary power over the material existence of less fortunately placed peoples. For the latter could only obtain the raw materials necessary to their own industrial life as they were able to sell their goods in the market of the more fortunate. Denied that market, they had no alternative save between submission to inequality, with all its social consequences, and resort to violence to abolish the inequality.

That same choice, moreover, was squarely placed before the rising middle classes in England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the results were the English Civil War and the French Revolution. It was always inevitable, too, that once the convulsion of the World War had begun to subside, peoples which found their economic circumstances unequal, and therefore inequitable, would seek to amend them. From the beginning of time the road to betterment had lain over the battlefield, and the League of Nations was foredoomed to failure if it undertook to close the only available road before it provided another.

British Imperial Preference, the Russian Five-Year Plan, the American New Deal (if it follows the course which found expression in the London Economic Conference), are bound in the end to make new wars inescapable, because each in its separate way is designed to permit a nation whose situation is well-nigh monopolistic in respect to the essentials of industry to exploit that monopoly in such fashion as to condemn less fortunate nations to the prospect of a declining standard of living and a rising tide of social unrest. And Fascism, National Socialism, and Japanese Imperialism are the more or less instinctive reactions of peoples caught between the poverty of their own national territories and the policies of the more fortunate nations.

In the larger sense the problem of peace and war in the contemporary world turns upon whether mankind can find a peaceful means of liquidating the consequences of the Industrial Revolution or must repeat the experiences of the past century and a half resulting from failure to find peaceful liquidation following the French Revolution.

The price of peace must, however, be paid by the substitution of some form of international control over the essential raw materials of the world for the present system. Otherwise the continuation of the present unequal division, aggravated by the ever-growing monopolistic practices inspired by a spirit of economic nationalism, must lead to explosion. For the conditions of life will inevitably become progressively more intolerable for peoples situated like the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese.

At the close of his latest book Bertrand Russell writes: ‘The same causes that produced the war in 1914 are still operative and, unless checked by international control of investment and raw materials, will inevitably produce the same effect but upon a larger scale. It is not by pacifist sentiment but by world-wide economic organization that civilized man can be saved from collective suicide.’

From Lord Russell’s conclusion I do not see how any student of contemporary conditions can dissent. Of course I am not naive enough to believe that in the present temper of peoples, beginning with the American, any such control as Lord Russell suggests is even remotely imaginable. But that is why I see little promise of peace in the world. For on no other basis than equality in opportunity would it be possible to establish a partnership between peoples to prevent war.

It was natural enough for Woodrow Wilson to believe that if he could settle the question of nationality he could solve the problem of peace. It was, perhaps, inevitable that he and his associates at Paris should ignore the economic issues, just as their predecessors at Vienna were blind to the racial. But the result has been that the fifteen years which separate Woodrow Wilson from Adolf Hitler have barely enabled us to state the problem of peace, which in theory was solved at Paris. And, in the process, the League of Nations which was to preserve peace has been discarded because it could not create it.