War in a Collectivist World
The Road to War
So long as the productivity of a nation is great, because its resources are ample and its people industrious and skillful, moderate doses of collectivism can be absorbed. Even though wealth is not produced at full efficiency, there is a margin of safety. But there are countries where the natural resources are meagre, where there is a growing population imbued with the belief that it. has the right and the power to achieve through the action of the state an improved standard of life. In these countries the paradox of increasing popular expectation with restricted production at home and abroad has provoked a profound social crisis.
This is the plight of the nations which are called the Have Nots, which think of themselves as proletarian peoples denied their fair share of opportunity. Among them the world-wide system of gradually cumulative collectivism has reached its climax. Among them collectivism has ceased to be gradual, democratic, and pacific, and has become fully militarized. It is because of the threatened aggression of these armed collectivist societies that their neighbors are compelled to adopt a defensive militarism. In this international system it is demonstrated not merely that total collectivism in one nation is total militarism, but that a world which has given itself over to collectivism must sink into militarism.
This is the end of the road. After the liberal century, in which the very idea of wars of supremacy had been forgotten, the world is again entangled in the deadly challenges delivered by great powers against other great powers. Once again men are ready to fight for supreme power, having reverted to the belief that by the exercise of power they can improve their lot. They have drawn the sword in the belief that they can use it to save themselves, and by the sword, unless they put it away again, they are destined to perish.
The Two Philosophies of Nationalism
It is a rather significant fact, it seems to me, that the tendency toward amalgamation into larger political unions should have reached its climax approximately between 1800 and 1870. In that decade the American Union was preserved, the German and the Italian states became united, the Danubian Empire established itself in the form which lasted until 1918, Canada achieved a federal union, and the British Commonwealth took its modern form. But after 1870 the movement for unification was arrested.
The common assumption is that all the ‘nations’ had by that time become united. There are a number of reasons, however, for thinking that this is not a true explanation, but a rationalization after the event. It assumes that the amalgamation of peoples into larger unions depended upon fundamental affinities of speech, culture, ethnic homogeneity, and historical tradition — in other words, that a national consciousness had to exist before national unity could be achieved.
But if we study the unifications up to 1870 we find many important instances where strong political union preceded the appearance of a strong national consciousness. This might be said of the states that entered into the United States, of the cantons that entered into the Swiss federation, of such unions as that of the Flemings and Walloons to form the Belgian state. We find, moreover, that in this historical period political union did not depend upon ethnic or cultural homogeneity; on the contrary, that peoples of different language, ethnic origin, religion, and political history overcame their particularism and became politically united.
It is even more significant that, beginning about 1870, a centrifugal tendency appeared, and that for the past sixty years the principle of nationality has been invoked not to unite but to divide. As nationalism was understood before 1870, the movement toward unification had by no means been completed. The political federation of Belgium and Holland, of the three Scandinavian states, of the four Balkan states, of the five Central American republics, for example, was no more inconceivable to the older nationalists than the union of Prussia and Bavaria, of Piedmont and the Papal States, of the Flemings and Walloons, of the German, French, and Italian speaking peoples of Switzerland. But these potential unions have not been realized. On the contrary, many unions that existed have disintegrated. Norway and Sweden have separated; there are five successor states in the Danube basin and five on the western marches of the former Russian empire. What is more, the centrifugal tendency is very strong even where the existing union has not actually been ruptured. There are sub-nationalist movements in Belgium by the Flemings and Walloons, in Jugoslavia by the Croats, in Czechoslovakia by the Germans and Slovaks, in Poland by the Ruthenians, in Spain by the Catalans.
The philosophy of nationalism has in this period been curiously transformed. Originating as a passion to overcome the particularism of petty states, it has since become the justifying principle of particularism. Where once it supported the sentiments that liquidated conflicting loyalties, it now instigates the sentiments that accentuate separatism. Thus, while the intellectual exponents of the current nationalist ideology imagine that they are carrying on the tradition of Washington and Hamilton, Cavour and Bismarck, they have in fact reversed it. The point they have missed is that the older nationalism reached out for unity among particularists by cultivating a common consciousness, whereas the current nationalism cultivates a common consciousness by attacking the idea of unity and emphasizing an increasingly exclusive particularism. So, while the older nationalism was the support of political unification, the newer nationalism is the agent of disunion.
There is, therefore, a profound difference between these two nationalist philosophies, the one inclusive in its tendency, the other exclusive. Under the older, a tenuous general sense of common nationality was invoked in establishing political unions. Then, because the unions proved to be beneficial, a much stronger feeling of common nationality developed. One has only to read the anxious admonitions in Washington’s Farewell Address to realize how little certainty he entertained that the people would feel themselves to be not merely Virginians but Americans. The modern ideologists of nationalism, who are protectionist, collectivist, and authoritarian in their premises, have forgotten how little developed was the sense of their nationality when the British, the French, the Americans, the Germans, and the Italians first achieved political unity. Seeing only the powerful sense of nationality which has developed under these unions and as their consequence, they make the wholly unwarranted, indeed the false and destructive, assumption that only those can or should be joined together politically who already possess an overpowering sense that they are one nation.
They have turned history upside down. They argue that people can live together politically only if they have a strong national feeling, whereas the fusion of the innumerable wandering tribes into nations is inexplicable except on the hypothesis that national feeling develops from the experience of living together successfully. By treating strong nationalism as the antecedent condition rather than the consequence of political union, the modern nationalists have given the world a doctrine which divides mankind into ever smaller particularist communities.
It is worth noting that the nationalism which eventuated in larger political unions flourished in the interlude between the fall of the mercantilist conception of state policy and the revival of that conception. The period from, say, 1776 to 1870 was the golden age of free trade and of political emancipation throughout the western world. It was an age when the reforming passion of men was centred upon the abolition of privileges, the removal of restraints, the restricting of the authority of the state. It was an age when men were dominated by the conviction that it was by the method of emancipation, rather than by authoritative planning and regulation, that mankind could most surely achieve its promise. And it was in that age of diminishing political interference that so many great political unifications were achieved.
But about 1870, when the reaction against free trade and laissez-faire began, the movement toward political unification was arrested and then reversed. The correspondence between the ascendancy of the liberal philosophy and political unification, between the authoritarian revival and political disunion, is striking. The question is whether it signifies a real correlation of cause and effect or is merely a curious coincidence.
The thesis that the diminution of authoritarian government promotes unity and that its increase is divisive could be fortified by many suggestive historic examples. One could cite the fact that the American Revolution took place at the culmination of the mercantilist régime, and that the grievances of the colonists, as outlined in their Declaration of Independence, were in substance that an absentee government was exploiting them by restrictive and discriminating laws, that King George III had established ‘an absolute tyranny over these States . . . cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.’ It was the cumulation of these grievances that led to the ‘separation.’ One might then cite the fact that it was the discord of the separated states, each exercising its own sovereignty, which led to their subsequent union.
If we examine the powers expressly granted to the new national government, the powers expressly denied to it, and the powers expressly taken away from the states, we find that the liberals who wrote the Constitution were inspired throughout by the conviction that, on the one hand, federal union was an escape from the vexatious particularism of the sovereign states, and on the other, that a union could be maintained only if it, in its turn, was a drastically limited sovereign. Thus among the powers granted to Congress we find the exclusive right to regulate foreign and interstate commerce, a mighty provision against the practice of a mercantilist policy by the separate states; we find, too, the power ‘to coin money, regulate the value thereof,’ to make uniform rules of bankruptcy. It is evident that the design was to establish free trade throughout the union, unobstructed by state tariffs, separate monetary systems, and widely differing systems of commercial law. To make certain that the states would not become little mercantilist sovereigns on their own account, they were explicitly forbidden ‘to lay any impost or duties on imports or exports’ in the interests of a separate economic policy. Then in the Bill of Rights, which was the condition of ratification, the federal government in its turn was expressly denied the powers that were then recognized as the instruments of tyranny. In short, the union was a method of emancipating the people from what we should now call the regimentation of the separate states; the federal government was given the power to maintain freedom of trade and intercourse and denied the power to establish an authoritarian regime. Nor is it wholly irrelevant to note that the issue which was to imperil the preservation of the union had its origin in the use of political coercion to maintain and promote human slavery.
American history does, therefore, lend weight to the hypothesis that there is a close connection between the diminution of state authority and the evolution of political unity. The presumption could be strengthened by innumerable examples from history. It has often been demonstrated, for example, that the aggrandizement of the national monarchy in England and in France found its great support among people seeking emancipation from the intimate tyranny of petty princes and local magnates; it is well known that the unification of Germany and of Italy was the culmination of experiments in customs unions and currency agreements and the like which represented a longing for relief from parochial interferences. Nor is it irrelevant to note that it was the Hapsburg and Romanoff empires, the two most intricately governed, most centralized, most bureaucratic states of the western world, which collapsed during the World War; and that both were dismembered.
The Centrifugal Effect of Collectivism
But these citations, though they are, I think, suggestive, are not proof. To show that authoritarianism divides and that liberalism unites, one must go beyond random historic examples to an explanation. It is only by understanding the reasons that the examples are convincing.
If we take the simplest example of the authoritarian principle, a protective tariff, we have only to ask ourselves whether anyone would be interested in a tariff wall which encircled at a uniform height all the commercial powers of the world. Suppose that the British Empire, Germany, Japan, France, and the United States had one common tariff against the rest of the world but no tariffs against each other. Is it not obvious that the protectionists in each of these countries would say that this gave them no protection ? They would insist that in order to make protection effective the trading area would have to be divided into national tariff systems.
This is the logic of the process by which the use of political power to direct human affairs forces men to segregate themselves into smaller and smaller communities. For only in so far as the protection is exclusive is it valuable. Unless it creates a special privilege it is ineffective. Thus, in a territory as large as the United States, the national tariff alone has never given sufficient ‘protection’ to those seeking the privilege of more or less exclusive control of markets. They have supplemented the peripheral tariff with internal tariffs applied through railroad rates, devices like the so-called Pittsburgh plus, monopolistic agreements, local quarantine regulations, and the like. The monopolist who would exclude a competitor must generally retire into a more exclusive stronghold. The larger the area, the more precarious will be his monopoly, the more diluted his advantages.
That is the reason why social legislation can be put. into effect more easily in small states than in large ones, and why those who sponsor such measures are apt to oppose not only freedom of international trade but local autonomy within a free trade area as large as the United States, where, says Mr. Charles A. Beard in The Open Door at Home, ‘ regions once industrial and prosperous have been blighted by the wholesale migration of capital to sections of cheapest production — the lowest standards of life, unorganized labor easily regimented by employers, absence of labor legislation, exploitation of children, long hours, and social squalor in general.’
The logic of this argument would call for cither an exclusive tariff around every established manufacturing centre in the United States or national legislation prohibiting, in effect, the more ‘backward’ states from entering into competition with the industries of more ‘progressive’ regions. Mr. Beard has the courage of his convictions. He recognizes that when, by the exercise of authority, prices are fixed above the competitive level the economic area must be contracted to exclusive competitors. This principle was recognized in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, a great collectivist measure which envisaged the organization of American industry under a system of codes closely regulating production, prices, and labor conditions. The vital essence of the whole conception was that each codified industry would enjoy an approximate monopoly of the American market, and that its monopoly profits would enable it to pay high wages. But, in order to protect the monopoly, competitors had to be excluded. Thus, in the more ‘advanced’ codes, barriers were raised against new enterprises and new processes, and the whole establishment was then protected not by a mere tariff but by the power to lay an absolute embargo against any imports.
And so, because the increase of state regulation requires a more and more exclusive territory if it is to be effective, the early nineteenth-century dream of international socialism has given way to the twentieth-century nightmare of national socialism. Collectivists of all descriptions — socialists of the Second International, communists of the Third, fascists with their international congresses, democratic planners — may cheer each other on across national frontiers and may exchange tracts and resolutions and propagandists, but the inexorable goal of all collectivism is the isolated and self-contained community. That is not because mankind is unable to fraternize: it is because an authoritarian régime has to be exclusive. The great military autocracies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were highly regimented mercantilist states; the most highly regimented mercantilist states of the twentieth century are military autocracies.
The realistic, full-blown collectivists — Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler — are national collectivists; the internationalism which the idealists of socialism and communism cling to is, as Mussolini and Hitler have proclaimed, a remnant of the nineteenth-century liberalism with its faith in the supranational development of commerce, the arts, and human personality. This residual hankering for brotherhood is, as Stalin has demonstrated, a useful instrument of Russian policy when it is not a downright nuisance.
The increasing exercise of sovereign power is a centrifugal force in society. Collectivism moves toward autarchy, the totalitarian states toward isolation. The obverse of this rule is that emancipation, the removal of privileges and restraints, promotes political union, that large societies must be lightly governed, that an increasing freedom of trade and intercourse within a state makes for an increasing participation in the common life of mankind. For the regulation of human affairs by the sovereign state is in the last analysis their regulation by physical force: the sanction of the law resides ultimately in the power of the state to command and forbid under penalty of death. This power can be invoked only when it can be effective. It can be effective only where it cannot be challenged. The more writs the king issues, the less far do they run: the greater the number of those who will be disposed and able to resist them. Thus, as the state moves in the direction of more elaborate and more intense intervention, it must contract its jurisdiction.
When authoritarianism dominates policy, the line of evolution is ever toward more exclusive but less comprehensive monopolies, more autocratic but more particularist states. It is, in short, a regression from the ideal of large political unions evolved within the larger world economy of the arts, the sciences, and commerce; it drives men backwards to such a congeries of petty, exclusive, tyrannical, and bellicose states as our fathers had supposed men would never see again.
The Socialist Failure
When the people had become habituated to the belief that the state has the power to raise their standard of living, and when the state responded by collectivist measures restricting opportunity and diminishing the efficiency of production, there was bound to be an intensified social conflict within the nations. It was naturally least severe where the margin of safety was greatest, and where there was a considerable surplus which could be redistributed to satisfy popular expectations. In countries like Germany and Italy, especially after they had been impoverished by the war, there was no adequate margin of safety, and an acute class struggle developed. This struggle was abated for a few years by foreign loans which were in effect subsidies made by the richer nations out of their surplus. But when these subsidies were cut off, the struggle was renewed fiercely.
In its initial phases this appeared to be a class struggle according to the Marxian pattern. But in its origins and in its issue the German and Italian struggle did not conform to the Marxian hypothesis. There was, it is true, an aggressive movement of the masses to encroach upon the property of the great landlords and the large incorporated industrialists. But this was resisted and defeated by an armed insurrection ending in a coup d’état. The Marxian formula does not explain why at the crucial point the masses lost faith in socialism. For in both Italy and Germany fascism, however much it may have been financed and instigated by landlords and big industrialists, acquired a large popular following among those who, according to the Marxian interpretation, should have rejected fascism and adhered to communism.
The event is explained, I believe, when we recognize that the Italian and German masses could not have improved their situation by seizing the estates and the factories, that on the contrary the only effect could have been to increase their misery. For there did not exist any substantial amount of wealth in the hands of the few which they could expropriate. The total national income was so meagre that a more equal distribution of it would not even theoretically have made any important difference. But above all, what income there was depended fundamentally not on the natural riches of the country but on an extremely delicate and precarious human organization of labor, technology, credit, and management. Those who seized a factory soon saw that they had obtained only an inert heap of bricks and steel: that this capitalist property was incapable of producing income except as part of an economy of credit and international trade that ceased to exist when the managers and directors had been ousted. Those who tried to be more moderate and attempted by legal methods to expropriate the shareholders and creditors and controlling directors of these enterprises found that they were gaining nothing, but were in fact impairing the productivity of the industries. The socialist movement was able to bring the industrial machine to a standstill; it gave no evidence of being able to make the machine yield more for the people.
Socialism was a failure in Central Europe because it sought to encroach on a capitalist order that was already almost completely impoverished. In a rich capitalism, where there is a large surplus, some wealth can be redistributed. But a poor capitalism, like that of post-war Germany, has almost no reserves that can be tapped; the attempt to find them, whether by law or by direct action, strikes not at excess profits but at capital assets, at working capital, and at those minimum profits without which capitalist production cannot be maintained. Now when we remember that it is from the middle class that the executives and managers are recruited, that it is the middle class who have their savings invested directly or indirectly in capitalist enterprises, that it is their savings and their income which are drawn upon when taxes or inflation is used to finance the social services of the poor, one can understand why socialism in these poor countries provoked a middle-class revolution. When industry was paralyzed by strikes and expropriatory laws, it was the middle-class industrial officer who lost his position and saw his invested savings impaired and his standard of living reduced by rising prices, increasing taxes, and the deterioration of the currency. He realized that in a poor country socialism, even of a gradual and democratic variety, does not mean the redistribution of the profits of capitalism; it means the gradual paralysis of capitalism — if carried far enough, its total destruction — and the decline of the whole community to a proletarian level.
Thus the members of the middle class came to realize that for their country, at least (though in essence it is true of all countries), the deepest need is not a different distribution, but a great production, of wealth. Once they had grasped that truth, if the situation was desperate and the struggle critical, they were disposed to follow leaders who promised to crush a movement that seemed to them to paralyze what productive capacity the nation possessed.
Proletarian Imperialism
So the middle-class fascist became passionately anti-Marxist. But having gone so far, and realizing that there could be no real relief except through an increased production of wealth, he came up against the brute fact that the materials for increasing wealth did not exist within his frontiers, and that the world markets in which he could earn the money to buy those materials were either greatly restricted or closed altogether. At this point he became not only an antisocialist but an aggressive nationalist. For, as he saw it, he was the victim of an economic encirclement, and unless he broke through he would be suffocated.
With the instruments of the terror, censorship, and propaganda, the fascist leaders indoctrinated the mass with the view that their real enemies were not the privileged classes at home but the privileged nations abroad. The transition from the psychology of class war to that of nationalist war is a very easy one. The fascist appeal combines the emotions of patriotism with the grievances of the proletarian. Those who have been socialists become national socialists. The class war is diverted toward international war. The people, habituated in the class struggle to appeals calling upon them to fight for their rights and for better opportunities, to strike at privilege and oppression, are told by the fascists that they must continue to fight, not as traitorous members of a class, but as patriots in a national cause. They do not have to stop loving their country, as orthodox international socialists are supposed to do. They can have for their leaders not mere workingmen and agitators but all the best people in the land — princes, generals, and great gentlemen. It is the class struggle de luxe, with all its pomp and circumstance, that the diffident poor find reassuring. They do not have to fight on the barricades as solitary and helpless bands against the police and against troops whose weapons they know to be deadly. If in some dim way they realize that they will have to fight later in the trenches, they believe that at least the fighting will not be at their own front door; the brunt of it, moreover, will be borne by very young men after their courage has been disciplined in barracks rather than by middle-aged men who have listened to socialist oratory.
Thus, under fascism the proletariat becomes imperialist and imperialism becomes proletarian. The nation, organized under military rule, prepares for a struggle against the nations which it looks upon as the wealthy landlords, the monopolists, the privileged owners of the rich territories, natural resources, and main highways of the world. Communism and fascism are not only much alike as systems of government; they are alike in the inwardness of their purpose. When the basic natural wealth exists within the national frontiers, as in Russia, the proletarian aggression is domestic; when the basic national wealth does not exist within those frontiers, as in Italy and Germany, the proletarian aggression is nationalized. It is turned outward beyond the frontiers, toward the conquest of the colonics and of the territories of more pacific but richer neighbors.
This explains what would otherwise be an inexplicable phenomenon, the appearance of communist Russia as a member in good standing of the society of nations and the isolation of the fascist states. The Russian communists have recognized that they have no need of conquests, because Russia has ample natural resources. It is this fact, rather than the pacifism of the communists, which accounts for the adoption of a policy of nonaggression which gives to Soviet Russia a common interest, along with the British Empire, France, and the United States, in the present territorial boundaries of the world. On the other hand, because the fascist states do not have within their own borders wealth to meet the expectations of their people, no promises of nonaggression they can give are credible. So long as the modern world is committed to the principles of national collectivism, they are under compulsion to pursue an aggressive policy because the sources of wealth, to which they must have access in order to live as well as they believe they have a right to live, are under foreign sovereignty.
The Revival of Total War
It may be said that about the year 1900 the nations became aware that they were crossing the great divide, leaving behind them the promised land of progress in peace, to enter into an epoch of deadly struggle for mastery and survival. The turning point is most clearly marked by the challenge to British maritime supremacy formulated in the German Navy Law of 1898.
For several generations a general peace, broken only by short and localized wars, had prevailed. During that peace Britain exercised an unchallenged supremacy on the seas and pursued a policy of free trade. The dominion that Great Britain exercised over a quarter of the people of the earth, and the preponderant influence that she exercised on the European continent through the balance of power, were not felt to be intolerable because in matters of trade and of human rights Britain was committed to the principles of freedom. Even to the subject peoples of the empire, the Irish, the Indian nations, the Egyptians, the struggle for autonomy was never hopeless. It was always supported by a large body of British opinion and could always find its ultimate justification in the principles of the British state. When Britain ruled harshly and denied to the people of the dependent empire their human rights, she was violating the British ideal in human affairs. Eventually those who were struggling for autonomy were bound to win, as in fact they did. In the realm of economic opportunity, free trade prevailed; the empire was not a closed preserve for the benefit of British subjects.
Within the framework of this international system Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States achieved their national unity and made great material progress. The rise in the general standard of living was probably greater in that period than at any time before or since. There were wars; but they were local wars of short duration, more like duels to settle an argument than battles of life and death. During the Crimean War, for example, English merchants were allowed to import goods from Russia through neutral countries; a Russian loan to pay interest on Russian bonds was floated in the English market; and during that same war France invited Russia to participate in the Exposition of Arts and Industries. Bismarck’s three wars were short, sharp, localized, and for limited objectives.
The conception of a total war — such as Rome had waged against Carthage, or even such wars as those which England had waged against Spain, against the Netherlands, and against France until the fall of Napoleon — was not entertained in the nineteenth century. The people of Europe did not feel that their lives, their liberties, their fortunes, and the pursuit of their happiness were bound up in a struggle for the political mastery of the world.
But the wars which began in 1914 differ in kind, not merely in degree, from the wars which were fought in the preceding century. To find wars of the same order, one would have to go back to the struggle between Spain and England, between England and Holland, between England and France, between Rome and Carthage, between Athens and Sparta. They may conveniently be called total as distinguished from limited wars. These are not fought for tangible stakes, say the unification of a national state, or the acquisition of an Alsace-Lorraine or an African colony. In total war the issue is complete supremacy, the power to settle controversy by superior force. Total wars cannot end, therefore, except by the destruction of the vanquished as an organized power in the major affairs of mankind, the fate that befell Carthage and Spain and Holland. Until the issue of supremacy is settled, men are doomed in an era of total wars to fight incessantly. There are intervals of armed truce, periods of recuperation, rearmament, and the regrouping of allies before the struggle is renewed. But there can be no settlement. For total wars are fought not for specific objects but for supremacy.
In the war of 1914-1318, Britain and France were convinced that they were fighting such a war; that, if they lost, Germany would deal with them as Rome dealt with Carthage. In the dictated peace of 1919 at Versailles they in their turn sought to impose a Carthaginian peace upon Germany. Clemenceau and Foch felt that they had failed to win the war when they were prevented from dismembering the German Empire, from exacting tribute which would keep the Germans prostrate, from occupying Germany as a conquered province. In 1933 the allies of 1914 again became convinced that a Germany renascent under Nazi leadership would in its turn seek to annihilate all rival powers in Europe.
These total wars should not be confused with limited wars like the Crimean, like the Danish, Austrian, and French wars waged by Prussia, much less with colonial wars like the Boer or the Spanish-American. It is an open question, it seems to me, whether even the Napoleonic Wars are to be regarded as total wars. For, while the victory of Bonaparte would have given him the mastery of the European world, his defeat was followed by a peace which was most remarkable in that it was not a Punic peace. The Congress of Vienna not only did not mutilate France; it did not even attempt to destroy her as a great power.
It used to be the fashion to heap scorn upon the Congress of Vienna. But in the longer perspective, considering the centuries of incessant wars between England and France, considering the state of Europe since 1914, it would now appear that the Congress of Vienna made a settlement which was unique in the history of great wars. It may be that the refusal to destroy France as a European power, that the willingness to live with her and let her live, reflected that great change in human opinion which crystallized during the eighteenth century in the liberal doctrines of free trade, laissez-faire, and the rights of man.
In any event, the dominant fact in the contemporary world is the return of the European and Asiatic great powers to the conception of total war. It is this fact that needs to be thoroughly understood, for otherwise the effort to preserve the peace is doomed not only to be frustrated but actually to augment the violence and frequency of wars. A pacifist movement which has not clearly grasped the essential difference between the era of total war in which we find ourselves and the era of limited wrars which preceded it will merely confuse and disorganize the peoples who are in mortal danger and thereby invite the aggressors to proceed.
Collective Security and Total War
The manner in which pacifist opinion has misconceived the real nature of the problem can be seen in the series of pacts signed in the name of collective security. The Covenant of the League of Nations, for example, provides a method of settling international disputes based entirely on the assumption that all potential wars are limited wars. The machinery of pacific adjustment is conceived on the analogy of lawsuits as a substitute for the duel, on the premise that violence can be eliminated by interpreting contracts or compromising claims. The Covenant envisages wars as contests dealing with justiciable issues, or at least with specific collisions of interest. But the war of 1914, the Japanese advance into Asia (in its implications), the Italian advance into Ethiopia, and the Nazi conception of the German destiny have national supremacy as their real objective.
The postulates of the League, on the other hand, being derived from the experience of the liberal nineteenth century, do not even begin to deal with the issue of national supremacy. It is not an issue that can be taken to the World Court or dealt with by votes in the Council and Assembly. Collective security, as it was organized after the war of 1914, rested on the assumption that the issue of national supremacy would not be raised, more particularly that Germany was altogether too prostrated to raise it again.
In the Kellogg-Briand Pact, this illusion is most clearly exhibited. In that pact nations voluntarily renounced the ambition to resort to war as an instrument of national policy, implying that those who had world power would keep it, that those who did not have world power would not seek it. There is pathos in the Kellogg Pact. For it embalms an ideal of international relations that was by no means unrealizable had the world remained faithful to the ideas of public policy which were current when Mr. Wilson, Mr. Kellogg, and M. Briand went to school. The pacific settlement of limited wars is a practicable ideal, and mankind might well have entertained the hope that it would gradually limit such wars until eventually it abolished them.
The post-war system of collective security was devised by British and American publicists and statesmen acting on the preconceptions of the nineteenth century. It is not accurate to say, as so many have said, that they intended as citizens of the dominant and ‘ satisfied ’ powers to make the existing order of things perpetual. On the contrary, they were quite prepared for, in fact they were prejudiced toward, great alterations in the political constitution of mankind. They promoted the rise of new national states not only as measures of war to disrupt Germany and Austria-Hungary; the sponsors of the League were on the whole also the supporters of Irish, Indian, and Egyptian nationalism, of the autonomy of the Dominions, the independence of the Philippines, the renunciation of American hegemony in Latin America. They even hoped through the method of mandates to strike at the idea that colonies were national properties. They hoped to lower economic barriers between nations, and to bring about the reduction of armaments to a point where they would be little more than a domestic police force or a territorial militia. In substance, the sponsors of the League were prepared to relinquish more and more of the prerogatives of their own mastery of the world, to liquidate by generous but, as they believed, enlightened concessions the prerogatives of their own supremacy.
The pacific system which they envisaged was one in which existing rights were to be regarded as the public law of the world and enforced until amended by concession and compromise. They founded their system on the premise that discontent with the existing international order would arise from specific grievances, some of which were justiciable, some arbitrable, the rest susceptible of being rectified or compromised. But what they did not envisage was discontent arising from the ambition to exercise the supremacy which they possessed. They were prepared to contemplate the relinquishment of more and more of the prerogatives of their own supremacy; but they did not propose the transfer of their supremacy to new empires. They hoped to rule the world lightly, to exercise their world power so magnanimously that all the world would assent to it, but, having just defeated Germany’s attempt at world power, they intended to hold on to their own world power. Rather they than someone else. They reasoned, not without prejudice of course, but plausibly, that no one was any better fitted than they to exercise world power. So they made many proposals to limit armaments by the method of ratios under which the relative power of the great states was to be recognized by treaty.
Thus the post-war system of collective security proposed to conserve the existing order of things in the field of ultimate power, but to concede an increasing equality of rights in all other fields. This was in essence the international system of the nineteenth century. Supremacy was exercised by an empire so much committed to the principles of free trade, national autonomy, cultural self-determination, and personal liberty that when the Empire violated its principles in Ireland, in Egypt, and in India it was morally on the defensive among its own people. The League of Nations was to be in substance a perpetuation of that order of things: Great Britain and the United States were to form a partnership, exercising, under the postulates of liberalism in other matters, a joint supremacy in the realm of power.
The event showed that the policies of the great powers did not correspond with the postulates of the international system they had designed. This was revealed at once in the terms imposed upon the vanquished nations. The military and economic clauses of the treaties, and certain of the territorial provisions as well, were designed to keep them, for at least a generation, weak and disorganized, and in a status of mental inferiority. The vanquished were treated as, presumably, they would have treated their enemies had they victoriously achieved world supremacy. But in imposing a Punic peace the allied and associated powers demonstrated that they were no longer acting on the nineteenth-century principle of supremacy restricted in its exercise by the tenets of liberalism. By the terms they dictated at Versailles, terms appropriate to the conception of total war, terms which had as their objective the perpetuation and exaggeration of their own supremacy, they committed Europe to a struggle for supremacy rather than to the settlement of specific grievances.
The dictated peace was followed by the American rejection of the partnership in so far as it entailed responsibilities for the enforcement of the European settlement. But the United States did not reject partnership in supremacy. The United States rejected the League. It ratified the Washington Treaties, under which supremacy at sea was shared with Britain, and in the region of the Pacific and Eastern Asia this supremacy was to become the guardian of existing rights. Simultaneously, the United States drastically restricted its own markets against imports of foreign goods and then used its financial and political power to promote its exports. Other nations followed the same course. Thus supremacy in the realm of power was unmitigated anywhere by a liberal policy. The masters of the world were completely imbued with the idea that power may be used to create prosperity through privilege.
Yet their institutions for the maintenance of peace were founded on a diametrically opposite conception of public policy. The system of collective security envisaged an order in which privileges would be steadily reduced, in which the question of who had the ultimate power would become less and less important. But the minds of men had become thoroughly impregnated with the belief that the state could through its power make them prosperous. Therefore, the control of the state at home, its power abroad, became the foci of universal interest. Under the liberal conception, dominant in the practice of the nineteenth century and formally enacted into the treaties of collective security, the threat of total wars for supremacy was to be ended by liquidating the privileges that made supremacy valuable to those who possessed it and onerous to those who did not. The liberals had said, in effect, that men would cease to fight for political power when they became indifferent to it, and that they would become indifferent when its influence on their lives was negligible. This was how the religious wars had ended, when men no longer believed that eternal salvation could be determined by the force of the secular arm. But in matters of income, of trade, property, and wages, the post-war generation believed fervently that earthly salvation could be determined by the secular arm. Thus supremacy, instead of becoming a matter of indifference in men’s feelings because it was increasingly negligible in fact, became the paramount and all-embracing issue of their lives.
When supremacy is the issue, the world is in a period of total wars in which there can be no decision except by the extinction of one of the antagonists as a power in affairs. This issue is not justiciable, nor can it be compromised. When it exists, peace is only an armed truce during which the warriors prepare for the next battle. Then the normal condition is not that of peace, occasionally interrupted by a local war. That is what the nineteenth century believed and that is what the Covenant implies. When the question of supremacy is raised, there is a condition of continuing war with intervals in which there is no fighting.