CHAPTER
XIV
The
Possibility of a First Step
towards International Unity-
Its Enormous Difficulties
THE study of the growth
of the nation-unit under the pressure indeed of a growing inner need and idea but
by the agency of political, economic and social forces, forms and instruments
shows us a progress that began from a loose formation in which various elements
were gathered together for unification, proceeded through a period of strong
concentration and coercion in which the conscious national ego was developed,
fortified and provided with a centre and instruments of its organic life and
passed on to a final period of assured separate existence and internal unity as
against outside pres- sure in which liberty and an active and more and more
equal share of all in the benefits of the national life became possible. If the
unity of the human race is to be brought about by the same means and agents and
in a similar fashion to that of the nation, we should expect it to follow a
similar course. That is at least the most visible probability and it seems to
be consistent with the natural law of all creation which starts from the loose
mass, the more or less amorphous vague of forces and materials and proceeds by contraction,
constriction, solidification into a firm mould in which the rich evolution of
various forms of life is at last securely possible.
If we
consider the actual state of the world and its immediate possibilities, we
shall see that a first period of loose formation and imperfect order is
inevitable. Neither the intellectual preparation of the human race nor the
development of its sentiments nor the economic and political forces and
conditions by which it is moved and preoccupied have reached to such a point of
inner stress or external pressure as would warrant us in
Page-361
expecting a total change of the basis of our life or
the establishment of a complete or a real unity. There cannot as yet be even a
real external unity, far less a psychological oneness. It is true that the
vague sense and need of something of the kind has been growing rapidly and the
object lesson of the war brought the master idea of the future out of the
nascent condition in which it was no more than the generous chimera of a few
pacifists or internationalist idealists. It came to be recognised that it
contains in itself some force of eventual reality, and the voice of those who
would cry it down as the pet notion of intellectual cranks and faddists had no
longer the same volume and confidence, because it was no longer so solidly
supported by the common sense of the average man, that short-sighted common
sense of the material mind which consists in a strong feeling for immediate
actualities and an entire blindness to the possibilities of the future. But
there has as yet been no long intellectual preparation of a more and more
dominant thought cast out by the intellectuals of the age to remould the ideas
of common men, nor has there been any such gathering to a head of the growing
revolt against present conditions as would make it possible for vast masses of
men seized by the passion for an ideal and by the hope of a new happiness for
mankind to break up the present basis of things and construct a new scheme of
collective life. In another direction, the replacing of the individualistic
basis of society by an increasing collectivism, there has been to a large
extent such an intellectual preparation and gathering force of revolt; there
the war has acted as a precipitative force and brought us much nearer to the
possibility of a realised - not necessarily a democratic - State socialism. But there have been
no such favourable preconditions for a strong movement of international
unification. No great effective outburst of a massed and dynamic idealism in
this direction can be reasonably predicted. The preparation may have begun, it
may have been greatly facilitated and hastened by recent events, but it is
still only in its first stages.
Under such
conditions the ideas and schemes of the world's intellectuals who would replan
the whole status of international life altogether and from its roots in
the light of general principles,
Page-362
are not likely to find any immediate realisation. In
the absence of a general idealistic outburst of creative human hope which would
make such changes possible, the future will be shaped not by the ideas of the
thinker but by the practical mind of the politician which represents the
average reason and temperament of the time and effects usually something much
nearer the minimum than the maximum of what is possible. The average general
mind of a great mass of men, while it is ready to listen to such ideas as it
has been prepared to receive and is accustomed to seize on this or that notion
with a partisan avidity, is yet ruled in its action not so much by its thought
as by its interests, passions and prejudices. The politician and the statesman
– and the world is now full of politicians but very empty of statesmen - act in
accordance with this average general mind of the mass; the one is governed by
it, the other has always to take it into chief account and cannot lead it where
he will, unless he is one of those great geniuses and powerful personalities
who unite a large mind and dynamic force of conception with an enormous power
or influence over men. Moreover, the political mind has limitations of its own
beyond those of the general average mind of the mass; it is even more
respectful of the status quo, more disinclined to great adventure in
which the safe footing of the past has to be abandoned, more incapable of
launching out into the uncertain and the new. To do that it must either be
forced by general opinion or a powerful interest or else itself fall under the
spell of a great new enthusiasm diffused in the mental atmosphere of the times.
If the
politician mind is left entirely to itself, we could expect no better tangible
result of the greatest international convulsion on record than a rearrangement
of frontiers, a redistribution of power and possessions and a few desirable or
undesirable developments of international, commercial and other relations. That
is one disastrous possibility leading to more disastrous convulsions - so long
as the problem is not solved - against which the future of the world is by no
means secure. Still, since the mind of humanity has been greatly moved and its
sentiments powerfully awakened, since the sense is becoming fairly wide-spread
that the old status of things is
Page-363
no longer tolerable and the undesirability of an
international balance reposing on a ring of national egoisms held in check only
by mutual fear and hesitation, by ineffective arbitration treaties and Hague
tribunals and the blundering discords of a European Concert must be now fairly
clear even to the politician mind, we might expect that some serious attempt
towards the beginning of a new order should be the result of the moral collapse
of the old. The passions and hatreds and selfish national hopes raised by the
war must certainly be a great obstacle in the way and may easily render futile
or of a momentary stability any such beginning. But, if nothing else, the mere
exhaustion and internal reaction produced after the relaxing of the tensity of
the struggle, might give time for new ideas, feelings, forces, events to emerge
which will counteract this pernicious influence.1
Still, the
most that we could at all expect must needs be very little. In the internal
life of the nations, the ultimate effects of the war cannot fail to be powerful
and radical, for there every- thing is ready, the pressure felt has been
enormous and the expansion after it has been removed must be correspondingly
great in its results; but in international life we can only look forward at the
best to a certain minimum of radical change which, however small, might yet in
itself turn out to be an irrevocable departure, a seed of sufficient vitality
to ensure the inevitability of future growth. If, indeed, developments had
occurred before the end of this world-wide struggle strong enough to change the
general mind of Europe, to force the dwarfish thoughts of its rulers into
greater depths and generate a more wide-reaching sense of the necessity for
radical change than has yet been developed, more might have been hoped for; but
as the great conflict drew nearer to its close, no such probability emerged;
the dynamic period during which in such a crisis the effective ideas and
tendencies of men are formed, passed without
1
Written originally in
1916 before the end of the war. This happier possibility could not immediately
materialise, but the growing insecurity, confusion and disorder have made the
creation of some international system more and more imperative if modem
civilisation is not to collapse in bloodshed and chaos. The result of this
necessity has been first the creation of the League of Nations and afterwards
the U.N.O.: neither has proved very satisfactory from the political point of
view, but henceforward the existence of some such arranged centre of order has
become very evidently indispensable.
Page-364
the creation of any great and profound impulse. There
were only two points on which the general mind of the peoples was power- fully
affected. First there was generated a sense of revolt against the possible repetition
of this vast catastrophe; still more strongly felt was the necessity for
finding means to prevent the unparalleled dislocation of the economic life of
the race which was brought about by the convulsion. Therefore it is in these
two directions that some real development could be expected; for so much must
be attempted if the general expectation and desire are to be satisfied and to
trifle with these would be to declare the political intelligence of Europe
bankrupt. That failure would convict its governments and ruling classes of
moral and intellectual impotence and might well in the end provoke a general
revolt of the European peoples against their existing institutions and the
present blind and rudderless leadership.
There was
to be expected, then some attempt to provide a settled and effective means for
the regulation and minimising of war for the limitation of armaments for the
satisfactory disposal of dangerous disputes and especially, though this
presents the greatest difficulty for meeting that conflict of commercial aims
and interests which is now the really effective although by no means the only
factor in the conditions that compel the recurrence of war. If this new
arrangement contained in itself the seed of international control, if it turned
out to be a first step towards a loose international formation or perhaps
contained its elements or initial lines or even a first scheme to which the
life of humanity could turn for a mould of growth in its reaching out to a
unified existence then, however rudimentary or unsatisfactory this arrangement
might be at first, the future would carry in it an assured promise. Once begun,
it will be impossible for mankind to draw back and whatever difficulties
disappointments, struggles reactions, checks or brutal interruptions might mark
the course of this development, they would be bound to help in the end rather
than hinder the final and inevitable result.
Still, it
would be vain to hope that the principle of inter- national control will be
thoroughly effective at first or that this loose formation, which is likely to
be in the beginning half form, half nebula will prevent farther conflicts,
explosions, catas-
Page-365
trophes.1 The difficulties are too great. The
mind of the race has not as yet the necessary experience; the intellect of its
ruling classes has not acquired the needed minimum of wisdom and foresight; the
temperament of the peoples has not developed the indispensable instincts and
sentiments. Whatever arrangement is made will proceed on the old basis of
national egoisms, hungers, cupidities, self-assertions and will simply
endeavour to regulate them just enough to prevent too disastrous collisions.
The first means tried will necessarily be insufficient because too much respect
will be paid to those very egoisms which it is sought to control. The causes of
strife will remain; the temper that engenders it will live on, perhaps
exhausted and subdued for a time in certain of its activities, but unexorcised;
the means of strife may be controlled but will be allowed to remain. Armaments
may be restricted, but will not be abolished; national armies may be limited in
numbers - an illusory limitation – but they will be maintained; science will
still continue to minister ingeniously to the art of collective massacre. War
can only be abolished if national armies are abolished and even then with
difficulty, by the development of some other machinery which humanity does not
yet know how to form or, even if formed, will not for some time be able or
willing perfectly to utilise. And there is no chance of national armies being
abolished; for each nation distrusts all the others too much, has too many
ambitions and hungers, needs to remain armed, if for no- thing else, to guard
its markets and keep down its dominions, colonies, subject peoples. Commercial
ambitions and rivalries, political pride, dreams, longings, jealousies are not
going to disappear as if by the touch of a magic wand merely because Europe has
in an insane clash of long-ripening ambitions, jealousies and hatreds decimated
its manhood and flung in three years the resources of decades into the
melting-pot of war. The awakening must go much deeper, lay hold upon much purer
roots of action before the psychology of nations will be transmuted into that
something "wondrous, rich and strange"
1 This prediction, easy enough to make at
that time, and the estimate of its causes have been fully justified by the
course of events and the outbreak..of a still greater, more disastrous war.
Page-366
which will eliminate war and international collisions
from our distressed and stumbling human life.
National
egoism remaining, the means of strife remaining, its causes, opportunities,
excuses will never be wanting. The present war came because all the leading
nations had long been so acting as to make it inevitable; it came because there
was a Balkan imbroglio and a Near-Eastern hope and commercial and colonial
rivalries in Northern Africa over which the dominant nations had been battling
in peace long before one or more of them grasped at the rifle and the shell.
Sarajevo and Belgium were mere determining circumstances; to get to the root
causes we have to go back as far at least as Agadir and Algeciras. From Morocco
to Tripoli, from Tripoli to Thrace and Macedonia, from Macedonia to Herzegovina
the electric chain ran with that inevitable logic of causes and results,
actions and their fruits which we call Karma, creating minor detonations on its
way till it found the inflammable point and created that vast explosion which
has filled Europe with blood and ruins. Possibly the Balkan question may be
definitively settled, though that is far from certain; possibly the definitive
expulsion of Germany from Africa may ease the situation by leaving that
continent in the possession of three or four nations who are for the present
allies. But even if Germany were expunged from the map and its resentments and
ambitions deleted as a European factor, the root causes of strife would remain.
There will still be an Asiatic question of the Near and the Far East which may
take on new conditions and appearances and regroup its constituent elements,
but must remain so fraught with danger that if it is stupidly settled or does
not settle itself, it would be fairly safe to predict the next great human
collision with Asia as either its first field or its origin. Even if that
difficulty is settled, new causes of strife must necessarily develop where the
spirit of national egoism and cupidity seeks for satisfaction; and so long as
it lives, satisfaction it must seek and repletion can never permanently satisfy
it. The tree must bear its own proper fruit, and Nature is always a diligent
gardener.
The limitation of armies and
armaments is an illusory remedy. Even if there could be found an effective
international
Page-367
means of control, it would cease to operate as soon as
the clash of war actually came. The European conflict has shown that, in the
course of war, a country can be turned into a huge factory of arms and a nation
convert its whole peaceful manhood into an army. England which started with a
small and even insignificant armed force, was able in the course of a single
year to raise mil- lions of men and in two to train and equip them and throw
them effectively into the balance. This object lesson is sufficient to show
that the limitation of armies and armaments can only lighten the national
burden in peace, leaving it by that very fact more resources for the conflict,
but cannot prevent or even minimise the disastrous intensity and extension of
war. Nor will the construction of a stronger international law with a more
effective sanction behind it be an indubitable or perfect remedy. It is often
asserted that this is what is needed; just as in the nation Law has replaced
and suppressed the old barbaric method of settling disputes between
individuals, families or clans by the arbitration of Might, a similar
development ought to be possible in the life of nations. Perhaps in the end;
but to expect it to operate successfully at once is to ignore both the real
basis of the effective authority of Law and the difference between the
constituents of a developed nation and the constituents of that ill- developed
international comity which it is proposed to initiate.
The
authority of Law in a nation or community does not really depend on any
so-called "majesty" or mystic power in man-made rules and enactments.
Its real sources of power are two, first, the strong interest of the majority
or of a dominant minority or of the community as a whole in maintaining it and,
secondly, the possession of a sole armed force, police and military, which
makes that interest effective. The metaphorical sword of justice can only act
because there is a real sword behind it to enforce its decrees and its
penalties against the rebel and the dissident. And the essential character of
this armed force is that it belongs to nobody, to no individual or constituent
group of the community except alone to the State, the king or the governing
class or body in which sovereign authority is centred. Nor can there be any
security if the armed force of the State is balanced or its sole effectivity
diminished by the existence of other
Page-368
armed forces belonging to groups and individuals and
free in any degree from the central control or able to use their power against
the governing authority. Even so, even with this authority backed by a sole and
centralised armed force, Law has not been able to prevent strife of a kind
between individuals and classes because it has not been able to remove the
psychological, economic and other causes of strife. Crime with its penalties is
always a kind of mutual violence, a kind of revolt and civil strife and even in
the best-policed and most law-abiding communities crime is still rampant. Even
the organisation of crime is possible although it cannot usually endure or fix
its power, be- cause it has the whole vehement sentiment and effective
organisation of the community against it. But what is more to the purpose, Law
has not been able to prevent, although it has minimised, the possibility of
civil strife and violent or armed discord within the organised nation. Whenever
a class or an opinion has thought itself oppressed or treated with intolerable
injustice, has found the Law and its armed force so entirely associated with an
opposite interest that the suspension of the principle of law and an insurgence
of the violence of revolt against the violence of oppression were or appeared
the only remedy, it has, if it thought it had a chance of success, appealed to
the ancient arbitration of Might. Even in our own days we have seen the most
law-abiding of nations staggering on the verge of a disastrous civil war and
responsible statesmen declaring their readiness to appeal to it if a measure disagreeable
to them were enforced, even though it was passed by the supreme legislative
authority with the sanction of the sovereign.
But in any
loose international formation presently possible the armed force would still be
divided among its constituent groups; it would belong to them, not to any
sovereign authority, super-State or federal council. The position would
resemble the chaotic organisation of the feudal ages in which every prince and
baron had his separate jurisdiction and military resources and could defy the
authority of the sovereign if he were powerful enough or if he could command
the necessary number and strength of allies among his peers. And in this case,
there would not be even the equivalent of a feudal sovereign - a king who,
Page-369
if nothing else, if not really a monarch, was at least
the first among his peers - with
the prestige of sovereignty and some means of developing it into a strong and
permanent actuality.
Nor would
the matter be much improved if there were a composite armed force of control
set over the nations and their separate military strength; for this composite
would break apart and its elements return to their conflicting sources on the
out- break of overt strife. In the developed nation the individual is the unit
and he is lost among the mass of individuals, unable safely to calculate the
force he could command in a conflict, afraid of all other individuals not bound
to him, because he sees in them natural supporters of outraged authority;
revolt is to him a most dangerous and incalculable business, even the initial
conspiracy fraught at every moment with a thousand terrors and dangers that
lower in terrible massed array against a small modicum of scattered chances.
The soldier also is a solitary individual, afraid of all the rest, a terrible
punishment suspended over him and ready to fall at the least sign of
insubordination, never sure of a confident support among his fellows or, even
if a little certain, not assured of any effective support from the civil
population and therefore deprived of that moral force which would encourage him
to defy the authority of Law and Government. And in his ordinary sentiment he
belongs no longer to individual or family or class, but to the State and the
country or at the very least to the machine of which he 'is a part. But here
the constituents would be a small number of nations, some of them powerful
empires, well able to look around them, measure their own force, make sure of
their allies, calculate the force against them; the chances of success or
failure would be all that they would have to consider. And the soldiers of the
composite army would belong at heart to their country and not at all to the
nebulous entity which controlled them.
Therefore,
pending the actual evolution of an international State so constituted as to be
something other than a mere loose conglomerate of nations or rather a palaver
of the deputies of national governments, the reign of peace and unity dreamed
of by the idealist could never be possible by these political or administrative
means or, if possible, could never be secure. Even
Page-370
if actual war were eliminated, still as in the nation
crime between individuals exists, or as other means such as disastrous general
strikes are used in the war of classes, so here too other means of strife would
be developed, much more disastrous perhaps than war. And even they would be
needed and inevitable in the economy of Nature, not only to meet the
psychological necessity of egoistic discord and passion and ambition, but as an
outlet and an arm for the sense of injustice, of oppressed rights, of thwarted
possibilities. The law is always the same, that wherever egoism is the root of
action it must bear its own proper results and reactions and, however minimised
and kept down they may be by an external machinery, their eventual outburst is
sure and can be delayed but not prevented for ever.
It is apparent at least that no
loose formation without a powerful central control could be satisfactory,
effective or enduring, even if it were much less loose, much more compact than
anything that seems at present likely to evolve in the near future. There must
be in the nature of things a second step, a movement towards greater rigidity,
constriction of national liberties and the erection of a unique central
authority with a uniform control over the earth's peoples.
Page-371
Home