CHAPTER
XXIV
The Need of
Military Unification
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victory in the conflict. This can only be secured to
the best possible perfection, - it cannot be done absolutely except by an
effective disarmament, - if the
whole military authority is centred in the central body and the whole actual or
potential military force of the society subjected to its undivided control.
In the
trend to the formation of the World-State, however subconscient, vague and
formless it may yet be, military necessity has begun to play the same large
visible part. The peoples of the world already possess a loose and chaotic
unity of life in which none can any longer lead an isolated, independent and
self-dependent existence. Each feels in its culture, political tendencies and
economic existence the influence and repercussion of events and movements in
other parts of the world. Each al- ready feels subtly or directly its separate
life overshadowed by the life of the whole. Science, international commerce and
the political and cultural penetration of Asia and Africa by the dominant West
have been the agents of this great change. Even in this loose unacknowledged
and underlying unity the occurrence or the possibility of great wars has become
a powerful element of disturbance to the whole fabric, a disturbance that may
one day become mortal to the race. Even before the European war, the necessity
of avoiding or minimising a collision between one or two that might prove fatal
to all was keenly felt and various well-intentioned but feeble and blundering
devices were tentatively introduced which had that end in view. Had any of
these makeshifts been tolerably effective, the world might long have remained
content with its present very unideal conditions and the pressing need of a
closer international organisation would not have enforced itself on the general
mind of the race. But the European collision rendered the indefinite
continuance of the old chaotic regime impossible. The necessity of avoiding any
repetition of the catastrophe was for a time universally acknowledged. A means
of keeping international peace and of creating an authority which shall have
the power to dispose of dangerous international questions and prevent what from
the new point of view of human unity we may call civil war between the peoples
of mankind, had somehow or other to be found or created
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Various ideas were put forward with more or less
authority as to the necessary conditions of international peace. The crudest of
these was the foolish notion created by a one-sided propaganda, which imagined
that the destruction of German militarism was the one thing needful and in
itself sufficient to secure the future peace of the world. The military power,
the political and commercial ambitions of Germany and her acute sense of her
confined geographical position and her encirclement by an un- friendly alliance
were the immediate moral cause of this particular war; but the real cause lay
in the very nature of the inter- national situation and the psychology of
national life. The chief feature of this psychology is the predominance and
worship of national egoism under the sacred name of patriotism. Every national
ego, like every organic life, desires a double self- fulfilment, intensive and
extensive or expansive. The deepening and enriching of its culture, political
strength and economic well- being within its borders is not felt to be
sufficient if there is not, without, an extension or expansion of its culture,
an increase of its political extent, dominion, power or influence and a
masterful widening of its commercial exploitation of the world. This natural
and instinctive desire is not an abnormal moral depravity but the very instinct
of egoistic life; and what life at present is not egoistic? But it can be
satisfied only to a very limited degree by peaceful and unaggressive means. And
where it feels itself hemmed in by obstacles that it thinks it can overcome,
opposed by barriers, encircled, dissatisfied with a share of possession and
domination it considers disproportionate to its needs and its strength, or
where new possibilities of expansion open out to it in which only its strength
can obtain for it its desirable portion, it is at once moved to the use of some
kind of force and can only be restrained by the amount of resistance it is
likely to meet. If it has a weak opposition of unorganised or ill-organised
peoples to overcome, it will not hesitate; if it has the opposition of powerful
rivals to fear, it will pause, seek for alliances or watch for its moment.
Germany had not the monopoly of this expansive instinct and egoism; but its
egoism was the best organised and least satisfied, the youngest, crudest,
hungriest, most self-confident and presumptuous, most satisfied with the self-
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righteous brutality of its desires. The breaking of
German militarism might ease for a moment the intensity of the many- headed
commercial wrestle but it cannot, by the removal of a dangerous and restless
competitor, end it. So long as any kind of militarism survives, so long as
fields of political or commercial aggrandisement are there and so long as
national egoisms live and are held sacred and there is no final check on their
inherent instinct of expansion, war will be always a possibility and almost a
necessity of the life of the human peoples.
Another
idea put forward with great authorities behind it was a league of free and
democratic nations which would keep the peace by pressure or by the use of
force if need be. If less crude, the solution is not for that any more
satisfactory than the other. It is an old idea, the idea Metternich put into
practice after the overthrow of Napoleon; only in place of a Holy Alliance of
monarchs to maintain peace and monarchical order and keep down democracy, it
was proposed to have a league of free - and imperial- peoples to enforce
democracy and to maintain peace. One thing is perfectly sure that the new
league would go the way of the old; it would break up as soon as the interests
and ambitions of the constituent Powers became sufficiently disunited or a new
situation arose such as was created by the violent resurgence of oppressed
democracy in 1848 or such as would be created by the inevitable future duel
between the young Titan, Socialism, and the old Olympian gods of a bourgeois-
democratic world. That conflict was already outlining its formidable shadow in
revolutionary Russia, has now taken a body and cannot be very long delayed
throughout Europe. For the war and its after consequences momentarily suspended
but it may very well turn out to have really precipitated the advent and
accentuated its force. One cause or the other or both together would bring a
certain dissolution. No voluntary league can be permanent in its nature. The
ideas which supported it, change; the interests which made it possible and
effective become fatally modified or obsolete.
The supposition is that democracies
will be less ready to go to war than monarchies; but this is true only within a
certain measure. What are called democracies are bourgeois States in
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the form either of a constitutional monarchy or a
middle-class republic. But everywhere the middle class has taken over with
certain modifications the diplomatic habits, foreign policies and international
ideas of the monarchical or aristocratic governments which preceded them.1
This continuity seems to have been. a natural law of the mentality of the
ruling class. In Germany it was the aristocratic and the capitalist class
combined that constituted the Pan-German party with its exaggerated and almost
'insane ambition. In the new Russia the bourgeoisie during its brief rule
rejected the political ideas of the Czardom in internal affairs and helped to
overturn autocracy, but preserved its ideas in external affairs minus the
German influence and stood for the expansion of Russia and the possession of
Constantinople. Certainly, there is an important difference. The monarchical or
aristocratic State is political in its mentality and seeks first of all
territorial aggrandisement and political predominance or hegemony among the nations, commercial
aims are only a secondary preoccupation attendant on the other. In the
bourgeois State there is a reverse order, for it has its eye chiefly on the
possession of markets, the command of new fields of wealth, the formation or
conquest of colonies or dependencies which can be commercially and industrially
exploited and on political aggrandisement only as a means for this more
cherished object. More- over, the monarchical or aristocratic statesman turned
to war as almost his first expedient. As soon as he was dissatisfied with the
response to his diplomacy, he grasped at the sword or the rifle. The bourgeois
statesman hesitates, calculates, gives a longer rope to diplomacy, tries to
gain his ends by bargainings, arrangements, peaceful pressure, demonstrations of
power. In the end he is ready to resort to war, but only when these expedients
have failed him and only if the end seems commensurate with the means and the
great speculation of war promises a very strong chance of success and solid
profit. But on the other hand, the bourgeois democratic State has developed a
stupendous military organisation of which the most powerful monarchs and
aristocracies could not dream. And if this tends to delay the
1
So
also has Socialist Russia taken over from the Czars these ideas and habits with
very little or no modification.
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outbreak of large wars, it tends too to make their final
advent sure and their proportions enormous and nowadays incalculable and
immeasurable.
There was a
strong suggestion at the time that a more truly democratic and therefore a more
peaceful spirit and more thoroughly democratic institutions would reign after
the restoration of peace by the triumph of the liberal nations. One rule of the
new international situation was to be the right of nations to dispose of their
own destinies and to be governed only by their free consent. The latter
condition is impossible of immediate fulfilment except in Europe, and even for
Europe the principle is not really recognised in its total meaning or put into
entire practice. If it were capable of universal application, if the existing
relations of peoples and the psychology of nations could be so altered as to
establish it as a working principle, one of the most fertile causes of war and
revolution would be removed, but all causes would not disappear. The greater
democratisation of the European peoples affords no sure guarantee. Certainly,
democracy of a certain kind, democracy reposing for its natural constitution on
individual liberty would be likely to be indisposed to war except in moments of
great and universal excitement. War demands a violent concentration of all the
forces, a spirit of submission, a suspension of free-will, free action and of
the right of criticism which is alien to the true democratic instinct. But the
democracies of the future are likely to be strongly concentrated governments in
which the principle of liberty is subordinated to the efficient life of the
community by some form of State Socialism. A democratic State of that kind
might well have even a greater power for war, might be able to put forward a
more violently concentrated military organisation in the event of hostilities
than even the bourgeois democracies and it is not at all certain that it would
be less tempted to use its means and power. Socialism has been international
and pacific in its tendencies, because the necessity of preparation for war is
favourable to the rule of the upper classes and because war itself is used in
the interests of the governments and the capitalists; the ideas and classes it
represents are at present depressed and do not grow by the uses or share
visibly in the profits of war.
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What will happen when they have hold of the government and
its temptations and opportunities has to be seen but can easily be forecast.
The possession of power is the great test of all idealisms and as yet there
have been none religious or secular which have withstood it or escaped
diminution and corruption.
To rely upon the common consent of
conflicting national egoisms for the preservation of peace between the nations is
to rely upon a logical contradiction. A practical improbability which, if we
can judge by reason and experience, amounts to an impossibility, can hardly be
a sound foundation for the building of the future. A League of Peace can only
prevent armed strife for a time. A system of enforced arbitration, even with
the threat of a large armed combination against the offender, may minimise the
chance of war and may absolutely forbid it to the smaller or weaker nations;
but a great nation which sees a chance of making itself the centre of a strong
combination of peoples interested in upsetting the settled order of things for
their own benefit, might always choose to take the risks of the adventure in
the hope of snatching advantages which in its estimation out- weighed the
risks.1 Moreover, in times of great
upheaval and movement when large ideas, enormous interests and inflamed
passions divide the peoples of the world, the whole system would be likely to
break to pieces and the very elements of its efficacy would cease to exist. Any
tentative and imperfect device would be bound before long to disclose its
inefficacy and the attempt at a deliberate organisation of international life
would have to be abandoned and the work left to be wrought out confusedly by
the force of events. The creation of a real, efficient and powerful authority
which would stand for the general sense and the general power of mankind in its
collective life and spirit and would be something more than a bundle of
vigorously separate States loosely tied together by the frail bond of a
violable moral agreement is the only effective step possible on this path.
Whether such an authority can really be created by agreement, whether it must
not rather create itself partly by the growth
1
The subsequent history of the League of Nations, which had not been
formed at the time of writing, has amply proved the inefficacy of these
devices
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of ideas, but still more by the shock of forces, is a
question to which the future alone can answer.
An authority
of this nature would have to command the psychological assent of mankind,
exercise a moral force upon the nations greater than that of their own national
authority and compel more readily their obedience under all normal
circumstances. It would have not only to be a symbol and a centre of the unity
of the race but make itself constantly serviceable to the world by assuring the
effective maintenance and development of large common interests and benefits
which would out- weigh all separate national interests and satisfy entirely the
sense of need that had brought it into existence. It must help more and more to
fix the growing sense of a common humanity and a common life in which the sharp
divisions which separate country from country, race from race, colour from
colour, continent from continent would gradually lose their force and undergo a
progressive effacement. Given these conditions, it would develop a moral
authority which would enable it to pursue with less and less opposition and
friction the unification of mankind. The nature of the psychological assent it
secured from the beginning would depend largely on its constitution and
character and would in its turn determine both the nature and power of the
moral authority it could exercise on the earth's peoples. If its constitution
and character were such as to conciliate the sentiment and interest in its
maintenance the active support of all or most of the different sections of
mankind or at least those whose sentiment and support counted powerfully and to
represent the leading political, social, cultural ideas and interests of the
time, it would have the maximum of psychological assent and moral authority and
its way would be comparatively smooth. If defective in these respects, it would
have to make up the deficiency by a greater concentration and show of military
force at its back and by extraordinary and striking services to the general
life, culture and development of the human race such as assured for the Roman
imperial authority the long and general assent of the Mediterranean and Western
peoples to the subjection and the obliteration of their national existence.
But in
either case the possession and concentration of
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military power would be for long the first condition of
its security, and the effectiveness of its own control and this possession
would have to be, as soon as possible, a sole possession. , It is difficult at
present to foresee the consent of the nations of the world to their own total
disarmament. For so long as strong national egoisms of any kind remained and
along with them mutual distrust, the nations would not sacrifice their
possession of an armed force on which they could rely for self-defence if their
interests or at least those that they considered essential to their prosperity
and their existence, came to be threatened. Any distrust of the assured
impartiality of the international government would operate in the same
direction. Yet such a disarmament would be essential to the assured cessation
of war - in the absence of some great and radical psychological and moral
change. If national armies exist, the possibility, even the certainty of war
will exist along with them. However small they might be made in times of peace,
and international authority, even with a military force of its own behind it,
would be in the position of the feudal king never quite sure of his effective
control over his vassals. The international authority must hold under its
command the sole trained military force in the world for the policing of the
nations and also - otherwise the monopoly would be ineffective - the sole disposal of the means of
manufacturing arms and implements of war. National and private munition
factories and arms factories must disappear. National armies must become like
the old baronial armies a memory of past and dead ages.
This
consummation would mark definitely the creation of a World-State in place of
the present international conditions.
For it can be brought into truly effective existence only if the international
authority became, not merely the arbiter of disputes, but the source of law and
the final power behind their execution. For the execution of its decrees
against recalcitrant countries or classes, for the prevention of all kinds of
strife not merely political but commercial, industrial and others or at least
of their decision by any other ways than a peaceful resort to law and
arbitration, for the suppression of any attempt at violent change and
revolution, the Wodd-State, even at its
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strongest, would still need the concentration of all
force in its own hands. While man remains what he is, force, in spite of all
idealisms and generous pacific hopes, must remain the ultimate arbiter and
governor of his life, and its possessor the real ruler. Force may veil its
crude presence at ordinary times and take only mild and civilised forms, - mild in comparison, for are not the
jail and the executioner still the two great pillars of the social order? - but it is there silently upholding
the specious appearances of our civilisation and ready to intervene, when- ever
called upon, in the workings of the fairer but still feebler gods of the social
cosmos. Diffused force fulfils the free workings of Nature and is the servant
of life but also of discord and struggle; concentrated, it becomes the
guarantee of organisation and the bond of order.
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