The
Conditions of a Free World-Union
A FREE world-union must in its very
nature be a complex unity based on a diversity and that diversity must be based
on free self- determination. A mechanical unitarian system would regard in its
idea the geographical groupings of men as so many conveniences for provincial
division, for the convenience of administration, much in the same spirit as the
French Revolution reconstituted France with an entire disregard of old natural
and historic divisions. It would regard mankind as one single nation and it
would try to efface the old separative national spirit altogether; it would
arrange its system probably by continents and subdivide the continents by
convenient geographical demarcations. In this other quite opposite idea, the
geographical, the physical principle of union would be subordinated to a
psychological principle; for not a mechanical division, but a living diversity would
be its object. If this object is to be secured, the peoples of humanity must be
allowed to group themselves according to their free-will, and their natural
affinities; no constraint or force could be allowed to compel an unwilling
nation or distinct grouping of peoples to enter into another system or join
itself or remain joined to it for the convenience, aggrandisement or political
necessity of another people or even for the general convenience, in disregard
of its own wishes. Nations or countries widely divided from each other
geographically like England and Canada or England and Australia might cohere
together. Nations closely grouped locally might choose to stand apart, like
England and Ireland or like Finland and Russia. Unity would be the largest
principle of life, but freedom would be its foundation-stone.1
In a world
built on the present political and commercial
1 Necessarily
to every principle there must be in application a reasonable limit; otherwise
fantastic and impracticable absurdities might take the place of a living truth.
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basis this system of groupings might present often
insuperable difficulties or serious disadvantages; but in the condition of
things in which alone a free world-union would be possible, these difficulties
and disadvantages would cease to operate. Military necessity of forced union
for strength of defence or for power of aggression would be non-existent,
because war would no longer be possible; force as the arbiter of international
differences and a free world-union are two quite incompatible ideas and
practically could not coexist. The political necessity would also disappear;
for it is largely made up of that very spirit of conflict and the consequent
insecure conditions of international life apportioning predominance in the
world to the physically and organically strongest nations out of which the
military necessity arose. In a free world-union determining its affairs and
settling its differences by agreement or, where agreement failed, by
arbitration, the only political advantage of including large masses of men, not
otherwise allied to each other in a single State, would be the greater
influence arising from mass and population. But this influence could not work
if the inclusion were against the will of the nations brought together in the
State; for then it would rather be a source of weakness and disunion in the
State's international action- unless indeed it were allowed in the
international system to weigh by its bulk and population without regard to the
will and opinion of the peoples constituting it. Thus the population of Finland
and Poland might swell the number of voices which a united Russia could count
in the council of the nations, but the will, sentiment and opinions of the
Finns and Poles be given no means of expression in that mechanical and unreal
unity.1 ()
But this would be contrary to the modern sense of justice and reason and
incompatible with the principle of freedom which could alone ensure a sound and
peaceful basis for the world-arrangement. Thus the elimination of war and the
settlement of differences by peaceful means would remove the military necessity
for forced unions, while the right of every people to a free voice and status
in the world would remove
1 The inclusion of India in the League of Nations has evidently been an
arrangement of this type.
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its political necessity and advantage. The elimination
of war and the recognition of the equal rights of all peoples are intimately
bound up with each other. That interdependence, admitted for a moment, even
though imperfectly, during the European conflict, will have to be permanently
accepted if there is to be any unification of the race.
The
economic question remains, and it is the sole important problem of a vital and
physical order which might possibly present in this kind of world-arrangement
any serious difficulties, or in which the advantages of a unitarian system
might really outweigh those of this more complex unity. In either, how- ever,
the forcible economic exploitation of one nation by another, which is so large
a part of the present economic order, would necessarily be abolished. There
would remain the possibility of a sort of peaceful economic struggle, a
separativeness, a building up of artificial barriers, - a phenomenon which has
been a striking and more and more prominent feature of the present commercial
civilisation. But it is likely that once the element of struggle were removed
from the political field, the stress of the same struggle in the economic field
would greatly decrease. The advantages of self-sufficiency and predominance, to
which political rivalry and struggle and the possibility of hostile relations
now give an enormous importance, would lose much of their stringency and the
advantages of a freer give and take would become more easily visible. It is
obvious, for example, that an independent Finland would profit much more by
encouraging the passage of Russian commerce through Finnish ports or an Italian
Trieste by encouraging the passage of commerce of the present Austrian
provinces than by setting up a barrier between itself and its natural feeders.
An Ireland politically or administratively independent, able to develop its
agricultural and technical education and intensification of productiveness, would
find a greater advantage in sharing the movement of the commerce of Great
Britain than in isolating itself, even as Great Britain would profit more by an
agreement with such an Ireland than by keeping her a poor and starving helot on
her estate. Throughout the world, the idea and fact of union once definitely
prevailing, unity of interests would be
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more clearly seen and the greater advantage of
agreement and mutual participation in a naturally harmonised life over the
feverish artificial prosperity created by a stressing of separative barriers.
That stressing is inevitable in an order of struggle and international
competition; it would be seen to be prejudicial in an order of peace and union
which would make for mutual accommodation. The principle of a free world-union
being that of the settlement of common affairs by common agreement, this could
not be confined to the removal of political differences and the arrangement of
political relations alone, but must naturally extend to economic differences
and economic relations as well. To the removal of war and the recognition of
the right of self-determination of the peoples the arrangement of the economic
life of the world in its new order by mutual and common agreement would have to
be added as the third condition of a free union.
There
remains the psychological question of the advantage to the soul of humanity, to
its culture, to its intellectual, moral, aesthetic, spiritual growth. At
present, the first great need of the psychological life of humanity is the
growth towards a greater unity; but its need is that of a living unity, not in
the externals of civilisation, in dress, manners, habits of life, details of
political, social and economic order, not a uniformity, which is the unity
towards which the mechanical age of civilisation has been driving, but a free
development everywhere with a constant friendly interchange, a close
understanding, a feeling of our common humanity, its great common ideals and
the truths towards which it is driving and a certain unity and correlation of
effort in the united human advance. At present it may seem that this is better
helped and advanced by many different nations and cultures living together in
one political State-union than by their political separateness. Temporarily,
this may be true to a certain extent, but let us see within what limits.
The old
psychological argument for the forcible inclusion of a subject nation by a
dominant people was the right or advantage of imposing a superior civilisation upon
one that was inferior or upon a barbarous race. Thus the Welsh and Irish
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people used to be told that their subjugation was a
great blessing to their countries, their languages petty patois which ought to
disappear as soon as possible, and in embracing English speech, English
institutions, English ideas lay their sole road to civilisation, culture and
prosperity. The British domination in India was justified by the priceless gift
of British civilisation and British ideals, to say nothing of the one and only
true religion, Christianity, to a heathen, orientally benighted and semi-
barbarous nation. All this is now an exploded myth. We can see clearly enough
that the long suppression of the Celtic spirit and Celtic culture, superior in
spirituality if inferior in certain practical directions to the Latin and
Teutonic, was a loss not only to the Celtic peoples, but to the world. India
has vehemently rejected the pretensions to superiority of British civilisation,
culture and religion, while still admitting, not so much the British, as the
modern ideals and methods in politics and in the trend to a greater social
equality; and it is becoming clear now, even to the more well-informed European
minds that the Anglicisation of India would have been a wrong not only to India
itself but to humanity.
Still it
may be said that, if the old principle of the association was wrong, yet the
association itself leads eventually to a good result. If Ireleand has lost for
the most part its old national speech and Wales has ceased to have a living
literature, yet as a large compensation the Celtic spirit is now reviving and
putting its stamp on the English tongue spoken by millions throughout the
world, and the inclusion of the Celtic countries in the British Empire may lead
to the development of an Anglo-Celtic life and culture better for the world
than the separate development of the two elements. India by the partial
possession of the English language has been able to link herself to the life of
the modern world and to reshape her literature, life and culture on a larger
basis and, now that she is reviving her own spirit and ideals in a new mould,
is producing an effect on the thought of the West; a perpetual union of the two
countries and a constant mutual interaction of their culture by this close
association would be more advantageous to them and to the world than their
cultural isolation from each other in a separate
existence.
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There is a temporary apparent truth in this idea,
though it is not the whole truth of the position, and we have given it full
weight in considering the claims of the imperialistic solution or line of
advance on the way to unity. But even the elements of truth in it can only be
admitted, provided a free and equal union replaces the present abnormal,
irritating and falsifying relations. Moreover, these advantages could only be
valuable as a stage towards a greater unity in which this close association
would no longer be of the same importance. For the final end is a common
world-culture in which each national culture should be, not merged into or
fused with some other culture differing from it in principle or temperament,
but evolved to its full power and could then profit to that end by all the
others as well as give its gains and influences to them, all serving by their
separateness and their interaction the common aim and idea of human perfection.
This would best be served, not by separateness and isolation, of which there
would be no danger, but yet by a certain distinctness and independence of life
not subordinated to the mechanising force of an artificial unity. Even within
the independent nation itself, there might be with advantage a tendency towards
greater local freedom of development and variation, a sort of return to the
vivid local and regional life of ancient Greece and India and mediaeval Italy;
for the disadvantages of strife, political weakness and precariousness of the
nation's independence would no longer exist in a condition of things from which
the old terms of physical conflict had been excluded, while all the cultural
and psychological advantages might be recovered. A world secure of its peace
and freedom might freely devote itself to the intensification of its real human
powers of life by the full encouragement and flowering of the individual,
local, regional, national mind and power in the firm frame of a united
humanity.
What
precise form the framework might take, it is impossible to forecast and useless
to speculate; only certain now current ideas would have to be modified or
abandoned. The idea of a world-Parliament is attractive at first sight, because
the parliamentary form is that to which our minds are accustomed; but an
assembly of the present unitarian national
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type could not be the proper instrument of a free
world-union of this large and complex kind; it could only be the instrument of
a unitarian World-State. The idea of a world-federation, if by that be
understood the Germanic or American form, would be equally inappropriate to the
greater diversity and freedom of national development which this type of
world-union would hold as one of its cardinal principles. Rather some kind of
confederation of the peoples for common human ends, for the removal of all
causes of strife and difference, for interrelation and the regulation of mutual
aid and interchange, yet leaving to each unit a full internal freedom and power
of self-determination, would be the right principle of this unity.
But, since
this is a much looser unity, what would prevent the spirit of separativeness
and the causes of clash and difference from surviving in so powerful a form as
to endanger the endurance of the larger principle of oneness, - even if that spirit and those causes
at all allowed it to reach some kind of
sufficient fulfilment? The unitarian ideal, on the contrary, seeks to efface
these opposite tendencies in their forms and even in their root cause and by so
doing would seem to ensure an enduring union. But it may be pointed out in
answer that, if it is by political ideas and machinery, under the pressure of
the political and economic spirit that the unity is brought about, that is to
say, by the idea and experience of the material ad- vantages, conveniences,
well-being secured by unification, then the unitarian system also could not be
sure of durability. For in the constant mutability of the human mind and
earthly circumstances, as long, as life is active, new ideas and changes are
inevitable. The suppressed desire to recover the lost element of variability,
separateness, independent living might well take advantage of them for what
would then be considered as a wholesome and necessary reaction. The lifeless
unity accomplished would dissolve from the pressure of the need of life within,
as the Roman unity dissolved by its lifelessness in helpless response to a
pressure from without, and once again local, regional, national egoism would
reconstitute for itself fresh forms and new centres.
On the
other hand, in a free world-union though originally
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starting from the national basis, the national idea
might be expected to undergo a radical transformation; it might even disappear
into a new and less strenuously compact form and idea of group-aggregation
which would not be separative in spirit, yet would preserve the necessary
element of independence and variation needed by both individual and grouping
for their full satisfaction and their healthy existence. Moreover, by
emphasising the psychological quite as much as the political and mechanical
idea and basis, it would give a freer and less artificial form and opportunity
for the secure development of the necessary intellectual and psychological
change; for such an inner change could alone give some chance of durability to
the unification. That change would be the growth of the living idea or religion
of humanity; for only so could there come the psychological modification of
life and feeling and outlook which would accustom both individual and group to
live in their common humanity first and most, subduing their individual and
group-egoism, yet losing nothing of their individual or group-power to develop
and ex- press in its own way the divinity in man which, once the race was
assured of its material existence, would emerge as the true object of human
existence.
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