E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis

CHAPTER 4
THE HARMONY OF INTERESTS

The Utopian Synthesis

No political society, national or international, can exist unless people submit to certain rules of conduct. The problem why people should submit to such rules is the fundamental problem of political philosophy. The problem presents itself just as insistently in a democracy as under other forms of government and in international as in national politics; for such a formula as "the greatest good of the greatest number" provides no answer to the question why the minority, whose greatest good is ex hypothesi not pursued, should submit to rules made in the interest of the greatest number. Broadly speaking, the answers given to the question fill into two categories, corresponding to the antithesis, discussed in a previous chapter, between those who regard politics as a function of ethics and those who regard ethics as a function of politics.

Those who assert the primacy of ethics over politics will hold that it is the duty of the individual to submit for the sake of the community as a whole, sacrificing his own interest to the interest of others who are more numerous, or in some other way more deserving. The "good" which consists in self-interest should be subordinated to the "good" which consists in loyalty and self-sacrifice for an end higher than self-interest. The obligation rests on some kind of intuition of what is right and cannot be demonstrated by rational argument. Those, on the other hand, who assert the primacy of politics over ethics, will argue that the ruler rules because he is the stronger, and the ruled submit because they are the weaker. This principle is just as easily applicable to democracy as to any other form of government. The majority rules because it is stronger, the minority submits because it is weaker. Democracy, it has often been said, substitutes the counting of heads for the breaking of heads. But the substitution is merely a convenience, and the principle of the two methods is the same. The realist, therefore, unlike the intuitionist, has a perfectly rational answer to the question why the individual should submit. He should submit because otherwise the stronger will compel him; and the results of compulsion are more disagreeable than those of voluntary submission. Obligation is thus derived from a sort of spurious ethic based on the reasonableness of recognizing that might is right.

Both these answers are open to objection. Modern man, who has witnessed so many magnificent achievements of human reason, is reluctant to believe that reason and obligation sometimes conflict. On the other hand, men of all ages have failed to find satisfaction in the view that the rational basis of obligation is merely the right of the stronger. One of the strongest points of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopianism was its apparent success in meeting both these objections at once. The utopian, starting from the primacy of ethics, necessarily believes in an obligation which is ethical in character and independent of the right of the stronger. But he has also been able to convince himself, on grounds other than those of the realist, that the duty of the individual to submit to rules made in the interest of the community can be justified in terms of reason, and that the greatest good of. the greatest number is a rational end even for those who are not included in the greatest number. He achieves this synthesis by maintaining that the highest, interest of the individual and the highest interest of the community naturally coincide. In pursuing his own interest, the individual pursues that of the community, and in promoting the interest of the community he promotes his own. This is the famous doctrine of the harmony of interests. It is a necessary corollary of the postulate that moral laws can be established by right reasoning. The admission of any ultimate divergence of interests would be fatal to this postulate; and any apparent clash of interests must therefore be explained as the result of wrong circulation. Burke tacitly accepted the doctrine of identify when he defined expediency as "that which is good for the community and for every individual in it."1 It was Handed an from the eighteenth-century rationalists to Bentham, and from Bentham to the Victorian moralists. The utilitarian philosophers could justify morality by the argument that, in promoting the good of others, one automatically promotes one's own. Honesty is the best policy. If people or nations behave badly, it must be, as Buckle and Sir Norman Angell and Professor Zimmern think, because they are unintellectual and short-sighted and muddleheaded.

The Paradise of Laissez-Faire

It was the laissez-faire school of political economy created by Adam Smith which was in the main responsible for popularizing the doctrine of the harmony of interests. The purpose of the school was to promote the removal of state control in economic matters; and in order to justify this policy, it set out to demonstrate that the individual could be relied on, without external control, to promote the interests of the community for the very reason that those interests were identical with his own. This proof was the burden of The Wealth Of Nations. The community is divided into those who live by rent, those who live by wages and those who live by profit; and the interests of "those three great orders" are "strictly and inseparably connected with the general interest of the society."2 The harmony is none the less real if those concerned are unconscious of it. The individual "neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much lie is promoting it.... lie intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." 3 The invisible hand, which Adam Smith would perhaps have regarded as a metaphor, presented no difficulty to Victorian piety. "It is curious to observe," remarks a tract issued by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge towards the middle of the nineteenth century, "how, through the wise and beneficent arrangement of Providence, men thus do the greatest service to the public when they are thinking of nothing but their own gain." 4 About the same time an English clergyman wrote a work entitled The Temporal Benefits of Christianity Explained. The harmony of interests provided a solid rational basis for morality. To love one's neighbor turned out to be a thoroughly enlightened way of loving oneself. "We now know," wrote Mr. Henry Ford as recently as 1930, "that anything which is economically right is also morally right, There can be no conflict between good economics and good morals." 5

The assumption of a general and fundamental harmony of interests is prima facie so paradoxical that it requires careful scrutiny, in the form which Adam Smith gave to it, it bad a definite application to the economic structure of the eighteenth century. It presupposed a society of small producers and merchants, interested in the maximization of production and exchange, infinitely mobile and adaptable, and unconcerned with the problem of the distribution of wealth. Those conditions were substantially fulfilled in an age when production involved no high degree of specialization and no sinking of capital in fixed equipment, and when the class which might be more interested in the equitable distribution of wealth than in its maximum production was insignificant and without influence. But by a curious coincidence, the year which saw the publication of The Wealth of Nations was also the year in which Watt invented his steam-engine. Thus, at the very moment when laissez-faire theory was receiving its classical exposition, its premises were undermined by an invention which was destined to call into being immobile, highly specialized, mammoth industries and a large and powerful proletariat more interested in distribution than in production. Once industrial capitalism and the class system had become the recognized structure of society, the doctrine of the harmony of interests acquired a new significance, and became, as we shall presently see, the ideology of a dominant group concerned to maintain its predominance by asserting the identity of its interests with those of the community as a whole.6

But this transformation could not have been effected; and the doctrine could not have survived at all, but for one circumstance. The survival of the belief in a harmony of interests was rendered possible by the unparalleled expansion of production, population and prosperity, which marked the hundred years following the publication of The Wealth of Nations arid the invention of the steam-engine. Expanding prosperity contributed to the popularity of the doctrine in three different ways. It attenuated competition for markets among producers, since fresh markets were constantly becoming available; it postponed the class issue, with its insistence on the primary importance of equitable distribution by extending to members of the less prosperous classes some share in the general prosperity; and by creating a sense of confidence in present and future well-being, it encouraged men to believe that the world was ordered on so rational a plan as the natural harmony of interests. "It was the continual widening of the field of demand which, for half a century, made capitalism operate as if it were a liberal utopia." 7 The tacit presupposition of infinitely expanding markets was the foundation on which the supposed harmony of interests rested. As Dr. Mannheim points out, traffic control is unnecessary so long as the number of cars does not exceed the comfortable capacity of the road.8 Until that moment arrives, it is easy to believe in a natural harmony of interests between road-users.

What was true of individuals was assumed to be also true of nations. Just as individuals, by pursuing their own good, unconsciously compass the good of the whole community, so nations in serving themselves serve humanity. Universal free trade was justified on the ground that the maximum economic interest of each nation was identified with the maximum economic interest of the whole world. Adam Smith, who was a practical reformer rather than a pure theorist, did indeed admit that governments might have to protect certain industries in the interests of national defense. But such derogations seemed to him and to his followers trivial exceptions to the rule. "Laissez-faire," as J. S. Mill puts it, "…should be the general rule: every departure from it, unless required by some great good, a certain evil." 9 Other thinkers gave the doctrine of the harmony of national interests a still wider application. "The true interests of a nation," observes a late eighteenth-century writer, "never yet stood in opposition to the general interest of mankind; and it can never happen that philanthropy and patriotism can impose on any man inconsistent duties." 10 T. H. Green, the English Hegelian who tempered the doctrines of his master with concessions to British nineteenth-century liberalism, held that "no action in its own interest of a state which fulfilled its idea could conflict with any true interest or right of general society," 11 though it is interesting to note that the question-begging epithet "true," which in the eighteenth-century quotation is attached to the interests of the nation, has been transferred by the nineteenth century to the interest of the general society. Mazzini, who embodied the liberal nineteenth-century philosophy of nationalism, believed in a sort of division of labor between nations. Each nation hid its own special task for which its special aptitudes fitted it, and the performance of this task was its contribution to the welfare of humanity. If all nations acted in this spirit, international harmony would prevail. The same condition of apparently infinite expansibility which encouraged belief in the economic harmony of interests made possible the belief in the political harmony of rival national movements. One reason why contemporaries of Mazzini thought nationalism a good thing was that there were few recognized nations, and plenty of room for them. In an age when Germans, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Magyars and half a dozen more national groups were not yet visibly jostling one another over an area of a few hundred square miles, it was comparatively easy t6 believe that each nation, by developing its own nationalism, could make its own special contribution to the international harmony of interests. Most liberal writers continued to believe, right down to 1918, that nations, by developing their own nationalism, promoted the cause of internationalism; and Wilson and many other makers of the peace treaties saw in national self-determination the key to world peace. More recently still, responsible Anglo-Saxon statesmen have been from time to time content to echo, probably without much reflection, the old Mazzinian formulae.12

Darwinism in Politics

When the centenary of The Wealth of Nations was celebrated in 1876, there were already symptoms of an impending breakdown. No country but Great Britain had been commercially powerful enough to believe in the international harmony of economic interests. Acceptance of free-trade principles outside Great Britain had always been partial, half-hearted and short-lived. The United States had rejected them from the start. About 1840, Friedrich List, who had spent much time studying industrial development in the United States, began to preach to a German audience the doctrine that, while free trade was the right policy for an industrially dominant nation like Great Britain, only protection could enable weaker nations to break the British stranglehold. German and American industries, built up behind protective tariffs, were soon seriously impinging on the world-wide British industrial monopoly. The British Dominions overseas made use of their newly-won fiscal autonomy to protect themselves against the manufactures of the mother country. The pressure of competition was increasing on all sides. Nationalism began to wear a sinister aspect, and to degenerate into imperialism. The philosophy of Hegel, who identified reality with an eternally recurring conflict of ideas, extended its influence. Behind Hegel stood Marx, who materialized the Hegelian conflict into a class-war of economic interest-groups, and working-class parties came into being which steadfastly refused to believe in the harmony of interests between capital and labor. Above all, Darwin propounded and popularized a biological doctrine of evolution through a perpetual struggle for life and the elimination of the unfit.

It was the doctrine of evolution which for a time enabled the laissez-faire philosophy to make its terms with the new conditions and the new trend of thought. Free competition had always been worshipped as the beneficent deity of the laissez-faire system. The French economist Bastiat, in a work significantly entitled Les Harmonies Economiques, had hailed competition as "that humanitarian force... which continually wrests progress from the hands of the individual to make it the common heritage of the great human family."13 Under the growing strains of the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was perceived that competition in the economic sphere implied exactly what Darwin proclaimed as the biological law of nature - the survival of the stronger at the expense of the weaker. The small producer or trader was gradually being put out of business by his large-scale competitor; and this development was what progress and the welfare of the community as a whole demanded. Laissez-faire meant an open field, and the prize to the strongest. The doctrine of the harmony of interests underwent an almost imperceptible modification. The good of the community (or, as people were now inclined to say, of the species) was still identical with the good of its individual members, but only of those individuals who were effective competitors in the struggle for life. Humanity went on from strength to strength, shedding its weaklings by the way. "The development of the species," as Marx said, "…and therefore the higher development of the individual can only be secured through the historical process, in which individuals are sacrificed." 14 Such was the doctrine of the new age of intensified economic competition preached by the school of Herbert Spencer, and commonly accepted in Great Britain in the 'seventies and 'eighties. The last French disciple of Adam Smith, Yves Guyot, assisted perhaps by the accident that the French word concurrence means "collaboration" as well as "competition," wrote a work entitled La Morale de la Concurrence. Among English writers who applied this evolutionary principle to international politics, the most popular was Bagehot:

About the same time, a Russian sociologist defined international politics as "the art of conducting the struggle for existence between social organisms"; 16 and in 1900 a distinguished professor, in a once famous book, stated the doctrine in all its naked ruthlessness :

In Germany, the same view was propounded by Treitschke and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The doctrine of progress through the elimination of unfit nations seemed a fair corollary of the doctrine of progress through the elimination of unfit individuals; and some such belief, though not always openly avowed, was implicit in late nineteenth-century imperialism. In the later nineteenth century, as an American historian remarks, "the basic problem of international relations was who should cut tip the victims."18 The harmony of interests was established through the sacrifice of "unfit" Africans and Asiatics.

One point had, unfortunately, been overlooked. For more than a hundred years, the doctrine of the harmony of interests had provided a rational basis for morality. The individual had been urged to serve the interest of the community on the plea that that interest was also his own. The ground had now been shifted. In the long run, the good of the community and the good of the individual were still the same. But this eventual harmony was preceded by a struggle for life between individuals, in which not only the good, but the very existence, of the loser were eliminated altogether from the picture. Morality in these conditions had no rational attraction for prospective losers; and the whole ethical system was built on the sacrifice of the weaker brother. In practice, nearly every state had made inroads on the classical doctrine, and introduced social legislation to protect the economically weak against the economically strong. The doctrine itself died harder. In the 'seventies Dostoevsky, who had none of the prejudices of an Englishman or an economist, made Ivan Karamazov declare that the price of admission to the "eternal harmony" was too high if it included the sufferings of the innocent. About the same time, Winwood Reade made an uncomfortable sensation in Great Britain with a book called The Martyrdom of Man, which drew attention to the immense tale of suffering and waste involved in the theory of evolution. In the nineties, Huxley confessed, in the name of science, to the existence of a discrepancy between the "cosmic process" and the "ethical process"; 19 and Balfour, approaching the problem from the angle of philosophy, concluded that "a complete harmony between 'egoism' and 'altruism', between the pursuit of the highest happiness for oneself and the highest happiness for other people, can never be provided by a creed which refuses to admit that the deeds done and the character formed in this life can flow over into another, and there permit a reconciliation and an adjustment between the conflicting principles which are not always possible here."20 Less and less was heard of the beneficent properties of free competition. Before 19l4, though the policy of international free trade was still upheld by the British electorate and by British economists, the ethical postulate which had once formed the basis of the laissez-faire philosophy no longer appealed, at any rate in its crude form, to any serious thinker. Biologically and economically, the doctrine of the harmony of interests was tenable only if you left out of account the interest of the weak who must be driven to the wall, or called in the next world to redress the balance of the present.

The International Harmony

Attention has been drawn to the curious way in which doctrines, already obsolete or obsolescent before the war of 1914, were reintroduced in the post-war period, largely through American inspiration, into the special field of international affairs. This would appear to be conspicuously true of the laissez-faire doctrine of the harmony of interests. In the United States, the history of laissez-faire presents special features. Throughout the nineteenth, and well into the twentieth, centuries the United States, while requiring tariff protection against European competition, had enjoyed the advantage of an expanding domestic market of apparently unlimited potentialities. In Great Britain, which continued clown to 1914 to dominate world trade, but was increasingly conscious of strains and stresses at home, J. S. Mill and later economists clung firmly to international free trade, but made more and more inroads into laissez-faire orthodoxy in the domestic sphere. In the United States, Carey and his successors justified protective tariffs, but in every other respect maintained the immutable principles of laissez-faire. In Europe after 1919, planned economy, which rests on the assumption that no natural harmony of interests exists and that interests must be artificially harmonized by state action, became the practice, if not the theory of almost every state. In the United States, the persistence of an expanding domestic market staved off this development till after 1929. The natural harmony of interests remained an integral part of the American view of life; and in this as in other respects, current theories of international politics were deeply imbued with the American tradition. Moreover, there was a special reason for the ready acceptance of the doctrine in the international sphere. In domestic affairs it is clearly the business of the state to create harmony if no natural harmony exists. In international politics, there is no organized power charged with the task of creating harmony; and the temptation to assume a natural harmony is therefore particularly strong. But this is no excuse for barking the issue. To make the harmonization of interests the goal of political action is not the same thing as to postulate that a natural harmony of interests exists; 21 and it is this latter postulate which his caused so much confusion in international thinking.

The Common Interest in Peace

Politically, the doctrine of the identity of interests his commonly taken the form of an assumption that every nation has an identical interest in peace, and that any nation which desires to disturb the peace is therefore both irrational and immoral. This view bears clear marks of its Anglo-Saxon origin. It was easy after 1918 to convince that part of mankind which lives in English-speaking countries that war profits nobody. The argument did not seem particularly convincing to Germans, who had profited largely from the wars of 1866 and 1870, and attributed their more recent sufferings, not to the war of 1914, but to the fact that they had lost it; or to Italians, who blamed not the war, but the treachery of allies who defrauded them in the peace settlement; or to Poles or Czecho-Slovaks who, far from deploring the war, owed their national existence to it; or to Frenchmen, who could not unreservedly regret a war which had restored Alsace-Lorraine to France; or to people of other nationalities who remembered profitable wars waged by Great Britain and the United States in the past. But these people had fortunately little influence over the formation of current theories of international relations, which emanated almost exclusively from the English-speaking countries. British and American writers continued to assume that the uselessness of war had been irrefutably demonstrated by the experience of 1914-18, and that an intellectual grasp of this fact was all that was necessary to induce the nations to keep the peace in the future; and they were sincerely puzzled as well as disappointed at the failure of other countries to share this view.

The confusion was increased by the ostentatious readiness of other countries to flatter the Anglo-Saxon world by repeating its slogans. In the fifteen years after the first world war, every Great Power (except, perhaps, Italy) repeatedly did lip-service to the doctrine by declaring peace to be one of the main objects of its policy. 22 But as Lenin observed long ago, peace in itself is a meaningless aim. "Absolutely everybody is in favor of peace in general," he wrote in 1915, "including Kitchener, Joffre, Hindenburg and Nicholas the Bloody, for everyone of them wishes to end the war." 23 The common interest in peace masks the fact that some nations desire to maintain the status quo without having to fight for it, and others to change the status quo without having to fight in order to do so. 24 The statement that it is in the interest of the world as a whole either that the status quo should be maintained, or that it should be changed, would be contrary to the facts. The statement that it is in the interest of the world as a whole that the conclusion eventually reached, whether maintenance or change, should be reached by peaceful means, would command general assent, but seems a rather meaningless platitude. The utopian assumption that there is a world interest in peace which is identifiable with the interest of each individual nation helped politicians and political writers everywhere to evade the unpalatable fact of a fundamental divergence of interest between nations desirous of maintaining the status quo and nations desirous of changing it. 25 A peculiar combination of platitude and falseness thus became endemic in the pronouncements of statesmen about international affairs. "In this whole Danubian area," said a Prime Minister of Czecho-Slovakia, "no one really wants conflicts and jealousies. The various countries want to maintain their independence, but otherwise they are ready for any cooperative measures. I am thinking specially of the Little Entente, Hungary and Bulgaria." 26 Literally the words may pass as true. Yet the conflicts and jealousies which nobody wanted were a notorious feature of Danubian politics after 1919, and the cooperation for which all were ready was unobtainable. The fact of divergent interests was disguised and falsified by the platitude of a general desire to avoid conflict.

International Economic Harmony

In economic relations, the assumption of a general harmony of interests was made with even greater confidence; for here we have a direct reflection of the cardinal doctrine of laissez-faire economics, and it is here that we can see most clearly the dilemma which results from the doctrine. When the nineteenth-century liberal spoke of the greatest good of the greatest number, he tacitly assumed that the good of the minority might have to be sacrificed to it. This principle applied equally to international economic relations. If Russia or Italy, for example, were not strong enough to build up industries without the protection of tariffs, then - the laissez-faire liberal would have argued -they should be content to import British and German manufactures and supply wheat and oranges to the British and German markets. If anyone had thereupon objected that this policy would condemn Russia and Italy to remain second-rate Powers economically and militarily dependent on their neighbors, the laissez-faire liberal would have had to answer that this was the will of Providence and that this was what the general harmony of interests demanded. The modern utopian internationalist enjoys none of the advantages, and has none of the toughness, of the nineteenth-century liberal. The material success of the weaker Powers in building up protected industries, as well as the new spirit of internationalism, preclude him from arguing that the harmony of interests depends on the sacrifice of economically unfit nations. Yet the abandonment of this premiss destroys the whole basis of the doctrine which be has inherited; and he is driven to the belief that the common good can be achieved without any sacrifice of the good of any individual member of the community. Every international conflict is therefore unnecessary and illusory. It is only necessary to discover the common good which is at the same time the highest good of all the disputants; and only the folly of statesmen stands in the way of its discovery. The utopian, secure in his understanding of this common good, arrogates to himself the monopoly of wisdom. The statesmen of the world one and all stand convicted of incredible blindness to the interest of those whom they are supposed to represent. Such was the picture of the international scene presented, in all seriousness, by British and American writers, including not a few economists.

It is for this reason that we find in the modern period an extraordinary divergence between the theories of economic experts and the practice of those responsible for the economic policies of their respective countries. Analysis will show that this divergence springs from a simple fact. The economic expert, dominated in the main by laissez-faire doctrine, considers the hypothetical economic interest of the world as a whole, and is content to assume that this is identical with the interest of each individual country. The politician pursues the concrete interest of his country, and assumes (if he makes any assumption at all) that the interest of the world as a whole is identical with it. Nearly every pronouncement of every international economic conference held between the two world wars was vitiated by this assumption that there was some "solution" or "plan" which, by a judicious balancing of interests, would be equally favorable to all and prejudicial to none.

The sequel of the Conference was the complete neglect of all the recommendations unanimously made by it; and if we are not content to accept the facile explanation that the leading statesmen of the world were either criminal or mad, we may begin to suspect the validity of its initial assumption. It seems altogether rash to suppose that economic nationalism is necessarily detrimental to states which practice it. In the nineteenth century, Germany and the United States, by pursuing a "strictly nationalistic policy," had placed themselves in a position to challenge Great Britain's virtual monopoly of world trade. No conference of economic experts, meeting in 1880, could have evolved a "general plan" for "parallel or concerted action" which would have allayed the economic rivalries of the time in a manner equally advantageous to Great Britain, Germany and the United States. It was not less presumptuous to suppose that a conference meeting in 1927 could allay the economic rivalries of the later period by a "plan" beneficial to the interests of everyone. Even the economic crisis of 1930-33 failed to bring home to the economists the true nature of the problem which they had to face. The experts who prepared the "Draft Annotated Agenda" for the World Economic Conference of I933 condemned the "world-wide adoption of ideals of national self-sufficiency which cut unmistakably athwart the lines of economic development."28 They did not apparently pause to reflect that those so-called "lines of economic development," which might be beneficial to some countries and even to the world as a whole, would inevitably be detrimental to other countries, which were using weapons of economic nationalism in self-defense. The Van Zeeland report of January 1938 began by asking, and answering in the affirmative, the question whether "the methods which, taken as a whole, form the system of international trade" are "fundamentally preferable" to "autarkic tendencies." Yet every Power at some period of its history, and as a rule for prolonged periods, has resorted to "autarkic tendencies." It is difficult to believe that there is any absolute sense in which "autarkic tendencies" are always detrimental to those who pursue them. Even if they could be justified only as the lesser of two evils, the initial premise of the Van Zeeland report was invalidated. But there was worse to come. " We must... make our dispositions," continued M. Van Zeeland, "in such a way that the new system shall offer to all participators advantages greater than those of the position in which they now find themselves."29 This is economic utopianism in its most purblind form. The report, like the reports of 1927 and 1933, assumed the existence of a fundamental principle of economic policy whose application would be equally beneficial to all states and detrimental to none; and for this reason it remained, like its predecessors, a dead letter.

Economic theory, as opposed to economic practice, was so powerfully dominated in the years between the two world wars by the supposed harmony of interests that it is difficult to find, in the innumerable international discussions of the period, any clear exposition of the real problem which baffled the statesmen of the world. Perhaps the frankest statement was one made by the Yugoslav Foreign Minister at the session of the Commission for European Union in January 1931. Arthur Henderson, on behalf of Great Britain, following the Netherlands delegate Dr. Colijn, had pleaded for an all-round tariff reduction "which must, by its nature, bring benefit to each and all by allowing that expansion of production and international exchange of wealth by which the common prosperity of all can be increased."30 Marinkovitch, who spoke next, concluded from the failure to carry out the recommendations of the 1927 Conference, that "there were extremely important reasons why the governments could not apply" those resolutions. He went on :

Marinkovitch went on to dispose of the theory of the "long-run" harmony of interests :

One further example of unwonted frankness may be quoted. Speaking in September 1937 over one of the United States broadcasting systems, the President of the Colombian Republic said:

The claims made on behalf of the Colombian Republic were perhaps exaggerated. But both the Yugoslav and the Colombian statements were powerful challenges to the doctrine of the harmony of interests. It is fallacy to suppose that, because Great Britain and the United States have an interest in the removal of trade barriers, this is also an interest of Yugoslavia and Colombia. International trade may be weaker. The economic interests of Europe or of the world at large may suffer. But Yugoslavia and Colombia will be better off than they would have been under a regime of European or world prosperity which reduced them to the position of satellites. Dr. Schacht spoke a little later of those "fanatical adherents of the most-favored-nation policy abroad, who from the abundance of their wealth cannot realize that a poor nation has nevertheless the courage to live by its own laws instead of suffering under the prescriptions of the well-to-do."34 Laissez-faire, in international relations as in those between capital and labor, is the paradise of the economically strong. State control, whether in the form of protective legislation or of protective tariffs, is the weapon of self-defense invoked by the economically weak. The clash of interests is real and inevitable; and the whole nature of the problem is distorted by an attempt to disguise it.

The Harmony Broken

We must therefore reject as inadequate and misleading the attempt to base international morality on an alleged harmony of interests which identifies the interest of the whole community of nations with the interest of each individual member of it. In the nineteenth century, this attempt met with widespread success, thanks to the continuously expanding economy in which it was made. The period was one of progressive prosperity, punctuated only by minor set-backs. The international economic structure bore considerable resemblance to the domestic economic structure of the United States. Pressure could at once be relieved by expansion to hitherto unoccupied and unexploited territories; and there was a plentiful supply of cheap labor, and of backward countries, which had not yet reached the level of political consciousness. Enterprising individuals could solve the economic problem by migration, enterprising nations by colonization. Expanding markets produced an expanding population, and population in turn reacted on markets. Those who were left behind in the race could plausibly be regarded as the unfit. A harmony of interests among the fit, based on individual enterprise and free competition, was sufficiently near to reality to form a sound basis for the current theory. With some difficulty the illusion was kept alive till 1914. Even British prosperity, though its foundations were menaced by German and American competition, continued to expand. The year 1913 was a record year for British trade.

The transition from the apparent harmony to the transparent clash of interests may be placed about the turn of the century. Appropriately enough, it found its first expression in colonial policies. In the British mind, it was primarily associated with events in South Africa. Mr. Churchill dates the beginning of "these violent times" from the Jameson Raid. 35 In North Africa and the Far East, there was a hasty scramble by the European Powers to secure the few eligible sites which were still vacant. Emigration of individuals from Europe, the point of principal tension, to America assumed unparalleled dimensions. In Europe itself, anti-Semitism - the recurrent symptom of economic stress - reappeared after a long interval in Russia, Germany and France.36 In Great Britain, agitation against unrestricted alien immigration began in the 1890's; and the first act controlling immigration was passed in 1905.

The first world war, which proceeded from this growing tension, aggravated it tenfold by intensifying its fundamental causes. In belligerent and neutral countries in Europe, Asia and America, industrial and agricultural production were everywhere artificially stimulated. After the war every country struggled to maintain its expanded production; and an enhanced and inflamed national consciousness was invoked to justify the struggle. One reason for the unprecedented vindictiveness of the peace treaties, and in particular of their economic clauses, was that practical men no longer believed - as they had done fifty or a hundred years earlier - in an underlying harmony of interests between victors and defeated. The object was now to eliminate a competitor, a revival of whose prosperity might menace your own. In Europe, the struggle was intensified by the creation of new states and new economic frontiers. In Asia, India and China built up large-scale manufactures to make themselves independent of imports from Europe. Japan became an exporter of textiles and other cheap goods which undercut European manufactures on the world market. Most important of all, there were no more open spaces anywhere awaiting cheap and profitable development and exploitation. The ample avenues of migration which had relieved the economic pressures of the pre-war period were closed; and in place of the natural flow of migration came the problem of forcibly evicted refugees.37 The complex phenomenon known as economic nationalism swept over the world. The fundamental character of this clash of interests became obvious to all except those confirmed utopians who dominated economic thought in the English-speaking countries. The hollowness of the glib nineteenth-century platitude that nobody can benefit from what harms another was revealed. The basic presupposition of utopianism had broken down.

What confronts us in international politics today is, therefore, nothing less than the complete bankruptcy of the conception of morality which has dominated political and economic thought for a century and a half. Internationally, it is no longer possible to deduce virtue from right reasoning, because it is no longer seriously possible to believe that every state, by pursuing the greatest good of the whole world, is pursuing the greatest good of its own citizens, and vice versa. The synthesis of morality and reason, at any rate in the crude form in which it was achieved by nineteenth-century liberalism, is untenable. The inner meaning of the modern international crisis is the collapse of the whole structure of utopianism based on the concept of the harmony of interests. The present generation will have to rebuild from the foundations. But before we can do this, before we can ascertain what can be salved from the ruins, we must examine the flaws in the structure which led to its collapse; and we can best do this by analyzing the realist critique of the utopian assumptions.

CHAPTER 5
THE REALIST CRITIQUE

The Foundations of Realism

For reasons explained in a previous chapter, realism enters the field far behind utopianism and by way of reaction from it. The thesis that "justice is the right of the stronger" was, indeed, familiar in the Hellenic world. But it never represented anything more than the protest of an uninfluential minority, puzzled by the divergence between political theory and political practice. Under the supremacy of the Roman Empire, and later of the Catholic Church, the problem could hardly arise; for the political good, first of the empire, then of the church, could be regarded as identical with moral good. It was only with the break-up of the mediaeval system that the divergence between political theory and political practice became acute and challenging. Machiavelli is the first important political realist.

Machiavelli's starting-point is a revolt against the utopianism of current political thought :

The three essential tenets implicit in Machiavelli's doctrine are the foundation-stones of the realist philosophy. In the first place, history is a sequence of cause and effect, whose course can be analyzed and understood by intellectual effort, but not (as the utopians believe) directed by "imagination." Secondly, theory does not (as the utopians assume) create practice, but practice theory. In Machiavelli's words, " good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels." Thirdly, politics are not (as the utopians pretend) a function of ethics, but ethics of politics. Men "are kept honest by constraint." Machiavelli recognized the importance of morality, but thought that there could be no effective morality where there was no effective authority. Morality is the product of power.1

The extraordinary vigor and vitality of Machiavelli's challenge to orthodoxy may be attested by the fact that, more than four centuries after he wrote, the most conclusive way of discrediting a political opponent is still to describe him as a disciple of Machiavelli.2 Bacon was one of the first to praise him for "saying openly and without hypocrisy what men are in the habit of doing, not what they ought to do."3 Henceforth no political thinker could ignore him. In France Bodin, in England Hobbes, in the Netherlands Spinoza, professed to find a compromise between the new doctrine and the conception of a "law of nature" constituting a supreme ethical standard. But all three were in substance realists; and the age of Newton for the first time conceived the possibility of a physical science of politics.4 The work of Bodin and Hobbes, writes Professor Laski, was " to separate ethics from politics, and to complete by theoretical means the division which Machiavelli had effected on practical grounds."5 "Before the names of just and Unjust can have place," said Hobbes, " there must be some coercive power." 6 Spinoza believed that practical statesmen had contributed more to the understanding of politics than men of theory "and, above all, theologians"; for "they have put themselves to the school of experience, and have therefore taught nothing which does not bear upon our practical needs."7 In anticipation of Hegel, Spinoza declares that "every man does what he does according to the laws of his nature and to the highest right of nature."8 The way is thus opened for determinism; and ethics become, in the last analysis, the study of reality.

Modern realism differs, however, in one important respect from that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both utopianism and realism accepted and incorporated in their philosophies the eighteenth-century belief in progress, with the curious and somewhat paradoxical result that realism became in appearance more "progressive" than utopianism. Utopianism grafted its belief in progress on to its belief in an absolute ethical standard, which remained ex hypothesi static. Realism, having no such sheet-anchor, became more and more dynamic and relativist. Progress became part of the inner essence of the historical process; and mankind was moving forward towards a goal which was left undefined, or was differently defined by different philosophers. The "historical school" of realists had its home in Germany, and its development is traced through the great names of Hegel and Marx. But no country in Western Europe, and no branch of thought, was immune from its influence in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century; and this development, while it has freed realism from the pessimistic coloring imparted to it by thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes, has thrown its determinist character into stronger relief.

The idea of causation in history is as old as the writing of history itself. But so long as the belief prevailed that human affairs were subject to the continuous supervision and occasional intervention of a Divine Providence, no philosophy of history based on a regular relationship of cause and effect was likely to be evolved. The substitution of reason for Divine Providence enabled Hegel to produce, for the first time, a philosophy based on the conception of a rational historical process. Hegel, while assuming a regular and orderly process, was content to find its directing force in a metaphysical abstraction - the Zeitgeist. But once the historical conception of reality had established itself, it was a short step to substitute for the abstract Zeitgeist some concrete material force. The economic interpretation of history was not invented, but developed and popularized by Marx. About the same time Buckle propounded a geographical interpretation of history which convinced him that human affairs were "permeated by one glorious principle of universal and undeviating regularity";9 and this has been revived in the form of the science of Geopolilik, whose inventor describes geography as "a political categorical imperative."10Spengler believed that events were determined by quasi-biological laws governing the growth and decline of civilizations. More eclectic thinkers- interpret history as the product of a variety of material factors, and the policy of a group or nation as a reflection of all the material factors which make up the group or national interest. "Foreign policies," said Mr. Hughes during his tenure of office as American Secretary of State, "are not built upon abstractions. They are the result of national interest arising from some immediate exigency or standing out vividly in historical perspective."11Any such interpretation of reality, whether in terms of a Zeitgeist, or of economics or geography, or of "historical perspective," is in its last analysis deterministic. Marx (though, having a program of action, he could not be a rigid and consistent determinist) believed in "tendencies which work out with an iron necessity towards an inevitable goal."12 "Politics," wrote Lenin, "have their own objective logic independent of the prescriptions of this or that individual or party."13 In January 1918, he described his belief in the coming socialist revolutions in Europe as "a scientific prediction."14

On the "scientific" hypothesis of the realists, reality is thus identified with the whole course of historical evolution, whose laws it is the business of the philosopher to investigate and reveal. There can be no reality outside the historical process. "To conceive of history as evolution and progress," writes Croce, "implies accepting it as necessary in all its parts, and therefore denying validity to judgments on it."15Condemnation of the past on ethical grounds has no meaning; for in Hegel's words, "philosophy transfigures the real which appears unjust into the rational."16What was, is right. History cannot be judged except by historical standards. It is significant that our historical judgments, except those relating to a past which we can ourselves remember as the present, always appear to start from the presupposition that things could not have turned out otherwise than they did. It is recorded that Venizelos, on reading in Fisher's History of Europe that the Greek invasion of Asia Minor in 1919 was a mistake, smiled ironically and said: "Every enterprise that does not succeed is a mistake."17If Wat Tyler's rebellion had succeeded, he would be an English national hero. If the American War of Independence had ended in disaster, the Founding Fathers of the United States would be briefly recorded in history as a gang of turbulent and unscrupulous fanatics. Nothing succeeds like success. "World history," in the famous phrase which Hegel borrowed from Schiller, "is the world court." The popular paraphrase "Might is Right " is misleading only if we attach too restricted a meaning to the word "Might." History creates rights, and therefore right. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest proves that the survivor was, in fact, the fittest to survive. Marx does not seem to have maintained that the victory of the proletariat was just in any other sense than that it was historically inevitable. Lukacs was a consistent, though perhaps indiscreet, Marxist when he based the "right" of the proletariat on its "historical mission."18 Hitler believed in the historical mission of the German people.

The Relativity of Thought

The outstanding achievement of modern realism, however, has been to reveal, not merely the determinist aspects of the historical process, but the relative and pragmatic character of thought itself. In the last fifty years, thanks mainly though not wholly to the influence of Marx, the principles of the historical school have been applied to the analysis of thought; and the foundations of a new science have been laid, principally by German thinkers under the name of the "sociology of knowledge." The realist has thus been enabled to demonstrate that the intellectual theories and ethical standards of utopianism, far from being the expression of absolute and a priori principles, are historically conditioned, being both products of circumstances and interests and weapons framed for the furtherance of interests. "Ethical notions," as Mr. Bertrand Russell has remarked, "are very seldom a cause, but almost always an effect, a means of claiming universal legislative authority for our own preferences, not, as we fondly imagine, the actual ground of those preferences."19 This is by far the most formidable attack which utopianism has to face; for here the very foundations of its belief are undermined by the realist critique.

In a general way, the relativity of thought has long been recognized. As early as the seventeenth century Bishop Burnet expounded the relativist view as cogently, if not as pungently, as Marx:

In modern times, the recognition of this phenomenon has become fairly general. "Belief, and to speak fairly, honest belief," wrote Dicey of the divisions of opinion in the nineteenth century about slavery, "was to a great extent the result not of argument, not even of direct self-interest, but of circumstances.... Circumstances are the creators of most men's opinions." 21 Marx narrowed down this somewhat Vague conception, declaring that all thought was conditioned by the economic interest and social status of the thinker. This view was perhaps unduly restrictive. In particular Marx, who denied the existence of "national" interests, underestimated the potency of nationalism as a force conditioning the thought of the individual. But the peculiar concentration which lie applied to the principle served to popularize it and drive it home. The relativity of thought to the interests and circumstances of the thinker has been far more extensively recognized and understood since Marx wrote.

The principle has an extremely wide field of application. It has become a commonplace to say that theories do not mould the course of events, but are invented to explain them. "Empire precedes imperialism." 22 Eighteenth-century England "put into practice the policy of laissez-faire before it found a justification, or even an apparent justification, in the new doctrine"; 23 and "the virtual break-up of laissez-faire as a body of doctrine... has followed, and not preceded, the decline of laissez-faire in the real world."24 The theory of "socialism in a single country" promulgated in Soviet Russia in 1924 was manifestly a product of the failure of Soviet regimes to establish themselves in other countries.

But the development of abstract theory is often influenced by events which have no essential connection with it at all.

Germany's dramatic rise to power in the sixties and seventies of last century was impressive enough to make the leading British philosophers of the next generation - Caird, T.H. Green, Bosanquet, McTaggart - ardent Hegelians. Thereafter, the Kaiser's telegram to Kruger and the German naval program spread the conviction among British thinkers that Hegel was a less good philosopher than had been supposed; and since 1914 no British philosopher of repute has ventured to sail under the Hegelian flag. After 1870, Stubbs and Freeman put early English history on a sound Teutonic basis, while even in France Fustel de Coulanges had an uphill struggle to defend the Latin origins of French civilization. During the past thirty years, English historians have been furtively engaged in making the Teutonic origins of England as inconspicuous as possible.

Nor is it only professional thinkers who are subject to such influences. Popular opinion is not less markedly dominated by them. The frivolity and immorality of French life was an established dogma in nineteenth-century Britain, which still remembered Napoleon. "When I was young," writes Mr. Bertrand Russell, "the French ate frogs and were called 'froggies', but they apparently abandoned this practice when we concluded our entente with them in 1904 - at any rate, I have never heard it mentioned since that date."26 Some years later, "the gallant little Jap" of 1905 underwent a converse metamorphosis into "the Prussian of the East." In the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace of British opinion that Germans were efficient and enlightened, and Russians backward and barbarous. About 1910, it was ascertained that Germans (who turned out to be mostly Prussians) were coarse, brutal and narrow-minded, and that Russians had a Slav soul. The vogue of Russian literature in Great Britain, which set in about the same time, was a direct outcome of the political rapprochement with Russia. The vogue of Marxism in Great Britain and France, which began on a modest scale after the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, rapidly gathered momentum, particularly among intellectuals, after 1934, when :it was discovered that Soviet Russia was a potential military ally against Germany. It is symptomatic that most people, when challenged, will indignantly deny that they form their opinions in this way; for as Acton long ago observed, "few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas."27 The conditioning of thought is necessarily a subconscious process.

The Adjustment of Thought to Purpose

Thought is not merely relative to the circumstances and interests of the thinker: it is also pragmatic in the sense that it is directed to the fulfillment of his purposes. For the realist, as a witty writer has put it, truth is "no more than the perception of discordant experience pragmatically adjusted for a particular purpose and for the time being."28 The purposeful character of thought has been discussed in a previous chapter; and a few examples will suffice here to illustrate the importance of this phenomenon in international politics.

Theories designed to discredit an enemy or potential enemy are one of the commonest forms of purposeful thinking. To depict one's enemies or one's prospective victims as inferior beings in the sight of God has been a familiar technique at any rate since the days of the Old Testament. Racial theories, ancient and modern, belong to this category; for the rule of one people or class over another is always justified by a belief in the mental and moral inferiority of the ruled. In such theories, sexual abnormality and sexual offenses are commonly imputed to the discredited race or group. Sexual depravity is imputed by the white American to the Negro; by the white South African to the Kaffir; by the Anglo-Indian to the Hindu; and by the Nazi German to the Jew. The most popular and most absurd of the charges leveled against the Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian revolution was that they advocated sexual promiscuity. Atrocity stories, among which offenses of a sexual character predominate, are the familiar product of war. On the eve of their invasion of Abyssinia, the Italians issued an official Green Book of Abyssinian atrocities. "The Italian Government", as the Abyssinian delegate at Geneva correctly observed, "having resolved to conquer and destroy Ethiopia, begins by giving Ethiopia a bad name."29

But the phenomenon also appears in less crude forms which sometimes enable it to escape detection. The point was well made by Crowe in a Foreign Office minute of March 1908:

The diagnosis is accurate and penetrating. But it is strange that so acute a mind as Crowe's should not have perceived that he himself was at this time performing, for the limited audience of statesmen and officials to which he had access, precisely the same operation of which he accused the German Government; for a perusal of his memoranda and minutes of the period reveals an able, but transparent, attempt to "create a feeling of intense and holy hatred" against his own country's future enemy - a curious instance of our promptness to detect the conditioned or purposeful character of other people's thought, while assuming that our own is wholly objective.

The converse of this propagation of theories designed to throw moral discredit on an enemy is the propagation of theories reflecting moral credit on oneself and one's own policies. Bismarck records the remark made to him by Walewski, the French Foreign Minister, in 1857, that it was the business of a diplomat to cloak the interests of his country in the language of universal justice. More recently, Mr. Churchill told the House of Commons that "there must be a moral basis for British rearmament and foreign policy."31 It is rare, however, for modern statesmen to express themselves with this frankness; and in contemporary British and American politics, the most powerful influence has been wielded by those more utopian statesmen who are sincerely convinced that policy is deduced from ethical principles, not ethical principles from policy. The realist is nevertheless obliged to uncover the hollowness of this conviction. "The right," said Woodrow Wilson to the United States Congress in 1917, "is more precious than peace," 32 " Peace comes before all," said Briand ten years later to the League of Nations Assembly, " peace comes even before justice." 33 Considered as ethical principles, both these contradictory pronouncements are tenable and could muster respectable support. Are we therefore to believe that we are dealing with a clash of ethical standards, and that if Wilson's and Briand's policies differed it was because they deduced them from opposite principles? No serious student of politics will entertain this belief. The most cursory examination shows that the principles were deduced from the policies, not the policies from the principles. In 1917, Wilson had decided on the policy of war with Germany, and he proceeded to clothe that policy in the appropriate garment of righteousness. In 1928 Briand was fearful of attempts made in the name of justice to disturb a peace settlement favorable to France; and he had no more difficulty than Wilson in finding the moral phraseology which fitted his policy. It would be irrelevant to discuss this supposed difference of principles on ethical grounds. The principles merely reflected different national policies framed to meet different conditions.

The double process of morally discrediting the policy of a potential enemy and morally justifying one's own may be abundantly illustrated from the discussions of disarmament between the two wars. The experience of the Anglo-Saxon Powers, whose naval predominance had been threatened by the submarine, provided an ample opportunity of denouncing the immorality of this new weapon. "Civilization demands," wrote the naval adviser to the American Delegation at the Peace Conference, "that naval warfare be placed on a higher plane" by the abolition of the submarine.34 Unfortunately the submarine was regarded as a convenient weapon by the weaker French, Italian and Japanese navies; and this particular demand of civilization could not therefore be complied with. A distinction of a more sweeping character was established by Lord Cecil in a speech to the General Council of the League of Nations Union in 1922:

The inspiration of regarding one's own vital armaments as defensive and beneficent and those of other nations as offensive and wicked proved particularly fruitful. Exactly ten years later, three commissions of the Disarmament Conference spent many weeks in a vain endeavor to classify armaments as "offensive" and "defensive." Delegates of all nations showed extraordinary ingenuity in devising arguments, supposedly based on pure objective theory, to prove that the armaments on which they chiefly relied were defensive, while those of potential rivals were essentially offensive. Similar attitudes have been taken up in regard to economic "armaments." In the latter part of the nineteenth century - and in a lesser degree down to 1931 - protective tariffs were commonly regarded in Great Britain as immoral. After 1931 straight tariffs regained their innocence, but barter agreements, industrial (though not agricultural) quotas, exchange controls and other weapons employed by Continental states were still tainted with immorality. Down to 1930, successive revisions of the United States tariff had almost invariably been upward; and American economists, in other respects staunch upholders of laissez-faire, had almost invariably treated tariffs as legitimate and laudable. But the change in the position of the United States from a debtor to a creditor Power, combined with the reversal of British economic policy, altered the picture; and the reduction of tariff barriers has come to be commonly identified by American spokesmen with the cause of international morality.

National Interest and the Universal Good

The realist should not, however, linger over the infliction of these pin-pricks through chinks in the utopian defenses. His task is to bring down the whole cardboard structure of utopian thought by exposing the hollowness of the material out of which it is built. The weapon of the relativity of thought must be used to demolish the utopian concept of a fixed and absolute standard by which policies and actions can be judged. If theories are revealed as a reflection of practice and principles of political needs, this discovery will apply to the fundamental theories and principles of the utopian creed, and not least to the doctrine of the harmony of interests which is its essential postulate.

It will not be difficult to show that the Utopian, when he preaches the doctrine of the harmony of interests, is innocently and unconsciously adopting Walewski's maxim, and clothing his own interest in the guise of a universal interest for the purpose of imposing it on the rest of the world. "Men come easily to believe that arrangements agreeable to themselves are beneficial to others," as Dicey observed; 36 and theories of the public good, which turn out on inspection to be an elegant disguise for some particular interest, are as common in international as in national affairs. The utopian, however eager he may be to establish an absolute standard, does not argue that it is the duty of his country, in conformity with that standard, to put the interest of the world at large before its own interest; for that would be contrary to his theory that the interest of all coincides with the interest of each. He argues that what is best for the world is best for his country, and then reverses the argument to read that what is best for his country is best for the world, the two propositions being, from the utopian standpoint, identical; and this unconscious cynicism of the contemporary utopian has proved a far more effective diplomatic weapon than the deliberate and self-conscious cynicism of a Walewski or a Bismarck. British writers of the past half-century have been particularly eloquent supporters of the theory that the maintenance of British supremacy is the performance of a duty to mankind. "If Great Britain has turned itself into a coal-shed and blacksmith's forge," remarked The Times ingenuously in 1885, "it is for the behoof of mankind as well as its own." 37 The following extract is typical of a dozen which might be culled from memoirs of public men of the period:

"I contend that we are the first race in the world," wrote Cecil Rhodes, "and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race."39 In 1891, the most popular and brilliant journalist of the day, W. T. Stead, founded the Review of Reviews. "We believe in God, in England and in Humanity," ran the editorial manifesto in its opening number. "The English-speaking race is one of the chief of God's chosen agents for executing coming improvements in the lot of mankind."40 An Oxford professor was convinced in 1912 that the secret of Britain's history was that "in fighting for her own independence she has been fighting for the freedom of Europe, and that the service thus rendered to Europe and to mankind has carried with it the possibility of that larger service to which we give the name Empire."41

The first world war carried this conviction to a pitch of emotional frenzy. A bare catalogue, culled from the speeches of British statesmen, of the services which British belligerency was rendering to humanity would fill many pages. In 1917, Balfour told the New York Chamber of Commerce that "since August, 1914, the fight has been for the highest spiritual advantages of mankind, without a petty thought or ambition."42 The Peace Conference and its sequel temporarily discredited these professions and threw some passing doubt on the belief in British supremacy as one of the moral assets of mankind. But the period of disillusionment and modesty was short. Moments of international tension, and especially moments when the possibility of war appears on the horizon, always stimulate this identification of national interest with morality. At the height of the Abyssinian crisis, the Archbishop of Canterbury admonished the French public through an interview in a Paris newspaper :

In the following year, Professor Toynbee was once more able to discover that the security of the British Empire "was also the supreme interest of the whole world."44 In 1937, Lord Cecil spoke to the General Council of the League of Nations Union of "our duty to our country, to our Empire and to humanity at large," and quoted :

An Englishman, as Mr. Bernard Shaw remarks in The Man of Destiny, "never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on to the opposite side to its interest is lost." It is not surprising that an American critic should recently have described the British as "Jesuits lost to the theological but gained for the political realm,"46 or that a former Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs should have commented, long before these recent manifestations, on " that precious gift bestowed upon the British people - the possession of writers and clergymen able in perfect good faith to advance the highest moral reasons for the most concrete diplomatic action, with inevitable moral profit to England."47

In recent times, the same phenomenon has become endemic in the United States. The story how McKinley prayed for divine guidance and decided to annex the Philippines is a classic of modern American history; and this annexation was the occasion of a popular outburst of moral self-approval hitherto more familiar in the foreign policy of Great Britain, than of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt, who believed more firmly than any previous American President in the doctrine L'etat, c'est moi, carried the process a step further. The following curious dialogue occurred in his cross-examination during a libel action brought against him in 1915 by a Tammany leader:

Woodrow Wilson was less naively egotistical, but more profoundly confident of the identity of American policy and universal justice. After the bombardment of Vera Cruz in 1914, he assured the world that "the United States bad gone down to Mexico to serve mankind."49 During the first world war, he advised American naval cadets "not only always to think first of America, but Always, also, to think, first of humanity" - a feat rendered slightly less difficult by his explanation that the United States had been "founded for the benefit of humanity."50 Shortly before the entry of the United States into the war, in an address to the Senate on war aims, he stated the identification still more categorically: "These are American principles American Policies.... They are the principles of mankind and must prevail." 51

It will be observed that utterances of this character proceed almost exclusively from Anglo-Saxon statesmen and writers. It is true that when a prominent National Socialist asserted that "anything that benefits the German people is right, anything that harms the German people is wrong,"52 he was merely propounding the same identification of national interest with universal right which had already been established for English-speaking countries by Wilson, Professor Toynbee, Lord Cecil and many others. But when the claim is translated into a foreign language, the note seems forced, and the identification unconvincing, even to the peoples concerned. Two explanations are commonly given of this curious discrepancy. The first explanation, which is popular in English-speaking countries, is that the policies of the English-speaking nations are in fact more virtuous and disinterested than those of Continental states, so that Wilson and Professor Toynbee and Lord Cecil are, broadly speaking, right when they identify the American and British national interests with the interest of mankind. The second explanation, which is popular in Continental countries, is that the English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good, and that this kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.

It seems unnecessary to accept either of these heroic attempts to cut the knot. The solution is a simple one. Theories of social morality are always the product of a dominant group which identifies itself with the community as a whole, and which possesses facilities denied to subordinate groups or individuals for imposing its view of life on the community. Theories of international morality are, for the same reason and in virtue of the same process, the product of dominant nations or groups of nations. For the past hundred years, and more especially since 1918, the English-speaking peoples have formed the dominant group in the world; and current theories of international morality have been designed to perpetuate their supremacy and expressed in the idiom peculiar to them. France, retaining something of her eighteenth-century tradition and restored to a position of dominance for a short period after 1918, has played a minor part in the creation of current international morality, mainly through her insistence on the role of law in the moral order. Germany, never a dominant Power and reduced to helplessness after 1918, has remained for these reasons outside the charmed circle of creators of international morality. Both the view that the English-speaking peoples are monopolists of international morality and the view that 'they are consummate international hypocrites may be reduced to the plain fact that the current canons of international virtue have, by a natural and inevitable process, been mainly created by them.

The Realist Critique of the Harmony of Interests

The doctrine of the harmony of interests yields readily to analysis in terms of this principle. It is the natural assumption of a prosperous and privileged class, whose members have a dominant voice in the community and are therefore naturally prone to identify its interest with their own. In virtue of this identification, any assailant of the interests of the dominant group is made to incur the odium of assailing the alleged common interest of the whole community, and is told that in making this assault he is attacking his own higher interests. The doctrine of the harmony of interests thus serves as an ingenious moral device invoked, in perfect sincerity, by privileged groups in order to justify and maintain their dominant position. But a further point requires notice. The supremacy within the community of the privileged group may be, and often is, so overwhelming that there is, in fact, a sense in which its interests are those of the community, since its well-being necessarily carries with it some measure of well-being for other members of the community, and its collapse would entail the collapse of the community as a whole. In so far, therefore, as the alleged natural harmony of interests has any reality, it is created by the overwhelming power of the privileged group, and is an excellent illustration of the Machiavellian maxim that morality is the product of Power. A few examples will make this analysis of the doctrine of the harmony of interests clear.

In the nineteenth century, the British manufacturer or merchant, having discovered that Laissez-faire promoted his own prosperity, was sincerely convinced that it also promoted British prosperity as a whole. Nor was this alleged harmony of interests between himself and the community entirely fictitious. The predominance of the manufacturer and the merchant was so overwhelming that there was a sense in which an identity between their prosperity and British prosperity as a whole could be correctly asserted. From this it was only a short step to argue that a worker on strike, in damaging the prosperity of the British manufacturer, was damaging British prosperity as a whole, and thereby damaging his own, so that he could be plausibly denounced by the predecessors of Professor Toynbee as immoral and by the predecessors of Professor Zimmern as muddle-headed. Moreover, there was a sense in which this argument was perfectly correct. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the harmony of interests and of solidarity between the classes must have seemed a bitter mockery to the under-privileged worker, whose inferior status and insignificant stake in "British prosperity" were consecrated by it; and presently he was strong enough to force the abandonment of laissez-faire and the substitution for it of the "social service state," which implicitly denies the natural harmony of interests and sets out to create a new harmony by artificial means.

The same analysis may be applied in international relations. British nineteenth-century statesmen, having discovered that free trade promoted British prosperity, were sincerely convinced that, in doing so, it also promoted the prosperity of the world as a whole. British predominance in world trade was at that time so overwhelming that there was a certain undeniable harmony between British interests and the interests of the world. British prosperity flowed over into other countries, and a British economic collapse would have meant world-wide ruin. British free traders could and did argue that protectionist Countries were not only egotistically damaging the prosperity of the world as a whole, but were stupidly damaging their own, so that their behavior was both immoral and muddle headed. In British eyes, it was irrefutably proved that international trade was a single whole, and flourished or slumped to ether. Nevertheless, this alleged international harmony of interests seemed a mockery to those under-privileged nations whose inferior status and insignificant stake in international trade were consecrated by it. The revolt against it destroyed that overwhelming British preponderance which had provided: a plausible basis for the theory. Economically, Great Britain in the nineteenth century was dominant enough to make a bold bid to impose on the world her own conception of international economic morality. When competition of all against all replaced the domination of the world market by a single Power, conceptions of international economic morality necessarily became chaotic.

Politically, the alleged community of interest in the maintenance of peace, whose ambiguous character has already been discussed, is capitalized in the same way by a dominant nation or group of nations just as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest of predominant Powers. In the past, Roman and British imperialism were commended to the world in the guise of the pax Romana and the pax Britannica. Today, when no single Power is strong enough to dominate the world, and supremacy is vested in a group of nations, slogans like "collective security" and "resistance to aggression" serve the same purpose of proclaiming an identity of interest between the dominant group and the world as a whole in the maintenance of peace. Moreover, as in the examples we have just considered, so long as the supremacy of the dominant group is sufficiently great, there is a sense in which this identity of interest exists. "England," wrote a German professor in the nineteen-twenties, "is the solitary Power with a national program which, while egotistic through and through, at the same time promises to the world something which the world passionately desires: order, progress and eternal peace."53 When Mr. Churchill declared that " the fortunes of the British Empire and its glory are inseparably interwoven with the fortunes of the world,"54 this statement had precisely the same foundation in fact as the statement that the prosperity of British manufacturers in the nineteenth century was inseparably interwoven with British prosperity as a whole. Moreover, the purpose of the statements was precisely the same, namely to establish the principle that the defense of the British Empire, or the prosperity of the British manufacturer, was a matter of common interest to the whole community, and that anyone who attacked it was therefore either immoral or muddleheaded. It is a familiar tactic of the privileged to throw moral discredit on the underprivileged by depicting them as disturbers of the peace; and this tactic is as readily applied internationally as within the national community. "International law and order," writes Professor Toynbee of a recent crisis, "were in the true interests of the whole of mankind... whereas the desire to perpetuate the region of violence in international affairs was an anti-social desire which was not even in the ultimate interests of the citizens of the handful of states that officially professed this benighted and anachronistic creed."55 This is precisely the argument, compounded of platitude and falsehood in about equal parts, which did duty in every strike in the early days of the British and American Labor movements. It was common form for employers, supported by the whole capitalist press, to denounce the "anti-social" attitude of trade union leaders, to accuse them of attacking law and order and of introducing "the reign of violence," and to declare that "true" and "ultimate" interests of the workers lay in peaceful cooperation with the employers.56 In the field of social relations, the disingenuous character of this argument has long been recognized. But just as the threat of class-war by the proletarian is "a natural cynical reaction to the sentimental and dishonest efforts of the privileged classes to obscure the conflict of interest between classes by a constant emphasis on the minimum interests which they have in common,"57 so the war-mongering of the dissatisfied Powers was the "natural, cynical reaction" to the sentimental and dishonest platitudinising of the satisfied Powers on the common interest in peace. When Hitler refused to believe "that God has permitted some nations first to acquire a world by force and then to defend this, robbery with moralizing theories,"58 he was merely echoing in another context the Marxist denial of a community of interest between "haves" and "have-nots," the Marxist exposure of the interested character of "bourgeois morality" and the Marxist demand for the expropriation of the expropriators.

The crisis of September 1938 demonstrated in a striking way the political implications of the assertion of a common interest in peace. When Briand proclaimed that "peace comes before all," or Mr. Eden that "there is no dispute which cannot be settled by peaceful means,"59 the assumption underlying these platitudes was that, so long as peace was maintained, no changes distasteful to France or Great Britain could be made in the status quo. In 1938, France and Great Britain were trapped by the slogans which they themselves had used in the past to discredit the dissatisfied Powers, and Germany had become sufficiently dominant (as France and Great Britain had hitherto been) to turn the desire for peace to her own advantage. About this time, a significant change occurred in the attitude of the German and Italian dictators. Hitler eagerly depicted Germany as a bulwark of peace menaced by warmongering democracies. The League of Nations, he declared in his Reichstag speech of April 28, 1939, is a "stirrer up of trouble," and collective security means "continuous danger of war." Mussolini borrowed the British formula about the possibility of settling all international disputes by peaceful means, and declared that "there are not in Europe at present problems so big and so active as to justify a war which from a European conflict would naturally become universal."60 Such utterances were symptoms that Germany and Italy were already looking forward to the time when, as dominant Powers, they would acquire the vested interest in peace recently enjoyed by Great Britain and France, and be able to get their way by pillorying the democratic countries as enemies of peace. These developments may have made it easier to appreciate Halevy's subtle observation that "propaganda against war is itself a form of war propaganda."61

The Realist Critique of Internationalism

The concept of internationalism is a special form of the doctrine of the harmony of interests. It yields to the same analysis; and there are the same difficulties about regarding it as an absolute standard independent of the interests and policies of those who promulgate it. "Cosmopolitanism," wrote Sun Yat-sen, "is the same thing as China's theory of world empire two thousand years ago.... China once wanted to be sovereign lord of the earth and to stand above every other nation, so she espoused cosmopolitanism." 62 In the Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty, according to Freud, "imperialism was reflected in religion as universality and monotheism."63 The doctrine of a single world-state, propagated by the Roman Empire and later by the Catholic Church, was the symbol of a claim to universal dominion. Modern internationalism has its genesis in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, during which French hegemony in Europe was at its height. This was the period which produced Sully's Grand Dessin and the Abbé Saint-Pierre's Projet de Paix Perpetuelle (both plans to perpetuate an international status quo favorable to the French monarchy), which saw the birth of the humanitarian and cosmopolitan doctrines of the Enlightenment, and which established French as the universal language of educated people. In the next century, the leadership passed to Great Britain, which became the home of internationalism. On the eve of the Great Exhibition of 1851 which, more than any other single event, established Great Britain's title to world supremacy, the Prince Consort spoke movingly of "that great end to which… all history points - the realization of the unity of mankind";64 and Tennyson hymned "the parliament of man, the federation of the world." France chose the moment of her greatest supremacy in the nineteen-twenties to launch a plan of European Union"; and Japan shortly afterwards developed an ambition to proclaim herself the leader of a united Asia. It was symptomatic of the growing international predominance of the United States when widespread popularity was enjoyed in the late nineteen-thirties by the book of an American journalist advocating a world union of democracies, in which the United States would play the predominant role.65

Just as pleas for "national solidarity" in domestic politics always come from a dominant group which can use this solidarity to strengthen its own control over the nation as a whole, so pleas for international solidarity and world union come from those dominant nations which may hope to exercise control over a unified world. Countries which are struggling to force their way into the dominant group naturally tend to invoke nationalism against the internationalism of the controlling Powers. In the sixteenth century, England opposed her nascent nationalism to the internationalism of the Papacy and the Empire. In the past century and a half Germany opposed her nascent nationalism to the internationalism first of France, then of Great Britain. This circumstance made her impervious to those universalist and humanitarian doctrines which were popular in eighteenth-century France and nineteenth-century Britain; and her hostility to internationalism was further aggravated after 1919, when Great Britain and France endeavored to create a new "international order" as a bulwark of their own predominance. "By 'international'," wrote a German correspondent in The Times, "we have come to understand a conception that places other nations at an advantage over our own."66 Nevertheless, there was little doubt that Germany, if she became supreme in Europe, would adopt international slogans and establish some kind of international organization to bolster up her power. A British Labor ex-Minister at one moment advocated the suppression of Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations on the unexpected ground that the totalitarian states might some day capture the League and invoke that article to justify the use of force by themselves.67 It seemed more likely that they would seek to develop the Anti-Comintern Pact into some form of international organization "The Anti-Comintern Pact," said Hitler in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, "will perhaps one day become the crystallization point of a group of Powers whose ultimate aim is none other than to eliminate the menace to the peace and culture of the world instigated by a satanic apparition." "Either Europe must achieve solidarity," remarked an Italian journal about the same time, "or the 'axis' will impose it." 68 "Europe in its entirety," said Goebbels, " is adopting a new order and a new orientation under the intellectual leadership of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy."69 These were symptoms not of a change of heart, but of the fact that Germany and Italy felt themselves to be approaching the time when they might become strong enough to espouse internationalism. "International order" and "international solidarity" will always be slogans of those who feel strong enough to impose them on others.

The exposure of the real basis of the professedly abstract principles commonly invoked in international politics is the most damning and most convincing part of the realist indictment of utopianism. The nature of the charge is frequently misunderstood by those who seek to refute it. The charge is not that human beings fail to live up to their principles. It matters little that Wilson, who thought that the right was more precious than peace, and Briand, who thought that peace came even before justice, and Mr. Eden, who believed in collective security, failed themselves, or failed to induce their countrymen, to apply these principles consistently. What matters is that these supposedly absolute and universal principles were not principles at all, but the unconscious reflections of national policy based on a particular interpretation of national interest at a particular time. There is a sense in which peace and cooperation between nations or classes or individuals is a common and universal end irrespective of conflicting interests and politics. There is a sense in which a common interest exists in the maintenance of order, whether it be international order or "law and order" within the nation. But as soon as the attempt is made to apply these supposedly abstract principles to a concrete political situation, they are revealed as the transparent disguises of selfish vested interests. The bankruptcy of utopianism resides not in its failure to live up to its principles, but in the exposure of its inability to provide any absolute and disinterested standard for the conduct of international affairs. The utopian, faced by the collapse of standards whose interested character he has failed to penetrate, takes refuge in condemnation of a reality which refuses to conform to these standards. A passage penned by the German historian Meinecke after the first world war is the best judgment by anticipation of the role of utopianism in the international politics of the period :

These "aimless complaints," these "doctrinaire suppositions"; this "inner falsehood and cant" will be familiar to all those who have studied what was written about international politics in English-speaking countries between the two world wars.

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 4

  1. Burke, Works, v. 407
  2. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. xi. conclusion.
  3. Ibiid. Book IV ch ii.
  4. Quoted in J.M. Keyes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, p. 7
  5. Quoted in J. Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, p. 400. I have failed to trace the original.
  6. See pp. 80-1.
  7. Nationalism: A Study by a Group of Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, p. 229.
  8. K. Mannheim, Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus, p. 104.
  9. J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, II Book V. ch. xi.
  10. Romilly, Thoughts on the Influence of the French Revolution, p. 5.
  11. T.H. Green, Principles of Political Obligation, 166.
  12. Mr. Eden, for example, in 1938 advocated "a comity of nations in which each can develop and flourish and give to their uttermost their own special contribution to the diversity of life" (Anthony Eden, Foreign Affairs, p. 277).
  13. Bastiat, Les Harmonies Economiques, p. 355.
  14. Marx, Theorien uber den Mehrwert, II i. p. 309.
  15. Bagehot, Physics and Politics (2nd ed.), p. 215. What does "material" mean in this passage? Does it merely mean "relevant"? Or is the writer conscious of an uncomfortable antithesis between "material" and "moral"?
  16. J. Novicow,  Le Politique Internationale, p. 242.
  17. Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science, p. 64
  18. W. L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, ii, p. 797.
  19. Huxley, Romanes Lecture, 1893, reprinted in Evolution and Ethics, p. 81
  20. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, p. 27.
  21. The confusion between the two was admirably illustrated by an interjection of Mr.Attlee in the House of Commons: "It was precisely the object of the establishment of the League of Nations that the preservation of peace was a common interest of the world" (House of Commons, December 21, 1937: Official Report, col 1811). Mr. Attlee apparently failed to distinguish between the proposition that a natural community of interests existed and the proposition that the League of Nations had been established to create one.
  22. "Peace must prevail, must come before all" (Briand, League of Naitons: Ninth Assembly, p. 83). "The maintenance of peace is the first objective of British Foreign Policy"(Eden, League of Naitons: Sixteenth Assembly, p. 106). "Peace is our dearest treasue" (Hitler in a speech in the German Reichstag on January 30, 1937, reported in The Times, February 1, 1937). "The principal aim of the international policy of the Soviet Union is the preservation of peace" (Chicherin in The Soviet Union and Peace (1929), p. 249). "The object of Japan, despite propaganda to the contrary, is peace" (Matsuoka, League of Naitons: Special Assembly 1932-33, iii, p. 73). The paucity of Italian pronouncements in favor of peace was probably expalined by the poor reputation of Italian Troops as fighters: Mussolini feared that any emphatic expression of preference for peace would be construed as an admission that Italy had no stomach for war.
  23. Lenin, Collected Works (Engl. Transl.), xviii, p. 264. Compare Spencer Wilkinson's dictum: "It is not peace but preponderence that is in each case the real object. The truth cannot be too often repeated that peace is never the object of policy: you cannot define peace except by referrence to war, which is a mens and never an end" (Government and the War, p. 121).
  24. "When a saint complains that people do not know the things belonging to their peace,what he really means is that they do not sufficiently care about the things belonging to his peace" (The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Festing-Jones, pp. 211-12). This would seem to be true of those latter-day saints, the satisfied Powers.
  25. It is sometimes maintained not merely that all nations have an equal interest in preferring peace to war (which is, in a sense, true), but that war can never in any circumstances bring to the victor advantages comparable with its cost. The latter view does not appear to be true of the past, though it is possible to argue (as does Bertrand Russell, Which Way Peace?) that it is true of modern warfare. If accepted, this view leads, of course, to absolute pacifism; for there is no reason to suppose that it is any truer of "defensive" than of "offensive" war (assuming the distinction between them to be valid).
  26. Daily Telegraph, August 26, 1938.
  27. League of Naitons: C.E.I. 44, p. 21 (italics in original).
  28. League of Naitons: C.48,M. 18, 1933, ii. p.6
  29. Report ... on the Possibility of Obtaining a General Reduction of the Obstacles to International Trade, Cmd. 5648.
  30. League of Naitons: C.144, M.45, 1931, vii. p.30
  31. Ibid. p.31
  32. Ibid. p. 32.
  33. Address broadcast by the Columbia Broadcasting System, U.S.A., on September 19, 1937, and published in Talks, October 1937.
  34. Address to the Economic Council of the German Academy, November 29, 1938.
  35. Winston Churchill, World Crisis, p. 26.
  36. The same conditions encouraged the growth of Zionism; for Zionism, as the Palestine Royal Commission of 1937 remarked, "on its negative side is a creed of escape" Cmd. 5479, p. 13.
  37. "The existence of refugees is a sympton of the disappearence of economic and political liberalism. Refugees are the by-product of an economic isolationism which has practically stopped free migration" (J. Hope Simpson, Refugees Preliminary Report of a Survey, p. 193).

Chapter 5

  1. Machiavelli, The Prince, chs. 15 and 23 (Engl. Transl., Everyman's Library, pp. 121, 193).
  2. Two curious recent illustrations may be cited. In the chapter of the Survey of International Affairs dealing with the Nazi Revolution, Professor Toynbee declares that National Socialism is the "Fulfillment of ideals . . . formulated . . . by Machiavelli"; and he reiterated this view in two further passages of considerable length in the same chapter (Survey of International Affairs, 1934, 00. 111, 117-19, 126-28). In the trial of Zinoviev, Kamanev and others in Moscow in August 1936, the Public Prosecutor, Vyshinsky, qu9oted a passage from Kamanev's writing's in which Machiavelli had been praised as "a master of political aphorism and a brilliant dialectician", and accused Kamanev of having "adopted the rules of Machiavelli" and "developed them to the utmost point of unscrupulousness and immorality" (The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre, pp. 138-9).
  3. Bacon On the Advancement of Learning, vii, ch. 2.
  4. Hobbes' scheme, "there was in theory no place for any new force or principle beyond the laws of motion found at the beginning; there were merely complex cases of mechanical causation " (Sabine, History of Political Thought, p. 458).
  5. Introduction to A Defense of Liberty against Tyrants (Vindiciae contra Tyrannos), ed. Laski, p. 45.
  6. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. xv.
  7. Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, i pp. 2-3.
  8. Ibid. Introduction.
  9. The concluding words of Buckle's History if Civilization.
  10. Kjellan, Der Staat als Lebensform, p. 81. Compare the opening words of Crowe's famous memorandum on British Foreign Policy is determined by the immutable conditions of her geographical situation" (British Documents on the Origin of the War, ed. Gooch and Temperly, iii. p. 397).
  11. International Concilation, No. 194, January 1924, p.3.
  12. Marx, Capital, Preface to 1st ed. (Engl, transl., Everyman's Library, p. 863).
  13. Lenin, Works, (2nd Russian ed.) x. p. 207.
  14. Ibid. xxii. p. 194.
  15. Croce, Storia della storiografia italiana, i. p. 26.
  16. Hegel, Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Lasson's ed.), p. 55.
  17. Conciliation Internationale, No. 5-6, 1937, p. 520.
  18. Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, p. 215.
  19. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1915-16, p. 302.
  20. Burnet, Essay upon Government, p. 10.
  21. Dicey, Law and Opinion (1905 ed.). p. 27.
  22. J.A. Hobson, Free Thought in the Social Sciences, p. 190.
  23. Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (Engl. transl.), p. 104.
  24. M. Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism, p. 188.
  25. L.T. Hobhouse, The Unity of Western Civilization, ed. F.S. Marvin (3rd ed.), pp. 177-8.
  26. Bertrand Russell, Which Way Peace? p. 158.
  27. Acton, History of Freedom, p. 62.
  28. Carl Becker, Yale Review, xxvii, p. 461.
  29. League of Naitons: Official Journal, November 1935, p. 1140.
  30. British Documents on the Origins of the War, ed. Gooch and Temperley, vi. p. 131.
  31. House of Commons, March 14, 1938: official Report, cols. 95-9.
  32. The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace, ed. R. S. Baker, i. p. 16.
  33. League of Naitons: Ninth Assembly, p.83.
  34. R.S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Sentiment, iii. p. 120. There is an amusing nineteenth-century parallel. "Privateering", wrote Queen Victoriaat the time of the conference of Paris in 1856, "is a kind of Piracy which disgraces our civilization; its abolition throughout the whole world would be a great step in advance." We are not surprised to read that "the privateer was then, like the submarine in modern times, the weapon of the weaker naval power" (Sir William Malkin, British Year Book of International Law, viii, pp. 6, 30).
  35. Published as League of Nations Union Pamphlet No. 76, p. 8. The very word "militarism" conveys to most English readers the same connotation of the peculiar wickedness of armies. It was left to an American historian, Dr. W.L.Langer, to coin the counterpart "navalism", which has won significantly little acceptance.
  36. Dicey, Law and Opinion in England (2nd ed.), pp. 14-5.
  37. The Times, August 27, 1885.
  38. Maurice and Arthur, The Life of Lord Wolseley, p. 314.
  39. W.T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil J. Rhodes, p. 58.
  40. Review of Reviews, January 15, 1891.
  41. Spencer Wilkinson, Government and the War, p. 116.
  42. Quoted in Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, ii. p. 646.
  43. Quoted in Manchester Guardian, October 18, 1935.
  44. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1935, ii. p. 46.
  45. Headway, November 1937.
  46. Carl Becker, Yale Review, xxvii, p. 452.
  47. Count Sforza, Foreign Affairs, October 1927, p. 67.
  48. Quoted in H.F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 318.
  49. Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: The New Democracy, ed. R.S. Baker, i. p. 104.
  50. Ibid, p. 318-19.
  51. Ibid, ii. p. 414.
  52. Quoted in Toynbee, Survey of International Affaris, 1936, p. 319.
  53. Dibelius, England, p. 109.
  54. Winston Churchill, Arms and the Covenant, p. 272.
  55. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1935, ii. p. 46.
  56. "Pray earnestly that right may triumph", said the representative of the Philadelphia coal-owners in an early strike organized by the United Mine Workers, "remembering that the Lord God Omnipotent still reigns, and that His reign is one law and order, and not of violnce and crime" (H.F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 267).
  57. R. Neibuhr, Moral Men and Immoral Society, p. 153.
  58. Speech in the Reichstag, January 30, 1939.
  59. League od Nations: Eighteenth Assembly, p. 63.
  60. The Times, May 15, 1939.
  61. Halevy, A History of the English People in 1895-1905 (Engl. transl.), i. Introduction, p. xi.
  62. Sun Yat-sen, San Min Chu I (Engl. transl.) pp. 68-9.
  63. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p.36.
  64. T. Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, iii. p. 247.
  65. Clarence Streit, Union Now.
  66. The Times, November 5, 1938.
  67. Lord Marley in the House of Lords, November 30, 1938: Official Report, col. 258.
  68. Relazioni Internazionali, quoted in The Times, December 5, 1938.
  69. Volkischer Beobachter, April 1, 1939.
  70. Meinecke, Staatsrdson,p. 533.