Kitabı oku: «American World Policies», sayfa 14

CHAPTER XVI
PACIFISM STATIC AND DYNAMIC

If at home we have a firm basis for national development, if we grow up as a Great Power beyond the range of fierce conflicts between the nations, the opportunity will be offered us to contribute in some degree to the ultimate establishment of peace, or at least to the limitation of war, in the world outside. Our influence can be cast upon the side of peace and augment the forces making for peace. Our hope lies in a national development, which will permit us while pursuing our larger national interests to work towards a great community of interest among other nations.

In such an international peace the United States has a direct and an indirect interest. It has been recently asserted that we in America might regard the present war with equanimity since it brought us huge profits. Undoubtedly there is money to be made out of the selling of provisions and munitions as well as from trade in countries from which competitors are temporarily excluded. On the other hand, the war means the impoverishment of European nations, who are our main purveyors and customers, and eventually the losses suffered by combatants must be shared to some extent by us who are non-combatants. The war brings about a dislocation of the world industry, a shrinking of capital, and in the end higher prices and a possible reduction in real wages. In the years to come we shall be forced to pay our share of the cost.

Nor is this economic motive our sole reason for desiring international peace. We are linked to the nations of Europe, and however we declaim against "hyphenates," cannot prevent our immigrants from sympathising with the land of their birth. The present straining of loyalties in this country is a sufficient reason for our desiring peace in Europe. Nor do we like bloodshed or the political reaction and the backwash of barbarism that wars entail. Finally, however neutral we remain, there is always the possibility that we may be plunged into a great European conflict, in which in the beginning at least we shall have no direct interest.

Diplomatically also, war in Europe is of no overwhelming advantage to us. In the early days of the Republic, a constant balancing of hostile forces prevented England and France from taking advantage of our weakness. The quarrels of Europe enabled us to preserve our independence by opposing a unitary strength to the enfeebling European dualism; otherwise we might not have dared to use so shrill a tone in admonishing the great powers. But even had the eagle not screeched, we might still have led a satisfactory national existence. Whatever was true in the past, however, we need no longer be so completely defenceless that we must fear that peace in Europe would mean a conquest of America. We should rather have Europe fight itself than us, but—in dollars and cents as in other values—we should prefer to see the world at peace.

We shall not secure peace, however, by merely wishing for it or by merely preaching it. In the midst of war there has always been the longing for peace, and throughout the centuries voices have been raised calling upon mankind to give up its war upon itself. The ideal of peace pervades much of all folklore; it inspires the Old Testament prophets and is everywhere expressed in the New Testament. The religious ideals of the Chinese, Hindus and Persians are suffused with the hope of peace, and Greek and Roman philosophers and poets dreamed of a peaceful commonwealth of peoples and planned the Federation of the World. The Early Church Fathers, Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, preached the gospel of peace, and while the Church doctrines later changed in this respect, there reappeared again and again during the Mediæval Period the conception of a World State, presided over by Emperor or Pope, and ending once for all the ceaseless strife among princes. After the Reformation religious sects grew up, like the Mennonites and the Quakers, who preached not only peace but non-resistance. Out of all this longing for peace, out of all these proposals, however, came nothing. Similarly the pacifist writings of the Abbé de St. Pierre, of Rousseau, of Leibnitz, of Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Kant, of Jeremy Bentham and of hundreds of others did not bring the world a single step nearer to an elimination of war.¹²⁴

Throughout this long history, pacifism failed because it was in no sense based upon the actual conditions of the world. It was a religious, sentimental, hortatory pacifism. Finding peace desirable, it pleaded with the men who ruled nations to compose their quarrels. It was an appeal not to the interest but to the sentiments of men. It discovered that war was evil and exhorted nations and rulers to refrain from evil.

With the period of enlightenment that began shortly before the French Revolution, the movement for peace was accelerated. The ideas that were once current only among philosophers began to spread among considerable sections of the population. Gradually also pacifism became rationalistic rather than religious or moral. War was attacked not because it was evil in the eyes of God but because, like high taxes, monopolies and tariffs, it was adverse to the economic interests of nations and peoples. The growth of the doctrine of laissez-faire and of free trade gave a new impetus to the pacifist movement. The people of the world were looked upon as a myriad of human atoms, whose welfare did not depend upon the power of the particular State of which they chanced to form a part, but upon the free enterprise of each and the unobstructed exchange of products among all these individuals. It was held that the world would be better if there were no customs barriers, and free trade on equal terms for all the people of the world was predicted as a proximate consummation. There would then be no need for wars or fleets or armies, which cost money and prevented the progress of humanity. Wars were economically inadvisable. They did not benefit the sovereign individual, and therefore could not benefit the nation, which was merely a huge assemblage of individuals.

Like the religious and emotional pacifism which preceded it, this rationalistic pacifism broke down through its sheer inapplicability to the facts of life. While the philosophers of the French Revolution were still proclaiming the advent of peace, the greatest wars until then in all history were already preparing, and again when in 1851 at the first World's Exposition in London men began to hope that the era of peace had at last come, a long period of war was again imminent. Never was there more talk of peace or hope of peace than in the years preceding the great conflict of 1914. No wonder many advocates and prophets of war believe that peace is forever impossible. "There," wrote the late Prof. J. A. Cramb, "in its specious and glittering beauty the ideal of Pacificism remains; yet in the long march of humanity across thousands of years or thousands of centuries it remains still an ideal, lost in inaccessible distances, as when first it gleamed across the imagination."¹²⁵ "Despite this hubbub of talk down all the centuries war has continued—absolutely as if not a word had been said on one side or the other. Man's dreadful toll in blood has not yet all been paid. The human race bears still this burden. Declaimed against in the name of religion, in the name of humanity, in the name of profit-and-loss, war still goes on."¹²⁶

But the fact that war still exists does not at all prove that it is inevitable, but merely that it has not yet been avoided. Militarists argue that war is biologically necessary, an ingrained ineradicable instinct, a necessary evil or an inescapable good, a gift of a stern god. There is a curious sentimental fatalism about our war prophets, but in the end their arguments come down to two, that we have always had wars and that we still have them. It was said many years ago that "the poor ye have always with you" and to-day poverty on an immense scale still exists in every part of the planet. Yet we do not despair of limiting or even of eradicating poverty. Tuberculosis has existed for centuries and still exists, but to-day we understand the disease and it is doomed. If war is inevitable it is so for reasons which have not yet been established. Until it is proved that war accompanies life and progress as the shadow accompanies the body, men will strive to eliminate war, however frequent and discouraging their failures.

The cause of these failures of pacifism has been its unreality, its too confident approach to a difficult problem. Many pacifists have tended to exhort about war instead of studying it; they have looked upon it as a thing accursed and irrational, beyond the pale of serious consideration. They have likened the belief that war has accomplished good in the past to a faith in witchcraft and other superstitions. They have tilted at war, as the Mediæval Church tilted at usury, without stopping to consider what relation this war-process bore to the basic facts of social evolution. It was an error to consider war as a thing in itself instead of an effect of precedent causes. Fortunately the newer pacifists, who have been rendered cautious by many bitter disappointments, are changing their approach and seeking to cure war not directly but by removing its causes. They are striving to outflank war.

Along this line alone can progress be made. You cannot end war without changing the international polity which leads to war. The bloody conflicts between nations, being a symptom of a world maladjustment and frequently an attempt to cure that maladjustment, can be averted only by policies which provide some other cure. To destroy war one must find some alternative regulator or governor of societies.

In their failure to provide such a regulator, or even to recognise that such a regulator is necessary, lies the vital defect of many of the peace plans to-day. Pacifism may be either static or dynamic; it may seek to keep things as they are, to crystallise international society in its present forms, or on the other hand may base itself on the assumption that these forms will change. It may address itself to the problem of stopping the world as one stops a clock, of forbidding unequal growth of nations, of discountenancing change, or it may seek to find an outlet and expression for the discontent and unrest which all growth brings. Pacifism that is static is doomed. Our only hope lies in a dynamic, evolutionary pacifism, based on a principle of the ever-changing adjustment of nations to an ever-changing environment.

At the bottom of static pacifism lies a conception somewhat as follows. The nations of the earth have an interest in maintaining peace, but are forced, tricked or lured into war by the tyranny or craft of princes and capitalists or by their own prejudices and sudden passions. Some nations are peaceful and some, by reason of an evil education, hostile; wherefore the hostile nations must be restrained by the peaceful, as the anti-social classes are restrained by the community. Honest differences of opinion among nations must be arbitrated; angry passions must be allowed to cool, and the nations must go about unarmed that there may be no indiscriminate shooting. Given these precautions we shall have peace.

But it is a peace without change, and such a peace, apart from its being impossible, is not even desirable. What the static pacifist does not perceive is that he is hopelessly conservative and stationary in a swiftly moving world. He would like to build a wall against Time and Change, to put down his stakes and bid evolution cease. It is this pathetic clinging to fixity, to a something immutable, that vitiates his proposals. Nations that hate war prefer it nevertheless to the preservation of unendurable conditions, and the best conditions, if they remain unaltered, speedily become unendurable. We should not be satisfied to-day with the best constitution of the world agreed upon a hundred years ago, before there were railroads and telegraphs, and when democracy and nationalism were weaker than to-day. If to-morrow morning our wisest and most forward-looking men were to re-constitute Society and petrify it in peace, our descendants would be far from content. The best heritage that the world can have is not a perfect constitution but a feasible principle of change.

A dynamic pacifism, on the other hand, must assume that the world is in change, and that no peace is possible or desirable which does not permit great international transformations. These transformations arise from various causes. Thus a candid consideration of the facts of international life must convince us that in the present era nationality is a potent, vital and probably a growing force, and that many of the ambitions and desires of men are mobilised nationally. The nations, however, grow unequally and are subjected to unequal pressure by their various environments. As a consequence certain nations become increasingly dissatisfied with their place in the world, and naturally, and in the present circumstances wisely, prefer the risks and costs of war to their present position. Such nations have an interest in war, if change cannot be otherwise effected. Moreover, it is clear to the dynamic pacifist that certain classes by the fact of their position in society are more bellicose than others, that classes grow at unequal rates and exert a varying influence, and that certain classes may have a direct and obvious interest in throwing their nation into war.

The neglect of any such dynamic conception of world society is revealed in all the proposals of the static pacifists. For example, the proposal to create a United States of Europe is based on a palpably false analogy with the United States of America, and ignores grossly the living principle of nationality. The states of Europe are either nations or are approaching nationhood. They lack the racial, linguistic and traditional bonds, which made the union of the American colonies not indeed easy but at least possible. These trans-Atlantic nations suffer from being jostled one against the other and their keen sense of national difference is accentuated by economic pressure and by a perpetual fear of foreign military aggression. To unite all these nations into one federal state, with a Senate, a House of Representatives and an impartial Supreme Court, is not only a static but a mechanical proposal. Nations grow; they are not manufactured.

Equally static is the proposal for immediate and universal disarmament. Nations will arm so long as they are afraid and so long as they want something vital that can be obtained only by warfare. Moreover, there is no principle to determine the permitted armament of each nation or to designate the country which shall control the international police that is to enforce disarmament. An unequal disarmament would be unwise because it would take from the more pacific and civilised nations the weapons necessary to restrain unorganised and retrograde peoples. The fundamental defect of the proposal, however, is that it provides no way by which one nation, injured by another, can secure redress. If there is to be neither war nor an effective international regulation, what limits can a nation set to non-military aggression by its neighbour?¹²⁷

The belief that all wars may be averted by arbitration is equally a static conception. During the last few decades international arbitration has settled many controversies, which could not be adjusted by ordinary diplomatic means. Increasingly cases have been submitted to arbitral decision. The real questions over which nations clash, however, are not arbitrable. One cannot arbitrate whether Russia or Germany should control the Balkans, whether the United States should admit Japanese immigrants, or whether Alsace should go to France or Germany, or Trieste to Italy or Austria. Arbitration has the limitations of judicial processes. It is possible to arbitrate questions concerning the interpretation of treaties and formal agreements or the application of recognised principles of international law, but no nation will arbitrate its right to exist. Moreover, the very fact that arbitration is a judicial process, based upon precedents and the assumption of the status quo renders it unacceptable to the nations which are dissatisfied with present arrangements. The necessity which knows no law respects no arbitration, and no board of arbitration, however impartial, could decide that one nation should have more colonies because she needed them or because she was growing, while another nation must stand aside because feeble and unprogressive. It is probably not in the interest of the world that Portugal and Belgium should retain their colonies in Africa, but on what precedent could these nations be forced to sell? Questions of vital interest therefore are in truth non-justiciable. No powerful nation will accept a subordinate position in the world because some arbitral body decides it may not adopt a certain policy. Arbitration is not a process of adjustment of growing nations to a changing environment.

But if nations will not gladly accept arbitration where supposedly vital interests are concerned, can they not be coerced? Out of the obvious need of such coercion arises a whole series of plans to force recalcitrant nations to accept mediation, to delay hostilities and even to abide by the arbitral award. A League to Enforce Peace is a proposed union of pacific nations to prevent immediate or even ultimate recourse to war, to force combatants to arbitrate justiciable disputes and to place the sanction of force behind the decisions of the nations.

This proposal contains within it an element valuable and indeed essential to international peace. It frankly assumes the right of a group of nations to compel a refractory nation by the use of force. It is far more realistic than the conception of a world peace based upon a sudden conversion of the nations to the iniquity of war, which is at bottom an anarchistic conception. For however we deplore a use of force we cannot rely exclusively upon anything less. Force is not intrinsically immoral, and without force no morality can prevail. The compulsion which the parent exercises over a child, and organised communities over the individual citizen, must equally form the basis of an international system. One cannot base such a system upon mere moral suasion, which, though of value as a precedent and complement to force, is frequently thwarted by the public opinion of each nation, formed within its borders and protected from outside influence by pride and a blinding national interest. Outside nations could not have persuaded Germany that it was unethical to invade Belgium. She would have appealed to her own moral sense and trusted to the future to make good her right to attack. Had Germany realised, however, that an invasion of Belgium would be actively resisted by otherwise neutral nations, overwhelming in force, she might have been willing to debate the question.

The immorality of force lies merely in improper use. All through history compulsion has been exerted for evil as well as for good purposes. The future of international concord lies, therefore, not in refraining from force or potential force, not in a purely laissez-faire policy, but in applying force to uphold a growing body of international ethics, increasingly recognised by the public opinion of the world.

But a League of Peace, unless it is more than a league of peace, suffers from the same defect of not providing an alternative to war. If Italy is not to attack Austria, some way must be found to protect Italian interests in the Trentino and Trieste, and if Germany is not to attack England, some security must be given that German commerce will be safe and German colonial aspirations not entirely disregarded. If the nations believe, rightly or wrongly, that their vital interests are being disregarded in the peace which the League enforces, there will be defections and revolts. Such a league would then become useless or worse, since it can only exert an influence so long as it possesses an immense preponderance of power.

The same defect inheres in a League of Satisfied Powers. Such powers, preferring the status quo to any probable revision of the affairs of the world, are in the beginning united by a common conservative instinct. But no nation is completely satisfied; each wants a "rectification" here and a "compensation" there. The same disagreements over the spoils of the world that would be found outside such a league would also make their appearance within, and in the end one or more of the satiated nations would join the group of the unsatisfied, and the league would cease to be a guarantee of peace. It would die of the endless flux in human affairs.

Similarly static is the proposal that all nations wait, or be compelled to wait, a set term before beginning hostilities. In many cases such a compulsory postponement would be advantageous in that it would favour the mobilisation of the pacific elements in the community and thus tend to prevent wars being suddenly forced upon the nation against the national interest by a small, bellicose social class. The underlying theory, however, is that nations always go to war because they are hot-headed, whereas in very many cases the decision to wage war at the proper time is perfectly deliberate and cold-blooded. Moreover, a compulsory wait before declaring war would alter the balance of power between the groups of powers, and would adversely affect certain ready nations, which could therefore only be coerced into accepting the arrangement. Unless some adequate provision were made (and it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to make it) to prevent a nation from preparing for war during the year's wait, the countries with the largest resources, such as Great Britain, the United States and Russia, would secure an enormous advantage, while nations like Germany and Japan would lose. An event in the very recent past illustrates this point. On August 1, 1914 the German Secretary of State intimated to the British Ambassador that a failure on the part of Russia to demobilise would cause Germany to declare instant war. "Russia had said that her mobilisation did not necessarily imply war, and that she could perfectly well remain mobilised for months without making war. This was not the case with Germany. She had the speed and Russia had the numbers, and the safety of the German Empire forbade that Germany should allow Russia time to bring up masses of troops from all parts of her wide dominions."¹²⁸ In other words, for Germany to give up her greater speed of mobilisation would be to destroy her advantage while assuring that of Russia. Actually, under present circumstances, such a proposal would tend to preserve the status quo and to aid the satisfied nations. In practice it would take from the dissatisfied nations the power to alter arrangements, which they feel are unjust.

Most of these plans, a federation of nations, a progressive disarmament, a wider application of the principle of arbitration, and a League to Enforce Peace, have elements of value, once they are divorced from purely static conceptions and are united with proposals to effect some form of progressive adjustment of nations to each other and to the world. In this effort at adjustment lies the real problem of securing international peace. So long as the nations have conflicting economic interests so wide and deep as to make their surrender perilous to the national future, so long will they find some way to escape from the restraints of peace. They will drive their armies through any compact or agreement, adverse to their economic interests, and in the process will smash whatever machinery has been created for establishing peace. A dynamic pacifism, therefore, must take into account this factor of the constantly changing, balancing, opposing economic needs of rival nations. It must devise not only some rudimentary form of international government but also arrangements by which the things for which the nations go to war may peacefully be distributed or utilized in a manner equitable to all.