PACIFISM AND THE LEAGUE OF PEACE
Peace is not mere non-resistance.
In short, we have little faith in a pacifism which is mere laissez-faire, in the doctrine that peace is the vacuum created by the absence of war. Peace is something more original than that. It is a great construction, of infinite complexity, which will be aided but not consummated by good intentions. It involves dangers, failures, disappointments. The interests of the world are interwoven, and no nation can work for peace by adopting counsels of perfection in a policy of isolation. Yet that is what mere non-resistance implies. It implies an unwillingness to take the risk of participation in world politics, it trusts vaguely that by staying at home and minding our business, we can make our own little cultivated garden bloom in peace and prosperity. There is no internationalism in such a view of things. The real internationalist is one who works first of all to keep his own nation from aggressive action, who infuses his own national policy with a desire for international peace. He works to control his own government so as to make it adopt a humanely constructive foreign policy. He does not refuse to have part in the world’s affairs because the world may soil his hands. He realizes that peace can be created only out of the strength of intelligent people, that even God when he fought the devil had to compromise his own perfection.
The clear-sighted idealist sees a League of Peace.
It is more than a century since Thomas Paine proposed to secure the world’s peace forever by a league between Britain, France and the United States. He made the suggestion on the eve of the Napoleonic wars, and it is hardly an accident that the idea was revived with a different trinity a few months before the present struggle. It was Britain, France and Germany that Jean Jaurès would have united in a League of Peace. At the parting of the ways the clear-sighted idealist has always understood that the choice is not between war and that sort of peace which is only a negation of war. The choice in both these crises lay between shattering war and constructive peace, between an open and destructive enmity and a peace based on a common will and an active partnership. Mirabeau had the same vivid perception, and what these three saw is still a vision that haunts us among the mists of war. Of the several proposals that arise inevitably in men’s minds when we think of preventing the renewal of this Continental struggle, there is none which sober thinkers propound so readily and none which has been worked out with greater detail in England than this expedient of the League of Peace. There are, indeed, a few who dare to speak of the United States of Europe, and some who discuss the creation of an international police force to secure the law of nations and repress aggression. But even they do not deny the inordinate difficulties. This war has lasted long enough to teach all but the unteachable that neither side will be able to crush and dominate the other. But short of the compulsion of irresistible might, will any influence suffice to bring the enemies of to-day by their spontaneous choice into a European federation? Is any people, even the most pacific, prepared as yet to accept the surrender of sovereignty which entry into even a loosely-knit federation would involve?
A practicable dream.
The League of Peace presents itself to practical men as a dream capable of an early translation into fact. The allies need only agree to join their forces against any power which persisted, after offers of arbitration or mediation (a reservation which no old-fashioned alliance ever made) in attacking any one of them. It would differ from other alliances partly by its insistence on the duty of arbitration, partly by its frank and public constitution, but mainly by the ready welcome which it would offer even to the enemy of yesterday, should he elect to enter it. The United States would rally to it, seeing in it their best hope of safety, and ultimately it might become a genuine Pan-European League. It is sometimes suggested that Paine’s Anglo-Franco-American combination might form its nucleus. More often its advocates base their hopes on the Anglo-Franco-Russian entente, expanded by adhesion of some of the present neutrals. No one suggests, and this is the weakest point of the whole scheme, that Germany and Austria would be likely to join such a League at the start, though no one of this way of thinking would desire to exclude them.
The League must be more than the old alliances.
Much would depend on the nucleus of the federation. Crude military considerations render an Anglo-French-American trinity impossible. Without discussing whether the United States would care to enter “the vortex of European militarism,” it is enough to point out that such a combination could not hope to hold the rest of Europe in check, could not even safeguard France against Germany alone, unless one or both of the English-speaking nations adopted compulsory military service. France must ally herself to some first-rate military power; no navy can protect her land frontiers. The Anglo-Franco-Russian combination is open to other objections. It does not represent a homogeneous civilization. Every outbreak of anti-Jewish fanaticism in Russia, every assault on Finland or Persia, every reminder that official Russia still belongs to the Dark Ages, would tend to weaken the moral authority of such a League. It has, moreover, too long a history. It would seem even to charitable Germans a mere perpetuation under a new name of the combination which M. Delcassé and King Edward were accused of forming to “pen Germany in.” It would seem to be nothing better than an alliance to assure the victors in the perpetual possession of the fruits of victory, and the new pacifist façade to the old armed fortress would only aggravate by hypocrisy the sin of success. Germany would never join this League; she would scheme with all the arts of barter and intrigue to detach Russia from it, and the old game of the Balance of Power would go on.
It must provide for changing conditions.
The fatal objection to any alliance of this kind is that it does not really meet the difficulty that no State will abandon its sovereignty. This alliance would not be a League of Peace unless it were prepared to exercise a very sharp supervision over the foreign policy of its members. If the old Anglo-Franco-Russian entente had been a genuine League of Peace, it would have had to say, for example, to Serbia, “You may join us, but if you do join us, you must abandon forever your Irredentist ambitions at the expense of Austria. We will protect you against any unprovoked attack by Austria. But you on your side must refrain from any encouragement to those who would dismember her.” It would have had to say with equal decision to France, “Join us by all means, but at the cost of refraining from any expansion in Morocco. You cannot march on Fez without provoking some German reply.” Such a League, in short, would be a mutual insurance society, but the risks would be too high unless the society could prohibit its members from any deliberate playing with fire. It is not enough to say, “We will murder an Archduke once in a way, but when he is dead and buried we will go to The Hague about him”; or, “We will, to be sure, take places in the sun which other people covet, but when we have taken them we shall not wantonly attack any unsuccessful rivals.” The League of Peace would either be the old imperialistic alliance under a dishonest name, or else it would be a highly conservative federation which would keep its members in a very strait pacifist jacket. If great powers would really endure such a control they might as well face at once the limitation of sovereignty implied in a United States of Europe.
All interests must be reconciled.
The vice of all such schemes is that they are based too one-sidedly on the idea of preventing wars. They take a static view of the world. They come quite naturally from citizens of satisfied powers, weary of the burden of defending what they have got. They ignore the fact that life is change. They make no provision for any organic alterations in the world’s structure. We can no more prevent war by organizing a defensive league than revolution by creating a police. We must deal with causes, must provide some means alternative to war by which large grievances can be redressed and legitimate ambitions satisfied. To recur to our concrete cases: if it is desired to insure that Serbia shall not again embroil a continent in war, some machinery must be provided by which Austria can be required to treat her subject Serbs reasonably well. When a “place in the sun” like Morocco, one of the few unappropriated parts of the earth fit for settlement by a white race, can no longer maintain its independence, there must be some impartial Power which can say, “This rich potential colony ought not to go to a State like France, with two similar colonies already under its flag and a dwindling population at home, but rather to a State like Germany, with no such colony of her own, despite her teeming population, her great birth-rate, her vigorous and expansive commerce.”
For such problems as this there is no solution in the quasi-legal processes of arbitration. The fundamental fact in the European history of the last twenty years has been the restless search of Germany for colonies and fields of exploitation. She felt her way in South Africa; the British Empire expanded to exclude her. She turned a timid glance to Brazil; the Monroe Doctrine was the flaming sword at the gate of that Paradise. She coveted Morocco; the British navy cleared its decks. She penetrated Turkey down the spine of the Bagdad Railway; she was met at the Gulf with opposing sea-power. A League of the Satisfied might appeal to London and Paris and Petrograd. But Berlin will ask, “What hope does it offer to me that when my population is still denser, my industry still more expansive, my need for markets and fields of exploitation for my capital even more clamant than it is to-day, your League of Peace will provide me with an outlet? You bar the future, and you call it peace.”
The Philadelphia Conference.
The recent Philadelphia conference on The League to Enforce Peace was extraordinarily sensible because it recognized so clearly its own limitations. It did not propose to stop the war. It did not urge anybody to act before he was ready to act. It did not try to stampede our government or any European government into some theoretical program. It tried merely to focus the ideas which have been most common in England and America during the last ten months. Under impressive circumstances, in a hall filled with noble memories, it crystallized a number of vague ideas into an hypothesis. The conference was visibly trying to reach some minimum agreement for the purpose of clarifying the thinking of individuals and groups all over the world.
Nobody is expected to act upon the resolutions, but everybody is expected to give what thought and knowledge and imagination he may have towards maturing the intentions which they expressed. The conference did what every person must do constantly for himself whenever he is trying to think out a long and complex problem. It stopped for breath and for a renewal of faith; it made a tentative proposal as a guide for the thought which is to follow. With great sanity it took no doctrinaire position, laid down no rule, such as peace-at-any-price, honor-cannot-be-arbitrated, sovereignty-is-one-and-indivisible, or any of the other assumptions which obscure pacifist and militarist argument. The delegates in Philadelphia were scientific in their spirit; they did not even attempt that over-precise definition of the final end which always results in the misleading use of theory. They were not doctors who begin their study of disease by trying to define the ideal healthy man, they were not political doctrinaires who begin by defining the ideally peaceful world. They were agreed, as doctors are agreed, that a sounder organic constitution is required, and that pain and suffering should be lessened as much as possible, but they did not attempt to say that they would not inflict pain to cure pain, or wage war to preserve the peace.
The idea which the delegates had uppermost in their thoughts was a league of nations that should give power to international law. It is an extension of The Hague plan by which the nations attempt not only to set up a court, but to compel those who have a dispute to go to the court. As we understand the resolutions, they do not take the added step of agreeing to enforce the decision of the court.
The idea is based on a tremendous compromise, as our own history shows. We were once a league of foreign States, suspicious of common action and jealous of each sovereign prerogative. On the greatest issue of our history we fought our greatest war, and the States which represented union and federalism put an end once for all to the unlimited sovereignty of any individual State. Our Civil War established the supremacy of the federal power over the States.
A League to back international law.
The United States of the World would face the same problem, though on a much more difficult scale. It will find that a court to adjust mistakes is not enough, for the really important conflicts that provoke war are not “justiciable.” They are matters upon which a policy has to be declared—upon which, in brief, legislation is needed. Some kind of legislature a League of Peace would have to establish, and with a legislature and court would have to go an executive. This would open up the problem of representation, of the large and populous State as against the small ones, of the “satisfied Powers” against the “unsatisfied.” For it is clear that the British Empire will not consent to give to Montenegro equal representation, or the United States to Venezuela. Here will be the question of conflicts between international and national legislation, similar to the conflicts which our Supreme Court is called upon to settle. All the problems of home rule, such as that of Ireland within the Empire, and of Ulster within Ireland, would have to be met in territory like that of the Balkans, by the League of Peace. It would have to determine whether, for example, the sovereignty of a national India was an internal question for the British Empire, or a legitimate subject for international settlement.
The business of such a League.
The League would have to work out the problem of unexploited territories, of weaker peoples, and of disorderly States. Just as our original Union had the whole West to organize, so the League would have Africa, large parts of Asia, and the middle Americas as a kind of international domain. It would have to meet those who want merely to exploit, and to support those who are liberal enough to throw about weaker peoples that protection under which they can really grow to freedom. Nor would that be all. The League would have to legislate about concessions, trading rights, tariffs, about spheres of influence, about the use of great ocean and land highways. As soon as it grappled with the economic aspects of diplomacy, it would find, just as our government found, that interstate commerce cannot be regulated satisfactorily by conflicting state interests.
In other words, there is no stopping short at a league to prevent war. Such a league would either grow to a world federalism, or it would break up in civil war. But that, far from being an argument against the League, is the strongest possible argument for it. It is the first step towards a closer world organization, and once that step is taken, the world will have to choose between taking some of the next steps and returning to the anarchy of sovereign nationalities. The vast implications of the League of Peace are what make it important. And its real service to mankind may well be that it will establish the first rallying point of a world citizenship.
It would mean a new world-federalism.
The development of such a citizenship is one of the great moral and educational problems of this century. It cannot mean a vague cosmopolitanism. It must mean the training of people who have learned to modify their national policies so that these do not make impossible an international allegiance. This war has offered us an example of such citizenship. The Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders who are fighting in Flanders and at the Dardanelles are living and dying for the largest political organization the world has so far known. Their allegiance in the British Empire is to a State which embraces one-quarter of the human race. Never before in history have men been loyal to so great and so diversified a unit. They have literally come from all the ends of the earth to preserve a union of democracies. They have shown by example what any World League most needs to know, that federalism on a grand scale is not an idle dream.
The New Republic, March 20 and June 26, 1915.