Peaceless Europe

by Francesco Saverio Nitti

Prussia won the war against Austria-Hungary in 1866, and did not ask for or impose any really onerous terms. It was contented with having regained hegemony among the German people. Prussia conquered France in 1870. It was an unjust war, and Prussia laid down two unjust conditions: Alsace-Lorraine and the indemnity of five milliards. As soon as the indemnity was paid—and it was an indemnity that could be paid in one lump sum—Prussia evacuated the occupied territory. It did not claim of France its colonies or its fleet, it did not impose the reduction of its armaments or control of its transport after the peace. The Treaty of Frankfort is a humanitarian act compared with the Treaty of Versailles.

If Germany had won the War—Germany to whom we have always attributed the worst possible intentions—what could it have done that the Entente has not done? It is possible that, as it is gifted with more practical common sense, it might have laid down less impossible conditions in order to gain a secure advantage without ruining the conquered countries.

There are about ninety millions of Germans in Europe, and perhaps fifteen millions in different countries outside Europe. But in the heart of Europe they represent a great ethnic unity; they are the largest and most compact national group in that continent. With all the good and bad points of their race, too methodical and at the same time easily depressed by a severe setback, they are still the most cultivated people on earth. It is impossible to imagine that they can disappear, much less that they can reconcile themselves to live in a condition of slavery. On the other hand, the Entente has built on a foundation of shifting sand a Europe full of small States poisoned with imperialism and in ruinous conditions of economy and finance, and a too great Poland without a national basis and necessarily the enemy of Russia and of Germany.

No people has always been victorious; the peoples who have fought most wars in modern Europe, English, French and Germans, have had alternate victories and defeats. A defeat often carries in its train reconsideration which is followed by renewed energy: the greatness of England is largely due to its steadfast determination to destroy the Napoleonic Empire. What elevates men is this steadfast and persevering effort, and a series of such collective efforts carries a nation to a high place.

There is nothing lasting in the existing groupings. At the moment of common danger eternal union and unbreakable solidarity are proclaimed; but both are mere literary expressions.

Great Britain, the country which has the least need to make war, has been at war for centuries with nearly all the European countries. There is one country only against which it has never made war, not even when a commercial challenge from the mercantile Republics of Italy seemed possible. That country is Italy. That shows that between the action of Italy there is not, nor can there be, contrast, and indeed that between the two nations there is complete agreement in European continental policy. It is the common desire of the two nations, though perhaps for different reasons, that no one State shall have hegemony on the continent. But between the years 1688 and 1815 Great Britain and France were at war for seventy years: for seventy years, that is, out of a hundred and twenty-seven there was a state of deadly hostility between the two countries.

General progress, evinced in various ways, above all in respect for and in the autonomy of other peoples, is a guarantee for all. No peoples are always victorious, none always conquered. In the time of Napoleon the First the French derided the lack of righting spirit in the German peoples, producers of any number of philosophers and writers. They would have laughed at anyone who suggested the possibility of any early German military triumph. After 1815 the countries of the Holy Alliance would never have believed in the possibility of the revolutionary spirit recovering; they were sure of lasting peace in Europe. In 1871 the Germans had no doubt at all that they had surely smothered France; now the Entente thinks that it has surely smothered Germany.

But civilization has gained something: it has gained that collection of rules, moral conditions, sentiments, international regulations, which tend both to mitigate violence and to regulate in a form which is tolerable, if not always just, relations between conquerors and conquered, above all, a respect for the liberty and autonomy of the latter.

Now, the treaties which have been made are, from the moral point of view, immeasurably worse than any consummated in former days, in that they carry Europe back to a phase of civilization which was thought to be over and done with centuries ago. They are a danger too. For as everyone who takes vengeance does so in a degree greater than the damage suffered, if one supposes for a moment that the conquered of to-day may be the conquerors of to-morrow, to what lengths of violence, degradation and barbarism may not Europe be dragged?

Every effort, then, should now be made to follow the opposite road to that traversed up to now, the more so in that the treaties cannot be carried out; and if it is desired that the conquered countries shall pay compensation to the conquerors, at least in part, for the most serious damage, then the line to be followed must be based on realities instead of on violence.