Peaceless Europe

by Francesco Saverio Nitti

The Libyan enterprise, undertaken on an impulse, against the opinion of Italy's allies, Austria and Germany, against the wish of England and France, is a very serious political responsibility for Italy.

The European War was the consequence of a long series of movements, aspirations, agitations. It cannot be denied, and it is recognized by clear-thinking men like Lloyd George, that France and England too have by their actions taken on themselves their part in the serious responsibility. To say that in the past they had never thought of war is to say a thing not true. And there is no doubt that all the diplomatic documents published before and during the War show in Russia, above all, a situation which inevitably would soon lead to war. In the Balkans, especially in Serbia, Russia was pursuing a cynical and shameless policy of corruption, nourishing and exciting every ferment of revolt against Austria-Hungary. Russian policy in Serbia was really criminal. Everyone in Germany was convinced that Russia was preparing for war. The Tsar's pacificist ideas were of no importance whatever. In absolute monarchies it is an illusion to think that the sovereign, though apparently an autocrat, acts in accordance with his own views. His views are almost invariably those of the people round him; he does not even receive news in its true form, but in the form given it by officials. Russia was an unwieldy giant who had shown signs of madness long before the actual revolution. It is impossible that a collective madness such as that which has had possession of Russia for three years could be produced on the spur of the moment; the regime of autocracy contained in itself the germs of Bolshevism and violence. Bolshevism cannot properly be judged by Western notions; it is not a revolutionary movement of the people; it is, as I have said before, the religious fanaticism of the Eastern Orthodox rising from the dead body of Tsarist despotism. Bolshevism, centralizing and bureaucratic, follows the same lines as the imperial policy of almost every Tsar.

Undoubtedly the greatest responsibility for the War lies on Germany. If it has not to bear all the responsibility, as the treaties claim, it has to bear the largest share; and the responsibility lies, rather than on the shoulders of the Emperor and the quite ordinary men who surrounded him, on those of the military caste and some great industrial groups. The crazy writings of General von Bernhardi and other scandalous publications of the same sort expressed, more than just theoretical views, the real hopes and tendencies of the whole military caste. It is true enough that there existed in Germany a real democratic society under the control of the civil government, but there was the military caste too, with privileges in social life and a special position in the life of the State. This caste was educated in the conception of violence as the means of power and grandeur. When a country has allowed the military and social theories of General von Bernhardi and the senselessly criminal pronouncements of the Emperor William II to prevail for so many years, it has put the most formidable weapons possible into the hands of its enemies. The people who governed Germany for so long have no right to complain now of the conditions in which their country is placed. But the great German people, hardworking and persevering, has full right to look on such conditions as the negation of justice. The head of a European State, a man of the clearest view and calmest judgment, speaking to me of the Emperor William, of whose character and intellect he thought very little, expressed the view that the Emperor did not want war, but that he would not avoid it when he had the chance.

The truth is that Germany troubled itself very little about France. Kinderlen Wächter, the most intelligent of the German Foreign Ministers, and perhaps the one most opposed to the War, when he outlined to me the situation as it was ten years ago, showed no anxiety at all except in regard to Russia. Russia might make war, and it was necessary to be ready or to see that it came about at a moment when victory was certain if conditions did not change. Germany had no reason at all for making war on France from the time that it had got well ahead of that country in industry, commerce and navigation. It is true that there were a certain number of unbalanced people in the metal industry who talked complacently of French iron and stirred up the yellow press, just as in France to-day there are many industrials with their eyes fixed on German coal which they want to seize as far as possible. But the intellectuals, the politicians, even military circles, had no anxiety at all except with regard to Russia.

There were mistaken views in German policy, no doubt, but at the same time there was real anxiety about her national existence. With a huge population and limited resources, with few colonies, owing to her late arrival in the competition for them, Germany looked on the never-ceasing desire of Russia for Constantinople as the ruin of her policy of expansion in the East.

And in actual fact there was but one way by which the three great Empires, which in population and extension of territory dominated the greater part of Europe, could avoid war, and that was to join in alliance among themselves or at least not to enter other alliances. The three great Empires divided themselves into two allied groups. From that moment, given the fact that in each of them the military caste held power, that the principal decisions lay in the hands of a few men not responsible to parliament; given the fact that Russia, faithful to her traditional policy, aimed to draw into her political orbit all the Slav peoples right down to the Adriatic and the Aegean and Austria, was leaning toward the creation of a third Slav monarchy in the dual kingdom, it was inevitable that sooner or later the violence, intrigue and corruption with which we are familiar should culminate in open conflict. Bismarck always saw that putting Russia and Germany up against each other meant war.

Peoples, like individuals, are far from representing with anything approaching completeness such social conceptions as we call violence and right, honesty and bad faith, justice and injustice; each people has its different characteristics, but no one people represents good, or another bad, no one represents brutality, or another civilization. All these meaningless phrases were brought out during the War, according to which, as was said by one of the Prime Ministers of the Entente, the War was the decisive struggle between the forces of autocracy and liberty, between the dark powers of evil and violence and the radiant powers of good and right. To-day all this causes nothing but a smile. Such things are just speechifying, and banal at that. Perhaps they were a necessity of War-time which might well be made use of; when you are fighting for your very life you use every means you have; when you are in imminent danger you do not choose your weapons, you use everything to hand. All the War propaganda against the German Empires, recounting, sometimes exaggerating, all the crimes of the enemy, claiming that all the guilt was on the side of Germany, describing German atrocities as a habit, almost a characteristic of the German people, deriding German culture as a species of liquid in which were bred the microbes of moral madness—all this was legitimate, perhaps necessary, during the War. The reply to the asphyxiating gas of the enemy was not only the same gas, but a propaganda calculated to do more damage, and which, in fact, did do as much damage as tanks and blockade.

But, when war is over, nothing should be put into a peace treaty except such things as will lead to a lasting peace, or the most lasting peace compatible with our degree of civilization.

On January 22, 1917, President Wilson explained the reasons why he made the proposal to put an end to the War; he said in the American Senate that the greatest danger lay in a peace imposed by conquerors after victory. At that time it was said that there must be neither conquerors nor conquered. A peace imposed after victory would be the cause of so much humiliation and such intolerable sacrifices for the conquered side, it would be so severe, it would give rise to so much bitter feeling that it would not be a lasting peace, but one founded on shifting sand.

In the spring of 1919, just before the most serious decisions were to be taken, Lloyd George put before the conference a memorandum entitled "Some considerations for the Peace Conference before they finally draft their terms."