Peaceless Europe

by Francesco Saverio Nitti

A comparative table of the navies in 1914 and 1921 shows that the fleets of the conquering countries are very much more powerful than they were before the War. Nevertheless, Russia and Austria-Hungary and the people arisen in their territories are not naval powers; Germany has lost all her fleet. The race for naval armaments regards especially the two Anglo-Saxon powers and Japan; the race for land armaments regards all the conquerors of Europe and especially the small States.

This situation cannot but be the cause of great preoccupation; but the greater preoccupation arises from the fact that the minor States, especially those which took no part in the War, become every day more exigent and display fresh aspirations.

The whole system of the Treaty of Versailles has been erected on the error of Poland. Poland was not created as the noble manifestation of the rights of nationality, ethnical Poland was not created, but a great State which, as she is, cannot live long, because there are not great foreign minorities, but a whole mass of populations which cannot co-exist, Poland, which has already the experience of a too numerous Israelitic population, has not the capacity to assimilate the Germans, the Russians and the Ukranians which the Treaty of Versailles has unjustly given to her against the very declarations of Wilson.

So that after, with the aid of the Entente, having had the strength to resist the Bolshevik troops, Poland is now in a state of permanent anarchy; consumes and does not produce; pays debts with a fantastic bigness and does not know how to regulate the incomings. No country in the world has ever more abused paper currency; her paper money is probably the most greatly depreciated of any country on earth. She has not succeeded in organizing her own production, and now tends to dissolve the production of her neighbours.

The whole Treaty of Versailles is based on a vigorous and vital Poland. A harmless Germany, unable to unite with an equally harmless German-Austria, should be under the military control of France and Belgium on the west, and of Poland on the east. Poland, separating Germany from Russia, besides imposing on Germany the territorial outrage of the Danzig corridor, cuts her off from any possibility of expansion and development in the east. Poland has been conceived as a great State. A Polish nation was not constituted; a Polish military State was constituted, whose principal duty is that of disorganizing Germany.

Poland, the result of a miracle of the War (no one could foretell the simultaneous fall of the Central Empires and of the Russian Empire), was formed not from a tenacious endeavour, but from an unforeseen circumstance, which was the just reward for the long martyrdom of a people. The borders of Poland will reach in time to the Baltic Sea in the north, the Carpathians and the Dniester in the south, in the east the country almost as far as Smolensk, in the west to the parts of Germany, Brandenburg and Pomerania. The new patriots dream of an immense Poland, the old Poland of tradition, and then to descend into the countries of the Ukraine and dominate new territories.

It is easy to see that, sooner or later, the Bolshevik degeneration over, Russia will be recomposed; Germany, in spite of all the attempts to break her up and crush her unity, within thirty or forty years will be the most formidable ethnical nucleus of Continental Europe. What will then happen to a Poland which pretends to divide two people who represent numerically and will represent in other fields also the greatest forces of Continental Europe of to-morrow?

Amongst many in France there is the old conception of Napoleon I, who considered the whole of European politics from an erroneous point of view, that of a lasting French hegemony in Europe, when the lasting hegemony of peoples is no longer possible. In the sad solitude of his exile at Saint Helena, Napoleon I said that not to have created a powerful Poland keystone of the roof of the European edifice, not to have destroyed Prussia, and to have been mistaken in regard to Russia, were the three great errors of his life. But all his work had as an end to put the life of Europe under the control of France, and was necessarily wrecked by reality, which does not permit the lasting mistake of a single nation which places herself above all the others in a free and progressive Europe.

If the policy of the Entente towards Germany and towards the conquered countries does not correspond either to collective declarations made during the War, or to the promises solemnly made by Wilson, the policy towards Russia has been a whole series of error. In fact, one cannot talk of a policy of the Entente, in so far that with the exception of a few errors committed in common, Great Britain, France and Italy have each followed their own policy.

In his sixth point, among the fourteen points, no longer pure, but violated and outraged worse than the women of a conquered race by a tribe of Kurds, Wilson said on January 8, 1918, that the treatment meted out to Russia by the sister nations, and therefore their loyalty in assisting her to settle herself, should be the stern proof of their goodwill. They should show that they did not confound their own interests, or rather their egoism, with what should be done for Russia. The proof was most unfortunate.