How deep-seated the enmities and the sense of strangeness among nations may be is seen in the fact that national groups living in close proximity to one another tend to become less friendly rather than to become affiliated. These feelings gradually produce conceptual entities, which stand for the reality of the foreign. These concepts are deposits, so to speak, from a great number of affective reactions, and they always contain imaginative content based upon enmity and suspicion. This underlying enmity between neighboring peoples is not something rare in the world. All foreigners, even in the minds of the most intelligent of peoples, are reconstructions, caricatures. These feelings and attitudes are strong and deep and they prevent genuine friendship among nations. We tend to think of all foreigners as in some degree malicious, as designing, and lacking in the good qualities and right habits which we ourselves possess.
Many authors have commented upon the entire inability of nations to understand one another. There is a deep reason for this, which we have already suggested. They do not wish to understand one another. It is a part of the archaic system of defense to maintain an attitude of distrust and misunderstanding and even fear. The fear of the enemy is a protection—against invasion from without and disruption within. Nations do not dare to relinquish their fear of one another, and we see something of this voluntary cherishing of fear and enmity in the present hesitation about entering into leagues on the part of many nations. Nations really wish to hate one another, it would seem. Other evidence of this we have observed in the cult of hate that has been promulgated to keep up morale in the recent war. We see enmity maintained when the differences among the peoples holding it are superficial and must indeed be exaggerated and caricatured in order to make them support feelings of dislike. Small differences in the customs of closely related peoples are sufficient sometimes to maintain intense antagonism. As Collier (68) says, it is precisely the bad manners of a people that cause conflict. These bad manners are of course manners that are different from our own.
Germany's outburst of hatred and its frequent exhibition during the war and its promulgation as a cult and a religion appear to have excited the interest of many writers on the war. As a chapter in the psychology of war it has suggested new problems and points of view, and it has also appealed to many as an interesting problem of national psychology. If our explanation of hatred as especially related to fear and to the sense of inferiority is correct Germany of all nations must have been affected with a disorder of morale, or some perversion of national consciousness.
The hatred of Germany for England is not the only example of international enmity in the world, but its expression in the war has made it peculiarly interesting. The grievance against England is first of all that England is great and prosperous, and lives in comfort upon the unearned fruits of empire, while the German has toiled hard through the centuries and has caught nothing. England is hated because in many ways she has stood squarely in the path of Germany's progress and because in the history of European diplomacy, doors leading to wider empire have been again and again slammed in Germany's face, usually by the hand of England. Germany hates England, according to German writers, because England, a kindred race, tried to betray western civilization into the hands of barbarism. Germany hates England because, to the German mind, England is hypocritical. The Englishman criticizes in others precisely what he does himself; Puritanical talk covers a sinful heart. Germany hates England because in her sea-policy England has been high handed and arrogant. The Germans often call England a robber nation, with the morals of a burglar who, having enriched himself by his trade, and having retired from business, now preaches honesty.
It is not merely the hatred of England on the part of Germany that is of interest for a psychology of war but the fact that Germany has taken her hate for England with a peculiar seriousness, believed it unique, has been to the pains of justifying it morally, has covered it with religious exaltation, made it a cult and even expressed it in a formula, and made it an educational program. There are many German writings justifying the hatred of England and encouraging hate as a weapon of righteousness. Smith (47) (64) has given us the titles of forty-four German publications in his own possession, having for subject Germany's hatred of England, and says that there are sixty-five more known to him. Some of these expressions of hatred are extreme. There is, or was, a pastor in Hamburg who declared from his pulpit that his people were doing God a service in hating England and in taking every step possible to wipe so pestiferous a nation from the face of the earth. Frau Reuter says that it is impossible now more than ever to love our enemies, that England who professed love for Germany and then betrayed her love must be hated. Stern, in his studies of hate in children found that hate may be strong without any clear content, in the minds of German children. That some of this hatred of England is a direct effect of the teachings of Treitschke can hardly be doubted, when we recall the great influence his teachings have had, and the peculiar bitterness of that dramatic personage for England, for England's pretentiousness, her middle class satisfaction, her insular conceit.
The further details of the cult of hatred in Germany need not detain us, since the purpose is only to suggest here the connection of hatred with the national pessimism, the fear and the inferiority motive of Germany. We see a similar attitude in Austria, where there is a violent race hatred toward the Serbians, which Le Bon has regarded as the motive from which Austria went to war. Ferrero comments upon the fact that hatred is conspicuously absent in America, and says that the greater hatred in Europe is due not only to the obvious result of nations being crowded together, but also to the caste system which limits the freedom of the individual and tends to engender deep passions. Dide (20) says that in Germany preoccupation with the idea of injustice is a cause of war, and Chapman (39) also remarks that Germany had gone mad thinking of her wrongs. That jealousy and fear are in general the substratum of national hatred is deeply impressed upon one in studying the psychology of Germany. All the hate motive of the late war might well be found in Germany's prayer "Gott strafe England." Germany appealed to God to punish England, of course, because Germany herself could not. Both the appeal and the hatred are reactions of fear and a sense of impotence. Germany hated England because England was secure behind her navy, upon her island, beyond the reach of the war machine which is Germany's symbol of power and the compensation for her sense of inferiority and weakness.
The Instinct of Combat
We may distinguish in the motives of war between the aggressive tendency, which we have already discussed as a reaction of fear or of anger, and a more specific instinct of combat as a possession of the individual, less subject to suggestion, less closely related to the phenomena of the herd. The aggressive reaction we associate, or some writers do associate it, with the predatory instinct, practical in its motive, having in part an economic basis. The love of combat which appears especially as a play motive in the child and the youth is expressed as a desire for conquest and in the pleasure of overcoming an enemy.
Some see in war a recrudescence of the instinct of combat, and indeed think of war as mainly such a return to primitive instinct. The life of peace represses this motive too much, they think. Life is too organized and coöperative and the individual craves release from it. The general objections to such an interpretation of war we have already stated. We think rather of certain specific movements as avenues of approach to highly complex states of ecstasy, and of these states of ecstasy as representing or containing the real craving for war, so far as there is one. The war mood exploits these movements and gives room for instincts to display themselves, and these instincts, in their expression, are pleasure-toned because they are archaic and have once been well organized and habitual forms of activity having practical objects. But to say that men have a profound but concealed desire to kill one another, that the fighting impulse remains intact in some original animal form, is a travesty upon human nature. It is precisely because in war killing is depersonalized, so to speak, that it is a moral duty and is performed under conditions in which there is a summation of many strong motives leading to the act that, as we see it, men find joy in battle. The instinct of attack, or the hunting instinct that is involved in this activity, can become pleasure-toned only because of the presence of other motives, and because the object is dehumanized for the time. Otherwise we should expect all soldiers, once having their aggressive instincts aroused in battle, to become dangerous to the community.