The Psychology of Nations / A Contribution to the Philosophy of History

by G. E. Partridge

In the industrial and financial stages of economic development new conditions arise which certainly must be taken into account in any theory of war. There are deep changes in national life. The moods of the city become a new force or a new factor in national life. Socialistic ideas and new aspects of nationalism and patriotism appear. There is a spirit of unrest; both pessimistic and optimistic tendencies in society are increased; the motive of power takes new forms, and there is a deep stirring of fundamental feelings and impulses. The crowd instincts, the old hunger motives, are felt beneath the surface of life. This is the effect of industrialism upon the psychic forces of peoples in their collective aspects. Nations also become as wholes more specialized in the industrial life; they are dependent upon one another as never before. All the ancient motives of commerce are stimulated, and the minds of nations revert to the old fears and the old romance connected with the thought of the seas. The growing interdependence of nations produces a peculiar and paradoxical condition. Competition in regard to markets arises, with all the complications and strains that we have seen in recent years. There are new motives of aggression, but at the same time the need and motives for peace are increased. Industries in general thrive best in an era of assured peace. They live upon the wealth and prosperity they themselves create. Intrigue, not force, is their proper weapon. Le Bon (42) says, that the desire to create markets was not the cause of the great war, because expansion went on very well in the time of peace. Germany had no aggressive designs except commercial designs we are told. Mach (95) tells us Germany's whole future, the success of her carefully laid plans for industrial development and supremacy, depended upon continued peace.

That such views of the relation of industry to war are in the main correct can hardly be doubted. Industrial relations create strains among nations, but when as a result of these strains war occurs it must be regarded as a disaster from the point of view of the industrial interests. Industry we say thrives upon the wealth that it creates. A war which destroys half the wealth of the world must be a calamity for all great industries except at the most a very few having peculiar relations to the activities of war.

But there is another aspect of the relations of industry to war. Industrialism as a great institution and movement of modern life becomes in itself a political power. Howe (100) says that with the end of Bismarck's wars personal wars and nationalistic wars came to an end. The old aristocracy of the land merged with the new aristocracy of wealth and this wealth has become the great political power in the world. But this is only a half truth. Industry has become a factor in the foreign relations of nations, and has become a power in politics, but the motives and powers we call political are exceedingly complex, and the interests of business, industry and finance are by no means the whole of or coincident with political interests. There are of course certain industries and financial interests which may even instigate wars, and some writers give them a high place among the causes of war. Especially the makers of munitions and armaments are credited with a baneful influence in the world. With their international understandings, their influence in legislative bodies, their control of newspapers, they are open to the charge of manipulating public sentiment, and bringing influence to bear upon governments. They are accused of equipping small countries and setting them against one another, of deliberately encouraging the race for military and naval supremacy. No one can doubt that their opportunities for trouble-making are many and enticing, but to think of these influences as anything more than the incidental and secondary causes of war seems to be a curious way of understanding history (100).

The inside history of the great financiering projects would no doubt give us some of the main clews to the present diplomatic relations of nations to one another. If we take into account the various intrigues in connection with the building of the Bagdad route, the financing of the Balkan States in their wars, the bargaining of the Powers in Turkey for financial concessions, the great business interests involved in the Russo-Japanese war, the loans to China and all the rest of the financial history of a few decades we should have in hand materials that no one could deny the importance of for an understanding of current history. Diplomacy has had added to its already complex duties the art of securing financial advantages. In general the art of this diplomacy is to secure these advantages without war, but there can be no doubt that financial relations have multiplied the points of contact and strain among peoples, and that these financial relations have become the main occasional causes of wars. Howe (100) thinks that surplus capital is to blame for a great many of the great disasters of modern times—that it destroyed Egyptian independence, led France into Morocco, Germany into Turkey, and into the farther East, embroiled the Balkan States; and that the great war has been a conflict over conflicting interests of Russia, England and Germany in Turkey. Under the guise of expansion of trade this invisible wealth has been exploiting the most vital interests of foreign countries. Veblen would go so far as to say that wars are government-made, that patriotism is exploited by governments in advance of pre-arranged hostilities to produce the spirit of war (97).

If we hold that these economic causes are now the most important causes of wars, it is easy to accept the conclusion that the most fundamental, and even perhaps the sole cause of war is the evil principle of ownership, as is actually maintained by many economists. If men in cliques, and men as individuals did not own privately great parts of the wealth of the world, these conflicts in which wealth and its distribution are the most vital interests would not take place. Many socialists, we know, hold these views, asserting that wars are due solely to industrial competition among nations, and to the fact that industrialism is based upon the wholly wrong principle of private ownership. Hullquist, a socialist, says that wars are likely to become more frequent and more violent as the capitalist system of production approaches its climax. The working classes, the socialists say, who have nothing permanent, are the natural enemies of war; the capitalists, who have much and want more, are constantly placing peace in jeopardy. The protective system of tariff also receives much abuse from these writers. Novicow (71) places the tariff system high among the causes of war. The belief that it is good to sell and bad to buy, he says, is the great trouble maker in the world. This was also the principle of Cobden the great English free-trader of the middle of the last century. The Manchester school of which he was the leader would do away with wars by making the world economically a unit.

Veblen (97) charges the price system with being a fundamental cause of war, and says that it must now come up for radical examination and perhaps modification. The theory of the rights of property and contract which have been taken as axiomatic premises by economic science may itself fail, or at least be thrown open to question. Either the price system will go, or there will be wars between nations in the future as there have been in the past, because of the need of protection of ownership rights, and because of the nationalism these rights create. To some extent these rights of property have been curtailed, Veblen remarks; the old feudalistic rights have in large part been annulled, and the world is at least owned by more people than was once the case. That these changes and readjustments of property rights will be carried still further he thinks there can be no doubt.

Stevens draws similar conclusions about the evil effects of property rights. The great war and all wars, he asserts, are based upon existing social conditions—upon the organization of the family, the school, the state, the church, upon the institution of property, with its corollaries of foreign markets and other industrial relations. Protection of trade, which works in the interest of the owner classes, indirect taxes which fall upon the consumer, the labor system by which, at the present time, the laborer receives but a small share of the profits, but must become when necessary the defender of the interests in which he does not share—all these things we hear being charged vigorously with being the causes of wars, including the recent great conflict. This system is blamed not only for our great international wars, but it is looked upon as the germ of wars to come, internal wars, when international wars shall have ceased, or temporarily have been abated. When, perhaps, the restrictions that assume that the gain of one country is the loss of another have satisfactorily been adjusted, the system that maintains that the capitalist can prosper only at the expense of the laborer will come up for final settlement (97).

All these views, from a psychological point of view, seem to be open to the criticism that they tend to consider the world one-sidedly and by a certain abstraction. They are dealing with a world governed only by economic laws. It is easy to construct these ideal worlds. They are simple and they lend themselves readily to the purposes of a political calculus. Finding economic motives in individual life, in the social life and in politics, and in history it is tempting both to explain the past and plan the future in terms of the entities and principles of economics. But after all it is only when we consider economic motives in their relations to all the motives behind human conduct that we are likely to see the economic motives in history in their true light. Then we shall very much doubt whether property has been in any real sense the cause of wars, or that the abrogation of property rights will be the means of establishing perpetual peace. We shall see that economic motives themselves are but aspects of deeper motives, and involve desire for objectives that are not sought for their material value, and also objectives that are not material at all. The process of development of present human society, so far back as we can see, and as far into the future as we can with any confidence predict, seems to contain as a necessity some form and degree of human slavery. This appears to be inherent in the fact itself of the existence of individual wills, having in any degree individual or personal interests as they must, and the impossibility of devising any social order or government that will give to the individual an ideal freedom, if such a conception be indeed possible at all. We may conjecture at least that in a world in which every trace of an economic motive had been removed, if this were possible, there would still be slavery of some kind, and the inexorable logic of individuality would in the end produce conflict and war.

Nations, like individuals, live, and they pass through certain stages that seem in a general way to be necessary phases of their development. During this process of development certain objects become, one after another, of the most vital concern because they are necessary to the satisfaction of the motives which guide the lives of these nations. But these objects are never so definitely marked off that they become to the exclusion of other motives the causes of wars. The social life is never so simple as this would imply. The past is always involved in the present. One after another certain types of economic objects-become more or less central in the interests of nations, but the minds of nations, like those of individuals, are always influenced by the tradition. Objects are desired with reference to the satisfaction of motives that represent complex and general desires. There are ideal objects as well as material objects; and the material object is often sought because of its possible use as a means of satisfying the desire for ideal values. First food, then land, then commerce, then industry, then wealth itself,—this has been the order in which economic values have become objects for the consciousness of people as groups, and have become involved in and more or less completely represent the relations among peoples we call political. That which is, relatively speaking, an object of necessity at one stage tends to become an ideal or romantic object of the next stage. The relations of economic objects to the desires of nations and to war are complex and not precisely what they may on the surface appear to be. Nations, like individuals, do not know what they need, and they do not even understand clearly what they desire. Their desires are complex: elementary economic motives, political motives, personal motives, the motives of industry and finance, the motive of power and the craving for certain states of consciousness all exist together, and to some extent antagonize one another. The present practical desire is confused by the traditional object. The will of a nation is a composite will, and its history is full of contradictory impulses, and also full of surprises. Nations often think they are fighting for economic reasons when their real motives are plainly to gain military distinction. The reputation is quite as satisfying as any material prosperity gained. There is an illusion and a delusion about it all. All these economic advantages that nations are always seeking have something unreal about them. Nations seek them long after they represent real values. Nations seek colonies when, if business is what they want, it could better be obtained nearer home. Finance looks for advantages overseas, when there are quite as safe investments at home paying quite as large profits. Nations have desires to do great things, not merely to live and prosper.

That is the way these economic problems of war appear, at least when they are examined in relation to other aspects of war and of society. These economic problems are merged into and subordinate to the political or the historical problems, and economic causes of war must be considered with reference to the psychological principles that are at the bottom of all social development.