Now, before attempting to determine in a graphic fashion what those two ideals are—before, that is, trying to draw two maps which shall represent respectively the German goal and the goal of the Allies, we must lay down certain postulates which are not always recognized but which are certainly true.
Unless we recognize their truth we shall come to accept wild statements, and to be frightened of those ridiculous prophecies which propose the extermination of Germany on the one hand, or the rule of the German government over England or France on the other.
I. The first of these postulates is that a modern European nation no longer desires to annex white men in Europe, and the territory they inhabit.
The example of Alsace-Lorraine alone has proved a sufficient lesson; the continued vitality of Poland after a hundred years has proved another, and even the difficulties of the Austro-Hungarian governments, with their subject races, a third. This does not mean that a modern European government would not annex in any circumstance. The possession of some all-important military or commercial point might occasionally make the perilous experiment worth while. But it means that the idea of annexation as an obvious corollary to military success has disappeared.
II. The second postulate is as follows: It is universally recognized—by the Germans quite as much as by ourselves—that the political boundaries so long established in Europe hardly ever correspond to exact national groupings, and very often violently conflict with the realities of national life.
No one is so foolish, for instance, as to pretend that the Finnish provinces of Russia are not quite separate from the rest of the Czar’s dominions in tradition, and consciousness, and habit, and all the rest that makes a nation. No one in England now denies the existence of an Irish nationality.
No one, to take an Eastern case, would pretend that the Serbian feeling of nationality was not very real, and was very far from being contained by the present boundaries of Serbia.
The excuse for the old point of view—the point of view that political boundaries were sufficient and that the true nationalities which they cut through or suppressed might be neglected—was that in time, with the modern rapidity of communication and the power of the modern State, these divergent elements would be absorbed, or digested into, the greater nationality which governed them. But experience has falsified this very reasonable conception. It has been found not only that this transformation did not take place, but even that the old real nationalities were actually getting stronger. Poland, for instance, artificially cut through by the German, Austrian, and Russian frontiers, did seem for a time as though it were going to spring into a Russian, a German, and an Austrian type of Polish men; and in the latter case, that of Austria, some considerable advance was made towards such a result. But generations passed, and the process did not continue; on the contrary, the tide began to set backwards, and the conception of a united Poland is far stronger to-day even in the small and successful Austrian portion of Poland than it was thirty years ago.
In the face of these two postulates, the true national groupings have discovered their power and have already begun to appear in real form, as it were, through the artificial political boundaries which divided or suppressed them. Any one, the Germans as much as the rest, proposing to reconstruct Europe must most certainly take account of such realities, and must deal with the many national groups of Europe as the stones out of which the new building is to be erected.
But the particular way in which those stones may be used, the combinations into which they may be grouped, the main influences which are to impose themselves upon particular great agglomerations of new nationalities are the whole issue of the debate, and form the whole subject of this war.