Peace Theories and the Balkan War

by Norman Angell

The immediate result of defeat would mean, of course, that insolvency would take place in a very large number of commercial businesses, and others would speedily follow. Those who cannot get away will starve unless large relief funds are forthcoming from, say, Canada and the United States, for this country, bereft of its manufactures, will not be able to sustain a population of more than a very few millions.—From an Article by "A Well-known Diplomatist" in The Throne, June 12, 1912.

These are but samples; and this sort of thing is going on in England and Germany alike. And when one protests that it is wicked rubbish born of funk and ignorance, that whatever happens in war this does not happen, and that it is based on false economics and grows into utterly false conceptions of international relationship, one is shouted down as an anti-armament man and an enemy of his country.

Well, if that view is persisted in, if in reality it is necessary for a people to have lies and nonsense told to them in order to induce them to defend themselves, some will be apt to decide that they are not worth defending. Or rather will they decide that this phase of the pro-armament campaign—which is not so much a campaign in favour of armament as one against education and understanding—will end in turning us into a nation either of poltroons or of bullies and aggressors, and that since life is a matter of the choice of risks it is wiser and more courageous to choose the less evil. A nation may be defeated and still live in the esteem of men—and in its own. No civilized man esteems a nation of Bashi-Bazouks or Prussian Junkers. Of the two risks involved—the risk of attack arising from a possible superiority of armament on the part of a rival, and the risk of drifting into conflict because, concentrating all our energies on the mere instrument of combat, we have taken no adequate trouble to understand the facts of this case—it is at least an arguable proposition that the second risk is the greater. And I am prompted to this expression of opinion without surrendering one iota of a lifelong and passionate belief that a nation attacked should defend itself to the last penny and to the last man.

And you think that this idea that the nations—ours amongst them—may drift into futile war from sheer panic and funk arising out of the terror inspired by phantoms born of ignorance, is merely the idea of Pacifist cranks?

The following, referring to the "precautionary measures" (i.e., mobilization of armies) taken by the various Powers, is from a leading article of the Times:—

"Precautions" are understandable, but the remark of our Berlin Correspondent that they may produce an untenable position from which retreat must be humiliating is applicable in more than one direction. Our Vienna Correspondent truly says that "there is no valid reason to believe war between Austria-Hungary and Russia to be inevitable, or even immediately probable." We entirely agree, but wish we could add that the absence of any valid reason was placing strict limitations upon the scope of "precautions." The same correspondent says he is constantly being asked:—"Is there no means of avoiding war?" The same question is now being asked, with some bewilderment, by millions of men in this country, who want to know what difficulties there are in the present situation which should threaten Europe with a general war, or even a collision larger than that already witnessed…. There is no great nation in Europe which to-day has the least desire that millions of men should be torn from their homes and flung headlong to destruction at the bidding of vain ambitions. The Balkan peoples fought for a cause which was peculiarly their own. They were inspired by the memories of centuries of wrong which they were burning to avenge. The larger nations have no such quarrel, unless it is wilfully manufactured for them. The common sense of the peoples of Europe is well aware that no issue has been presented which could not be settled by amicable discussion. In England men will learn with amazement and incredulity that war is possible over the question of a Servian port, or even over the larger issues which are said to lie behind it. Yet that is whither the nations are blindly drifting Who, then, makes war? The answer is to be found in the Chancelleries of Europe, among the men who have too long played with human lives as pawns in a game of chess, who have become so enmeshed in formulas and the jargon of diplomacy that they have ceased to be conscious of the poignant realities with which they trifle. And thus will war continue to be made, until the great masses who are the sport of professional schemers and dreamers say the word which, shall bring, not eternal peace, for that is impossible, but a determination that wars shall be fought only in a just and righteous and vital cause. If that word is ever to be spoken, there never was a more appropriate occasion than the present; and we trust it will be spoken while there is yet time.

And the very next day there appeared in the Daily Mail an article by
Mr. Lovat Fraser ending thus:—

The real answer rests, or ought to rest, with the man in the train.
Does he want to join in Armageddon? It is time that he began to
think about it, for his answer may soon be sought.

Now we have here, stated in the first case by the most authoritative of English newspapers, and in the second by an habitual contributor of the most popular, the whole case of Pacifism as I have attempted to expound it, namely: (1) That our current statecraft—its fundamental conceptions, its "axioms," its terminology—has become obsolete by virtue of the changed conditions of European society; that the causes of conflict which it creates are half the time based on illusions, upon meaningless and empty formulas; (2) that its survival is at bottom due to popular ignorance and indifference—the survival on the part of the great mass of just those conceptions born of the old and now obsolete conditions—since diplomacy, like all functions of government, is a reflection of average opinion; (3) that this public opinion is not something which descends upon us from the skies but is the sum of the opinions of each one of us and is the outcome of our daily contacts, our writing and talking and discussion, and that the road to safety lies in having that general public opinion better informed not in directly discouraging such better information; (4) that the mere multiplication of "precautions" in the shape of increased armaments and a readiness for war, in the absence of a corresponding and parallel improvement of opinion, will merely increase and not exorcise the danger, and, finally, (5) that the problem of war is necessarily a problem of at least two parties, and that if we are to solve it, to understand it even, we must consider it in terms of two parties, not one; it is not a question of what shall be the policy of each without reference to the other, but what the final upshot of the two policies taken in conjunction will be.

Now in all this the Times, especially in one outstanding central idea, is embodying a conception which is the antithesis of that expressed by Militarists of the type of Mr. Churchill, and, I am sorry to say, of Lord Roberts. To these latter war is not something that we, the peoples of Europe, create by our ignorance and temper, by the nursing of old and vicious theories, by the poorness and defects of the ideas our intellectual activities have developed during the last generation or two, but something that "comes upon us" like the rain or the earthquake, and against which we can only protect ourselves by one thing: more arms, a greater readiness to fight.