Peace Theories and the Balkan War

by Norman Angell

But what, it will be said, is the practical outcome? Admitting that we are, or that our fathers were, in part responsible for this war, that it is their false theories which have made it necessary, that like false theories on our part may make future wars inevitable—what shall we do to prevent that catastrophe?

Now while as an "abstract proposition" everyone will admit that the one thing which distinguishes the civilized man from the savage is a difference of ideas, no one apparently believes that it is a dangerous and evil thing for the political ideas of savages to dominate most of our countrymen or that so intangible a thing as "ideas" have any practical importance at all. While we believe this, of course—to the extent to which we believe it—improvement is out of the question. We have to realize that civic faith, like religious faith, is of importance; that if English influence is to stand for the right and not the wrong in human affairs, it is impossible for each one of us individuals to be wrong; that if the great mass is animated by temper, blindness, ignorance, passion, small and mean prejudices, it is not possible for "England" to stand for something quite different and for its influence to be ought but evil. To say that we are "for our country right or wrong" does not get over the matter at all; rather is it equivalent to saying that we would as readily have it stand for evil as for good. And we do not in the least seem to realize that for an Englishman to go on talking wicked nonsense across the dinner table and making one of the little rivulets of bad temper and prejudice which forms the mighty river drowning sane judgment is to do the England of our dreams a service as ill (in reality far more mischievous) as though the plans of fortresses were sold to Germany. We must all learn to shoot straight; apparently we need not learn to think straight. And yet if Europe could do the second it could dispense with the first. "Good faith" has a score of connotations, and we believe apparently that good politics can dispense with all of them and that "Patriotism" has naught to do with any.

Of course, to shoot straight is so much easier than to think straight, and I suppose at bottom the bellicist believes that the latter is a hopeless object since "man is not a thinking animal." He deems, apparently, we must just leave it at that. Of course, if he does leave it at that—if we persist in believing that it is no good discussing these matters, trying to find out the truth about them, writing books and building churches—our civilization is going to drift just precisely as those other civilizations which have been guided by the same dreadful fatalism have drifted—towards the Turkish goal. "Kismet. Man is a fool to babble of these things; what he may do is of no avail; all things will happen as they were pre-ordained." And the English Turk—the man who prefers to fight things out instead of thinking things out—takes the same line.

If he adopts the Turkish philosophy he must be content with the Turkish result. But the Western world as a whole has refused to be content with the Turkish result, and however tiresome it may be to know about things, to bother with "theories" and principles, we have come to realise that we have to choose between one of two courses: either to accept things as they are, not to worry about improvement or betterment at all, fatalistically to let things slide or—to find out bit by bit where our errors have been and to correct those errors. This is a hard road, but it is the road the Western world has chosen; and it is better than the other.

And it has not accepted this road because it expects the millenium to-morrow week. There is no millenium, and Pacifists do not expect it or talk about it; the word is just one of those three-shies-a-penny brickbats thrown at them by ignorance. You do not dismiss attempts to correct errors in medicine or surgery, or education, or tramcars, or cookery, by talking about the millenium; why should you throw that word at attempts to correct the errors of international relationship?

Nothing has astonished me more than the fact that the "practical" man who despises "theories" nearly always criticises Pacifism because it is not an absolute dogma with all its thirty-nine articles water-tight. "You are a Pacifist, then suppose…," and then follows generally some very remote hypothesis of what would happen if all the Orient composed its differences and were to descend suddenly upon the Western world; or some dogmatic (and very theoretical) proposition about the unchangeability of human nature, and the foolishness of expecting the millenium—an argument which would equally well have told against the union of Scotland and England or would equally justify the political parties in a South American republic in continuing to settle their differences by militarist methods instead of the Pacifist methods of England.

Human nature may be unchanging: it is no reason why we should fight a futile war with Germany over nothing at all; the yellow peril may threaten; that is a very good reason why we should compose our differences in Europe. Men always will quarrel, perhaps, over religious questions, bigotry and fanaticism always will exist—it did not prevent our getting rid of the wars of religion, still less is it a reason for re-starting them.

The men who made that immense advance—the achievement of religious toleration—possible, were not completely right and had not a water-tight theory amongst them; they did not bring the millenium, but they achieved an immense step. They were pioneers of religious freedom, yet were themselves tyrants and oppressors; those who abolished slavery did a good work, though much of the world was left in industrial servitude; it was a good thing to abolish judicial torture, though much of our penal system did yet remain barbaric; it was a real advance to recognise the errors upon which these things rested, although that recognition did not immediately achieve a complete, logical, symmetrical and perfect change, because mankind does not advance that way. And so with war. Pacifism does not even pretend to be a dogma: it is an attempt to correct in men's minds some of the errors and false theories out of which war grows.

The reply to this is generally that the inaptitude of men for clear thinking and the difficulties of the issues involved will render any decision save the sheer clash of physical force impossible; that the field of foreign politics is such a tangle that the popular mind will always fall back upon decision by force.

As a matter of fact the outstanding principles which serve to improve human conduct, are quite simple and understandable, as soon as they have been shorn of the sophistries and illusions with which the pundits clothe them. The real work of the reformers is to hack away these encumbering theories. The average European has not followed, and could not follow, the amazing and never-ending disputation on obscure theological points round which raged the Reformation; but the one solid fact which did emerge from the whole was the general realization that whatever the truth might be in all this confusion, it was quite evidently wicked and futile to attempt to compel conformity to any one section of it by force; that in the interests of all force should be withheld; because if such queries were settled by the accident of predominant force, it would prove, not which was right, but which was stronger. So in such things as witchcraft. The learned and astute judges of the 18th century, who sent so many thousands to their death for impossible crimes, knew far more of the details of witchcraft than do we, and would beat us hopelessly in an argument on the subject; but all their learning was of no avail, because they had a few simple facts, the premises, crooked, and we have them straight; and all that we need to know in this amazing tangle of learned nonsense, is that the probabilities are against an old woman having caused a storm at sea and drowned a Scottish King. And so with the French Revolution. What the Encyclopaedists and other pioneers of that movement really did for the European peoples in that matter, was not to elaborate fantastic schemes of constitution making, but by their argumentation to achieve the destruction of old political sophistries—Divine Rights of Kings and what not—and to enable one or two simple facts to emerge clearly and unmistakeably, as that the object of government is the good of the governed, and can find its justification in nothing else whatsoever. It was these simple truths which, spreading over the world—with many checks and set-backs—have so profoundly modified the structure of Christendom.