The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

That conclusion was opposed, as we have seen, on two main grounds. One was that the desire for conquest and extension of territory did not enter appreciably into the causes of war, ‘since no one really believed that victory could advantage them.’ The other ground of objection, in contradistinction, was that the economic advantages of conquest or military predominance were so great and so obvious that to deny them was mere paradox-mongering.

The validity of both criticisms has been very thoroughly tested in the period that has followed the Armistice. Whether it be true or not that the competition for territory, the belief that predominant power could be turned to economic account, entered into the causes of the War, that competition and belief have certainly entered into the settlement and must be reckoned among the causes of the next war. The proposition that the economic advantages of conquest and coercion are illusory is hardly to-day a paradox, however much policy may still ignore the facts.

The outstanding facts of the present situation most worth our attention in this connection are these: Military predominance, successful war, evidently offer no solution either of specifically international or of our common social and economic problems. The political disintegration going on over wide areas in Europe is undoubtedly related very intimately to economic conditions: actual lack of food, the struggle for ever-increasing wages and better conditions. Our attempted remedies—our conferences for dealing with international credit, the suggestion of an international loan, the loans actually made to the enemy—are a confession of the international character of that problem. All this shows that the economic question, alike nationally and internationally, is not, it is true, something that ought to occupy all the energies of men, but something that will, unless dealt with adequately; is a question that simply cannot be swept aside with magnificent gestures. Finally, the nature of the settlement actually made by the victor, its characteristic defects, the failure to realise adequately the victor’s dependence on the economic life of the vanquished, show clearly enough that, even in the free democracies, orthodox statecraft did indeed suffer from the misconception which The Great Illusion attributed to it.

What do we see to-day in Europe? Our preponderant military power—overwhelming, irresistible, unquestioned—is impotent to secure the most elementary forms of wealth needed by our people: fuel, food, shelter. France, who in the forty years of her ‘defeat’ had the soundest finances in Europe, is, as a victor over the greatest industrial nation in Europe, all but bankrupt. (The franc has fallen to a discount of over seventy per cent.) All the recurrent threats of extended military occupation fail to secure reparations and indemnities, the restoration of credit, exchange, of general confidence and security.

And just as we are finding that the things necessary for the life of our peoples cannot be secured by military force exercised against foreign nations or a beaten enemy, so are we finding that the same method of force within the limits of the nation used by one group as against another, fails equally. The temper or attitude towards life which leads us to attempt to achieve our end by the forcible imposition of our will upon others, by dictatorship, and to reject agreement, has produced in some degree everywhere revolt and rebellion on the one side, and repression on the other; or a general disruption and the breakdown of the co-operative processes by which mankind lives. All the raw materials of wealth are here on the earth as they were ten years ago. Yet Europe either starves or slips into social chaos, because of the economic difficulty.

In the way of the necessary co-operation stands the Balkanisation of Europe. Why are we Balkanised rather than Federalised? Why do Balkan and other border States fight fiercely over this coalfield or that harbour? Why does France still oppose trade with Russia, and plot for the control of an enlarged Poland or a reactionary Hungary? Why does America now wash her hands of the whole muddle in Europe?

Because everywhere the statesmen and the public believe that if only the power of their State were great enough, they could be independent of rival States, achieve political and economic security and dispense with agreements and obligations.

If they had any vivid sense of the vast dangers to which reliance upon isolated power exposed any State, however great; if they had realised how the prosperity and social peace of their own States depended upon the reconciliation and well-being of the vanquished, the Treaty would have been a very different document, peace would long since have been established with Russia, and the moral foundations of co-operation would be present.

By every road that presented itself, The Great Illusion attempted to reveal the vital interdependence of peoples—within and without the State—and, as a corollary to that interdependence, the very strict limits of the force that can be exercised against any one whose life, and daily—and willing—labour is necessary to us. It was not merely the absence of these ideas but the very active presence of the directly contrary ideas of rival and conflicting interest, which explained the drift that the present writer thought—and said so often—would, unless checked, lead Western civilisation to a vast orgy of physical self-destruction and moral violence and chaos.

The economic conditions which constitute one part of the vindication of The Great Illusion are of course those described in the first part of this book, particularly in the first chapter. All that need be added here are a few suggestions as to the relationship between those conditions and the propositions we are concerned to verify.