The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

Examine for a moment the economic manifestation of international hostilities. There has just begun in the United States a clamorous campaign for the denunciation of the Panama Treaty which places British ships on an equality with American. American ships must be exempt from the tolls. ‘Don’t we own the Canal?’ ask the leaders of this campaign. There is widespread response to it. But of the millions of Americans who will become perhaps passionately angry over that matter and extremely anti-British, how many have any shares in any ships that can possibly benefit by the denunciation of the Treaty? Not one in a thousand. It is not an economic motive operating at all.

Capitalism—the management of modern industry by a small economic autocracy of owners of private capital—has certainly a part in the conflicts that produce war. But that part does not arise from the direct interest that the capitalists of one nation as a whole have in the destruction of the trade or industry of another. Such a conclusion ignores the most elementary facts in the modern organisation of industry. And it is certainly not true to say that British capitalists, as a distinct group, were more disposed than the public as a whole to insist upon the Carthaginian features of the Treaty. Everything points rather to the exact contrary. Public opinion as reflected, for instance, by the December, 1918, election, was more ferociously anti-German than capitalists are likely to have been. It is certainly not too much to say that if the Treaty had been made by a group of British—or French—bankers, merchants, shipowners, insurance men, and industrialists, liberated from all fear of popular resentment, the economic life of Central Europe would not have been crushed as it has been.

Assuredly, such a gathering of capitalists would have included groups having direct interest in the destruction of German competition. But it would also have included others having an interest in the restoration of the German market and German credit, and one influence would in some measure have cancelled the other.

As a simple fact we know that not all British capitalists, still less British financiers, are interested in the destruction of German prosperity. Central Europe was one of the very greatest markets available for British industry, and the recovery of that market may constitute for a very large number of manufacturers, merchants, shippers, insurance companies, and bankers, a source of immense potential profit. It is a perfectly arguable proposition, to put it at the very lowest, that British ‘capitalism’ has, as a whole, more to gain from a productive and stable Europe than from a starving and unstable one. There is no reason whatever to doubt the genuineness of the internationalism that we associate with the Manchester School of Capitalist Economics.

But in political nationalism as a force there are no such cross currents cancelling out the hostility of one nation to another. Economically, Britain is not one entity and Germany another. But as a sentimental concept, each may perfectly well be an entity; and in the imagination of John Citizen, in his political capacity, voting on the eve of the Peace Conference, Britain is a triumphant and heroic ‘person,’ while Germany is an evil and cruel ‘person,’ who must be punished, and whose pockets must be searched. John has neither the time nor has he felt the need, for a scientific attitude in politics. But when it is no longer a question of giving his vote, but of earning his income, of succeeding as a merchant or shipowner in an uncertain future, he will be thoroughly scientific. When it comes to carrying cargoes or selling cotton goods, he can face facts. And, in the past at least, he knows that he has not sold those materials to a wicked person called ‘Germany,’ but to a quite decent and human trader called Schmidt.

What I am suggesting here is that for an explanation of the passions which have given us the Treaty of Versailles we must look much more to rival nationalisms than to rival capitalisms; not to hatreds that are the outgrowth of a real conflict of interests, but to certain nationalist conceptions, ‘myths,’ as Sorel has it. To these conceptions economic hostilities may assuredly attach themselves. At the height of the war-hatred of things German, a shopkeeper who had the temerity to expose German post cards or prints for sale would have risked the sacking of his shop. The sackers would not have been persons engaged in the post card producing trade. Their motive would have been patriotic. If their feelings lasted over the war, they would vote against the admission of German post cards. They would not be moved by economic, still less by capitalistic motives. These motives do enter, as we shall see presently, into the problems raised by the present condition of Europe. But it is important to see at what point and in what way. The point for the moment—and it has immense practical importance—is that the Treaty of Versailles and its economic consequences should be attributed less to capitalism (bad as that has come to be in its total results) than to the pressure of a public opinion that had crystallised round nationalist conceptions.[16]

Here, at the end of 1920, is the British Press still clamouring for the exclusion of German toys. Such an agitation presumably pleases the millions of readers. They are certainly not toymakers or sellers; they have no commercial interest in the matter save that ‘their toys will cost them more’ if the agitation succeeds. They are actuated by nationalist hostility.

If Germany is not to be allowed to sell even toys, there will be very few things indeed that she can sell. We are to go on with the policy of throttling Europe in order that a nation whose industrial activity is indispensable to Europe shall not become strong. We do not see, it is true, the relation between the economic revival of Europe and the industrial recuperation of Germany; we do not see it because we can be made to feel anger at the idea of German toys for British children so much more readily than we can be made to see the causes which deprive French children of warmth in their schoolrooms. European society seems to be in the position of an ill-disciplined child that cannot bring itself to swallow the medicine that would relieve it of its pain. The passions which have been cultivated in five years of war must be indulged, whatever the ultimate cost to ourselves. The judgment of such a society is swamped in those passions.

The restoration of much of Europe will involve many vast and complex problems of reconstruction. But here, in the alternatives presented by the payment of a German indemnity, for instance, is a very simple issue: if Germany is to pay, she must produce goods, that is, she must be economically restored; if we fear her economic restoration, then we cannot obtain the execution of the reparation clauses of the Treaty. But that simple issue one of the greatest figures of the Conference cannot face. He has not, eighteen months after the Treaty, emerged from the most elementary confusion concerning it. If the psychology of Nationalism renders so simple a problem insoluble, what will be its effect upon the problem of Europe as a whole?

Again, it may be that shipowners are behind the American agitation and toy manufacturers behind the British. A Coffin Trust might intrigue against measures to prevent a repetition of the influenza epidemic. But what should we say of the fitness for self-government of a people that should lend itself by millions to such an intrigue of Coffin-makers, showing as the result of its propaganda a fierce hostility to sanitation? We should conclude that it deserved to die. If Europe went to war as the result of the intrigues of a dozen capitalists, its civilisation is not worth saving; it cannot be saved, for as soon as the capitalists were removed, its inherent helplessness would place it at the mercy of some other form of exploitation.