The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

While it may be perfectly true that Belgians, Serbs, Poles, Bohemians, fought from motives of nationality, it may also be true that the wars which they were compelled to fight had an economic cause.

If the desire of Germany or Austria for undeveloped territory had anything to do with that thrust towards the Near East in the way of which stood Serbian nationality, then economic causes had something to do with compelling Serbia and Belgium to fight for their nationality. Owing to the pressure of the economic need or greed of others, we are still concerned with economic forces, though we may be actuated only by the purest nationalism: the economic pressure of others is obviously part of the problem of our national defence. And if one examines in turn the chief problems of nationality, one finds in almost every case that any aggression by which it may be menaced is prompted by the need, or assumed need, of other nations for mines, ports, access to the sea (warm water or other), or for strategic frontiers to defend those things.

Why should the desire of one people to rule itself, to be free, be thwarted by another making exactly the same demands? In the case of the Germans we ascribe it to some special and evil lust peculiar to their race and training. But the Peace has revealed to us that it exists in every people, every one.

A glance at the map enables us to realise readily enough why a given State may resist the ‘complete independence’ of a neighbouring territory.

Here, on the borders of Russia, for instance, are a number of small States in a position to block the access of the population of Russia to the sea; in a position, indeed, by their control of certain essential raw materials, to hold up the development of a hundred million people, very much as the robber barons of the Rhine held up the commerce of that waterway. No powerful Russia, Bolshevik or Czarist, will permanently recognise the absolute right of a little State, at will (at the bidding, perhaps, of some military dictator, who in South American fashion may have seized its Government), to block her access to the ‘highways of the world.’ ‘Sovereignty and independence’—absolute sovereignty over its own territory, that is—may well include the ‘right’ to make the existence of others intolerable. Ought any nation to have such a right? Like questions are raised in the case of the States that once were Austria. They have achieved their complete freedom and independence. Some of the results are dealt with in the first chapter. In some cases the new States are using their ‘freedom, sovereignty, and independence’ for the purpose of worsening a condition of famine and economic paralysis that spells indescribable suffering for millions of completely innocent folk.[33]

So far, the new Europe is economically less competent than the old. The old Austrian grouping, for instance, made possible a stable and orderly life for fifty million people. A Mittel Europa, with its Berlin-Bagdad designs, would, whatever its dangers otherwise, have given us a vastly greater area of co-ordinated production, an area approaching that of the United States; it would have ensured the effective co-operation of populations greatly in excess of those of the United States. Whatever else might have happened, there would have been no destruction by famine of the populations concerned if some such plan of organised production had materialised. The old Austria at least ensured for the children physical health and education, for the peasants work in their fields, in security; and although denial of full national rights was doubtless an evil thing, it still left free a vast field of human activities—those of the family, of productive labour, of religion, music, art, love, laughter.

A Europe of small ‘absolute’ nationalisms threatens to make these things impossible. We have no standard, unhappily, by which we can appraise the moral loss and gain in the exchange of the European life of July, 1914, for that which Europe now faces and is likely to face in the coming years. But if we cannot measure or weigh the moral value of absolute nationalism, the present situation does enable us to judge in some measure the degree of security achieved for the principle of nationality, and to what extent it may be menaced by the economic needs of the millions of Europe. And one is impelled to ask whether nationality is not threatened by a danger far greater than any it had to meet in the old Europe, in the anarchy and chaos that nationalism itself is at present producing.

The greater States, like Germany, may conceivably manage somehow to find a modus vivendi. A self-sufficing State may perhaps be developed (a fact which will enable Germany at one and the same time to escape the payment of reparations and to defy future blockades). But that will mean embittered nationalism. The sense of exclusion and resentment will remain.

The need of Germany for outside raw materials and food may, as the result of this effort to become self-sufficing, prove less than the above considerations might suggest. But unhappily, assumed need can be as patent a motive in international politics as real need. Our recent acquiescence in the independence of Egypt would imply that our need for persistent occupation was not as great as we supposed. Yet the desire to remain in Egypt helped to shape our foreign policy during a whole generation, and played no small part in the bargaining with France over Morocco which widened the gulf between ourselves and Germany.

The preservation of the principle of nationality depends upon making it subject at least to some form of internationalism. If ‘self-determination’ means the right to condemn other peoples to death by starvation, then that principle cannot survive. The Balkanisation of Europe, turning it into a cauldron of rival ‘absolute’ nationalisms, does not mean safety for the principle of nationality, it means its ultimate destruction either by anarchy or by the autocratic domination of the great Powers. The problem is to reconcile national right and international obligation. That will mean a discipline of the national impulse, and of the instincts of domination which so readily attach themselves to it. The recognition of economic needs will certainly help towards such discipline. However ‘materialistic’ it may be to recognise the right of others to life, that recognition makes a sounder foundation for human society than do the instinctive impulses of mystic nationalism.