The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

‘We have said that we would create a system of barbed wire. There are places where it will have to be guarded to prevent Germany from passing. There are peoples like the Poles, of whom I spoke just now, who are fighting against the Soviets, who are resisting, who are in the van of civilisation. Well, we have decided ... to be the Allies of any people attacked by the Bolsheviks. I have spoken of the Poles, of the help that we shall certainly get from them in case of necessity. Well, they are fighting at this moment against the Bolsheviks, and if they are not equal to the task—but they will be equal to it—the help which we shall be able to give them in different ways, and which we are actually giving them, particularly in the form of military supplies and uniforms—that help will be continued. There is a Polish army, of which the greater part has been organised and instructed by French officers.... The Polish army must now be composed of from 450,000 to 500,000 men. If you look on the map at the geographical situation of this military force, you will think that it is interesting from every point of view. There is a Czecho-Slovak army, which already numbers nearly 150,000 men, well equipped, well armed, and capable of sustaining all the tasks of war. Here is another factor on which we can count. But I count on many other elements. I count on Rumania.’

Since then Hungary has been added, part of the Hungarian plan being the domination of Austria by Hungary, and, later, possibly the restoration of an Austrian Monarchy, which might help to detach monarchical and clerical Bavaria from Republican Germany.[55] This is the revival of the old French policy of preventing the unification of the German people.[56] It is that aspiration which largely explains recent French sympathy for Clericalism and Monarchism and the reversal of the policy heretofore pursued by the Third Republic towards the Vatican.

The systematic arming of African negroes reveals something of Napoleon’s leaning towards the military exploitation of servile races. We are probably only at the beginning of the arming of Africa’s black millions. They are, of course, an extremely convenient military material. French or British soldiers might have scruples against service in a war upon a Workers’ Republic. Cannibals from the African forest ‘conscribed’ for service in Europe are not likely to have political or social scruples of that kind. To bring some hundreds of thousands of these Africans to Europe, to train them systematically to the use of European arms; to teach them that the European is conquerable; to put them in the position of victors over a vanquished European people—here indeed are possibilities. With Senegalese negroes having their quarters in Goethe’s house, and placed, if not in authority, at least as the instruments of authority over the population of a European university city; and with the Japanese imposing their rule upon great stretches of what was yesterday a European Empire (and our Ally) a new page may well have opened for Europe.

But just consider the chances of stability for power based on the assumption of continued co-operation of a number of ‘intense’ nationalisms, each animated by its sacred egoisms. France has turned to this policy as a substitute for the alliance of two or three great States, which national feeling and conflicting interests have driven apart. Is this collection of mushroom republics to possess a stability to which the Entente could not attain?

One looks over the list. We have, it is true, after a century, the re-birth of Poland, a great and impressive case of the vindication of national right. But Poland, yesterday the victim of the imperialist oppressor, has, herself, almost in a few hours, as it were, acquired an imperialism of her own. The Pole assures us that his nationality can only be secure if he is given dominion over territories with largely non-Polish populations; if, that is, some fifteen millions of Ruthenes, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, are deprived of a separate national existence. Italy, it is true, is now fully redeemed; but that redemption involves the ‘irredentism’ of large numbers of German Tyrolese, Yugo-Slavs, and Greeks. The new Austria is forbidden to federate with the main branch of the race to which her people belong—though federation alone can save them from physical extinction. The Czecho-Slovak nation is now achieved, but only at the expense of a German unredeemed population larger numerically than that of Alsace-Lorraine. And Slovaks and Czechs already quarrel—many foresee the day when the freed State will face its own rebels. The Slovenes and Croats and the Serbs do not yet make a ‘nationality,’ and threaten to fight one another as readily as they would fight the Bulgarians they have annexed in Bulgarian Macedonia. Rumania has marked her redemption by the inclusion of considerable Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Serbian ‘irredentisms’ within her new borders. Finland, which with Poland typified for so long the undying struggle for national right, is to-day determined to coerce the Swedes on the Aaland Islands and the Russians on the Carelian Territory. Greek rule of Turks has already involved retaliatory, punitive, or defensive measures which have needed Blue Book explanation. Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaidjan have not yet acquired their subject nationalities.

The prospect of peace and security for these nationalities may be gathered in some measure by an enumeration of the wars which have actually broken out since the Peace Conference met in Paris, for the appeasement of Europe. The Poles have fought in turn, the Czecho-Slovaks, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, and the Russians. The Ukrainians have fought the Russians and the Hungarians. The Finns have fought the Russians, as have also the Esthonians and the Letts. The Esthonians and Letts have also fought the Baltic Germans. The Rumanians have fought Hungary. The Greeks have fought the Bulgarians and are at present in ‘full dress’ war with the Turks. The Italians have fought the Albanians, and the Turks in Asia Minor. The French have been fighting the Arabs in Syria and the Turks in Cilicia. The various British expeditions or missions, naval or military, in Archangel, Murmansk, the Baltic, the Crimea, Persia, Siberia, Turkestan, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Soudan, or in aid of Koltchak, Denikin, Yudenitch, or Wrangel, are not included in this list as not arising in a strict sense perhaps out of nationality problems.

Let us face what all this means in the alignment of power in the world. The Europe of the Grand Alliance is a Europe of many nationalities: British, French, Italian, Rumanian, Polish, Czecho-Slovak, Yugo-Slav, Greek, Belgian, Magyar, to say nothing of the others. None of these States exceeds greatly forty millions of people, and the populations of most are very much less. But the rival group of Germany and Russia, making between them over two hundred millions, comprises just two great States. And contiguous to them, united by the ties of common hatreds, lie the Mahomedan world and China. Prusso-Slavdom (combining racial elements having common qualities of amenity to autocratic discipline) might conceivably give a lead to Chinese and other Asiatic millions, brought to hate the West. The opposing group is a Balkanised Europe of irreconcilable national rivalries, incapable, because of those rivalries, of any prolonged common action, and taking a religious pride in the fact of this incapacity to agree. Its moral leaders, or many of them, certainly its powerful and popular instrument of education, the Press, encourage this pugnacity, regarding any effort towards its restraint or discipline as political atheism; deepening the tradition which would make ‘intense’ nationalism a noble, virile, and inspiring attitude, and internationalism something emasculate and despicable.

We talk of the need of ‘protecting European civilisation’ from hostile domination, German or Russian. It is a danger. Other great civilisations have found themselves dominated by alien power. Seeley has sketched for us the process by which a vast country with two or three hundred million souls, not savage or uncivilised but with a civilisation, though descending along a different stream of tradition, as real and ancient as our own, came to be utterly conquered and subdued by a people, numbering less than twelve millions, living on the other side of the world. It reversed the teaching of history which had shown again and again that it was impossible really to conquer an intelligent people alien in tradition from its invaders. The whole power of Spain could not in eighty years conquer the Dutch provinces with their petty population. The Swiss could not be conquered. At the very time when the conquest of India’s hundreds of millions was under way, the English showed themselves wholly unable to reduce to obedience three millions of their own race in America. What was the explanation? The Inherent Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon Stock?

For long we were content to draw such a flattering conclusion and leave it at that, until Seeley pointed out the uncomfortable fact that the great bulk of the forces used in the conquest of India were not British at all. They were Indian. India was conquered for Great Britain by the natives of India.

‘The nations of India (says Seeley) have been conquered by an army of which, on the average, about a fifth part was English. India can hardly be said to have been conquered at all by foreigners; she was rather conquered by herself. If we were justified, which we are not, in personifying India as we personify France or England, we could not describe her as overwhelmed by a foreign enemy; we should rather have to say that she elected to put an end to anarchy by submitting to a single government, even though that government were in the hands of foreigners.’[57]