I am suggesting here that, at the bottom of the choice in favour of the Balance of Power or preponderance as a political method, is neither the desire for safety nor the desire to place ‘might behind right,’ but the desire for domination, the instinct of self-assertion, the anti-social wish to be judge in our own case; and further, that the way out of the difficulty is to discipline this instinct by a better social tradition. To do that we must discredit the old tradition—create a different feeling about it; to which end it is indispensable to face frankly the nature of its moral origins; to look its motives in the face.[68]
It is extremely suggestive in this connection that the ‘realist’ politician, the ‘hard-headed practical man,’ disdainful of Sunday School standards,’ in his defence of national necessity, is quite ready to be contemptuous of national safety and interest when these latter point plainly to a policy of international agreement as against domination. Agreement is then rejected as pusillanimous, and consideration for national interest as placing ‘pocket before patriotism.’ We are then reminded, even by the most realist of nationalists, that nations live for higher things than ‘profit’ or even safety. ‘Internationalism,’ says Colonel Roosevelt, ‘inevitably emasculates its sincere votaries,’ and ‘every civilisation worth calling such’ must be based ‘on a spirit of intense nationalism.’ For Colonel Roosevelt or General Wood in America as for Mr Kipling, or Mr Chesterton, or Mr Churchill, or Lord Northciffe, or Mr Bottomley, and a vast host of poets, professors, editors, historians, bishops, publicists of all sorts in England and France, ‘Internationalist’ and ‘Pacifist’ are akin to political atheist. A moral consideration now replaces the ‘realist.’ The metamorphosis is only intelligible on the assumption here suggested that both explanations or justifications are a rationalisation of the impulse to power and domination.
Our political, quite as much as our social, conduct is in the main the result of motives that are mainly unconscious instinct, habit, unquestioned tradition. So long as we find the result satisfactory, well and good. But when the result of following instinct is disaster, we realise that the time has come to ‘get outside ourselves,’ to test our instincts by their social result. We have then to see whether the ‘reasons’ we have given for our conduct are really its motives. That examination is the first step to rendering the unconscious motive conscious. In considering, for instance, the two methods indicated in this chapter, we say, in ‘rationalising’ our decision, that we chose the lesser of two risks. I am suggesting that in the choice of the method of the Balance of Power our real motive was not desire to achieve security, but domination. It is just because our motives are not mainly intellectual but ‘instinctive’ that the desire for domination is so likely to have played the determining role: for few instincts and innate desires are stronger than that which pushes to ‘self-affirmation’—the assertion of preponderant force.
We have indeed seen that the Balance of Power means in practice the determination to secure a preponderance of power. What is a ‘Balance?’ The two sides will not agree on that, and each to be sure will want it tilted in its favour. We decline to place ourselves within the power of another who may differ from us as to our right. We demand to be stronger, in order that we may be judge in our own case. This means that we shall resist the claim of others to exactly the same thing.
The alternative is partnership. It means trust. But we have seen that the exercise of any form of force, other than that which one single individual can wield, must involve an element of ‘trust.’ The soldiers must be trusted to obey the officers, since the former have by far the preponderance of force; the officers must be trusted to obey the constitution instead of challenging it; the police must be trusted to obey the authorities; the Cabinet must be trusted to obey the electoral decision; the members of an alliance to work together instead of against one another, and so on. Yet the assumption of the ‘Power Politician’ is that the method which has succeeded (notably within the State) is the ‘idealistic’ but essentially unpractical method in which security and advantage are sacrificed to Utopian experiment; while the method of competitive armament, however distressing it may be to the Sunday Schools, is the one that gives us real security. ‘The way to be sure of preserving peace,’ says Mr Churchill, ‘is to be so much stronger than your enemy that he won’t dare to attack you.’ In other words it is obvious that the way for two people to keep the peace is for each to be stronger than the other.
‘You may have made your front door secure’ says Marshal Foch, arguing for the Rhine frontier, ‘but you may as well make sure by having a good high garden wall as well.’
‘Make sure,’ that is the note—si vis pacem.... And he can be sure that ‘the average practical man,’ who prides himself on ‘knowing human nature’ and ‘distrusting theories’ will respond to the appeal. Every club smoking room will decide that ‘the simple soldier’ knows his business and has judged human forces aright.
Yet of course the simple truth is that the ‘hard-headed soldier’ has chosen the one ground upon which all experience, all the facts, are against him. Then how is he able to ‘get away with it’—to ride off leaving at least the impression of being a sternly practical unsentimental man of the world by virtue of having propounded an aphorism which all practical experience condemns? Here is Mr Churchill. He is talking to hard-headed Lancashire manufacturers. He desires to show that he too is no theorist, that he also can be hard-headed and practical. And he—who really does know the mind of the ‘hard-headed business man’—is perfectly aware that the best road to those hard heads is to propound an arrant absurdity, to base a proposed line of policy on the assumption of a physical impossibility, to follow a will-o’-the-wisp which in all recorded history has led men into a bog.
They applaud Mr Churchill, not because he has put before them a cold calculation of relative risk in the matter of maintaining peace, an indication, where, on the whole, the balance of safety lies; Mr Churchill, of course, knows perfectly well that, while professing to do that, he has been doing nothing of the sort. He has, in reality, been appealing to a sentiment, the emotion which is strongest and steadiest in the ‘hard-faced men’ who have elbowed their way to the top in a competitive society. He has ‘rationalised’ that competitive sentiment of domination by putting forward a ‘reason’ which can be avowed to them and to others.
Colonel Roosevelt managed to inject into his reasons for predominance a moral strenuousness which Mr Churchill does not achieve.