We reach in the final analysis of the interplay of motive a very clear political pragmatism. Either policy will justify itself, and by the way it works out in practice, prove that it is right.
Here is a statesman—Italian, say—who takes the ‘realist’ view, and comes to a Peace Conference which may settle for centuries the position of his country in the world—its strength, its capacity for defending itself, the extent of its resources. In the world as he knows it, a country has one thing, and one thing only, upon which it can depend for its national security and the defence of its due rights; and that thing is its own strength. Italy’s adequate defence must include the naval command of the Adriatic and a strategic position in the Tyrol. This means deep harbours on the Dalmatian coast and the inclusion in the Tyrol of a very considerable non-Italian population. To take them may, it is true, not only violate the principle of nationality but shut off the new Yugo-Slav nation from access to the sea and exchange one irredentism for another. But what can the ‘realist’ Italian statesman, whose first duty is to his own country do? He is sorry, but his own nationality and its due protection are concerned; and the Italian nation will be insecure without those frontiers and those harbours. Self-preservation is the law of life for nations as for other living things. You have, unfortunately, a condition in which the security of one means the insecurity of another, and if a statesman in these circumstances has to choose which of the two is to be secure, he must choose his own country.
Some day, of course, there may come into being a League of Nations so effective that nations can really look to it for their safety. Meantime they must look to themselves. But, unfortunately, for each nation to take these steps about strategic frontiers means not only killing the possibility of an effective League: it means, sooner or later, killing the military alliance which is the alternative. If one Alsace-Lorraine could poison European politics in the way it did, what is going to be the effect ultimately of the round dozen that we have created under the treaty? The history of Britain in reference to Arab and Egyptian Nationality; of France in relation to Poland and other Russian border States; of all the Allies in reference to Japanese ambitions in China and Siberia, reveals what is, fundamentally, a precisely similar dilemma.
When the statesmen—Italian or other—insist upon strategic frontiers and territories containing raw materials, on the ground that a nation must look to itself because we live in a world in which international arrangements cannot be depended on, they can be quite certain that the reason they give is a sound one: because their own action will make it so: their action creates the very conditions to which they appeal as the reason for it. Their decision, with the popular impulse of sacred egoism which supports it, does something more than repudiate Mr Wilson’s principles; it is the beginning of the disruption of the Alliance upon which their countries have depended. The case is put in a manifesto issued a year or two ago by a number of eminent Americans from which we have already quoted in Chapter III.
It says:—
‘If, as in the past, nations must look for their future security chiefly to their own strength and resources, then inevitably, in the name of the needs of national defence, there will be claims for strategic frontiers and territories with raw material which do violence to the principle of nationality. Afterwards those who suffer from such violations would be opposed to the League of Nations, because it would consecrate the injustice of which they would be the victims. A refusal to trust to the League of Nations, and a demand for “material” guarantees for future safety, will set up that very distrust which will afterwards be appealed to as justification for regarding the League as impracticable because it inspires no general confidence. A bold “Act of Political Faith” in the League will justify itself by making the League a success; but, equally, lack of faith will justify itself by ruining the League.’
That is why, when in the past the realist statesman has sometimes objected that he does not believe in internationalism because it is not practical, I have replied that it is not practical because he does not believe in it.
The prerequisite to the creation of a society is the Social Will. And herein lies the difficulty of making any comparative estimate of the respective risks of the alternative courses. We admit that if the nations would sink their sacred egoisms and pledge their power to mutual and common protection, the risk of such a course would disappear. We get the paradox that there is no risk if we all take the risk. But each refuses to begin. William James has illustrated the position:—
‘I am climbing the Alps, and have had the ill luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in myself make me sure that I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my feet to execute what, without those subjective emotions, would have been impossible.
‘But suppose that, on the contrary, the emotions ... of mistrust predominate.... Why, then, I shall hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the abyss. In this case, and it is one of an immense class, the part of wisdom is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable, preliminary conditions of the realisation of its object. There are cases where faith creates its own justification. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish.’