The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

An action in public policy—the proclamation of the blockade, or the confiscation of so much tonnage, or the cession of territory, or the refusal of a loan—these things are remote and vague; not only is the relation between results and causes remote and sometimes difficult to establish, but the results themselves are invisible and far away. And when the results of a policy are remote, and can be slurred over in our minds, we are perfectly ready to apply, logically and ruthlessly, the most ferocious of political theories. It is of supreme importance then what those theories happen to be. When the issue of war and peace hangs in the balance, the beam may well be kicked one way or the other by our general political philosophy, these somewhat vague and hazy notions about life being a struggle, and nature red of tooth and claw, about wars being part of the cosmic process, sanctioned by professors and bishops and writers. It may well be these vague notions that lead us to acquiesce in the blockade or the newest war. The typhus or the rickets do not kill or maim any the less because we do not in our minds connect those results with the political abstractions that we bandy about so lightly. And we touch there the greatest service which a more ‘economic’ treatment of European problems may perform. If the Treaty of Versailles had been more economic it would also have been a more humane and human document. If there had been more of Mr Keynes and less of M. Clemenceau, there would have been not only more food in the world, but more kindliness; not only less famine, but less hate; not only more life, but a better way of life; those living would have been nearer to understanding and discarding the way of death.

Let us summarise the points so far made with reference to the ‘economic’ motive.

We need not accept any hard and fast (and in the view of the present writer, unsound) doctrine of economic determinism, in order to admit the truth of the following:—

1. Until economic difficulties are so far solved as to give the mass of the people the means of secure and tolerable physical existence, economic considerations and motives will tend to exclude all others. The way to give the spiritual a fair chance with ordinary men and women is not to be magnificently superior to their economic difficulties, but to find a solution for them. Until the economic dilemma is solved, no solution of moral difficulties will be adequate. If you want to get rid of the economic preoccupation, you must solve the worst of the economic problem.

2. In the same way the solution of the economic conflict between nations will not of itself suffice to establish peace; but no peace is possible until that conflict is solved. That makes it of sufficient importance.

3. The ‘economic’ problem involved in international politics the use of political power for economic ends—is also one of Right, including the most elemental of all rights, that to exist.

4. The answer which we give to that question of Right will depend upon our answer to the actual query of The Great Illusion: must a country of expanding population expand its territory or trade by means of its political power, in order to live? Is the political struggle for territory a struggle for bread?

5. If we take the view that the truth is contained in neither an unqualified affirmative nor an unqualified negative, then all the more is it necessary that the interdependence of peoples, the necessity for a truly international economy, should become a commonplace. A wider realisation of those facts would help to create that pre-disposition necessary for a belief in the workability of voluntary co-operation, a belief which must precede any successful attempt to make such co-operation the basis of an international order.

6. The economic argument of The Great Illusion, if valid, destroys the pseudo-scientific justification for political immoralism, the doctrine of State necessity, which has marked so much of classical statecraft.

7. The main defects of the Treaty of Versailles are due to the pressure of a public opinion obsessed by just those ideas of nations as persons, of conflicting interests, which The Great Illusion attempted to destroy. If the Treaty had been inspired by the ideas of interdependence of interest, it would have been not only more in the interests of the Allies, but morally sounder, providing a better ethical basis for future peace.