The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

The fact of the difference has already been entered into at some length. It remains to see how the change affects the general argument adopted in The Great Illusion.

It does not affect its final conclusions. The argument ran: A conqueror cannot profit by ‘loot’ in the shape of confiscations, tributes, indemnities, which paralyse the economic life of the defeated enemy. They are economically futile. They are unlikely to be attempted, but if they are attempted they will still be futile.[119]

Events have confirmed that conclusion, though not the expectation that the enemy’s economic life would be left undisturbed. We have started a policy which does injure the economic life of the enemy. The more it injures him, the less it pays us. And we are abandoning it as rapidly as nationalist hostilities will permit us. In so far as pre-war conditions pointed to the need of a definitely organised international economic code, the situation created by the Treaty has only made the need more visible and imperative. For, as already explained in the first Part, the old understandings enabled industry to be built up on an international basis; the Treaty of Versailles and its confiscations, prohibitions, controls, have destroyed those foundations. Had that instrument treated German trade and industry as the Germans treated French in 1871 we might have seen a recovery of German economic life relatively as rapid as that which took place in France during the ten years which followed her defeat. We should not to-day be faced by thirty or forty millions in Central and Eastern Europe without secure means of livelihood.

The present writer confesses most frankly—and the critics of The Great Illusion are hereby presented with all that they can make of the admission—that he did not expect a European conqueror, least of all Allied conquerors, to use their victory for enforcing a policy having these results. He believed that elementary considerations of self-interest, the duty of statesmen to consider the needs of their own countries just emerging from war, would stand in the way of a policy of this kind. On the other hand, he was under no illusions as to what would result if they did attempt to enforce that policy. Dealing with the damage that a conqueror might inflict, the book says that such things as the utter destruction of the enemy’s trade

could only be inflicted by an invader as a means of punishment costly to himself, or as the result of an unselfish and expensive desire to inflict misery for the mere joy of inflicting it. In this self-seeking world it is not practical to assume the existence of an inverted altruism of this kind.—(p. 29.)

Because of the ‘interdependence of our credit-built finance and industry’

the confiscation by an invader of private property, whether stocks, shares, ships, mines, or anything more valuable than jewellery or furniture—anything, in short, which is bound up with the economic life of the people—would so react upon the finance of the invader’s country as to make the damage to the invader resulting from the confiscation exceed in value the property confiscated—(p. 29).

Speaking broadly and generally, the conqueror in our day has before him two alternatives: to leave things alone, and in order to do that he need not have left his shores; or to interfere by confiscation in some form, in which case he dries up the source of the profit which tempted him—(p. 59).

All the suggestions made as to the economic futility of such a course—including the failure to secure an indemnity—have been justified.[120]

In dealing with the indemnity problem the book did forecast the likelihood of special trading and manufacturing interests within the conquering nation opposing the only condition upon which a very large indemnity would be possible—that condition being either the creation of a large foreign trade by the enemy or the receipt of payment in kind, in goods which would compete with home production. But the author certainly did not think it likely that England and France would impose conditions so rapidly destructive of the enemy’s economic life that they—the conquerors—would, for their own economic preservation, be compelled to make loans to the defeated enemy.