The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

Let us note the phase of the argument that the procedure adopted renders out of date. A good deal of The Great Illusion was devoted to showing that Germany had no need to expand territorially; that her desire for overseas colonies was sentimental, and had little relation to the problem of providing for her population. At the beginning of 1914 that was certainly true. It is not true to-day. The process by which she supported her excess population before the War will, to put it at its lowest, be rendered extremely difficult of maintenance as the result of allied action. The point, however, is that we are not benefiting by this paralysis of German industry. We are suffering very greatly from it: suffering so much that we can be neither politically nor economically secure until this condition is brought to an end. There can be no peace in Europe, and consequently no safety for us or France, so long as we attempt by power to maintain a policy which denies to millions in the midst of our civilisation the possibility of earning their living. In so far as the new conditions create difficulties which did not originally exist, our victory does but the more glaringly demonstrate the economic futility of our policy towards the vanquished.

An argument much used in The Great Illusion as disproving the claims made for conquest was the position of the population of small States. ‘Very well,’ may say the critic, ‘Germany is now in the position of a small State. But you talk about her being ruined!’

In the conditions of 1914, the small State argument was entirely valid (incidentally the Allied Governments argue that it still holds).[121] It does not hold to-day. In the conditions of 1920 at any rate, the small State is, like Germany, economically at the mercy of British sea power or the favoritism of the French Foreign Office, to a degree that was unknown before the War. How is the situation to develop? Is the Dutch or Swedish or Austrian industrial city permanently to be dependent upon the good graces of some foreign official sitting in Whitehall or the Quai d’Orsay? At present, if an industrialist in such a city wishes to import coal or to ship a cargo to one of the new Baltic States, he may be prevented owing to political arrangements between France and England. If that is to be the permanent situation of the non-Entente world, then peace will become less and less secure, and all our talk of having fought for the rights of the small and weak will be a farce. The friction, the irritation, and sense of grievance will prolong the unrest and uncertainty, and the resultant decline in the productivity of Europe will render our own economic problems the more acute. The power by which we thus arrogate to ourselves the economic dictatorship of Europe will ultimately be challenged.

Can we revert to the condition of things which, by virtue of certain economic freedoms that were respected, placed the trader or industrialist of a small State pretty much on an equality, in most things, with the trader of the Great State? Or shall we go forward to a recognised international economic system, in which the small States will have their rights secured by a definite code?

Reversion to the old individualist ‘trans-nationalism’ or an internationalism without considerable administrative machinery—seems now impossible. The old system is destroyed at its sources within each State. The only available course now is, recognising the fact of an immense growth in the governmental control or regulation of foreign trade, to devise definite codes or agreements to meet the case. If the obtaining of necessary raw materials by all the States other than France and England is to be the subject of wrangles between officials, each case to be treated on its merits, we shall have a much worse anarchy than before the War. A condition in which two or three powers can lay down the law for the world will indeed be an anti-climax.

We may never learn the lesson; the old futile struggles may go on indefinitely. But if we do put our intelligences to the situation it will call for a method of treatment somewhat different from that which pre-war conditions required.

For the purposes of the War, in the various Inter-Allied bodies for the apportionment of shipping and raw material, we had the beginnings of an economic League of Nations, an economic World Government. Those bodies might have been made democratic, and enlarged to include neutral interests, and maintained for the period of Reconstruction (which might in any case have been regarded as a phase properly subject to war treatment in these matters). But these international organisations were allowed to fall to pieces on the removal of the common enmity which held the European Allies and America together.

The disappearance of these bodies does not mean the disappearance of ‘controls,’ but the controls will now be exercised in considerable part through vast private Capitalist Trusts dealing with oil, meat, and shipping. Nor will the interference of government be abolished. If it is considered desirable to ensure to some group a monopoly of phosphates, or palm nuts, the aid of governments will be invoked for the purpose. But in this case the government will exercise its powers not as the result of a publicly avowed and agreed principle, but illicitly, hypocritically.

While professing to exercise a ‘mandate’ for mankind, a government will in fact be using its authority to protect special interests. In other words we shall get a form of internationalism in which the international capitalist Trust will control the Government instead of the Government’s controlling the Trust.

The fact that this was happening more and more before the War was one reason why the old individualist order has broken down. More and more the professed position and function of the State was not its real position and function. The amount of industry and trade dependent upon governmental intervention (enterprises of the Chinese Loan and Bagdad Railway type) before the War was small compared with the quantity that owed nothing to governmental protection. But the illicit pressure exercised upon governments by those interested in the exploitation of backward countries was out of proportion to the public importance of their interests.