The point I desired to emphasise was that unless we keep before ourselves the welfare of the individual as the test of politics (not necessarily the motive of each individual for himself) we constantly forget the purpose and aim of politics, and patriotism becomes not the love of one’s fellow countrymen and their welfare, but the love of power expressed by that larger ‘ego’ which is one’s group. ‘Mystic Nationalism’ comes to mean something entirely divorced from any attribute of individual life. The ‘Nation’ becomes an abstraction apart from the life of the individual.
There is a further consideration. The fact that the Nation-State is not co-terminous with Society is shown by its vital need of others; it cannot live by itself; it must co-operate with others; consequently it has obligations to those others. The demonstration of that fact involves an appeal to ‘interest,’ to welfare. The most visible and vital co-operation outside the limits of the Nation-State is the economic; it gives rise to the most definite, as to the most fundamental obligation—the obligation to accord to others the right to existence. It is out of the common economic need that the actual structure of some mutual arrangement, some social code, will arise, has indeed arisen. This makes the beginning of the first visible structure of a world society. And from these homely beginnings will come, if at all, a more vivid sense of the wider society. And the ‘economic’ interest, as distinct from the temperamental interest of domination, has at least this social advantage. Welfare is a thing that in society may well grow the more it is divided: the better my countrymen the richer is my life likely to become. Domination has not this quality: it is mutually exclusive. We cannot all be masters. If any country is to dominate, somebody or some one else’s country must be dominated; if the one is to be the Superior Race, some other must be inferior. And the inferior sooner or later objects, and from that resistance comes the disintegration that now menaces us.
It is perfectly true that we cannot create the kind of State which will best subserve the interests of its citizens unless each is ready to give allegiance to it, irrespective of his immediate personal ‘interest.’ (The word is put in inverted commas because in most men not compelled by bad economic circumstances to fight fiercely for daily bread, sheer physical sustenance, the satisfaction of a social and creative instinct is a very real ‘interest,’ and would, in a well-organised society, be as spontaneous as interest in sport or social ostentation.) The State must be an idea, an abstraction, capable of inspiring loyalty, embodying the sense of interdependence. But the circumstances of the independent modern national State, in frequent and unavoidable contact with other similar States, are such as to stimulate not mainly the motives of social cohesion, but those instincts of domination which become anti-social and disruptive. The nationalist stands condemned not because he asks allegiance or loyalty to the social group, but first, because he asks absolute allegiance to something which is not the social group but only part of it, and secondly, because that exclusive loyalty gives rise to disruptive pugnacities, injurious to all.
In pointing out the inadequacy of the unitary political Nation-State as the embodiment of final sovereignty, an inadequacy due to precisely the development of such organisations as Labour, the present writer merely anticipated the drift of much political writing of the last ten years on the problem of State sovereignty; as also the main drift of events.[125]
If Mr Lindsay finds the very mild suggestions in The Great Illusion touching the necessary qualification of the sovereignty of the Nation-State subversive, one wonders what his feelings are on reading, say, Mr Cole, who in a recent book (Social Theory) leaves the Political State so attenuated that one questions whether what is left is not just ghost. At the best the State is just one collateral association among others.
The sheer mechanical necessities of administration of an industrial society, so immeasurably more complex than the simple agricultural society which gave us the unitary political State, seem to be pushing us towards a divided or manifold sovereignty. If we are to carry over from the National State into the new form of the State—as we seem now in danger of doing—the attitude of mind which demands domination for ‘our’ group, the pugnacities, suspicions, and hostilities characteristic of nationalist temper, we may find the more complex society beyond our social capacity. I agree that we want a common political loyalty, that mere obedience to the momentary interest of our group will not give it; but neither will the temper of patriotism as we have seen it manifested in the European national State. The loyalty to some common code will probably only come through a sense of its social need. (It is on the ground of its social need that Mr Lindsay defends the political State.) At present we have little sense of that need, because we have (as Versailles proved) a belief in the effectiveness of our own power to exact the services we may require. The rival social or industrial groups have a like belief. Only a real sense of interdependence can undermine that belief; and it must be a visible, economic interdependence.
A social sense may be described as an instinctive feeling for ‘what will work.’ We are only yet at the beginning of the study of human motive. So much is subconscious that we are certainly apt to ascribe to one motive conduct which in fact is due to another. And among the neglected motives of conduct is perhaps a certain sense of art—a sense, in this connection, of the difficult ‘art of living together.’ It is probably true that what some, at least, find so revolting in some of the manifestations of nationalism, chauvinism, is that they violently challenge the whole sense of what will work, to say nothing of the rights of others. ‘If every one took that line, nobody could live.’ In a social sense this is gross and offensive. It has an effect on one like the manners of a cad. It is that sort of motive, perhaps, more than any calculation of ‘interest,’ which may one day cause a revulsion against Balkanisation. But to that motive some informed sense of interdependence is indispensable.
CHAPTER VI
VINDICATION BY EVENTS
IF the question merely concerned the past, if it were only a matter of proving that this or that ‘School of thought’ was right, this re-examination of arguments put forward before the War would be a sterile business enough. But it concerns the present and the future; bears directly and pertinently upon the reasons which have led us into the existing chaos; and the means by which we might hope to emerge. As much to-day as before the War (and far more obviously) is it true that upon the reply to the questions raised in this discussion depends the continuance of our civilisation. Our society is still racked by a fierce struggle for political power, our populations still demand the method of coercion, still refuse to face the facts of interdependence, still insist clamorously upon a policy which denies those facts.
The propositions we are here discussing were not, it is well to recall, merely to the effect that ‘war does not pay,’ but that the ideas and impulses out of which it grows, and which underlay—and still underlie—European politics, give us an unworkable society; and that unless they can be corrected they will increasingly involve social collapse and disintegration.