The Threefold Commonwealth

by Rudolf Steiner

IV

International Aspects of the Threefold Commonwealth

The internal structure of a healthy social organism makes its international relations also threefold. Each of its three branches will have its own independent relation to the corresponding branch of other threefold organisms. All manner of interconnections will spring up between the economic network of one district and that of another, without being directly influenced by the connections between their “rights-States.”[1] And, conversely, the relations between their “rights-States” will, within certain limits, develope in complete independence of their economic connections. This independence of origin will enable these two sets of relations to act as a check upon each other in cases of dispute. Such a close interweaving of interests will grow up, as will make territorial frontiers seem negligible in the life of mankind.

The spiritual organisations of the different districts will become linked in a way that only the common spiritual life of mankind can make possible. Detached from the State and placed on its own footing, the spiritual life will develope all manner of connections, that are impossible when the recognition of spiritual services does not rest with a spiritual corporation, but with the “rights-State.” So far as this is concerned, there is no real difference between the services rendered by science,—which are frankly international,—and those rendered in any other spiritual field. The common language of a nation, and all that goes along with language, constitutes one such field of spiritual life,—including the national consciousness itself. The people of one language-area do not come into unnatural conflict with those of another language-area, except when they try to make their national form of civilisation predominant through the use of their State-organisation or their economic power. If one national civilisation spreads more readily, and has greater spiritual fertility than another, then it is quite right that it should spread; and the process of spreading will be a peaceful one, provided it comes about solely through the agency of the spiritual communities of the different social organisms.

At the present time, the keenest opposition to the threefold order will come precisely from those groups of mankind which have clustered round a common origin of speech and national culture. Such opposition however must break down before the common goal of all mankind,—a goal towards which men will set their faces with increasing consciousness from the very necessities of life in the modern age. Mankind will come to feel, that each of its many parts can only lead a life worthy of their common humanity, when bound in living links to all the rest. National affinities, together with other impulses of a natural order, are amongst the causes which historically led to the formation of communities in “rights” and communities of industrial economy. But the forces to which nationalities owe their growth require for their development free mutual interaction, untrammelled by any ties that grow up between the respective bodies of State and the economic Associations. And the way of achieving this, is for the various national communities to develope the threefold order within their own social structures; and then their three branches can each expand its own relation with the corresponding branches of the other communities.

In this way, peoples, States, economic bodies, become grouped together in formations that are very various in shape and character, and every part of mankind becomes so linked with the other parts, that each is conscious of the life of the other pulsing through its own daily interests. A league of nations is the outcome,—arising out of root impulses that correspond to actual realities. There will be no need to “institute” one, built up solely on legal theories of right.[2]

To anyone, who is thinking of these things in terms of real life, it must seem of especial importance, that the aims here set before the body social, whilst having a meaning for the whole of mankind collectively, are such as can be put in practice by any single corporate community, no matter what may be the attitude adopted by other countries for the time being.—If one corporate community has organised itself into its three natural divisions, the administratures of the three divisions can act together as a single body, and thus perfectly well form relations even with outside communities that are not yet prepared to adopt the threefold order themselves. Whoever leads the way with the threefold order, will be furthering the common aim of all mankind. What actually has to be done, will be carried through by that strength which an aim brings with it in practical life, when it is rooted in the actual guiding forces of humanity,—rather than by diplomatic agreements, or drafting schemes at conferences. It is on a basis of reality that this aim is conceived in thought. It is one to be pursued in the real action of life at any and every point amongst the communities of men.

Anyone, watching what was going on in the life of peoples and of States during the last 30 or 40 years from a point of view such as given in these pages, could see how the State-structures that had been built up in the course of history, with their blending of spiritual life, “rights” and industrial economy, were becoming involved in international relations that were heading for catastrophe. At the same time, it was equally plain, that the opposite forces at work within mankind’s unconscious impulses were tending towards the threefold order. Here lies the remedy for those convulsions that have been brought about by the mania for unification. The way of life among the “leaders of mankind” was not however of the kind to enable them to see what had been for years past slowly working up. In the spring and summer of 1914, one still found “statesmen” saying, that, thanks to the governments’ exertions, the peace of Europe was, so far as could be humanly foreseen, assured. These “statesmen” simply had not the faintest notion, that all that they were doing and saying had absolutely lost touch with the course of real events. Yet these were the people who were looked up to as “practical”; and people were regarded as little better than “cranks” at that time, who had been forming other views during all those years, which differed from those of the “statesmen”;—such views, for instance, as those expressed by the present writer months before the war-catastrophe, when addressing a small audience in Vienna,—(a large audience would certainly have laughed him down.) He then spoke of the danger menacing, in more or less these words:—“The tendencies prevalent in the life of the present day will continue to gather strength, until they end by annihilating themselves. And if one reads social life with the eyes of the spirit, one can perceive everywhere the ghastly signs of social tumours forming. Here is the great menace to our civilisation, manifest to anyone able to read below the surface of existence. It is this that is so appalling, so overpowering, that—even if one could otherwise repress all zeal on behalf of a science in which spiritual knowledge is made instrumental to the knowledge of life’s events,—these things alone would impell one to speak, to proclaim the remedy, to hurl one’s words as it were in the face of the world. If the body social follows the same line of evolution as hitherto, it will become full of sores—sores of civilisation that will be for it what cancers are for man’s natural body.”—Such were the foundations upon which life rested, and which the ruling circles neither could nor would see. But their special view of life led them to find in such conditions a pretext for measures that would have been better left undone, but for none that were of a sort to establish confidence between the different communities of mankind.—Whoever is under the belief that the social necessities of the time played no part amongst the immediate causes of the present world-catastrophe, should ask himself this question:—What direction would political impulses have taken in the States that were rushing into mutual war, if the “statesmen” had recognised the social needs of the times, and embodied these in their aims? And how much that was done would have been left undone, if their efforts had thus been directed to something more substantial than piling up inflammable material, that was bound sooner or later to lead to an explosion? As one watched the relations between the States during recent years, and the cancer creeping on in them, owing to the form that social life had taken amongst the leading sections of mankind, one could understand how a man of broadly human spiritual interests, such as Hermann Grimm, was led to speak as he did, so early in 1888, when discussing the form that social aims had taken amongst the leading circles:—“The end they set before them, is the ultimate formation of mankind into a commonwealth of brothers, who ever afterwards shall go forward hand-in-hand, actuated only by the noblest impulses. Merely to follow history on the map of Europe, one would imagine that a general internecine massacre were the next step imminent.” Only the thought, that a “road must be found” to the true riches of human life, this thought alone can keep alive a sense of human worth. It is a thought “which hardly seems compatible with the gigantic preparations for war that we and our neighbours too are making. And yet, I believe in it. And in the light of this thought we must live; unless indeed it were better to put an end to human existence altogether by common consent, and appoint an official day of universal suicide” (Herman Grimm: “The Last Five Years,”—Pub. 1888.)—What were these “preparations for war,” save steps taken by men who were bent upon preserving their old State constructions in one and undivided form, despite the fact that the evolution of the new age had made this onefold form incompatible with the very essence of healthy relations between the peoples. Health can, nevertheless, be brought into the common life of the peoples, by that form of social order that takes its shape from the requirements of the times.

The State-structure of Austria-Hungary had, for more than half a century, been struggling towards a new formation. Its spiritual life, which had its roots in a multiplicity of racial communities, called for a form of development to which the old onefold State, created by outworn impulses, offered a continual obstacle. The incident with which the great catastrophe opened—the quarrel between Austria and Serbia—is a conclusive sign, that the political frontiers of the onefold State ought not, after a certain point of time, to have formed the cultural frontiers for the spiritual life of its various nationalities. Could the spiritual life have been on its own footing, independent of the political State and political boundaries, it would have had a chance to develope regardless of frontiers, in a manner befitting the true purpose of the several nationalities; and the struggle, which was deeply rooted in the spiritual life, need never have found vent in a political catastrophe. Deliberate development in this direction seemed an utter impossibility, sheer lunacy indeed, to all “statesman-like” thinkers in Austria-Hungary. Their habits of thought admitted of no other conception than that the boundaries of State must also be the boundaries of national community. They could not understand, how spiritual organisations could be formed, cutting across state frontiers, and comprising the school system and other branches of spiritual life. It was against all their habitual conceptions. And yet this “inconceivable” thing is what international life demands in the new age. A really practical thinker ought not to be held up by apparent impossibilities, and assume that the obstacles in the way of doing what is requisite are insurmountable. He must simply concentrate on surmounting them. But instead of turning their statesman-like thought along lines that would have been in unison with modern-age requirements, they devoted their whole energies to bolstering up the onefold form of State against the demands of the age by all manner of institutions. The State grew more and more unwieldy and impossible in its structure. And in the second decade of the twentieth century, it had reached a point when it could no longer keep itself together in its old form, and must either passively await dissolution, or else attempt to accomplish externally by force the internally impossible, and maintain itself by the power which a war-footing would give to it. In 1914 there remained for the Austro-Hungarian “statesmen” but one alternative:—Either they must direct their policy along the lines of life in a healthy social order, and make known their intention to the world,—a course which might have revived new confidence,—or else they were absolutely obliged to start a war, in order to keep the old structure from tumbling about their ears.—What happened in 1914 must be judged from these underlying causes; otherwise it is impossible to think correctly and justly about the question of “blame.” The fact that many nationalities went to compose the fabric of her State, might well seem to have made it Austria-Hungary’s mission in the world’s history to lead the way in evolving a healthy form of social order. The mission was not recognised. And this sin against the spirit of the world’s historic life drove Austria-Hungary into war.