Third. There are restrictions upon opportunities to trade with territories ruled as colonies or being exploited within spheres of influence. This is what now remains of the old mercantile system which flourished before our Revolutionary War, and which has been weakening ever since. Great Britain claims no preference for herself in her colonies. Other states have been less liberal. The fear of such restrictions being applied against them is to-day the main motive for a policy of colonial oversea possessions. If industrial states could be assured of the application of the open-door policy, no state would envy another its colonies. Colonies should be the world’s.
Fourth. There are restrictions in the free use of the sea. Unlike land routes, ocean routes are offered practically without cost to all, whithersoever the sea runs. Over these, however, until modern times commerce has been subject to pillage by regular warships as well as by pirates. The claims of commerce have been more slowly recognized on the sea than on the land; and, to an extent now unthinkable on land, warring states still feel free to interfere with neutral traders....
National financial groups control foreign policy. Economic oppositions determine foreign policy.
Another factor of increasing importance in the recent conflict of nations has been the competition between groups of financiers and concessionaires, organized upon a “national” basis, to obtain exclusive or preferential control in the undeveloped countries for the profitable use of exported capital. Closely related to commercial competition, this competition for lucrative investments has played an even greater part in producing dangerous international situations. For these financial and commercial interests have sought to use the political and the forcible resources of their respective Governments to enable them to obtain the concessions and other privileges they require for the security and profitable application of their capital. The control of foreign policy thus wielded has been fraught with two perils to world-peace. It has brought the Governments of the competing financial groups into constant friction, and it has been the most fruitful direct source of expeditionary forces and territorial aggressions in the coveted areas. As the struggle for lucrative overseas investments has come to occupy a more important part than the struggle for ordinary markets, the economic oppositions between European Governments have become more and more the determinant factors in foreign policy, and in the competition of armaments, upon which Governments rely to support and to achieve the aims their economic masters impose upon them.
John A. Hobson, “Towards International Government,” pp. 128-139.
TRADE AS A CAUSE OF WAR
Idealism hides real causes of war.
Decent men in the belligerent countries feel a natural repugnance in time of war to any discussion of the economic bearings of the struggle. If nations are to fight with clear consciences and single hearts, they must fight on in the belief that any objects which concern their statesmen beyond the objects of defense and national security are purely idealistic. We are all pragmatists in wartime; we believe what will conduce to victory. Cool observers see clearly the widening out of an immense range of colonial, imperial, and economic issues which will confront us at the settlement and after it. But these things are not debated as we debate the issues of nationality in this war. One might suppose from a study of our press that we are much more vitally interested in the fate of the Slovenes than we are in the trade of China.
This idealism is absolutely sincere, and a natural consequence of the exaltation of emotion which belongs to any war of nations. We can endure the thought that our young men are falling in many thousands for the liberties of little peoples. That brief statement of our aims would end in bathos if we were to add to it the subjection of China to Japanese suzerainty, the partition of Turkey into spheres of influence, the acquisition by the Allies of the German colonies, and the setting up of a Russian customs house at Constantinople. The mischief of this obsession is that the very field which stands most in need of illumination from critical yet idealistic thinking is left in a half light of semi-secrecy, and the will of democracies hardly dreams of intervening in the clash of the interests which divide it. Public opinion and the fortunes of war will govern the settlement of Belgium and Alsace, but in our present temper it is only too probable that all the colonial and economic issues involved in it will be left to the diplomatists with only the interests behind them.