A Europe which has organized itself for peace will be at no loss for expedients wherewith to reconcile the appetites of capital with the rights of nationality. A spectator of the moving cosmopolitan drama which is played, the world over, around this central motive of the export of capital, can readily invent attractive schemes for the regulation of the process. But such exercises tempt one to ignore the dynamics of the problem. The same primitive forces of greed which in earlier centuries inspired conquests and migrations are still strong enough to grip diplomacy and build navies. Our first task is to win at home the power to control this export of capital, to check it where it disregards the current ethical standards, to rebuff it where it would lead us into international rivalry, and at last to use it as the potent servant of a humane diplomacy. It can be forbidden to carry the devastations of slavery into distant continents. It can be checked in its usurer’s practises upon simple States. It can be used, if it be firmly mastered, to starve into submission a semi-civilized Empire which meditates aggressive war, or draws from Western stores the funds to finance its own oppressions.
H. N. Brailsford, “The War of Steel and Gold,” pp. 241-253.
THE PROBLEM OF DIPLOMACY
The chief problem of diplomacy is the weak State.
This whole business of jockeying for position is at first glance so incredibly silly that many liberals regard diplomacy as a cross between sinister conspiracy and a meaningless etiquette. It would be all of that if the stakes of diplomacy were not real. Those stakes have to be understood, for without such an understanding diplomacy is incomprehensible and any scheme of world peace an idle fancy.
The chief, the overwhelming problem of diplomacy seems to be the weak state—the Balkans, the African sultanates, Turkey, China, and Latin America, with the possible exception of the Argentine, Chile, and Brazil. These states are “weak” because they are industrially backward and at present politically incompetent. They are rich in resources and cheap labor, poor in capital, poor in political experience, poor in the power of defense. The government of these states is the supreme problem of diplomacy. Just as the chief task of American politics to the Civil War was the organization of the unexploited West, so the chief task of world diplomacy to-day is the organization of virgin territory and backward peoples. I use backward in the conventional sense to mean a people unaccustomed to modern commerce and modern political administration.
This solicitude about backward peoples seems to many good democrats a combination of superciliousness and greed....
And yet the plain fact is that the interrelation of peoples has gone so far that to advocate international laissez-faire now is to speak a counsel of despair. Commercial cunning, lust of conquest, rum, bibles, rifles, missionaries, traders, concessionaires have brought the two civilizations into contact, and the problem created must be solved, not evaded.
Economic imperialism and the weak State.