Who should intervene in backward states, what the intervention shall mean, how the protectorate shall be conducted—this is the bone and sinew of modern diplomacy. The weak spots of the world are the arenas of friction. This friction is increased and made popular by frontier disputes over Alsace-Lorraine or Italia Irredenta, but in my judgment the boundary lines of Europe are not the grand causes of diplomatic struggle. Signor Ferrero confessed recently that the present generation of Italians had all but forgotten Italia Irredenta, and the Revanche has been a decadent French dream until the Entente and the Dual Alliance began to clash in Morocco, in Turkey, in China. Alsace-Lorraine has no doubt kept alive suspicion of Germany, and predisposed French opinion to inflicting diplomatic defeats in Morocco. But the arena where the European Powers really measure their strength against each other is in the Balkans, in Africa, and in Asia....
War is for sake of prestige in undeveloped countries.
This war is fought not for specific possessions, but for that diplomatic prestige and leadership which are required to solve all the different problems. It is like a great election to decide who shall have the supreme power in the Concert of Europe. Austria began the contest to secure her position as a great Power in the Balkans; Russia entered it to thwart this ambition; France was engaged because German diplomatic supremacy would reduce France to a “second-class power,” which means a power that holds world power on sufferance; England could not afford to see France “crushed” or Belgium annexed because British imperialism cannot alone cope with the vigor of Germany; Germany felt herself “encircled,” which meant that wherever she went—to Morocco, Asia Minor, or China—there a coalition was ready to thwart her. The ultimate question involved was this: whenever in the future diplomats meet to settle a problem in the backward countries, which European nation shall be listened to most earnestly? What shall be the relative prestige of Germans and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Russians; what sense of their power, what historical halo, what threat of force, what stimulus to admiration shall they possess? To lose this war will be like being a Republican politician in the solid South when the Democrats are in power at Washington. It will mean political, social, and economic inferiority.
World problem is due to competition for unorganized territory.
Americans have every reason to understand the dangers of unorganized territory, to realize clearly why it is a “problem.” Our Civil War was preceded by thirty or forty years of diplomatic struggle for a balance of power in the West. Should the West be slave or free, that is, should it be the scene of homesteads and free labor, or of plantations and slaves? Should it be formed into States which sent senators and representatives to support the South or the North? We were virtually two nations, each trying to upset the balance of power in its own favor. And when the South saw that it was beaten, that is to say “encircled,” when its place in the Western sun was denied, the South seceded and fought. Until the problem or organizing the West had been settled, peace and federal union were impossible.
The world’s problem is the same problem tremendously magnified and complicated.
The point I have been making will, I fear, seem a paradox to many readers,—that the anarchy of the world is due to the backwardness of weak states; that the modern nations have lived in an armed peace and collapsed into hideous warfare because in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, Central and South America there are rich territories in which weakness invites exploitation, in which inefficiency and corruption invite imperial expansion, in which the prizes are so great that the competition for them is to the knife.
This is the world problem upon which all schemes for arbitration, leagues of peace, reduction of armaments must prove themselves. The diplomats have in general recognized this. It was commonly said for a generation that Europe would be lucky if it escaped a general war over the breakup of Turkey in Europe. The Sick Man has infected the Continent. Our own “preparedness” campaign is based on the fear that the defenselessness of Latin America will invite European aggression, that the defenselessness of China will bring on a struggle in the Pacific. Few informed people imagine for a moment that any nation of the world contemplates seizing or holding our own territory. That would be an adventure so ridiculous that no statesman would think of it. If we get into trouble it will be over some place like Mexico, or Haiti, or the Philippines, or the Panama Canal, or Manchuria, or Hawaii....
Need of European legislatures to deal with problem.
Europe has also recognized that some kind of world government must be created. The phrase world government, of course, arouses immediate opposition; the idea of a European legislature would be pronounced utopian. Yet there have been a number of European legislatures. The Berlin Conference of 1885 was called to discuss “freedom of commerce in the basin and mouths of the Congo; application to the Congo and Niger of the principles adopted at the Congress of Vienna with a view to preserve freedom of navigation on certain international rivers ... and a definition of formalities to be observed so that new occupations on the African coasts shall be deemed effective.” The Powers represented made all sorts of reservations, but they managed to pass a “General Act of the West African Conference.” The Congo Free State was recognized. As Mr. Harris says: “Bismarck saw in this a means of preventing armed conflict over the Congo Basin, of restricting the Portuguese advance, and of preserving the region to free trade.” What was it that Bismarck saw? He saw that the great wealth of the Congo and its political weakness might make trouble in Europe unless the Congo was organized into the legal structure of the world.