The important point is that there should be in existence permanent international commissions to deal with those spots of the earth where world crises originate. How many there should be need not be suggested here. There should have been one for Morocco, for the Congo, for the Balkan Peninsula, perhaps for Manchuria; there may have to be one for Constantinople, for certain countries facing the Caribbean Sea. Such international governing bodies are needed wherever the prizes are great, the territory unorganized, and the competition active.
The idea is not over-ambitious. It seems to me the necessary development of schemes which European diplomacy has been playing with for some time. It represents an advance along the line that governments, driven by necessity, have been taking of their own accord. What makes it especially plausible is that it grasps the real problems of diplomacy, that it provides not a panacea but a method and the beginnings of a technique. It is internationalism, not spread thin as a Parliament of Man, but sharply limited to those areas of friction where internationalism is most obviously needed.
Walter Lippmann, “The Stakes of Diplomacy,” pp. 87-135.
SOCIALISTS AND IMPERIALISM
Peace impossible without solution of economic conflicts.
Possibly we shall learn nothing from the war; at the present moment it looks that way. For all the world, including Socialists, seem to be divided between militarists and pacifists. By pacifism I mean of course the movement Socialists have attacked for fifty years—up to the present war—under the name of “bourgeois pacifism,” the idea that disarmament, the Hague Tribunal, and similar devices could put an end to militarism and war.
In one sense of course every internationalist, whether Socialist or Democrat, is a pacifist. Every internationalist is opposed to war. But from the days of Marx and before, up to the present time, all Socialists have been prepared for certain war-producing contingencies which can be abolished neither by calling them “illusions,” as Norman Angell has done, nor by any other phrases or exorcisms. Nor can the economic causes of national conflict be avoided by disarmament, Hague tribunals, international police, or abolition of secret diplomacy, as proposed by the Women’s Peace Party, the British Union of Democratic Control, the Independent Labor Party, etc. In a word, no measure dealing with military affairs or with mere political forms can in the long run have any effect whatever—as long as the present conflict of economic interests between the nations remains. The whole effort of the bourgeois pacifist from the Socialist standpoint is to attempt—in spite of the horrible and tremendous lessons of the present war—to close our eyes resolutely to the great task that lies before us, namely, to find a way either in the near future or ultimately to bring the conflict of national economic interests to an end.
Interests of nations do conflict.
There are two economic forces in the world which can not be conjured away either by words, by mere political rearrangements, or by any action whatever with regard to arms—whether making for more armament or less armament. There is no power at present which can prevent a great independent nation like Russia or Japan, Germany or Austria, where the political conditions are in whole or in part those of the eighteenth century, from declaring wars of conquest either against helpless, backward or small countries, or against the economically more advanced and more democratic countries like England, France, or the United States. It is true that industrial capitalism now preponderates in Germany, but no German publicist has ever denied the tremendous influence of the landlord nobility, both over the government and over the economic and political structure of German society. It is true also that these great agricultural estates are partially operated under capitalistic conditions, but the position of agricultural labor throughout enormous districts of Prussia is certainly semi-feudal. This is equally true of Austria, and the landlord nobility is perhaps even more predominant in Hungary than in Prussia.