The Hungarians used the liberty they won in 1867 to subject the Slavonic population between themselves and the sea, and prevent its union with the free principality of Serbia of the same Slavonic nationality. This drove Serbia in 1912 to follow Hungary’s example by seizing the coast of the non-Slavonic Albanians; and when Austria-Hungary prevented this (a right act prompted by most unrighteous motives), Serbia fought an unjust war with Bulgaria and subjected a large Bulgarian population, in order to gain access to the only seaboard left her, the friendly Greek port of Salonika.
Hungary and Serbia are nominally national states: but more than half the population in Hungary, and perhaps nearly a quarter in Serbia, is alien, only held within the state by force against its will. The energy of both states is perverted to the futile and demoralizing work of “Magyarizing” and “Serbizing” subject foreign populations, and they have not even been successful. The resistance of Southern Slav nationalism on the defensive to the aggression of Hungarian nationalism has given the occasion for the present catastrophe.
The evil element in nationalism under its many names, “Chauvinism,” “Jingoism,” “Prussianism,” is the one thing in our present European civilization that can and does produce the calamity of war. If our object is to prevent war, then, the way to do so is to purge Nationality of this evil. This we cannot do by any mechanical means, but only by a change of heart, by converting public opinion throughout Europe from “National Competition” to “National Cooperation.” Public opinion will never be converted so long as the present system of injustice remains in force, so long as one nation has less and another more than its due. The first step towards internationalism is not to flout the problems of nationality, but to solve them.
The map of Europe must be justly revised.
The most important practical business, then, of the conference that meets when war is over, will be the revision of the map of Europe....
Otherwise no permanent settlement is possible.
If we do not think about nationality, it is simply because we have long taken it for granted, and our mind is focussed on posterior developments; but it is increasingly hard to keep ourselves out of touch with other countries, and though our blindness has been partly distraction, it has also been in part deliberate policy. We saw well enough that the present phase of the national problem in Europe carried in it the seeds of war. We rightly thought that war itself was the evil, an evil incomparably greater than the national injustices that might become the cause of it. We knew that, if these questions were opened, war would follow. We accordingly adopted the only possible course. We built our policy on the chance that national feeling could be damped down till it had been superseded in the public opinion of Europe by other interests, not because Nationalism was unjustified, but because it endangered so much more than it was worth. Knowing that we had passed out of the nationalist phase ourselves, and that from our present political point of view war was purely evil, we hoped that it was merely a question of time for the Continental populations to reach the same standpoint. Notably in Germany, the focus of danger, we saw social interests coming more and more to the front at the expense of militarism. We threw ourselves into the negative task of staving off the catastrophe in the interim, by a strenuous policy of compromise and conciliation, which has been successful on at least two critical occasions. Now that the evil has been too powerful and the catastrophe has happened, the reasons for this policy are dead. Nationalism has been strong enough to produce war in spite of us. It has terribly proved itself to be no outworn creed, but a vital force to be reckoned with. It is stronger on the Continent than social politics. It is the raw material that litters the whole ground. We must build it into our foundations, or give up the task, not only of constructive social advance beyond the limits we have already reached, but even of any fundamental reconstruction of what the war will have destroyed.
Perhaps we might have foretold this from the case of Ireland immediately under our eyes. Failure to solve her national problem has arrested Ireland’s development since the seventeenth century, and imprisoned her in a world of ideas almost unintelligible to an Englishman till he has traveled in the Balkans. This has been England’s fault, and we are now at last in a fair way to remedy it. The moment we have succeeded in arranging that the different national groups in Ireland govern themselves in the way they really wish, the national question will pass from the Irish consciousness; they will put two centuries behind them at one leap, and come into line with ourselves. The Dublin strike, contemporary with the arming of the Volunteers, shows how the modern problems are jostling at the heels of the old. Although “Unionist” and “Nationalist” politicians could still declare that their attitude towards the strike was neutral, the parliament of the new Irish state will discuss the social problem and nothing else.
Nationality is subjective not material.
Ireland, then, has forced us to think about the problem of nationalism; and our Irish experience will be invaluable to us when peace is made, and we take in hand, in concert with our allies, the national questions of the rest of Europe. To begin with, we already have a notion of what Nationality is. Like all great forces in human life, it is nothing material or mechanical, but a subjective psychological feeling in living people. This feeling can be kindled by the presence of one or several of a series of factors: a common country, especially if it is a well defined physical region, like an island, a river basin, or a mountain mass; a common language, especially if it has given birth to a literature; a common religion; and that much more impalpable force, a common tradition or sense of memories shared from the past.