So it is with the European organism. It is as full of life, as perpetually in transformation, as the individual national molecules of which it is woven, yet we confuse it in turn with each of its transitory garments. If we are to find a satisfactory issue out of the present crisis, we must begin by correcting our standpoint.
The impending settlement will not be permanent, and the better it fits the situation, the less permanent will it be....
Our real work will be to regulate this immediate settlement so that it varies in harmony with the subsequent growth of Europe and modifies its structure and mechanism to meet the organism’s changing needs.
We have now discovered the flaw in guarantees of the old order. They were framed for rigidity, and therefore were doomed to crack. Our new guarantees must be elastic: they must be forged of steel not cast in iron.
How can we frame guarantees of this malleable character?...
(i.) Firstly, we propose guarantees of political independence and integrity in the case of the three Scandinavian States, the Slovene Unit, the Greek islands off Anatolia, Persia, and the Sultanate of Oman. The autonomy guaranteed to Poland within the Russian Empire comes under the same head.
(ii.) Secondly, we propose to guarantee economic rights-of-way to one State across the political territory of another. Instances of this type are the Russian railway through Norway to the Atlantic and through Persia to the Indian Ocean; Poland’s title to free trade down the Vistula, and to the enjoyment of a free port at Danzig; and Germany’s similar claim to an unhampered outlet at Trieste.
Both these classes of guarantee are adapted from the international machinery invented during the nineteenth century. The first class is an extension of the political guarantee given to Belgium in 1839, the second of the economic right-of-way secured to her through Dutch waters, in order to furnish the commerce of Antwerp with a free passage down the estuary of the Scheldt to the open sea.
No settlement can be permanent.
Our standpoint towards these two classes is inevitably prejudiced by their associations. We envisage them as embodied “once for all,” like their nineteenth-century precedents, in a contract, and like nineteenth-century diplomacy we tend to regard such contracts as so many girders in a “permanent settlement.”