Arnold J. Toynbee, “Nationality and the War,” chap. XII.
THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY
International politics dominated by a theory.
The position I intend to put forward and defend is this: War is made—this war has been made—not by any necessity of nature, any law beyond human control, any fate to which men must passively bow; it is made because certain men who have immediate power over other men are possessed by a certain theory. Sometimes they are fully conscious of this theory. More often, perhaps, it works in them unconsciously. But it is there, the dominating influence in international politics. I shall call it the governmental theory, because it is among governing persons—Emperors, Kings, Ministers, and their diplomatic and military advisers—that its influence is most conspicuous and most disastrous. But it is supported also by historians, journalists, and publicists, and it is only too readily adopted by the ordinary man, when he turns from the real things he knows and habitually handles to consider the unknown field of foreign affairs.
Very briefly, and, therefore, crudely expressed, the theory is this: “The world is divided, politically, into States. These States are a kind of abstract beings, distinct from the men, women, and children who inhabit them. They are in perpetual and inevitable antagonism to one another; and though they may group themselves in alliances, that can be only for temporary purposes to meet some other alliance or single power. For States are bound by a moral or physical obligation to expand indefinitely, each at the cost of the others. They are natural enemies, they always have been so, and they always will be; and force is the only arbiter between them. That being so, war is an eternal necessity. As a necessity, it should be accepted, if not welcomed, by all sound-thinking and right-feeling men. Pacifists are men at once weak and dangerous. They deny a fact as fundamental as any of the facts of the natural world. And their influence, if they have any, can only be disastrous to their State in its ceaseless and inevitable contest with other States.”
Artificiality of the governmental theory.
Stated thus briefly, and in its most uncompromising terms, this is what I have called the governmental theory. I propose to criticize it in detail. But before doing so I will ask the reader to compare with it the ordinary attitude of the plain men and women who inhabit these States, and who have to bear the burden of the wars in which the theory involves them. These ordinary people, in the course of their daily lives, do not think at all in terms of the State. They think about the people they come in contact with, about their business, their friends, and their families. When they come across foreigners, as many of them do, in business or in travel, they may like or dislike them, but they do not regard them as predestined enemies. On the contrary, if they are intelligent, they know themselves to be cooperating with them in innumerable complicated ways, implying mutual advantage. Differences of language and of social habit make it easier for most people to associate with their fellow-countrymen than with foreigners. But that is all. There are, of course, among these men and women real enmities and spontaneous quarrels. But these do not occur because men belong to different States. They occur because they really have injured one another, or hate one another; and they occur, naturally, for the most part, between men of the same State, because it is these who most often come into direct contact with one another. It is not, therefore, these enmities of ordinary men that give rise to wars.
Governments, not peoples, make wars.
Wars are made by governments, acting under the influence of the governmental theory. And of this fact—for a fact it is among civilized Western peoples in modern times—no better example could be given than the present war. Before it broke out nobody outside governmental and journalistic circles was expecting it. Nobody desired it. And though, now that it is being waged, all the nations concerned are passionately interested in it, and all believe themselves to be fighting in a righteous cause, yet no ordinary citizen, in the days preceding its outbreak, would have maintained that there was any good reason for war, and few even knew what the reasons alleged were or might be. Even now the different nations have quite opposite views as to which Government was responsible. We believe it was the German Government; and with equal conviction Germans believe it was the British. But nobody believes that it was the mass of the people in any nation. The millions who are carrying on the war, at the cost of incalculable suffering, would never have made it if the decision had rested with them. That is the one indisputable fact. How can such a fact occur? How is it possible for Governments to drag into war people who did not desire war and who have no quarrel with one another?