In short, we have little faith in a pacifism which is mere laissez-faire, in the doctrine that peace is the vacuum created by the absence of war. Peace is something more original than that. It is a great construction, of infinite complexity, which will be aided but not consummated by good intentions. It involves dangers, failures, disappointments. The interests of the world are interwoven, and no nation can work for peace by adopting counsels of perfection in a policy of isolation. Yet that is what mere non-resistance implies. It implies an unwillingness to take the risk of participation in world politics, it trusts vaguely that by staying at home and minding our business, we can make our own little cultivated garden bloom in peace and prosperity. There is no internationalism in such a view of things. The real internationalist is one who works first of all to keep his own nation from aggressive action, who infuses his own national policy with a desire for international peace. He works to control his own government so as to make it adopt a humanely constructive foreign policy. He does not refuse to have part in the world’s affairs because the world may soil his hands. He realizes that peace can be created only out of the strength of intelligent people, that even God when he fought the devil had to compromise his own perfection.
The clear-sighted idealist sees a League of Peace.
It is more than a century since Thomas Paine proposed to secure the world’s peace forever by a league between Britain, France and the United States. He made the suggestion on the eve of the Napoleonic wars, and it is hardly an accident that the idea was revived with a different trinity a few months before the present struggle. It was Britain, France and Germany that Jean Jaurès would have united in a League of Peace. At the parting of the ways the clear-sighted idealist has always understood that the choice is not between war and that sort of peace which is only a negation of war. The choice in both these crises lay between shattering war and constructive peace, between an open and destructive enmity and a peace based on a common will and an active partnership. Mirabeau had the same vivid perception, and what these three saw is still a vision that haunts us among the mists of war. Of the several proposals that arise inevitably in men’s minds when we think of preventing the renewal of this Continental struggle, there is none which sober thinkers propound so readily and none which has been worked out with greater detail in England than this expedient of the League of Peace. There are, indeed, a few who dare to speak of the United States of Europe, and some who discuss the creation of an international police force to secure the law of nations and repress aggression. But even they do not deny the inordinate difficulties. This war has lasted long enough to teach all but the unteachable that neither side will be able to crush and dominate the other. But short of the compulsion of irresistible might, will any influence suffice to bring the enemies of to-day by their spontaneous choice into a European federation? Is any people, even the most pacific, prepared as yet to accept the surrender of sovereignty which entry into even a loosely-knit federation would involve?
A practicable dream.
The League of Peace presents itself to practical men as a dream capable of an early translation into fact. The allies need only agree to join their forces against any power which persisted, after offers of arbitration or mediation (a reservation which no old-fashioned alliance ever made) in attacking any one of them. It would differ from other alliances partly by its insistence on the duty of arbitration, partly by its frank and public constitution, but mainly by the ready welcome which it would offer even to the enemy of yesterday, should he elect to enter it. The United States would rally to it, seeing in it their best hope of safety, and ultimately it might become a genuine Pan-European League. It is sometimes suggested that Paine’s Anglo-Franco-American combination might form its nucleus. More often its advocates base their hopes on the Anglo-Franco-Russian entente, expanded by adhesion of some of the present neutrals. No one suggests, and this is the weakest point of the whole scheme, that Germany and Austria would be likely to join such a League at the start, though no one of this way of thinking would desire to exclude them.
The League must be more than the old alliances.
Much would depend on the nucleus of the federation. Crude military considerations render an Anglo-French-American trinity impossible. Without discussing whether the United States would care to enter “the vortex of European militarism,” it is enough to point out that such a combination could not hope to hold the rest of Europe in check, could not even safeguard France against Germany alone, unless one or both of the English-speaking nations adopted compulsory military service. France must ally herself to some first-rate military power; no navy can protect her land frontiers. The Anglo-Franco-Russian combination is open to other objections. It does not represent a homogeneous civilization. Every outbreak of anti-Jewish fanaticism in Russia, every assault on Finland or Persia, every reminder that official Russia still belongs to the Dark Ages, would tend to weaken the moral authority of such a League. It has, moreover, too long a history. It would seem even to charitable Germans a mere perpetuation under a new name of the combination which M. Delcassé and King Edward were accused of forming to “pen Germany in.” It would seem to be nothing better than an alliance to assure the victors in the perpetual possession of the fruits of victory, and the new pacifist façade to the old armed fortress would only aggravate by hypocrisy the sin of success. Germany would never join this League; she would scheme with all the arts of barter and intrigue to detach Russia from it, and the old game of the Balance of Power would go on.
It must provide for changing conditions.
The fatal objection to any alliance of this kind is that it does not really meet the difficulty that no State will abandon its sovereignty. This alliance would not be a League of Peace unless it were prepared to exercise a very sharp supervision over the foreign policy of its members. If the old Anglo-Franco-Russian entente had been a genuine League of Peace, it would have had to say, for example, to Serbia, “You may join us, but if you do join us, you must abandon forever your Irredentist ambitions at the expense of Austria. We will protect you against any unprovoked attack by Austria. But you on your side must refrain from any encouragement to those who would dismember her.” It would have had to say with equal decision to France, “Join us by all means, but at the cost of refraining from any expansion in Morocco. You cannot march on Fez without provoking some German reply.” Such a League, in short, would be a mutual insurance society, but the risks would be too high unless the society could prohibit its members from any deliberate playing with fire. It is not enough to say, “We will murder an Archduke once in a way, but when he is dead and buried we will go to The Hague about him”; or, “We will, to be sure, take places in the sun which other people covet, but when we have taken them we shall not wantonly attack any unsuccessful rivals.” The League of Peace would either be the old imperialistic alliance under a dishonest name, or else it would be a highly conservative federation which would keep its members in a very strait pacifist jacket. If great powers would really endure such a control they might as well face at once the limitation of sovereignty implied in a United States of Europe.
All interests must be reconciled.