The only way in which, world organization can command a world patriotism is by proving its usefulness. If it affords a protection and produces a prosperity such as the national State cannot produce, it will begin to draw upon the emotions of men. If they are capable of loving anything so abstract and complicated as the British Empire, or even the United States, they are not incapable of attaching themselves to a still larger State. For the moment it was evident that patriotism could embrace something more extensive and abstract than a village which a man might know personally, world organization ceased to be an idle dream. If men could be citizens of an empire scattered over all the seas, there was no longer anything inconceivable about their becoming citizens of a State which covered modern civilization. The idea has ceased to be a psychological impossibility.
Problem is to broaden the basis of loyalty.
Our problem is to broaden the basis of loyalty. And for that task we have considerable experience to guide us. Within a hundred and twenty-five years we have seen the welding together of the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. We have seen small rival States converted into members of federal unions. We have watched patriotism expand from the local unit to the larger one. We have seen Massachusetts patriots converted into American patriots, Bavarians into Germans, Venetians into Italians. In the last few years we have been witnessing the growth of an imperial patriotism within the British Empire.
Loyalty will not stop at existing frontiers.
There is, so far as I can see, not the least ground for supposing that the broadening of loyalty must stop at the existing frontiers. The task of the great unifiers, like Hamilton, Cavour, and Bismarck, looked just as difficult in their day as ours does now. They had States’ rights, sovereignty, traditional jealousy, and economic conflicts to overcome. They conquered them. Who dares to say that we must fail?...
Loyalty is a fluctuating force, not attached by any necessity to some one spot on the map or contained within some precise frontier. Loyalty seeks an authority to which it can be loyal, and when it finds an authority which gives security and progress and opportunity it fastens itself there. The problem of world organization is to attach enough loyalty to the immature World State to enable it to weather the inevitable attacks.
Walter Lippmann, “The Stakes of Diplomacy,” pp. 172-188.
THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION
Our task is to extend the sphere of Law.