At this moment[[1]] there is small likelihood that that rational answer will be given. Fighting inhibits thinking, and in the allied countries the belief is held that Germany provoked the war through mere wantonness and not because of economic pressure, and that security can come only by ending Prussian militarism. In Germany there is an analogous conception of her opponents.
The theory that the war was merely wanton has the merit of simplicity, but like other simple interpretations, it does not cover the facts. There were in Germany certain current ideas concerning racial dominion, the natural mission of the German and the absolute supremacy and moral self-sufficiency of the State, which intensified the war spirit. The Pan-Germans harangued in press and on platform to a people intoxicated by former military and economic triumphs and rendered susceptible by army discipline to martial intoxication. Had it not been for a real sense of insecurity, however, peaceable Germans would have been less receptive to such martial ideas. For a generation after 1870 Germany, though armed, had been pacific because secure; her economic centre of gravity lay within. It was not until her national interests extended beyond her boundaries that this sense of insecurity arose. Pan-Germanism was the intellectual and emotional expression of an economic malaise.
To boycott Germany after the war will neither decrease her anxiety nor improve the prospects of peace in Europe. Such a "war after the war," as it is now proposed, is a flat denial of the economic interdependence of nations. Its obvious result would be to intensify, rather than moderate, the industrial competition. Driven from the markets of the allies, Germany would be forced to dump her goods into all neutral countries (at the expense of the trade of the boycotting nations), as well as to form a counter economic alliance and if possible a military coalition. A permanent economic injury to the Central Powers would at the first convenient moment provoke military retaliation. And, parenthetically, a nation like Germany, with its growing population and resources, cannot remain crushed. Even if too weak to make headway against a powerful group of nations, it will always be strong enough to act as a make-weight between two opposed coalitions. Thus if England and Russia, no longer united by a common peril, were to clash in the Mediterranean or in Persia, the presence of an economically threatened and therefore bellicose Germany would tend to precipitate hostilities. If a boycotted Germany by an economic or military alliance could detach one or more of her present enemies, the international situation created would be as dangerous as that of 1914.[[2]]
The argument that economic insecurity does not tend toward war is thus seen to halt on all fours. There is, however, a stronger or at least a more obvious argument against the promotion of economic internationalism. It is the claim that wars are caused by nationalistic strife. If the incessant struggle between nationalities cannot be appeased but must lead again and again to world-wide wars, then it is futile to seek to avert war by the creation of an economic internationalism. No agreement among the great nations about trade or colonies will avail so long as Poles, Bulgars and Southern Slavs can throw the world into war to fulfil their nationalistic aspirations. Until this nationalistic problem is solved no sure advance towards a permanent peace is possible.
Undoubtedly the struggle of subject nationalities to be free, and of independent nations to annex their kin, has been a fruitful source of strife during the last century. The sense of nationality has been intensified by the nation's mobilisation of the economic interests of its citizens; it has become almost pathological as a result of petty nationalistic fragments competing for separate existence. Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbians want the same tract in Macedonia; Roumanians, Italians and Serbs wish to redeem their subject brethren in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; France seeks to rescue the Francophile though German-speaking Alsatians and Lothringians, and Germany would gladly welcome the Dutch and Flemings back to their putative German allegiance. There is no limit to these nationalistic claims; no room for arbitration; no fixed principle to determine to which nation each group shall be awarded. The result, quite apart from any action among the Great Powers, seems war—inevitable and endless.[[3]]
It is impossible to withhold one's admiration for the inspiring fight which oppressed peoples all over the world are making for their independence. We thrill over the old story of the Grecian revolt against Turkey, of the great risorgimento of Italy, of the long slow struggle of Germany to achieve statehood. The century since the Vienna Congress has marked an almost uninterrupted victory for the principle of nationality. Yet though we sympathise with the aspirations of Poles, Finns, Armenians and Bohemians, an unlimited independence cannot always be desired. Nationalities are not sundered geographically, but men of diverse stocks and traditions are interspersed, as though a malign power had wished to make concord forever impossible. Ireland cannot secure autonomy, to say nothing of independence of Great Britain, without encountering Ulster's demand to be independent of Ireland. Similarly a Great Roumania, a Greater Serbia, a Poland, an independent Bohemia can be secured only by denying the equal rights of lesser racial groups. To-day Hungarians misrule the Roumanians of Transylvania; to-morrow a Greater Roumania may misrule the Transylvania Hungarians. The principle of the independence of nationalities collides with itself.
It also collides with overwhelming economic facts. Racially Trieste is semi-Italian, but if Italy acquires the city (and includes it in her customs union), a vast Austrian and German hinterland is deprived of a necessary commercial outlet. Italy can hold the East Adriatic only by smothering Serbia. Moreover many of these foetal nationalities are too weak and geographically too insecure for independent political existence. What reality would attach to an independent Bohemia held in a vice between two hostile German neighbours, and with a German population in its own territory? Even in peace the Teutonic powers could gently strangle the new nation by means of discriminating tariffs.
Finally many of the claims for nationalistic expansion are inspired by a motive quite different from what appears on the surface. What the nation usually wants is not merely its own unredeemed brethren, but more territory and people. Its unredeemed brethren are the easiest to take. But while Roumania demands sovereignty over the Roumanians of Transylvania, she will not let the Bulgarians of the Dobrudja go. In the one case she upholds the sacred principle of nationality; in the other she discards that principle for the sake of a strategic frontier. Serbians and Greeks ask not only for the right to recover their ancient territory but also for the right to rule over Bulgarians and Turks. What they really desire is access to the sea, ample resources for an adequate population, and the national power, without which an independent existence is an illusion.
It is too late to dream of a really independent existence for each pigmy nationality, strewn about in Eastern Europe. In the absence of a Balkan Confederation, Servia, Roumania, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Greece may preserve their separate sovereignties, though only if they submit to the "advice" of greater nations, as Portugal submits to Britain. But for such nations to have conflicting nationalistic aspirations, to wage bloody wars for larger territory and more subjects, is a ridiculous and a tragic situation. Servia, dreaming of the restoration of the empire of Tsar Stephen Dushan, whose armies marched to the walls of Constantinople, Greece aspiring to the Empire of the East, are a menace to the peace of the world. It is doubtful whether all of these ambitious nationalities can even preserve their separate national existence. If the welfare of Europe conflicts with the independence of a Montenegro or a Bohemia, some lesser form of self-government must be discovered.