IR research

THE TWENTY YEARS' CRISIS 1919-1939

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS

BY EDWARD HALLETT CARR PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS IN THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH

LONDON

MACMILLAN & CO. LTD

1946

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PART TWO

THE INTERNATIONAL CRISIS

CHAPTER 3: THE UTOPIAN BACKGROUND

The Foundations of Utopianism

THE modern school of utopian political thought must be traced back to the break-

up of the mediaeval system, which presupposed a universal ethic and a universal political

system based on divine authority. The realists of the Renaissance made the first

determined onslaught on the primacy of ethics and propounded a view of politics which

made ethics an instrument of politics, the authority of the state being thus substituted for

the authority of the church as the arbiter of morality. The answer of the utopian school to

this challenge was not an easy one. An ethical standard was required which would be

independent of any external authority, ecclesiastical or civil; and the solution was found

in the doctrine of a secular "law of nature" whose ultimate source was the individual

human reason. Natural law, as first propounded by the Greeks, had been an intuition of

the human heart about what is morally right. "It is eternal", said Sophocles' Antigone,

"and no man knows whence it came." The Stoics and the mediaeval schoolmen identified

natural law with reason; and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this

identification was revived in a new and special form. In science, the laws of nature were

deduced by a process of reasoning from observed facts about the nature of matter. By an

easy analogy, the Newtonian principles were now applied to the ethical problems. The

moral law of nature could be scientifically established; and rational deduction from the

supposed facts of human nature took the place of revelation or intuition as the source of

morality. Reason could determine what were the universally valid moral laws; and the

assumption was made that, once these laws were determined, human beings would

conform to them just as matter conformed to

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the physical laws of nature. Enlightenment was the royal road to the millennium.

By the eighteenth century, the main lines of modern utopian thought were firmly

established. It was essentially individualist in that it made the human conscience the final

court of appeal in moral questions; in France it became associated with a secular, in

England with an evangelical tradition. It was essentially rationalist in that it identified the

human conscience with the voice of reason. 1

But it had still to undergo important

developments; and it was Jeremy Bentham who, when the industrial revolution had

transferred the leadership of thought from France to England, gave to nineteenth-century

utopianism its characteristic shape. Starting from the postulate that the fundamental

characteristic of human nature is to seek pleasure and avoid pain, Bentham deduced from

this postulate a rational ethic which defined the good in the famous formula "the greatest

happiness of the greatest number". As has often been pointed out, "the greatest happiness

of the greatest number" performed the function, which natural law had performed for a

previous generation, of an absolute ethical standard. Bentham firmly believed in this

absolute standard, and rejected as "anarchical" the view that there are "as many standards

of right and wrong as there are men". 2

In effect, "the greatest happiness of the greatest

number" was the nineteenth-century definition of the content of natural law.

The importance of Bentham's contribution was twofold. In the first place, by identifying

the good with happiness, he provided a plausible confirmation of the "scientific"

assumption of the eighteenth-century rationalists that man would infallibly conform to

the moral law of nature once its content had been rationally determined. Secondly, while

preserving the rationalist and individualist aspect of the doctrine, he succeeded in giving

it a broader basis. The doctrine of reason in its eighteenth-century guise was pre-

eminently intellectual and aristocratic. Its political corollary was an enlightened

____________________ 1 While this is the form of utopianism which has been predominant for the past three centuries, and which still prevails (though perhaps with diminishing force) in English- speaking countries, it would be rash to assert that individualism and rationalism are necessary attributes to utopian thought. Fascism contained elements of a utopianism which was anti-individualist and irrational. These qualities were already latent in the utopian aspects of Leninism -- and perhaps even of Marxism.

2 Bentham, Works, ed. Bowring, i. p. 31.

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despotism of philosophers, who alone could be expected to have the necessary reasoning

power to discover the good. But now that happiness was the criterion, the one thing

needful was that the individual should understand where his happiness lay. Not only was

the good ascertainable -- as the eighteenth century had held -- by a rational process, but

this process -- added the nineteenth century -- was not a matter of abstruse philosophical

speculation, but of simple common sense. Bentham was the first thinker to elaborate the

doctrine of salvation by public opinion. The members of the community "may, in their

aggregate capacity, be considered as constituting a sort of judicatory or tribunal -- call it .

. . The Public-Opinion Tribunal". 1

It was James Mill, Bentham's pupil, who produced the

most complete argument yet framed for the infallibility of public opinion:

Every man possessed of reason is accustomed to weigh evidence and to be guided and

determined by its preponderance. When various conclusions are, with their evidence,

presented with equal care and with equal skill, there is a moral certainty, though some

few may be misguided, that the greatest number will judge right, and that the greatest

force of evidence, whatever it is, will produce the greatest impression. 2

This is not the only argument by which democracy as a political institution can be

defended. But this argument was, in fact, explicitly or implicitly accepted by most

nineteenth-century liberals. The belief that public opinion can be relied on to judge

rightly on any question rationally presented to it, combined with the assumption that it

will act in accordance with this right judgment, is an essential foundation of the liberal

creed. In Great Britain, the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were pre-

eminently the age of popular preaching and of political oratory. By the voice of reason

men could be persuaded both to save their own immoral souls and to move along the path

of political enlightenment and progress. The optimism of the nineteenth century was

based on the triple conviction that the pursuit of the good was a matter of right reasoning,

that the spread of knowledge would soon make it

____________________ 1 Bentham, Works, ed. Bowring, viii. p. 561.

2 James Mill, The Liberty of the Press, pp. 22-3.

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possible for everyone to reason rightly on this important subject, and that anyone who

reasoned rightly on it would necessarily act rightly.

The application of these principles to international affairs followed, in the main, the same

pattern. The Abbé SaintPierre, who propounded one of the earliest schemes for a League

of Nations, "was so confident in the reasonableness of his projects that he always

believed that, if they were fairly considered, the ruling powers could not fail to adopt

them". 1

Both Rousseau and Kant argued that, since wars were waged by princes in their

own interest and not in that of their peoples, there would be no wars under a republican

form of government. In this sense, they anticipated the view that public opinion, if

allowed to make itself effective, would suffice to prevent war. In the nineteenth century,

this view won widespread approval in Western Europe, and took on the specifically

rationalist colour proper to the doctrine that the holding of the right moral beliefs and the

performance of the right actions can be assured by process of reasoning. Never was there

an age which so unreservedly proclaimed the supremacy of the intellect. "It is intellectual

evolution", averred Comte, "which essentially determines the main course of social

phenomena." 2

Buckle, whose famous History of Civilisation was published between

1857 and 1861, boldly declared that dislike of war is "a cultivated taste peculiar to an

intellectual people". He chose a cogent example, based on the assumption, natural to a

British thinker, of the ingrained bellicosity of Great Britain's most recent enemy. " Russia

is a warlike country", he wrote, "not because the inhabitants are immoral, but because

they are unintellectual. The fault is in the head, not in the heart." 3

The view that the

spread of education would lead to international peace was shared by many of Buckle's

contemporaries and successors. Its last serious exponent was Sir Norman Angell, who

sought, by The Great Illusion and other books, to convince the world that war never

brought profit to anyone. If he could establish this point by irrefutable argument, thought

Sir Norman, then war could not occur. War was simply a "failure of understanding".

Once the head was purged of

____________________ 1 J. S. Bury, The Idea of Progress, p. 131.

2 Comte, Cours do Philosophie Positive, Lecture LXI.

3 Buckle, History of Civilisation ( World's Classics ed.), i. pp. 151-2.

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the illusion that war was profitable, the heart could look after itself. "The world of the

Crusades and of heretic burning", ran the opening manifesto of a monthly journal called

War and Peace which started publication in October 1913, ". . . was not a badly-meaning,

but a badly-thinking world. . . . We emerged from it by correcting a defect in

understanding; we shall emerge from the world of political warfare or armed peace in the

same way." 1

Reason could demonstrate the absurdity of the international anarchy; and

with increasing knowledge, enough people would be rationally convinced of its absurdity

to put an end to it.

Benthamism Transplanted

Before the end of the nineteenth century, serious doubts had been thrown from more than

one quarter on the assumptions of Benthamite rationalism. The belief in the sufficiency of

reason to promote right conduct was challenged by psychologists. The identification of

virtue with enlightened self-interest began to shock philosophers. The belief in the

infallibility of public opinion had been attractive on the hypothesis of the earlier

utilitarians that public opinion was the opinion of educated and enlightened men. It was

less attractive, at any rate to those who thought themselves educated and enlightened,

now that public opinion was the opinion of the masses; and as early as 1859, in his essay

On Liberty, J. S. Mill had been preoccupied with the dangers of "the tyranny of the

majority". After 1900, it would have been difficult to find, either in Great Britain or in

any other European country, any serious political thinker who accepted the Benthamite

assumptions without qualification. Yet, by one of the ironies of history, these

halfdiscarded nineteenth-century assumptions reappeared, in the second and third decades

of the twentieth century, in the special field of international politics, and there became the

foundationstones of a new utopian edifice. The explanation may be in part that, after

1914, men's minds naturally fumbled their way back, in search of a new utopia, to those

apparently firm foundations of nineteenth-century peace and security. But a more

decisive factor was the influence of the United States,

____________________ 1 Quoted in Angell, Foundations of International Polity, p. 224. Internal evidence suggests that the passage was written by Sir Norman Angell himself.

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ill in the heyday of Victorian prosperity and of Victorian belief in the comfortable

Benthamite creed. Just as Bentham, a century earlier, had taken the eighteenth-century

doctrine of reason and refashioned it to the needs of the coming age, so now Woodrow

Wilson, the impassioned admirer of Bright and Gladstone, transplanted the nineteenth-

century rationalist faith to the almost virgin soil of international politics and, bringing it

back with him to Europe, gave it a new lease of life. Nearly all popular theories of

international politics between the two world wars were reflexions, seen in an American

mirror, of nineteenth-century liberal thought.

In a limited number of countries, nineteenth-century liberal democracy had been a

brilliant success. It was a success because its presuppositions coincided with the stage of

development reached by the countries concerned. Out of the mass of current speculation,

the leading spirits of the age took precisely that body of theory which corresponded to

their needs, consciously and unconsciously fitting their practice to it, and it to their

practice. Utilitarianism and laissez-faire served, and in turn directed, the course of

industrial and commercial expansion. But the view that nineteenth-century liberal

democracy was based, not on a balance of forces peculiar to the economic development

of the period and the countries concerned, but on certain a priori rational principles

which had only to be applied in other contexts to produce similar results, was essentially

utopian; and it was this view which, under Wilson's inspiration, dominated the world

after the first world war. When the theories of liberal democracy were transplanted, by a

purely intellectual process, to a period and to countries whose stage of development and

whose practical needs were utterly different from those of Western Europe in the

nineteenth century, sterility and disillusionment were the inevitable sequel. Rationalism

can create a utopia, but cannot make it real. The liberal democracies scattered throughout

the world by the peace settlement of 1919 were the product of abstract theory, stuck no

roots in the soil, and quickly shrivelled away.

Rationalism and the League of Nations

The most important of all the institutions affected by this one-sided intellectualism of

international politics was the League

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of Nations, which was an attempt "to apply the principles of Lockeian liberalism to the

building of a machinery of international order". 1

"The Covenant", observed General

Smuts, ". . . simply carries into world affairs that outlook of a liberal democratic society

which is one of the great achievements of our human advance." 2

But this transplantation

of democratic rationalism from the national to the international sphere was full of

unforeseen difficulties. The empiricist treats the concrete case on its individual merits.

The rationalist refers it to an abstract general principle. Any social order implies a large

measure of standardisation, and therefore of abstraction; there cannot be a different rule

for every member of the community. Such standardisation is comparatively easy in a

community of several million anonymous individuals conforming more or less closely to

recognised types. But it presents infinite complications when applied to sixty known

states differing widely in size, in power, and in political, economic and cultural

development. The League of Nations, being the first largescale attempt to standardise

international political problems on a rational basis, was particularly liable to these

embarrassments.

The founders of the League, some of whom were men of political experience and

political understanding, had indeed recognised the dangers of abstract perfection.

"Acceptance of the political facts of the present", remarked the official British

Commentary on the Covenant issued in 1919, "has been one of the principles on which

the Commission has worked", 3

and this attempt to take account of political realities

distinguished the Covenant not only from previous paper schemes of world organisation,

but also from such purely utopian projects as the International Police Force, the

BriandKellogg Pact and the United States of Europe. The Covenant possessed the virtue

of several theoretical imperfections. Purporting to treat all members as equal, it assured to

the Great

____________________ 1 R. H. S. Crossman in J. P. Mayer, Political Thought, p. 202.

2 New Year's Eve broadcast from Radio-Nations, Geneva: The Times, January 1, 1938.

3 The Covenant of the League of Nations and a Commentary Thereon, Cmd. 151 (1919), p. 12. "The great strength of the Covenant", said the British Government some years later, "lies in the measure of discretion which it allows to the Council and Assembly in dealing with future contingencies which may have no parallel in history and which therefore cannot all of them be foreseen in advance" ( League of Nations: Official Journal, May 1928, p. 703).

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Powers a permanent majority on the Council of the League. 1

It did not purport to

prohibit war altogether, but only to limit the occasions on which it might legitimately be

resorted to. The obligation imposed on members of the League to apply sanctions to the

Covenant-breaker was not free from vagueness; and this vagueness had been discreetly

enhanced by a set of "interpretative" resolutions passed by the Assembly of 1921. The

starkness of the territorial guarantee provided by Article 10 of the Covenant was

smoothed away in a resolution which secured an almost unanimous vote at the Assembly

of 1923. It seemed for the moment as if the League might reach a working compromise

between utopia and reality and become an effective instrument of international politics.

Unhappily, the most influential European politicians neglected the League during its

critical formative years. Abstract rationalism gained the upper hand, and from about 1922

onwards the current at Geneva set strongly in the utopian direction. 2

It came to be

believed, in the words of an acute critic, "that there can exist, either at Geneva or in

foreign offices, a sort of carefully classified card-index of events or, better still,

'situations', and that, when the event happens or the situation presents itself, a member of

the Council or Foreign Minister can easily recognise that event or situation and turn up

the index to be directed to the files where the appropriate action is prescribed ". 3

There

were determined efforts to perfect the machinery, to standardise the procedure, to close

the "gaps" in the Covenant by an absolute veto on all war, and to make the application of

sanctions "automatic". The Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance, the Geneva Protocol, the

General Act,

____________________ 1 The defection of the United States upset this balance, and left four major confronted with four minor Powers. Subsequent increases in membership, which have taken place at frequent intervals since 1923, gave a permanent preponderance to the minor Powers. The Council, in becoming more "representative", lost much of its effectiveness as a political instrument. Reality was sacrificed to an abstract principle. It should be added that the prudent Swiss Delegate foresaw this result when the first increase was mooted in 1922 ( League of Nations: Third Assembly, First Committee, pp. 37-8).

2 By a curious irony, this development was strongly encouraged by a group of American intellectuals; and some European enthusiasts imagined that, by following this course, they would propitiate American opinion. The rift between the theory of the intellectuals and the practice of the government, which developed in Great Britain from 1932 onwards, began in the United States in 1919.

3 J. Fischer-Williams, Some Aspects of the Covenant of the League of Nations, p. 238.

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the plan to incorporate the Briand-Kellogg Pact in the Covenant and "the definition of the

aggressor", were all milestones on the dangerous path of rationalisation. The fact that the

utopian dishes prepared during these years at Geneva proved unpalatable to most of the

principal governments concerned was a symptom of the growing divorce between theory

and practice.

Even the language current in League circles betrayed the growing eagerness to avoid the

concrete in favour of the abstract generalisations. When it was desired to arrange that the

Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance could be brought into force in Europe without waiting

for the rest of the world, a stipulation was inserted that it might come into force "by

continents" -- a proviso with farcical implications for every continent except Europe. A

conventional phraseology came into use, which served as the current coin of delegates at

Geneva and of League enthusiasts elsewhere and which, through constant repetition, soon

lost all contact with reality. "I cannot recall any time", said Mr. Churchill in 1932, "when

the gap between the kind of words which statesmen used and what was actually

happening in many countries was so great as it is now." 1

The Franco-Soviet Pact, which

was a defensive alliance against Germany, was so drafted as to make it appear an

instrument of general application, and was described as a shining example of the

principle of "collective security". A member of the House of Commons, when asked in

the debate on sanctions in June 1936 whether he would run the risk of war with Italy,

replied that he was prepared to face "all the consequences naturally flowing from the

enforcement of the Covenant against an aggressor nation". 2

These linguistic contortions

encouraged the frequent failure to distinguish between the world of abstract reason and

the world of political reality. " Metaphysicians, like savages", remarks Mr. Bertrand

Russell, "are apt to imagine a magical connexion between words and things." 3

The

metaphysicians of Geneva found it difficult to believe that an accumulation of ingenious

texts prohibiting war was not a barrier against war itself. "Our purpose", said M. Benes in

introducing the Geneva Protocol to the 1924 Assembly, "was to make war impossible, to

kill it, to anni-

____________________ 1 Winston Churchill, Arms and the Covenant, p. 43.

2 Quoted in Toynbee, Survey of International, Affairs, 1935, ii. p. 448.

3 B. Russell in Atlantic Monthly, clix. ( February 1937), p. 155.

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hilate it. To do this we had to create a system." 1

The Protocol was the "system". Such

presumption could only provoke nemesis. Once it came to be believed in League circles

that salvation could be found in a perfect card-index, and that the unruly flow of

international politics could be canalised into a set of logically impregnable abstract

formulae inspired by the doctrines of nineteenth-century liberal democracy, the end of the

League as an effective political instrument was in sight.

The Apotheosis of Public Opinion

Nor did any better fortune attend the attempt to transplant to the international sphere the

liberal democratic faith in public opinion. And here there was a double fallacy. The

nineteenthcentury belief in public opinion comprised two articles: first (and in

democracies this was, with some reservations, true), that public opinion is bound in the

long run to prevail; and second (this was the Benthamite view), that public opinion is

always right. Both these beliefs, not always clearly distinguished one from the other,

were uncritically reproduced in the sphere of international politics.

The first attempts to invoke public opinion as a force in the international world had been

made in the United States. In 1909, President Taft evolved a plan for the conclusion of

treaties between the United States and other Great Powers for the compulsory arbitration

of international disputes. But how, it was asked, would the award of the arbitral court be

enforced? Taft disposed of the question with complete light-heartedness. He had never

observed that in a democracy like the United States the enforcement of awards gave rise

to any particular difficulty; and he professed himself "very little concerned" about this

aspect of the matter. "After we have gotten the cases into court and decided, and the

judgments embodied in a solemn declaration of a court thus established, few nations will

care to face the condemnation of international public opinion and disobey the judgment."

2 Public opinion, as in democratic countries, was bound to prevail; and public opinion, as

the Benthamites said, could always be trusted to come down on the right side. The United

States Senate rejected the President's proposal, so that the opportunity did not occur to

____________________ 1 League of Nations: Fifth Assembly, p. 497.

2 W. Taft, The United States and Peace, p. 150.

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put "international public opinion" to the test. Four years later, Bryan, Wilson's first

Secretary of State, came forward with a further set of treaties. In the Bryan treaties,

arbitration was dropped in favour of conciliation. Their most novel and significant feature

was the provision that the parties to them should not resort to war until twelve months

had elapsed from the beginning of the dispute. In hot blood, the Bryan treaties seemed to

admit, men might not listen to the voice of reason. But once delay had cooled their

passions, reason, in the guise of international public opinion, would resume her

compelling force. Several such treaties were in fact signed between the United States and

other Powers -- some of them, by a curious irony, in the first days of the first world war.

"The sum and substance" of these treaties, said Wilson in October 1914, was "that

whenever any trouble arises the light shall shine on it for a year before anything is done;

and my prediction is that after the light has shone on it for a year, it will not be necessary

to do anything; that after we know what happened, then we will know who was right and

who was wrong". 1

The belief in the compelling power of reason, expressed through the voice of the people,

was particularly congenial to Wilson. When he entered politics in 1910 as a candidate for

the Governorship of New Jersey, his campaign was based on an appeal to "the people"

against the political bosses; and he displayed an almost mystical faith that the people

would follow him if he could speak to enough of them". The result of his campaign

confirmed him in his belief in the potency of the voice of reason speaking through his

lips. He would govern by the persuasiveness of reason acting on an all-powerful public

opinion. "If the bosses held back, he had only to appeal to the people. . . . The people

wanted the high things, the right things, the true things." 2

America's entry into the war entailed no modification of Wilson's faith in the rightness of

popular judgment. He took up the cue in one of the speeches in which he discussed the

future conditions of peace:

It is the peculiarity of this great war that, while statesmen have seemed to cast about for

definitions of their purpose

____________________ 1 The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: The New Democracy, ed. R. S. Baker , i. p. 206.

2 R. S. Baker, Woodrow Wilsox: Life and Letters, iii. p. 173.

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and have sometimes seemed to shift their ground and their point of view, the thought of

the mass of men, whom statesmen are supposed to instruct and lead, has grown more and

more unclouded, more and more certain of what it is they are fighting for. National

purposes have fallen more and more into the background; and the common purpose of

enlightened mankind has taken their place. The counsels of plain men have become on all

hands more simple and straightforward and more unified than the counsels of

sophisticated men of affairs, who still retain the impression that they are playing a game

of power and are playing for high stakes. That is why I have said that this is a people's

war, not a statesmen's. Statesmen must follow the clarified common thought or be

broken. 1

"Unless the Conference was prepared to follow the opinions of mankind", he said on his

way to Paris," and to express the will of the people rather than that of the leaders of the

Conference, we should be involved in another break-up of the world." 2

Such conceptions did, in fact, play a conspicuous part in the work of the Conference.

When the Italian Delegates proved recalcitrant in their claims to Fiume and the Adriatic

coast, Wilson remained convinced that if he could appeal against the "leaders" to the

"people", if only (as at the New Jersey election) he "could speak to enough of them", the

voice of reason must infallibly prevail. The communiqué to the Italian people, and the

withdrawal of the Italian Delegation from Paris, were the result of this conviction. The

problem of disarmament was approached in the same spirit. Once the enemy Powers had

been disarmed by force, the voice of reason, speaking through public opinion, could be

trusted to disarm the Allies. Both Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George "felt that, if the German

army was limited, France would have to follow suit, and that she could hardly maintain

an immense army under those conditions". 3

And if anyone had paused to enquire on

what compulsion France would have to disarm, the only answer could have been an

appeal to the rational force of public

____________________ 1 The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace, ed. R. S. Baker, i. p. 259.

2 Intimate Papers of Colonel House, ed. C. Seymour, iv. p. 291.

3 D. Lloyd George, The Truth about the Treaties, i. p. 187.

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opinion. Most important of all, the whole conception of the League of Nations was from

the first closely bound up with the twin belief that public opinion was bound to prevail

and that public opinion was the voice of reason. If "open covenants openly arrived at"

could be made the rule, the plain people could be relied on to see that the contents

conformed to the requirements of that reason which was the highest morality. The new

order must be based, not on "covenants of selfishness and compromise" between

governments, but on "the thought of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the

world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated

standards of right and wrong". 1

It must be sustained by the organised opinion of

mankind". 2

The ticklish problem of material sanctions was approached reluctantly from the

American, and almost as reluctantly from the British, side. Like Taft, Anglo-Saxon

opinion felt itself "very little concerned" over this aspect of the matter; for the recognition

of the necessity of sanctions was in itself a derogation from the utopian doctrine of the

efficacy of rational public opinion. It was unthinkable that a unanimous verdict of the

League should be defied; and even if by some mischance the verdict were not unanimous,

"a majority report would probably be issued, and . . . this", suggested Lord Cecil during

the debates in Paris, "would be likely to carry great weight with the public opinion of the

world". 3

The official British Commentary on the Covenant developed the same point of

view:

The League [it declared] must continue to depend on the free consent, in the last resort, of

its component States; this assumption is evident in nearly every article of the Covenant,

of which the ultimate and most effective sanction must be the public opinion of the

civilised world. If the nations of the future are in the main selfish, grasping and warlike,

no instrument or machinery will restrain them. It is only possible to establish an

organisation which may make peaceful co-operation easy and hence customary, and to

trust in the influence of custom to mould public opinion.

____________________ 1 The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace, ed. R. S. Baker, i. p. 133.

2 Ibid. i. p. 234.

3 Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, ii. p. 64.

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The sanctions provisions were slurred over, half apologetically and with a consolatory

postscript:

Not the least important part of the pressure will be supplied by the publicity stipulated for

in the procedure of settlement. The obscure issues from which international quarrels arise

will be dragged out into the light of day and the creation of an informed public opinion

made possible. 1

When the House of Commons debated the ratification of the Versailles Treaty, Lord

Cecil was the principal expositor of the League Covenant:

For the most part [he told the House] there is no attempt to rely on anything like a

superstate; no attempt to rely upon force to carry out a decision of the Council or the

Assembly of the League. That is almost impracticable as things stand now. What we rely

upon is public opinion . . . and if we are wrong about it, then the whole thing is wrong. 2

Addressing the Imperial Conference of 1923 on the subject of the League, Lord Cecil

explained that "its method is not . . . the method of coercive government: it is a method of

consent and its executive instrument is not force, but public opinion". 3

And when the

first League Assembly met, Lord Cecil, as British Delegate, propounded the same

philosophy from the tribune:

It is quite true that by far the most powerful weapon at the command of the League of

Nations is not the economic or the military weapon or any other weapon of material

force. By far the strongest weapon we have is the weapon of public opinion. 4

Even the more sceptical and sophisticated Balfour, explaining the absence of sanctions

from the Washington agreements of 1921, declared that "if any nation hereafter

deliberately separates itself from the collective action we have taken in Washington in

this year of grace, it will stand condemned

____________________ 1 The Covenant of the League of Nations with a Commentary Thereon, Cmd. 151, pp. 12, 16.

2 House of Commons, July 21, 1919: Official Report, cols. 990, 992.

3 Imperial Conference of 1923, Cmd. 1987, p. 44.

4 League of Nations: First Assembly, p. 395.

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before the world"; 1

and it was one of the presuppositions of liberal democracy that such

condemnation would be effective. But the argument that public opinion is the all-

important weapon is two-edged; and in 1932, during the Manchurian crisis, the ingenious

Sir John Simon used it to demonstrate that any other kind of action was superfluous. "The

truth is", he told the House of Commons, "that when public opinion, world opinion, is

sufficiently unanimous to pronounce a firm moral condemnation, sanctions are not

needed." 2

Given the Benthamite and Wilsonian premises, this answer was irrefutable. If

public opinion had failed to curb Japan, then -- as Lord Cecil had said in 1919 -- "the

whole thing is wrong".

The Nemesis of Utopianism

The nemesis of utopianism in international politics came rather suddenly. In September

1930, the President of Columbia University, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, ventured on the

"reasonably safe prediction that the next generation will see a constantly increasing

respect for Cobden's principles and point of view and a steadily growing endeavour more

largely to give them practical effect in public policy". 3

On September 10, 1931, Lord

Cecil told the Assembly of the League of Nations that" there has scarcely ever been a

period in the world's history when war seems less likely than it does at present". 4

On

September 18, 1931, Japan opened her campaign in Manchuria; and in the following

month, the last important country which had continued to adhere to the principle of free

trade took the first steps towards the introduction of a general tariff.

From this point onwards, a rapid succession of events forced upon all serious thinkers a

reconsideration of premises which were becoming more and more flagrantly divorced

from reality. The Manchurian crisis had demonstrated that the "condemnation of

international public opinion", invoked by Taft and by so many after him, was a broken

reed. In the United States, this conclusion was drawn with extreme reluctance. In 1932,

an American Secretary of State still cautiously main-

____________________ 1 Quoted in Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, p. 399.

2 House of Commons, March 22, 1932: Official Report, col. 923.

3 N. M. Butler, The Path to Peace p. xii.

4 League of Nations: Twelfth Assembly, p. 59.

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tained that "the sanction of public opinion can be made one of the most potent sanctions

of the world". 1

In September 1938, President Roosevelt based his intervention in the

CzechoSlovak crisis on the belief of the United States Government in "the moral force of

public opinion"; 2

and in April 1939, Mr. Cordell Hull once again announced the

conviction that "a public opinion, the most potent of all forces for peace, is more strongly

developing throughout the world". 3

But in countries more directly menaced by

international crisis, this consoling view no longer found many adherents; and the

continued addition to it of American statesmen was regarded as an index of American

unwillingness to resort to more potent weapons. Already in 1932, Mr. Churchill taunted

the League of Nations Union with "long-suffering and inexhaustible gullibility" for

continuing to preach this outworn creed. 4

Before long the group of intellectuals who had

once stressed the relative unimportance of the "material" weapons of the League began to

insist loudly on economic and military sanctions as the necessary cornerstones of an

international order. When Germany annexed Austria, Lord Cecil indignantly enquired

whether the Prime Minister "holds that the use of material force is impracticable and that

the League should cease to attempt 'sanctions' and confine its efforts to moral force". 5

The answer might well have been that, if Neville Chamberlain did in fact hold this view,

he could have learned it from Lord Cecil's own earlier utterances.

Moreover, scepticism attacked not only the premise that public opinion is certain to

prevail, but also the premise that public opinion is certain to be right. At the Peace

Conference, it had been observed that statesmen were sometimes more reasonable and

moderate in their demands than the public opinion which they were supposed to

represent. Even Wilson himself once used -- no doubt, in perfect sincerity -- an argument

which directly contradicted his customary thesis that reason can be made to prevail by

appealing to "the plain

____________________ 1 Mr. Stimson to the Council of Foreign Relations on August 8, 1932 ( New York Times, August 9, 1932).

2 Believing, as this government does, in the moral force of public opinion ( Sumner Welles in State Department Press Releases, October 8, 1938, p. 237).

3 The Times, April 18, 1939.

4 Winston Churchill, Arms and the Covenant, p. 36.

5 Daily Telegraph, March 24, 1938.

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people everywhere throughout the world". In the League of Nations Commission of the

Conference, the Japanese had raised the issue of race equality. "How can you treat on its

merits in this quiet room", enquired the President, "a question which will not be treated

on its merits when it gets out of this room?" 1

Later history provided many examples of

this phenomenon. It became a commonplace for statesmen at Geneva and elsewhere to

explain that they themselves had every desire to be reasonable, but that public opinion in

their countries was inexorable; and though this plea was sometimes a pretext or a tactical

manœuvre, there was often a solid substratum of reality beneath it. The prestige of public

opinion correspondingly declined. "It does not help the conciliator, the arbitrator, the

policeman or the judge", wrote a wellknown supporter of the League of Nations Union

recently, "to be surrounded by a crowd emitting either angry or exulting cheers." 2

Woodrow Wilson's" plain men throughout the world", the spokesmen of "the common

purpose of enlightened mankind", had somehow transformed themselves into a disorderly

mob emitting incoherent and unhelpful noises. It seemed undeniable that, in international

affairs, public opinion was almost as often wrong-headed as it was impotent. But where

so many of the presuppositions of 1919 were crumbling, the intellectual leaders of the

utopian school stuck to their guns; and in Great Britain and the United States -- and to a

lesser degree in France -- the rift between theory and practice assumed alarming

dimensions. Armchair students of international affairs were unanimous about the kind of

policy which ought to be followed, both in the political and in the economic field.

Governments of many countries acted in a sense precisely contrary to this advice, and

received the endorsement of public opinion at the polls.

The Problem of Diagnosis

In such disasters the obvious explanation is never far to seek. The able historian of the

Communist International has noted that, in the history of that institution, "every failure --

not objective failure, but the failure of the reality to comply

____________________ 1 Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, ii. p. 701.

2 Lord Allen of Hurtwood, The Times, May 30, 1938.

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with the utopia -- supposes a traitor". 1

The principle has a wide application, and touches

deep springs of human character. Statesmen of more than one country have been pilloried

by disappointed utopians as wreckers of the international order. The few members of the

school who have tried to go behind this simple anthropomorphic explanation hesitate

between two alternative diagnoses. If mankind in its international relations has signally

failed to achieve the rational good, it must either have been too stupid to understand that

good, or too wicked to pursue it. Professor Zimmern leans to the hypothesis of stupidity,

repeating almost word for word the argument of Buckle and Sir Norman Angell:

The obstacle in our path . . . is not in the moral sphere, but in the intellectual. . . . It is not

because men are illdisposed that they cannot be educated into a world social

consciousness. It is because they -- let us be honest and say "we" -- are beings of

conservative temper and limited intelligence.

The attempt to build a world order has failed not through "pride or ambition or greed",

but through " muddled thinking ". 2

Professor Toynbee, on the other hand, sees the cause

of the breakdown in human wickedness. In a single volume of the annual Survey of

International Affairs, he accuses Italy of "positive, strong-willed, aggressive egotism",

Great Britain and France of "negative, weak-willed, cowardly egotism", Western

Christendom as a whole of a "sordid" crime, and all the members of the League of

Nations, except Abyssinia, of "covetousness" or "cowardice" (the choice is left to them),

while the attitude of the Americans is merely " rather captious and perverse". 3

Some

writers combined the charge of stupidity and the charge of wickedness. Much comment

on international affairs was rendered tedious and sterile by incessant girding at a reality

which refused to conform to utopian prescriptions.

The simplicity of these explanations seemed almost ludicrously disproportionate to the

intensity and complexity of the

____________________ 1 F. Borkenau, The Communist International, p. 79.

2 Neutrality and Collective Security ( Harris Foundation Lectures: Chicago, 1936), pp. 8, 18.

3 Survey of International Affairs, 1935, ii. pp. 2, 89, 96, 219-20, 480.

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international crisis. 1

The impression made on the ordinary man was more accurately

recorded in April 1938 in some words of Mr. Anthony Eden:

It is utterly futile to imagine that we are involved in a European crisis which may pass as

it has come. We are involved in a crisis of humanity all the world over. We are living in

one of those great periods of history which are aweinspiring in their responsibilities and

in their consequences. Stupendous forces are loose, hurricane forces. 2

It is not true, as Professor Toynbee believes, that we have been living in an exceptionally

wicked age. It is not true, as Professor Zimmern implies, that we have been living in an

exceptionally stupid one. Still less is it true, as Professor Lauterpacht more optimistically

suggests, that what we have been experiencing is "a transient period of retrogression"

which should not be allowed unduly to colour our thought. 3

It is a meaningless evasion

to pretend that we have witnessed, not the failure of the League of Nations, but only the

failure of those who refused to make it work. The breakdown of the nineteen-thirties was

too overwhelming to be explained merely in terms of individual action or inaction. Its

downfall involved the bankruptcy of the postulates on which it was based. The

foundations of nineteenth-century belief are themselves under suspicion. It may be not

that men stupidly or wickedly failed to apply right principles, but that the principles

themselves were false or inapplicable. It may turn out to be untrue that if men reason

rightly about international politics they will also act rightly, or that right reasoning about

one's own or one's nation's interests is the road to an international paradise. If the

assumptions of nineteenth-century liberalism are in fact untenable, it need not surprise us

that the utopia of the international theorists made so little impression on reality. But if

they are untenable to-day, we shall also have to explain why they found such widespread

acceptance, and inspired such splendid achievements, in the nineteenth century.

____________________ 1 As a recent writer has said of the French eighteenth-century nationalists, "their superficiality lay in a shocking exaggeration of the simplicity of the problem" Sabine, A History of Political Theory, p. 551).

2 Anthony Eden, Foreign affairs, p. 275.

3 International Affairs, xvii. ( September-October 1938), p. 712

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CHAPTER 4

THE HARMONY OF INTERESTS

The Utopian Synthesis

No political society, national or international, can exist unless people submit to certain

rules of conduct. The problem why people should submit to such rules is the fundamental

problem of political philosophy. The problem presents itself just as insistently in a

democracy as under other forms of government and in international as in national politics

; for such a formula as "the greatest good of the greatest number" provides no answer to

the question why the minority, whose greatest good is ex hypothesi not pursued, should

submit to rules made in the interest of the greatest number. Broadly speaking, the answers

given to the question fall into two categories, corre-sponding to the antithesis, discussed

in a previous chapter, between those who regard politics as a function of ethics and those

who regard ethics as a function of politics.

Those who assert the primacy of ethics over politics will hold that it is the duty of the

individual to submit for the sake of the community as a whole, sacrificing his own

interest to the interest of others who are more numerous, or in some other way more

deserving. The " good " which consists in selfinterest should be subordinated to the "

good " which consists in loyalty and self-sacrifice for an end higher than self-interest.

The obligation rests on some kind of intuition of what is right and cannot be

demonstrated by rational argument. Those, on the other hand, who assert the primacy of

politics over ethics, will argue that the ruler rules because he is the stronger, and the ruled

submit because they are the weaker. This principle is just as easily applicable to

democracy as to any other form of government. The majority rules because it is stronger,

the minority submits because it is weaker. Democracy, it has often been said, substitutes

the counting of heads for the break-ing of heads. But the substitution is merely a

convenience, and the principle of the two methods is the same. The realist, therefore,

unlike the intuitionist, has a perfectly rational answer

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to the question why the individual should submit. He should submit because otherwise

the stronger will compel him; and the results of compulsion are more disagreeable than

those of voluntary submission. Obligation is thus derived from a sort of spurious ethic

based on the reasonableness of recognising that might is right.

Both these answers are open to objection. Modern man, who has witnessed so many

magnificent achievements of human reason, is reluctant to believe that reason and

obligation sometimes conflict. On the other hand, men of all ages have failed to find

satisfaction in the view that the rational basis of obligation is merely the right of the

stronger. One of the strongest points of eighteenth--and nineteenth-century utopianism

was its apparent success in meeting both these objections at once. The utopian, starting

from the primacy of ethics, necessarily believes in an obligation which is ethical in

character and independent of the right of the stronger. But he has also been able to

convince himself, on grounds other than those of the realist, that the duty of the

individual to submit to rules made in the interest of the community can be justified in

terms of reason, and that the greatest good of the greatest number is a rational end even

for those who are not included in the greatest number. He achieves this synthesis by

maintaining that the highest interest of the individual and the highest interest of the

community naturally coincide. In pursuing his own interest, the individual pursues that of

the community, and in promoting the interest of the community he promotes his own.

This is the famous doctrine of the harmony of interests. It is a necessary corollary of the

postulate that moral laws can be established by right reasoning. The admission of any

ultimate divergence of interests would be fatal to this postulate; and any apparent clash of

interests must therefore be explained as the result of wrong calculation. Burke tacitly

accepted the doctrine of identity when he defined expediency as "that which is good for

the community and for every individual in it". 1

It was handed on from the eighteenth-

century rationalists to Bentham, and from Bentham to the Victorian moralists. The

utilitarian philosophers could justify morality by the argument that, in promoting the

good of others, one automatically promotes one's own. Honesty is the best policy. If

people or nations behave

____________________ 1 Burke, Works, v. 407.

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badly, it must be, as Buckle and Sir Norman Angell and Professor Zimmern think,

because they are unintellectual and short-sighted and muddle-headed.

The Paradise of Laissez-Faire

It was the laissez-faire school of political economy created by Adam Smith which was in

the main responsible for popularising the doctrine of the harmony of interests. The

purpose of the school was to promote the removal of state control in economic matters;

and in order to justify this policy, it set out to demonstrate that the individual could be

relied on, without external control, to promote the interests of the community for the very

reason that those interests were identical with his own. This proof was the burden of The

Wealth of Nations. The community is divided into those who live by rent, those who live

by wages and those who live by profit; and the interests of "those three great orders " are

" strictly and inseparably connected with the general interest of the society ". 1

The

harmony is none the less real if those concerned are unconscious of it. The individual "

neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . .

. He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an

invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." 2 . The invisible

hand, which Adam Smith would perhaps have regarded as a metaphor, presented no

difficulty to Victorian piety." It is curious to observe ", remarks a tract issued by the

Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge towards the middle of the nineteenth

century, " how, through the wise and beneficent arrangement of Providence, men thus do

the greatest service to the public when they are thinking of nothing but their own gain." 3

About the same time an English clergyman wrote a work entitled The Temporal Benefits

of Christianity Explained. The harmony of interests provided a solid rational basis for

morality. To love one's neighbour turned out to be a thoroughly enlightened way of

loving oneself. "We now know", wrote Mr. Henry Ford as recently as 1930, "that

anything which is

____________________ 1 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1. ch. xi. conclusion.

2 Ibid. Book IV. ch. ii.

3 Quoted in J. M. Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, p. 7.

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economically right is also morally right. There can be no conflict between good

economics and good morals." 1

The assumption of a general and fundamental harmony of interests is prima facie so

paradoxical that it requires careful scrutiny. In the form which Adam Smith gave to it, it

had a definite application to the economic structure of the eighteenth century. It

presupposed a society of small producers and merchants, interested in the maximisation

of production and exchange, infinitely mobile and adaptable, and unconcerned with the

problem of the distribution of wealth. Those conditions were substantially fulfilled in an

age when production involved no high degree of specialisation and no sinking of capital

in fixed equipment, and when the class which might be more interested in the equitable

distribution of wealth than in its maximum production was insignificant and without

influence. But by a curious coincidence, the year which saw the publication of The

Wealth of Nations was also the year in which Watt invented his steam-engine. Thus, at

the very moment when laissez-faire theory was receiving its classical exposition, its

premises were undermined by an invention which was destined to call into being

immobile, highly specialised, mammoth industries and a large and powerful proletariat

more interested in distribution than in production. Once industrial capitalism and the

class system had become the recognised structure of society, the doctrine of the harmony

of interests acquired a new significance, and became, as we shall presently see, the

ideology of a dominant group concerned to maintain its predominance by asserting the

identity of its interests with those of the community as a whole. 2

But this transformation could not have been effected, and the doctrine could not have

survived at all, but for one circumstance. The survival of the belief in a harmony of

interests was rendered possible by the unparalleled expansion of production, population

and prosperity, which marked the hundred years following the publication of The Wealth

of Nations and the invention of the steam-engine. Expanding prosperity contributed to the

popularity of the doctrine in three different ways. It attenuated competition for markets

among producers, since fresh markets were constantly becoming available; it

____________________ 1 Quoted in J. Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, p. 400. I have failed to trace the original.

2 See pp. 80 - 81.

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postponed the class issue, with its insistence on the primary importance of equitable

distribution, by extending to members of the less prosperous classes some share in the

general prosperity; and by creating a sense of confidence in present and future well-

being, it encouraged men to believe that the world was ordered on so rational a plan as

the natural harmony of interests. "It was the continual widening of the field of demand

which, for half a century, made capitalism operate as if it were a liberal utopia." 1

The

tacit presupposition of infinitely expanding markets was the foundation on which the

supposed harmony of interests rested. As Dr. Mannheim points out, traffic control is

unnecessary so long as the number of cars does not exceed the comfortable capacity of

the road. 2

Until that moment arrives, it is easy to believe in a natural harmony of

interests between road-users.

What was true of individuals was assumed to be also true of nations. Just as individuals,

by pursuing their own good, unconsciously compass the good of the whole community,

so nations in serving themselves serve humanity. Universal free trade was justified on the

ground that the maximum economic interest of each nation was identified with the

maximum economic interest of the whole world. Adam Smith, who was a practical

reformer rather than a pure theorist, did indeed admit that governments might have to

protect certain industries in the interests of national defence. But such derogations

seemed to him and to his followers trivial exceptions to the rule. "Laissez-faire ", as J. S.

Mill puts it, ". . . should be the general rule: every departure from it, unless required by

some great good, a certain evil." 3

Other thinkers gave the doctrine of the harmony of

national interests a still wider application. "The true interests of a nation", observes a late

eighteenthcentury writer, " never yet stood in opposition to the general interest of

mankind; and it can never happen that philanthropy and patriotism can impose on any

man inconsistent duties." 4

T. H. Green, the English Hegelian who tempered the doctrines

of his master with concessions to British nineteenth-century liberalism, held that "no

action in its own interest of a state

____________________ 1 Nationalism: A Study by a Group of Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, p. 229.

2 K. Mannheim, Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus, p. 104.

3 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, II. Book V. ch. xi.

4 Romilly, Thoughts on the Influence of the French Revolution, p. 5.

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which fulfilled its idea could conflict with any true interest or right of general society ", 1

though it is interesting to note that the question-begging epithet " true ", which in the

eighteenthcentury quotation is attached to the interests of the nation, has been transferred

by the nineteenth century to the interest of the general society. Mazzini, who embodied

the liberal nineteenth-century philosophy of nationalism, believed in a sort of division of

labour between nations. Each nation had its own special task for which its special

aptitudes fitted it, and the performance of this task was its contribution to the welfare of

humanity. If all nations acted in this spirit, international harmony would prevail. The

same condition of apparently infinite expansibility which encouraged belief in the

economic harmony of interests made possible the belief in the political harmony of rival

national movements. One reason why con-temporaries of Mazzini thought nationalism a

good thing was that there were few recognised nations, and plenty of room for them. In

an age when Germans, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Magyars and half a dozen more

national groups were not yet visibly jostling one another over an area of a few hundred

square miles, it was comparatively easy to believe that each nation, by developing its own

nationalism, could make its own special contribution to the international harmony of

interests. Most liberal writers continued to believe, right down to 1918, that nations, by

developing their own nationalism, promoted the cause of internationalism; and Wilson

and many other makers of the peace treaties saw in national self-determination the key to

world peace. More recently still, responsible AngloSaxon statesmen have been from time

to time content to echo, probably without much reflexion, the old Mazzinian formulae. 2

Darwinism in Politics

When the centenary of The Wealth of Nations was celebrated in 1876, there were already

symptoms of an impending breakdown. No country but Great Britain had been

commercially powerful enough to believe in the international harmony of

____________________ 1 T. H. Green, Principles of Political Obligation, § 166.

2 Mr. Eden, for example, in 1938 advocated "a comity of nations in which each can develop and flourish and give to their uttermost their own special con-tribution to the diversity of life" ( Anthony Eden, Foreign Affairs, p. 277).

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economic interests. Acceptance of free-trade principles outside Great Britain had always

been partial, half-hearted and shortlived. The United States had rejected them from the

start. About 1840, Friedrich List, who had spent much time studying industrial

development in the United States, began to preach to a German audience the doctrine

that, while free trade was the right policy for an industrially dominant nation like Great

Britain, only protection could enable weaker nations to break the British stranglehold.

German and American industries, built up behind protective tariffs, were soon seriously

impinging on the world-wide British industrial monopoly. The British Dominions

overseas made use of their newly-won fiscal autonomy to protect themselves against the

manufactures of the mother country. The pressure of competition was increasing on all

sides. Nationalism began to wear a sinister aspect, and to degenerate into imperialism.

The philosophy of Hegel, who identified reality with an eternally recurring conflict of

ideas, extended its influence. Behind Hegel stood Marx, who materialised the Hegelian

conflict into a class-war of economic interest--groups, and working-class parties came

into being which steadfastly refused to believe in the harmony of interests between

capital and labour. Above all, Darwin propounded and popularised a biological doctrine

of evolution through a perpetual struggle for life and the elimination of the unfit.

It was the doctrine of evolution which for a time enabled the laissez-faire philosophy to

make its terms with the new conditions and the new trend of thought. Free competition

had always been worshipped as the beneficent deity of the laissez-faire system. The

French economist Bastiat, in a work significantly entitled Les Harmonies Économiques,

had hailed competition as "that humanitarian force . . . which continually wrests

progress from the hands of the individual to make it the common heritage of the great

human family ". 1

Under the growing strains of the latter half of the nineteenth century, it

was perceived that competition in the economic sphere implied exactly what Darwin

proclaimed as the biological law of nature--the survival of the stronger at the expense of

the weaker. The small producer or trader was gradually being put out of business by his

large-scale competitor; and this development was what progress and the welfare of the

cora-

____________________ 1 Bastiat, Les Harmonies Économiques, p. 355.

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munity as a whole demanded. Laissez-faire meant an open field, and the prize to the

strongest. The doctrine of the harmony of interests underwent an almost imperceptible

modification. The good of the community (or, as people were now inclined to say, of the

species) was still identical with the good of its individual members, but only of those

individuals who were effective competitors in the struggle for life. Humanity went on

from strength to strength, shedding its weaklings by the way. "The development of the

species", as Marx said, ". . . and therefore the higher development of the individual, can

only be secured through the historical process, in which individuals are sacrificed." 1

Such was the doctrine of the new age of intensified economic competition preached by

the school of Herbert Spencer, and commonly accepted in Great Britain in the 'seventies

and 'eighties. The last French disciple of Adam Smith, Yves Guyot, assisted perhaps by

the accident that the French word concurrence means "collaboration" as well as

"competition", wrote a work entitled La Morale de la Concurrence. Among English

writers who applied this evolutionary principle to international politics, the most popular

was Bagehot :

Conquest is the premium given by nature to those national characters which their

national customs have made most fit to win in war, and in most material respects those

winning characters are really the best characters. The characters which do win in war

are the characters which we should wish to win in war. 2

About the same time, a Russian sociologist defined international politics as "the art of

conducting the struggle for existence between social organisms"; 3

and in 1900 a

distinguished professor, in a once famous book, stated the doctrine in all its naked

ruthlessness :

The path of progress is strewn with the wreck of nations; traces are everywhere to be

seen of the hecatombs of inferior races, and of victims who found not the narrow way to

the

____________________ 1 Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, II. i. p. 309.

2 Bagehot, Physics and Politics ( 2nd ed.), p.215. What does "material mean in this passage? Does it merely mean "relevant" ? Or is the writer con-scious of an uncomfortable antithesis between "material" and "moral" ?

3 J. Novicow, La Politique International, p. 242.

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greater perfection. Yet these dead peoples are, in very truth, the stepping stones on which

mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper emotional life of to-day. 1

In Germany, the same view was propounded by Treitschke and Houston Stewart

Chamberlain. The doctrine of progress through the elimination of unfit nations seemed a

fair corollary of the doctrine of progress through the elimination of unfit individuals; and

some such belief, though not always openly avowed, was implicit in late nineteenth-

century imperialism. In the later nineteenth century, as an American historian remarks,

"the basic problem of international relations was who should cut up the victims". 2

The

harmony of interests was established through the sacrifice of "unfit" Africans and

Asiatics.

One point had, unfortunately, been overlooked. For more than a hundred years, the

doctrine of the harmony of interests had provided a rational basis for morality. The

individual had been urged to serve the interest of the community on the plea that that

interest was also his own. The ground had now been shifted. In the long run, the good of

the community and the good of the individual were still the same. But this eventual

harmony was preceded by a struggle for life between individuals, in which not only the

good, but the very existence, of the loser were eliminated altogether from the picture.

Morality in these conditions had no rational attraction for prospective losers; and the

whole ethical system was built on the sacrifice of the weaker brother. In practice, nearly

every state had made inroads on the classical doctrine, and introduced social legislation to

protect the economically weak against the economically strong. The doctrine itself died

harder. In the 'seventies Dostoevsky, who had none of the prejudices of an Englishman or

an economist, made Ivan Karamazov declare that the price of admission to the "eternal

harmony" was too high if it included the sufferings of the innocent. About the same time,

Winwood Reade made an uncomfortable sensation in Great Britain with a book called

The Martyrdom of Man, which drew attention to the immense tale of suffering and waste

involved in the theory of evolution. In the 'nineties, Huxley

____________________ 1 Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science, p. 64.

2 W. L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imparialism, ii. p. 797.

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confessed, in the name of science, to the existence of a discrepancy between the " cosmic

process " and the " ethical process "; 1

and Balfour, approaching the problem from the

angle of philosophy, concluded that " a complete harmony between ' egoism ' and '

altruism ', between the pursuit of the highest happiness for oneself and the highest

happiness for other people, can never be provided by a creed which refuses to admit that

the deeds done and the character formed in this life can flow over into another, and there

permit a reconciliation and an adjustment between the conflicting principles which are

not always possible here ". 2

Less and less was heard of the beneficent properties of free

competition. Before 1914, though the policy of international free trade was still upheld by

the British electorate and by British economists, the ethical postulate which had once

formed the basis of the laissez-faire philosophy no longer appealed, at any rate in its

crude form, to any serious thinker. Biologically and economically, the doctrine of the

harmony of interests was tenable only if you left out of account the interest of the weak

who must be driven to the wall, or called in the next world to redress the balance of the

present.

The International Harmony

Attention has been drawn to the curious way in which doctrines, already obsolete or

obsolescent before the war of 1914, were reintroduced in the post-war period, largely

through American inspiration, into the special field of international affairs. This would

appear to be conspicuously true of the laissez-faire doctrine of the harmony of interests.

In the United States, the history of laissez-faire presents special features. Throughout the

nineteenth, and well into the twentieth, centuries the United States, while requiring tariff

protection against European competition, had enjoyed the advantage of an expanding

domestic market of apparently unlimited potentialities. In Great Britain, which continued

down to 1914 to dominate world trade, but was increasingly conscious of strains and

stresses at home, J. S. Mill and later economists clung firmly to international free trade,

but made more and more inroads into laissez-faire orthodoxy in the domestic sphere. In

the

____________________ 1 Huxley, Romanes Lecture, 1893, reprinted in Evolution and Ethics, p. 81.

2 Balfour, Foudations of Belief, p. 27.

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United States, Carey and his successors justified protective tariffs, but in every other

respect maintained the immutable principles of laissez-faire. In Europe after 1919,

planned economy, which rests on the assumption that no natural harmony of interests

exists and that interests must be artificially harmonised by state action, became the

practice, if not the theory, of almost every state. In the United States, the persistence of an

expanding domestic market staved off this development till after 1929. The natural

harmony of interests remained an integral part of the American view of life; and in this as

in other respects, current theories of international politics were deeply imbued with the

American tradition. Moreover, there was a special reason for the ready acceptance of the

doctrine in the international sphere. In domestic affairs it is clearly the business of the

state to create harmony if no natural harmony exists. In international politics, there is no

organised power charged with the task of creating harmony; and the temptation to assume

a natural harmony is therefore particularly strong. But this is no excuse for burking the

issue. To make the harmonisation of interests the goal of political action is not the same

thing as to postulate that a natural harmony of interests exists; 1

and it is this latter

postulate which has caused so much confusion in international thinking.

The Common Interest in Peace

Politically, the doctrine of the identity of interests has commonly taken the form of an

assumption that every nation has an identical interest in peace, and that any nation which

desires to disturb the peace is therefore both irrational and immoral. This view bears clear

marks of its Anglo-Saxon origin. It was easy after 1918 to convince that part of mankind

which lives in English-speaking countries that war profits nobody. The argument did not

seem particularly convincing to Germans, who had profited largely from the wars of 1866

____________________ 1 The confusion between the two was admirably illustrated by an interjection of Mr. Attlee in the House of Commons: "It was precisely the object of the establishment of the League of Nations that the preservation of peace was a common interest of the world" (House of Commons, December 21, 1937: Official Report, col. 1811). Mr. Attlee apparently failed to distinguish between the proposition that a natural community of interests existed and the proposition that the Leave of Nations had been established to create one.

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and 1870, and attributed their more recent sufferings, not to the war of 1914, but to the

fact that they had lost it; or to Italians, who blamed not the war, but the treachery of allies

who defrauded them in the peace settlement; or to Poles or Czecho-Slovaks who, far

from deploring the war, owed their national existence to it; or to Frenchmen, who could

not unreservedly regret a war which had restored Alsace-Lorraine to France; or to people

of other nationalities who remembered profitable wars waged by Great Britain and the

United States in the past. But these people had fortunately little influence over the

formation of current theories of international relations, which emanated almost

exclusively from the English-speaking countries. British and American writers continued

to assume that the uselessness of war had been irrefutably demonstrated by the

experience of 1914-18, and that an intellectual grasp of this fact was all that was

necessary to induce the nations to keep the peace in the future; and they were sincerely

puzzled as well as disappointed at the failure of other countries to share this view.

The confusion was increased by the ostentatious readiness of other countries to flatter the

Anglo-Saxon world by repeating its slogans. In the fifteen years after the first world war,

every Great Power (except, perhaps, Italy) repeatedly did lip-service to the doctrine by

declaring peace to be one of the main objects of its policy. 1

But as Lenin observed long

ago, peace in itself is a meaningless aim. "Absolutely everybody is in favour of peace in

general", he wrote in 1915, "including Kitchener, Joffre, Hindenburg and Nicholas the

Bloody, for everyone of them wishes to end the war." 2

The common interest in peace

____________________ 1 "Peace must prevail, must come before all" ( Briand, League of Nations: Ninth Assembly, p. 83). "The maintenance of peace is the first objective of British foreign policy" ( Eden, League of Nations: Sixteenth Assembly, p. 106). "Peace is our dearest treasure" ( Hitler, in a speech in the German Reichstag on January 30, 1937, reported in The Times, February 1, 1937). "The principal aim of the international policy of the Soviet Union is the preservation of peace" ( Chicherin in The Soviet Union and Peace ( 1929), p. 249). "The object of Japan, despite propaganda to the contrary, is peace" ( Matsuoka, League of Nations: Special Assembly 1932-33, iii. p. 73). The paucity of Italian pronouncements in favour of peace was probably explained by the poor reputation of Italian troops as fighters: Mussolini feared that any emphatic expression of preference for peace would be construed as an admission that Italy had no stomach for war.

2 Lenin, Collected Works (Engl. transl.), xviii. p. 264. Compare Spenser Wilkinson's dictum: "It is not peace but preponderance that is in each case the real object. The truth cannot be too often repeated that peace is never the object

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masks the fact that some nations desire to maintain the status quo without having to fight

for it, and others to change the status quo without having to fight in order to do so. 1

The

statement that it is in the interest of the world as a whole either that the status quo should

be maintained, or that it should be changed, would be contrary to the facts. The statement

that it is in the interest of the world as a whole that the conclusion eventually reached,

whether maintenance or change, should be reached by peaceful means, would command

general assent, but seems a rather meaningless platitude. The utopian assumption that

there is a world interest in peace which is identifiable with the interest of each individual

nation helped politicians and political writers everywhere to evade the unpalatable fact of

a fundamental divergence of interest between nations desirous of maintaining the status

quo and nations desirous of changing it. 2

A peculiar combination of platitude and

falseness thus became endemic in the pronouncements of statesmen about international

affairs. "In this whole Danubian area", said a Prime Minister of Czecho-Slovakia, "no one

really wants conflicts and jealousies. The various countries want to maintain their

independence, but otherwise they are ready for any co-operative measures. I am thinking

specially of the Little Entente, Hungary and Bulgaria." 3

Literally the words may pass as

true. Yet the conflicts and jealousies which nobody wanted were a notorious feature of

Danubian politics after 1919, and the co-operation for which all were ready was

unobtainable. The fact of divergent interests was disguised and falsified by the platitude

of a general desire to avoid conflict.

____________________ of policy: you cannot define peace except by reference to war, which is a means and never an end" ( Government and the War, p. 121).

1 "When a saint complains that people do not know the things belonging to their peace, what he really means is that they do not sufficiently care about the things belonging to his peace" ( The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Festing- Jones , pp. 211-12). This would seem to be true of those latter-day saints, the satisfied Powers.

2 It is sometimes maintained not merely that all nations have an equal interes in preferring peace to war (which is, in a sense, true), but that war can never in any circumstances bring to the victor advantages comparable with its cost. The latter view does not appear to be true of the past, though it is possible to argue (as does Bertrand Russell, Which Way Peace?) that it is true of modern warfare. If accepted, this view leads, of course, to absolute pacifism; for there is no reason to suppose that it is any truer of "defensive" than of "offensive" war (assuming the distinction between them to be valid).

3 Daily Telegraph, August 26, 1938.

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International Economic Harmony

In economic relations, the assumption of a general harmony of interests was made with

even greater confidence; for here we have a direct reflexion of the cardinal doctrine of

laissez-faire economics, and it is here that we can see most clearly the dilemma which

results from the doctrine. When the nineteenth-century liberal spoke of the greatest good

of the greatest number, he tacitly assumed that the good of the minority might have to be

sacrificed to it. This principle applied equally to international economic relations. If

Russia or Italy, for example, were not strong enough to build up industries without the

protection of tariffs, then -- the laissez-faire liberal would have argued -- they should be

content to import British and German manufactures and supply wheat and oranges to the

British and German markets. If anyone had thereupon objected that this policy would

condemn Russia and Italy to remain second-rate Powers economically and militarily

dependent on their neighbours, the laissez-faire liberal would have had to answer that this

was the will of Providence and that this was what the general harmony of interests

demanded. The modern utopian internationalist enjoys none of the advantages, and has

none of the toughness, of the nineteenth-century liberal. The material success of the

weaker Powers in building up protected industries, as well as the new spirit of

internationalism, preclude him from arguing that the harmony of interests depends on the

sacrifice of economically unfit nations. Yet the abandonment of this premiss destroys the

whole basis of the doctrine which he has inherited; and he is driven to the belief that the

common good can be achieved without any sacrifice of the good of any individual

member of the community. Every international conflict is therefore unnecessary and

illusory. It is only necessary to discover the common good which is at the same time the

highest good of all the disputants; and only the folly of statesmen stands in the way of its

discovery. The utopian, secure in his understanding of this common good, arrogates to

himself the monopoly of wisdom. The statesmen of the world one and all stand convicted

of incredible blindness to the interest of those whom they are supposed to represent. Such

was the picture of the international scene presented, in all seriousness, by British and

American

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writers, including not a few economists.

It is for this reason that we find in the modern period an extraordinary divergence

between the theories of economic experts and the practice of those responsible for the

economic policies of their respective countries. Analysis will shew that this divergence

springs from a simple fact. The economic expert, dominated in the main by laissez-faire

doctrine, considers the hypothetical economic interest of the world as a whole, and is

content to assume that this is identical with the interest of each individual country. The

politician pursues the concrete interest of his country, and assumes (if he makes any

assumption at all) that the interest of the world as a whole is identical with it. Nearly

every pronouncement of every international economic conference held between the two

world wars was vitiated by this assumption that there was some "solution" or "plan"

which, by a judicious balancing of interests, would be equally favourable to all and

prejudicial to none. Any strictly nationalistic policy [declared the League Conference of

economic experts in 1927] is harmful not only to the nation which practises it but also to

the others, and therefore defeats its own end, and if it be desired that the new state of

mind revealed by the Conference should lead rapidly to practical results, any programme

of execution must include, as an essential factor, the principle of parallel or concerted

action by the different nations. Every country will then know that the concessions it is

asked to make will be balanced by corresponding sacrifices on the part of the other

countries. It will be able to accept the proposed measures, not merely in view of its own

individual position, but also because it is interested in the success of the general plan laid

down by the Conference. 1

The sequel of the Conference was the complete neglect of all the recommendations

unanimously made by it; and if we are not content to accept the facile explanation that the

leading statesmen of the world were either criminal or mad, we may begin to suspect the

validity of its initial assumption. It seems altogether rash to suppose that economic

nationalism is necessarily detrimental to states which practise it. In the nineteenth

century, Germany and the United States, by pursuing a

____________________ 1 League of Nations: C.E.I. 44, p. 21, (italics in original).

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"strictly nationalistic policy", had placed themselves in a position to challenge Great

Britain's virtual monopoly of world trade. No conference of economic experts, meeting in

1880, could have evolved a "general plan" for "parallel or concerted action" which would

have allayed the economic rivalries of the time in a manner equally advantageous to

Great Britain, Germany and the United States. It was not less presumptuous to suppose

that a conference meeting in 1927 could allay the economic rivalries of the later period

by a "plan" beneficial to the interests of everyone. Even the economic crisis of 1930-33

failed to bring home to the economists the true nature of the problem which they had to

face. The experts who prepared the "Draft Annotated Agenda" for the World Economic

Conference of 1933 condemned the "world-wide adoption of ideals of national self-

sufficiency which cut unmistakably athwart the lines of economic development ". 1

They

did not apparently pause to reflect that those so-called "lines of economic development",

which might be beneficial to some countries and even to the world as a whole, would

inevitably be detrimental to other countries, which were using weapons of economic

nationalism in self-defence. The Van Zeeland report of January 1938 began by asking,

and answering in the affirmative, the question whether "the methods which, taken as a

whole, form the system of international trade" are "fundamentally preferable" to "autarkic

tendencies". Yet every Power at some period of its history, and as a rule for prolonged

periods, has resorted to "autarkic tendencies". It is difficult to believe that there is any

absolute sense in which "autarkic tendencies" are always detrimental to those who pursue

them. Even if they could be justified only as the lesser of two evils, the initial premise of

the Van Zeeland report was invalidated. But there was worse to come. "We must . . .

make our dispositions", continued M. Van Zeeland, "in such a way that the new system

shall offer to all participators advantages greater than those of the position in which they

now find themselves." 2

This is economic utopianism in its most purblind form. The

report, like the reports of 1927 and 1933, assumed the existence of a fundamental

principle of economic

____________________ 1 League of Nations: C.48, M.18, 1933, ii. p. 6.

2 Report . . . on the Possibility of Obtaining a General Reduction of the Obstacles to International Trade, Cmd. 5648.

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policy whose application would be equally beneficial to all states and detrimental to

none; and for this reason it remained, like its predecessors, a dead letter.

Economic theory, as opposed to economic practice, was so powerfully dominated in the

years between the two world wars by the supposed harmony of interests that it is difficult

to find, in the innumerable international discussions of the period, any clear exposition of

the real problem which baffled the statesmen of the world. Perhaps the frankest statement

was one made by the Yugoslav Foreign Minister at the session of the Commission for

European Union in January 1931. Arthur Henderson, on behalf of Great Britain,

following the Netherland delegate Dr. Colijn, had pleaded for an all-round tariff

reduction "which must, by its nature, bring benefit to each and all by allowing that

expansion of production and international exchange of wealth by which the common

prosperity of all can be increased". 1

Marinkovitch, who spoke next, concluded from the

failure to carry out the recommendations of the 1927 Conference, that "there were

extremely important reasons why the governments could not apply" those resolutions. He

went on:

The fact is that apart from economic considerations there are also political and social

considerations. The old "thingswill-right-themselves" school of economists argued that if

nothing were done and events were allowed to follow their natural course from an

economic point of view, economic equilibrium would come about of its own accord. That

is probably true (I do not propose to discuss the point). But how would that equilibrium

come about? At the expense of the weakest. Now, as you are aware, for more than

seventy years there has been a powerful and growing reaction against this theory of

economics. All the socialist parties of Europe and the world are merely the expression of

the opposition to this way of looking at economic problems.

We were told that we ought to lower customs barriers and even abolish them. As far as

the agricultural states of Europe are concerned, if they could keep the promises they

made in 1927 -- admitting that the statements of 1927 did contain promises -- and could

carry that policy right through, we might perhaps find ourselves able to hold our

____________________ 1 League of Nations: C.144, M.45, 1931, vii. p. 30.

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own against overseas competition in the matter of agricultural products. But at the same

time we should have to create in Poland, Roumania and Yugoslavia the same conditions

as exist in Canada and the Argentine, where vast territories are inhabited by a scanty

population and where machinery and other devices are employed. . . . We could not

sacrifice our people by shooting them, but they would nevertheless be killed off by

famine -- which would come to the same thing. I am sure that the key to which M. Colijn

has referred does not exist. Economic and social life is too complicated to allow of a

solution by any one formula; it calls for complicated solutions. We shall have to take into

account the many varieties of geographical, political, social and other conditions which

exist. 1

Marinkovitch went on to dispose of the theory of the "longrun" harmony of interests:

Last year, when I was in the Yugoslav mountains, I heard that the inhabitants of a small

mountain village, having no maize or wheat on which to live, were simply cutting down a

wood which belonged to them . . . and were living on what they earned by selling the

wood. . . . I went to the village, collected together some of the leading inhabitants and

endeavoured to reason with them, just like the great industrial states reason with us. I said

to them: "You possess plenty of common sense. You see that your forest is becoming

smaller and smaller. What will you do when you cut down the last tree?" They replied to

me: "Your Excellency, that is a point which worries us: but on the other hand, what

should we do now if we stopped cutting down our trees?"

I can assure you that the agricultural countries are in exactly the same situation. You

threaten them with future disasters; but they are already in the throes of disaster. 2

One further example of unwonted frankness may be quoted. Speaking in September 1937

over one of the United States broadcasting systems, the President of the Colombian

Republic said:

In no field of human activity are the benefits of the crisis as clear as in the relationships

between nations and especially

____________________ 1 League of Nations: C.144, M.45, 1931, vii. p. 31.

2 Ibid. 32.

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of the American nations. If it is true that the economic relations have become rigorous

and at times harsh, it is also true that they have fortunately become more democratic.

The crisis freed many countries which had up to then been subordinated to the double

mental and financial imperialism of the nations which controlled international markets

and policies. Many nations learned to trust less international cordiality and to seek an

autonomous life, full of initial obstacles but which nevertheless created strong interests

within a short time. . . .

When the arbitrary systems that prevail to-day begin to be relaxed, there will be a weaker

international trade, but there will also be a larger number of nations economically strong.

Economic co-operation to-day is a very different and more noble thing than the old co-

operation which was based on the convenience of industrial countries and of bankers who

tutored the world. The certainty acquired by many small nations that they can subsist and

prosper without subordinating their conduct and their activities to foreign interests has

began to introduce a greater frankness and equality in the relations between modern

nations. . . .

It is true that the crisis has shipwrecked many high and noble principles of our

civilisation; but it is also true that in this return to a kind of primitive struggle for

existence, peoples are being freed of many fictions and of much hypocrisy which they

had accepted in the belief that with them they were insuring their well-being. . . .

The foundation of international economic freedom lies in the recognition that when

strong nations place themselves on the defensive, they act just like the weak ones do, and

that all of them have an equal right to defend themselves with their own resources. 1

The

claims made on behalf of the Colombian Republic were perhaps exaggerated. But both

the Yugoslav and the Colombian statements were powerful challenges to the doctrine of

the harmony of interests. It is fallacy to suppose that, because Great Britain and the

United States have an interest in the removal of trade barriers, this is also an interest of

Yugoslavia and Colombia. International trade may be weaker. The

____________________ 1 Address broadcast by the Columbia Broadcasting System, U.S.A., on September 19, 1937, and published in Talks, October 1937.

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economic interests of Europe or of the world at large may suffer. But Yugoslavia and

Colombia will be better off than they would have been under a régime of European or

world prosperity which reduced them to the position of satellites. Dr. Schacht spoke a

little later of those "fanatical adherents of the most-favoured-nation policy abroad, who

from the abundance of their wealth cannot realise that a poor nation has nevertheless the

courage to live by its own laws instead of suffering under the prescriptions of the well-to-

do". 1

Laissezfaire, in international relations as in those between capital and labour, is the

paradise of the economically strong. State control, whether in the form of protective

legislation or of protective tariffs, is the weapon of self-defence invoked by the

economically weak. The clash of interests is real and inevitable; and the whole nature of

the problem is distorted by an attempt to disguise it.

The Harmony Broken

We must therefore reject as inadequate and misleading the attempt to base international

morality on an alleged harmony of interests which identifies the interest of the whole

community of nations with the interest of each individual member of it. In the nineteenth

century, this attempt met with widespread success, thanks to the continuously expanding

economy in which it was made. The period was one of progressive prosperity, punctuated

only by minor set-backs. The international economic structure bore considerable

resemblance to the domestic economic structure of the United States. Pressure could at

once be relieved by expansion to hitherto unoccupied and unexploited territories; and

there was a plentiful supply of cheap labour, and of backward countries, which had not

yet reached the level of political consciousness. Enterprising individuals could solve the

economic problem by migration, enterprising nations by colonisation. Expanding markets

produced an expanding population, and population in turn reacted on markets. Those who

were left behind in the race could plausibly be regarded as the unfit. A harmony of

interests among the fit, based on individual enterprise and free competition, was

sufficiently near to reality to form a sound basis

____________________ 1 Address to the Economic Council of the German Academy, November 29, 1938.

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for the current theory. With some difficulty the illusion was kept alive till 1914. Even

British prosperity, though its foundations were menaced by German and American

competition, continued to expand. The year 1913 was a record year for British trade.

The transition from the apparent harmony to the transparent clash of interests may be

placed about the turn of the century. Appropriately enough, it found its first expression in

colonial policies. In the British mind, it was primarily associated with events in South

Africa. Mr. Churchill dates the beginning of "these violent times" from the Jameson Raid.

1 In North Africa and the Far East, there was a hasty scramble by the European Powers to

secure the few eligible sites which were still vacant. Emigration of individuals from

Europe, the point of principal tension, to America assumed unparalleled dimensions. In

Europe itself, anti-Semitism -- the recurrent symptom of economic stress -- reappeared

after a long interval in Russia, Germany and France. 2

In Great Britain, agitation against

unrestricted alien immigration began in the 1890's; and the first act controlling

immigration was passed in 1905.

The first world war, which proceeded from this growing tension, aggravated it tenfold by

intensifying its fundamental causes. In belligerent and neutral countries in Europe, Asia

and America, industrial and agricultural production were everywhere artificially

stimulated. After the war every country struggled to maintain its expanded production;

and an enhanced and inflamed national consciousness was invoked to justify the struggle.

One reason for the unprecedented vindictiveness of the peace treaties, and in particular of

their economic clauses, was that practical men no longer believed -- as they had done

fifty or a hundred years earlier -- in an underlying harmony of interests between victors

and defeated. The object was now to eliminate a competitor, a revival of whose

prosperity might menace your own. In Europe, the struggle was intensified by the

creation of new states and new economic frontiers. In Asia, India and China built up

largescale manufactures to make themselves independent of imports

____________________ 1 Winston Churchill, World Crisis, p. 26.

2 The same conditions encouraged the growth of Zionism; for Zionism, as the Palestine Royal Commission of 1937 remarked, "on its negative side is a creed of escape" (Cmd. 5479, p. 13).

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from Europe. Japan became an exporter of textiles and other cheap goods which undercut

European manufactures on the world market. Most important of all, there were no more

open spaces anywhere awaiting cheap and profitable development and exploitation. The

ample avenues of migration which had relieved the economic pressures of the pre-war

period were closed; and in place of the natural flow of migration came the problem of

forcibly evicted refugees. 1

The complex phenomenon known as economic nationalism

swept over the world. The fundamental character of this clash of interests became

obvious to all except those confirmed utopians who dominated economic thought in the

English-speaking countries. The hollowness of the glib nineteenth-century platitude that

nobody can benefit from what harms another was revealed. The basic presupposition of

utopianism had broken down.

What confronts us in international politics to-day is, therefore, nothing less than the

complete bankruptcy of the conception of morality which has dominated political and

economic thought for a century and a half. Internationally, it is no longer. possible to

deduce virtue from right reasoning, because it is no longer seriously possible to believe

that every state, by pursuing the greatest good of the whole world, is pursuing the greatest

good of its own citizens, and vice versa. The synthesis of morality and reason, at any rate

in the crude form in which it was achieved by nineteenth-century liberalism, is untenable.

The inner meaning of the modern international crisis is the collapse of the whole structure

of utopianism based on the concept of the harmony of interests. The present generation

will have to rebuild from the foundations. But before we can do this, before we can

ascertain what can be salved from the ruins, we must examine the flaws in the structure

which led to its collapse; and we can best do this by analysing the realist critique of the

utopian assumptions.

____________________ 1 "The existence of refugees is a symptom of the disappearance of economic and political liberalism. Refugees are the by-product of an economic isolationism which has practically stopped free migration" ( J. Hope Simpson, Refugees: Preliminary Report of a Survey, p. 193).

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CHAPTER 5

THE REALIST CRITIQUE

The Foundations of Realism

FOR reasons explained in a previous chapter, realism enters the field far behind

utopianism and by way of reaction from it. The thesis that "justice is the right of the

stronger" was, indeed, familiar in the Hellenic world. But it never represented anything

more than the protest of an uninfluential minority, puzzled by the divergence between

political theory and political practice. Under the supremacy of the Roman Empire, and

later of the Catholic Church, the problem could hardly arise; for the political good, first

of the empire, then of the church, could be regarded as identical with moral good. It was

only with the break-up of the mediaeval system that the divergence between political

theory and political practice became acute and challenging. Machiavelli is the first

important political realist.

Machiavelli's starting-point is a revolt against the utopianism of current political thought:

It being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it

appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the

imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have

never been seen and known, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought

to live that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin

than his preservation.

The three essential tenets implicit in Machiavelli's doctrine are the foundation-stones of

the realist philosophy. In the first place, history is a sequence of cause and effect, whose

course can be analysed and understood by intellectual effort, but not (as the utopians

believe) directed by "imagination". Secondly, theory does not (as the utopians assume)

create practice, but practice theory. In Machiavelli's words, "good counsels,

whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince,

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and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels". Thirdly, politics are not (as the

utopians pretend) a function of ethics, but ethics of politics. Men "are kept honest by

constraint". Machiavelli recognised the importance of morality, but thought that there

could be no effective morality where there was no effective authority. Morality is the

product of power. 1

The extraordinary vigour and vitality of Machiavelli's challenge to orthodoxy may be

attested by the fact that, more than four centuries after he wrote, the most conclusive way

of discrediting a political opponent is still to describe him as a disciple of Machiavelli. 2

Bacon was one of the first to praise him for "saying openly and without hypocrisy what

men are in the habit of doing, not what they ought to do". 3

Henceforth no political

thinker could ignore him. In France Bodin, in England Hobbes, in the Netherlands

Spinoza, professed to find a compromise between the new doctrine and the conception of

a "law of nature" constituting a supreme ethical standard. But all three were in substance

realists; and the age of Newton for the first time conceived the possibility of a physical

science of politics. 4

The work of Bodin and Hobbes, writes Professor Laski, was "to

separate ethics from politics, and to complete by theoretical means the division which

Machiavelli had effected on practical grounds". 5

"Before the names of Just and Unjust

can have place", said Hobbes, "there must be some coercive power." 6

Spinoza believed

that practical statesmen

____________________ 1 Machiavelli, The Prince, chs. 15 and 23 (Engl. transl., Everyman's Library, pp. 121, 193).

2Two curious recent illustrations may be cited. In the chapter of the Survey of International Affairs dealing with the Nazi revolution, Professor Toynbee declares that National Socialism is the "fulfilment of ideals . . . formulated . . . by Machiavelli"; and he reiterates this view in two further passages of considerable length in the same chapter ( Survey of lnternational, 1934, pp. 111, 117-19, 126-8). In the trial Zinoviev, Kamenev and others in Moscow in August 1936, the Public Prosecutor, Vyshinsky, quoted a passage from Kamenev's writings in which Machiavelli had been praised as "a master of political aphorism and a brilliant dialectician", and accused Kamenev of having "adopted the rules of Machiavelli" and "developed them to the utmost point of unscrupulousness and immorality" ( The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre, pp. 138-9).

3 Bacon, On the Advancement of Learning, vii. ch. 2.

4Hobbes's scheme, "there was in theory no place for any new force or principle beyond the laws of motion found at the beginning; there were merely complex cases of mechanical causation" ( Sabine, History of Political Thought, p. 458).

5 Introduction to A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants (Vindiciae contra Tyrannos), ed. Laski, p. 45.

6 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. xv.

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had contributed more to the understanding of politics than men of theory "and, above all,

theologians"; for "they have put themselves to the school of experience, and have

therefore taught nothing which does not bear upon our practical needs". 1

In anticipation

of Hegel, Spinoza declares that "every man does what he does according to the laws of

his nature and to the highest right of nature". 2

The way is thus opened for determinism;

and ethics become, in the last analysis, the study of reality.

Modern realism differs, however, in one important respect from that of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries. Both utopianism and realism accepted and incorporated in their

philosophies the eighteenth-century belief in progress, with the curious and somewhat

paradoxical result that realism became in appearance more "progressive" than

utopianism. Utopianism grafted its belief in progress on to its belief in an absolute ethical

standard, which remained ex hypothesi static. Realism, having no such sheet-anchor,

became more and more dynamic and relativist. Progress became part of the inner essence

of the historical process; and mankind was moving forward towards a goal which was left

undefined, or was differently defined by different philosophers. The "historical school" of

realists had its home in Germany, and its development is traced through the great names

of Hegel and Marx. But no country in Western Europe, and no branch of thought, was

immune from its influence in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century; and

this development, while it has freed realism from the pessimistic colouring imparted to it

by thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes, has thrown its determinist character into

stronger relief.

The idea of causation in history is as old as the writing of history itself. But so long as the

belief prevailed that human affairs were subject to the continuous supervision and

occasional intervention of a Divine Providence, no philosophy of history based on a

regular relationship of cause and effect was likely to be evolved. The substitution of

reason for Divine Providence enabled Hegel to produce, for the first time, a philosophy

based on the conception of a rational historical process. Hegel, while assuming a regular

and orderly process, was content to find its directing force in a metaphysical abstraction -

- the Zeitgeist

____________________ 1 Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, i. pp. 2-3.

2 Ibid. Introduction.

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But once the historical conception of reality had established itself, it was a short step to

substitute for the abstract Zeitgeist some concrete material force. The economic

interpretation of history was not invented, but developed and popularised, by Marx.

About the same time Buckle propounded a geographical interpretation of history which

convinced him that human affairs were "permeated by one glorious principle of universal

and undeviating regularity"; 1

and this has been revived in the form of the science of

Geopolitik, whose inventor describes geography as "a political categorical imperative". 2

Spengler believed that events were determined by quasi-biological laws governing the

growth and decline of civilisations. More eclectic thinkers interpret history as the product

of a variety of material factors, and the policy of a group or nation as a reflexion of all the

material factors which make up the group or national interest. "Foreign policies", said

Mr. Hughes during his tenure of office as American Secretary of State, "are not built

upon abstractions. They are the result of national interest arising from some immediate

exigency or standing out vividly in historical perspective." 3

Any such interpretation of

reality, whether in terms of a Zeitgeist, or of economics or geography, or of "historical

perspective", is in its last analysis deterministic. Marx (though, having a programme of

action, he could not be a rigid and consistent determinist) believed in "tendencies which

work out with an iron necessity towards an inevitable goal". 4

"Politics", wrote Lenin,

"have their own objective logic independent of the prescriptions of this or that individual

or party." 5

In January 1918, he described his belief in the coming socialist revolutions in

Europe as "a scientific prediction". 6

On the "scientific" hypothesis of the realists, reality is thus identified with the whole

course of historical evolution, whose laws it is the business of the philosopher to

investigate and

____________________ 1 The concluding words of Buckle History of Civilisation.

2 Kjellen, Der Staat als Lebensform, p. 81. Compare the opening words of Crowe's famous memorandum on British foreign policy: "The general character of England's foreign policy is determined by the immutable conditions of her geographical situation" ( British Documents on the Origin of the War, ed. Gooch and Temperley, iii. p. 397).

3 International Conciliation, No. 194, January 1924, p. 3.

4 Marx, Capital, Preface to 1st ed. (Engl. transl., Everyman's Library, p. 863).

5 Lenin, Works ( 2nd Russian ed.), x. p. 207.

6 Ibid. xxii. p. 194.

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reveal. There can be no reality outside the historical process. "To conceive of history as

evolution and progress", writes Croce, "implies accepting it as necessary in all its parts,

and therefore denying validity to judgments on it." 1

Condemnation of the past on ethical

grounds has no meaning; for in Hegel's words, "philosophy transfigures the real which

appears unjust into the rational". 2

What was, is right. History cannot be judged except by

historical standards. It is significant that our historical judgments, except those relating to

a past which we can ourselves remember as the present, always appear to start from the

presupposition that things could not have turned out otherwise than they did. It is

recorded that Venizelos, on reading in Fisher History of Europe that the Greek invasion

of Asia Minor in 1919 was a mistake, smiled ironically and said: "Every enterprise that

does not succeed is a mistake". 3

If Wat Tyler's rebellion had succeeded, he would be an

English national hero. If the American War of Independence had ended in disaster, the

Founding Fathers of the United States would be briefly recorded in history as a gang of

turbulent and unscrupulous fanatics. Nothing succeeds like success. "World history", in

the famous phrase which Hegel borrowed from Schiller, "is the world court". The popular

paraphrase "Might is Right" is misleading only if we attach too restricted a meaning to

the word "Might". History creates rights, and therefore right. The doctrine of the survival

of the fittest proves that the survivor was, in fact, the fittest to survive. Marx does not

seem to have maintained that the victory of the proletariat was just in any other sense

than that it was historically inevitable. Lukacs was a consistent, though perhaps

indiscreet, Marxist when he based the "right" of the proletariat on its "historical mission".

4 Hitler believed in the historical mission of the German people.

The Relativity of Thought

The outstanding achievement of modern realism, however, has been to reveal, not merely

the determinist aspects of the historical process, but the relative and pragmatic character

of

____________________ 1 Croce, Storia della storiografia italiana, i. p. 26.

2 Hegel, Philosophie der Weltgeschichte ( Lasson ed.), p. 55.

3 Conciliation Internationale, No. 5-6, 1937, p. 520.

4 Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, p. 215.

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thought itself. In the last fifty years, thanks mainly though not wholly to the influence of

Marx, the principles of the historical school have been applied to the analysis of thought;

and the foundations of a new science have been laid, principally by German thinkers,

under the name of the "sociology of knowledge". The realist has thus been enabled to

demonstrate that the intellectual theories and ethical standards of utopianism, far from

being the expression of absolute and a priori principles, are historically conditioned,

being both products of circumstances and interests and weapons framed for the

furtherance of interests. "Ethical notions", as Mr. Bertrand Russell has remarked, "are

very seldom a cause, but almost always an effect, a means of claiming universal

legislative authority for our own preferences, not, as we fondly imagine, the actual

ground of those preferences." 1

This is by far the most formidable attack which

utopianism has to face; for here the very foundations of its belief are undermined by the

realist critique.

In a general way, the relativity of thought has long been recognised. As early as the

seventeenth century Bishop Burnet expounded the relativist view as cogently, if not as

pungently, as Marx:

As to the late Civil Wars, 'tis pretty well known what notions of government went current

in those days. When monarchy was to be subverted we knew what was necessary to

justify the fact; and then, because it was convenient for the purpose, it was undoubtedly

true in the nature of things that government had its original from the people, and the

prince was only their trustee. . . . But afterwards, when monarchy took its place again . . .

another notion of government came into fashion. Then government had its original

entirely from God, and the prince was accountable to none but Him. . . . And now, upon

another turn of things, when people have a liberty to speak out, a new set of notions is

advanced; now passive obedience is all a mistake, and instead of being a duty to suffer

oppression, 'tis a glorious act to resist it: and instead of leaving injuries to be redressed by

God, we have a natural right to relieve ourselves. 2

____________________ 1 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1915-16, p. 302.

2 Burnet, Essay upon Government, p. 10.

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In modern times, the recognition of this phenomenon has become fairly general. "Belief,

and to speak fairly, honest belief", wrote Dicey of the divisions of opinion in the

nineteenth century about slavery, "was to a great extent the result not of argument, not

even of direct self-interest, but of circumstances. . . . Circumstances are the creators of

most men's opinions." 1

Marx narrowed down this somewhat vague conception, declaring

that all thought was conditioned by the economic interest and social status of the thinker.

This view was perhaps unduly restrictive. In particular Marx, who denied the existence of

"national" interests, underestimated the potency of nationalism as a force conditioning the

thought of the individual. But the peculiar concentration which he applied to the principle

served to popularise it and drive it home. The relativity of thought to the interests and

circumstances of the thinker has been far more extensively recognised and understood

since Marx wrote.

The principle has an extremely wide field of application. It has become a commonplace

to say that theories do not mould the course of events, but are invented to explain them.

"Empire precedes imperialism." 2

Eighteenth-centuryEngland "put into practice the policy

of laissez-faire before it found a justification, or even an apparent justification, in the new

doctrine"; 3

and "the virtual break-up of laissez-faire as a body of doctrine . . . has

followed, and not preceded, the decline of laissez-faire in the real world". 4

The theory of

"socialism in a single country" promulgated in Soviet Russia in 1924 was manifestly a

product of the failure of Soviet régimes to establish themselves in other countries.

But the development of abstract theory is often influenced by events which have no

essential connexion with it at all.

In the story of political thought [writes a modern social thinker] events have been no less

potent than arguments. The failure and success of institutions, the victories and defeats of

countries identified with certain principles have repeatedly brought new strength and

resolution to the adherents or opponents of these principles as the case might

____________________ 1 Dicey, Law and Opinion ( 1905 ed.), p. 27.

2 J. A. Hobson, Free Thought in the Social Sciences, p. 190.

3 Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (Engl. transl.), p. 104.

4 M. Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism, p. 188.

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be in all lands. . . . Philosophy as it exists on earth is the word of philosophers who,

authority tells us, suffer as much from toothache as other mortals, and are, like others,

open to the impression of near and striking events and to the seductions of intellectual

fashion. 1

Germany's dramatic rise to power in the sixties and seventies of last century was

impressive enough to make the leading British philosophers of the next generation --

Caird, T. H. Green, Bosanquet, McTaggart -- ardent Hegelians. Thereafter, the Kaiser's

telegram to Kruger and the German naval programme spread the conviction among

British thinkers that Hegel was a less good philosopher than had been supposed; and

since 1914 no British philosopher of repute has ventured to sail under the Hegelian flag.

After 1870, Stubbs and Freeman put early English history on a sound Teutonic basis,

while even in France Fustel de Coulanges had an uphill struggle to defend the Latin

origins of French civilisation. During the past thirty years, English historians have been

furtively engaged in making the Teutonic origins of England as inconspicuous as

possible.

Nor is it only professional thinkers who are subject to such influences. Popular opinion is

not less markedly dominated by them. The frivolity and immorality of French life was an

established dogma in nineteenth-century Britain, which still remembered Napoleon.

"When I was young", writes Mr. Bertrand Russell, "the French ate frogs and were called

'froggies', but they apparently abandoned this practice when we concluded our entente

with them in 1904 -- at any rate, I have never heard it mentioned since that date." 2

Some

years later, "the gallant little Jap" of 1905 underwent a converse metamorphosis into "the

Prussian of the East". In the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace of British opinion

that Germans were efficient and enlightened, and Russians backward and barbarous.

About 1910, it was ascertained that Germans (who turned out to be mostly Prussians)

were coarse, brutal and narrow-minded, and that Russians had a Slav soul. The vogue of

Russian literature in Great Britain, which set in about the same time, was a direct

outcome of the political

____________________ 1 L. T. Hobhouse, The Unity of Western Civilisation, ed. F. S. Marvin ( 3rd ed.), pp. 177-8.

2 Bertrand Russell, Which Way Peace? p. 158.

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rapprochement with Russia. The vogue of Marxism in Great Britain and France, which

began on a modest scale after the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, rapidly

gathered momentum, particularly among intellectuals, after 1934, when it was discovered

that Soviet Russia was a potential military ally against Germany. It is symptomatic that

most people, when challenged, will indignantly deny that they form their opinions in this

way; for as Acton long ago observed, "few discoveries are more irritating than those

which expose the pedigree of ideas". 1

The conditioning of thought is necessarily a

subconscious process.

The Adjustment of Thought to Purpose

Thought is not merely relative to the circumstances and interests of the thinker: it is also

pragmatic in the sense that it is directed to the fulfilment of his purposes. For the realist,

as a witty writer has put it, truth is "no more than the perception of discordant experience

pragmatically adjusted for a particular purpose and for the time being". 2

The purposeful

character of thought has been discussed in a previous chapter; and a few examples will

suffice here to illustrate the importance of this phenomenon in international politics.

Theories designed to discredit an enemy or potential enemy are one of the commonest

forms of purposeful thinking. To depict one's enemies or one's prospective victims as

inferior beings in the sight of God has been a familiar technique at any rate since the days

of the Old Testament. Racial theories, ancient and modern, belong to this category; for

the rule of one people or class over another is always justified by a belief in the mental

and moral inferiority of the ruled. In such theories, sexual abnormality and sexual

offences are commonly imputed to the discredited race or group. Sexual depravity is

imputed by the white American to the negro; by the white South African to the Kaffir; by

the Anglo-Indian to the Hindu; and by the Nazi German to the Jew. The most popular and

most absurd of the charges levelled against the Bolsheviks in the early days of the

Russian revolution was that they advocated sexual promiscuity. Atrocity stories,

____________________ 1 Acton, History of Freedom, p. 62.

2 Carl Becker, Yale Review, xxvii, p. 461.

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among which offences of a sexual character predominate, are the familiar product of war.

On the eve of their invasion of Abyssinia, the Italians issued an official Green Book of

Abyssinian atrocities. "The Italian Government as the Abyssinian delegate at Geneva

correctly observed, having resolved to conquer and destroy Ethiopia, begins by giving

Ethiopia a bad name." 1

But the phenomenon also appears in less crude forms which sometimes enable it to

escape detection. The point was well made by Crowe in a Foreign Office minute of

March 1908:

The German (formerly Prussian) Government has always been most remarkable for the

pains it takes to create a feeling of intense and holy hatred against a country with which it

contemplates the possibility of war. It is undoubtedly in this way that the frantic hatred of

England as a monster of personified selfishness and greed and absolute want of

conscience, which now animates Germany, has been nursed and fed. 2

The diagnosis is accurate and penetrating. But it is strange that so acute a mind as

Crowe's should not have perceived that he himself was at this time performing, for the

limited audience of statesmen and officials to which he had access, precisely the same

operation of which he accused the German Government; for a perusal of his memoranda

and minutes of the period reveals an able, but transparent, attempt to "create a feeling of

intense and holy hatred" against his own country's future enemy -- a curious instance of

our promptness to detect the conditioned or purposeful character of other people's

thought, while assuming that our own is wholly objective.

The converse of this propagation of theories designed to throw moral discredit on an

enemy is the propagation of theories reflecting moral credit on oneself and one's own

policies. Bismarck records the remark made to him by Walewski, the French Foreign

Minister, in 1857, that it was the business of a diplomat to cloak the interests of his

country in the language of universal justice. More recently, Mr. Churchill told the House

of Commons that "there must be a moral basis for

____________________ 1 League of Nations: Official Journal, November 1935, p. 1140.

2 British Documents on the Origins of the War, ed. Gooch and Temperley, vi. p. 131.

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British rearmament and foreign policy". 1

It is rare, however, for modern statesmen to

express themselves with this frankness; and in contemporary British and American

politics, the most powerful influence has been wielded by those more utopian statesmen

who are sincerely convinced that policy is deduced from ethical principles, not ethical

principles from policy. The realist is nevertheless obliged to uncover the hollowness of

this conviction. "The right", said Woodrow Wilson to the United States Congress in

1917, "is more precious than peace." 2

"Peace comes before all," said Briand ten years

later to the League of Nations Assembly, "peace comes even before justice." 3

Considered

as ethical principles, both these contradictory pronouncements are tenable and could

muster respectable support. Are we therefore to believe that we are dealing with a clash

of ethical standards, and that if Wilson's and Briand's policies differed it was because

they deduced them from opposite principles? No serious student of politics will entertain

this belief. The most cursory examination shews that the principles were deduced from

the policies, not the policies from the principles. In 1917, Wilson had decided on the

policy of war with Germany, and he proceeded to clothe that policy in the appropriate

garment of righteousness. In 1928 Briand was fearful of attempts made in the name of

justice to disturb a peace settlement favourable to France; and he had no more difficulty

than Wilson in finding the moral phraseology which fitted his policy. It would be

irrelevant to discuss this supposed difference of principles on ethical grounds. The

principles merely reflected different national policies framed to meet different conditions.

The double process of morally discrediting the policy of a potential enemy and morally

justifying one's own may be abundantly illustrated from the discussions of disarmament

between the two wars. The experience of the Anglo-Saxon Powers, whose naval

predominance had been threatened by the submarine, provided an ample opportunity of

denouncing the immorality of this new weapon. "Civilisation demands", wrote the naval

adviser to the American Delegation at the

____________________ 1 House of Commons, March 14, 1938: Official Report, cols. 95-99.

2 The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson : War and Peace, ed. R. S. Baker, i. p. 16.

3 League of Nations: Ninth Assembly, p. 83.

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Peace Conference, "that naval warfare be placed on a higher plane" by the abolition of

the submarine. 1

Unfortunately the submarine was regarded as a convenient weapon by

the weaker French, Italian and Japanese navies; and this particular demand of civilisation

could not therefore be complied with. A distinction of a more sweeping character was

established by Lord Cecil in a speech to the General Council of the League of Nations

Union in 1922:

The general peace of the world will not be materially secured merely by naval

disarmament. . . . If all the maritime Powers were to disarm, or drastically limit their

armaments, I am not at all sure that would not increase the danger of war rather than

decrease it, because the naval arm is mainly defensive; the offensive must be to a large

extent the military weapon. 2

The inspiration of regarding one's own vital armaments as defensive and beneficent and

those of other nations as offensive and wicked proved particularly fruitful. Exactly ten

years later, three commissions of the Disarmament Conference spent many weeks in a

vain endeavour to classify armaments as "offensive" and "defensive". Delegates of all

nations shewed extraordinary ingenuity in devising arguments, supposedly based on pure

objective theory, to prove that the armaments on which they chiefly relied were

defensive, while those of potential rivals were essentially offensive. Similar attitudes

have been taken up in regard to economic "armaments". In the latter part of the

nineteenth century -- and in a lesser degree down to 1931 -- protective tariffs were

commonly regarded in Great Britain as immoral. After 1931 straight tariffs regained their

innocence, but barter agreements, industrial (though not

____________________ 1 R. S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, iii. p. 120. There is an amusing nineteenth-century parallel. "Privateering", wrote Queen Victoria at the time of the Conference of Paris in 1856, "is a kind of Piracy which disgraces our civilisation; its abolition throughout the whole world would be a great step in advance." We are not surprised to read that "the privateer was then, like the submarine in modern times, the weapon of the weaker naval Power" (Sir William Malkin , British Year Book of International Law, viii. pp. 6, 30).

2 Published as League of Nations Union Pamphlet No. 76, p. 8. The very word "militarism" conveys to most English readers the same connotation of the peculiar wickedness of armies. It was left to an American historian, Dr. W. L. Langer, to coin the counterpart "navalism", which has won significantly little acceptance.

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agricultural) quotas, exchange controls and other weapons employed by Continental

states were still tainted with immorality. Down to 1930, successive revisions of the

United States tariff had almost invariably been upward; and American economists, in

other respects staunch upholders of laissez-faire, had almost invariably treated tariffs as

legitimate and laudable. But the change in the position of the United States from a debtor

to a creditor Power, combined with the reversal of British economic policy, altered the

picture; and the reduction of tariff barriers has come to be commonly identified by

American spokesmen with the cause of international morality.

National Interest and the Universal Good

The realist should not, however, linger over the infliction of these pin-pricks through

chinks in the utopian defences. His task is to bring down the whole cardboard structure of

utopian thought by exposing the hollowness of the material out of which it is built. The

weapon of the relativity of thought must be used to demolish the utopian concept of a

fixed and absolute standard by which policies and actions can be judged. If theories are

revealed as a reflexion of practice and principles of political needs, this discovery will

apply to the fundamental theories and principles of the utopian creed, and not least to the

doctrine of the harmony of interests which is its essential postulate.

It will not be difficult to shew that the utopian, when he preaches the doctrine of the

harmony of interests, is innocently and unconsciously adopting Walewski's maxim, and

clothing his own interest in the guise of a universal interest for the purpose of imposing it

on the rest of the world. "Men come easily to believe that arrangements agreeable to

themselves are beneficial to others", as Dicey observed; 1

and theories of the public good,

which turn out on inspection to be an elegant disguise for some particular interest, are as

common in international as in national affairs. The utopian, however eager he may be to

establish an absolute standard, does not argue that it is the duty of his country, in

conformity with that standard, to put the interest of the world at large before its own

interest; for that would be contrary to his theory that the

____________________ 1 Dicey, Law and Opinion in England ( 2nd ed.), pp. 14-15.

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interest of all coincides with the interest of each. He argues that what is best for the world

is best for his country, and then reverses the argument to read that what is best for his

country is best for the world, the two propositions being, from the utopian standpoint,

identical; and this unconscious cynicism of the contemporary utopian has proved a far

more effective diplomatic weapon than the deliberate and self-conscious cynicism of a

Walewski or a Bismarck. British writers of the past half-century have been particularly

eloquent supporters of the theory that the maintenance of British supremacy is the

performance of a duty to mankind. "If Great Britain has turned itself into a coal-shed and

blacksmith's forge", remarked The Times ingenuously in 1885, "it is for the behoof of

mankind as well as its own." 1

The following extract is typical of a dozen which might be

culled from memoirs of public men of the period:

I have but one great object in this world, and that is to maintain the greatness of the

Empire. But apart from my John Bull sentiment upon the point, I firmly believe that in

doing so I work in the cause of Christianity, of peace, of civilisation, and the happiness of

the human race generally. 2

"I contend that we are the first race in the world," wrote Cecil Rhodes, "and that the more

of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race." 3

In 1891, the most popular

and brilliant journalist of the day, W. T. Stead, founded the Review of Reviews. "We

believe in God, in England and in Humanity", ran the editorial manifesto in its opening

number. "The English-speaking race is one of the chief of God's chosen agents for

executing coming improvements in the lot of mankind." 4

An Oxford professor was

convinced in 1912 that the secret of Britain's history was that "in fighting for her own

independence she has been fighting for the freedom of Europe, and that the service thus

rendered to Europe and to mankind has carried with it the possibility of that larger service

to which we give the name Empire". 5

____________________ 1 The Times, August 27, 1885.

2 Maurice and Arthur, The Life of Lord Wolseley, p. 314.

3 W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil J. Rhodes, p. 58.

4 Review of Reviews, January 15, 1891.

5 Spencer Wilkinson, Government and the War, p. 116.

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The first world war carried this conviction to a pitch of emotional frenzy. A bare

catalogue, culled from the speeches of British statesmen, of the services which British

belligerency was rendering to humanity would fill many pages. In 1917, Balfour told the

New York Chamber of Commerce that "since August, 1914, the fight has been for the

highest spiritual advantages of mankind, without a petty thought or ambition". 1

The

Peace Conference and its sequel temporarily discredited these professions and threw

some passing doubt on the belief in British supremacy as one of the moral assets of

mankind. But the period of disillusionment and modesty was short. Moments of

international tension, and especially moments when the possibility of war appears on the

horizon, always stimulate this identification of national interest with morality. At the

height of the Abyssinian crisis, the Archbishop of Canterbury admonished the French

public through an interview in a Paris newspaper:

We are animated by moral and spiritual considerations. I do not think I am departing

from my role by contributing towards the clearing up of this misunderstanding. . . .

It is . . . no egoist interest that is driving us forward, and no consideration of interest

should keep you behind. 2

In the following year, Professor Toynbee was once more able to discover that the security

of the British Empire "was also the supreme interest of the whole world". 3

In 1937, Lord

Cecil spoke to the General Council of the League of Nations Union of "our duty to our

country, to our Empire and to humanity at large", and quoted:

Not once nor twice in our rough island story

The path of duty is the way to glory. 4

An Englishman, as Mr. Bernard Shaw remarks in The Man of Destiny, "never forgets that

the nation which lets its duty get on to the opposite side to its interest is lost". It is not

surprising that an American critic should recently have described the British as "Jesuits

lost to the theological but

____________________ 1 Quoted in Beard, The Rise of American Civilisation, ii. p. 646.

2 Quoted in Manchester Guardian, October 18, 1935.

3 Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1935, ii. p. 46.

4 Headway, November 1937.

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gained for the political realm", 1

or that a former Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs

should have commented, long before these recent manifestations, on "that precious gift

bestowed upon the British people -- the possession of writers and clergymen able in

perfect good faith to advance the highest moral reasons for the most concrete diplomatic

action, with inevitable moral profit to England". 2

In recent times, the same phenomenon has become endemic in the United States. The

story how McKinley prayed for divine guidance and decided to annex the Philippines is a

classic of modern American history; and this annexation was the occasion of a popular

outburst of moral self-approval hitherto more familiar in the foreign policy of Great

Britain than of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt, who believed more firmly than

any previous American President in the doctrine L'état, c'est moi, carried the process a

step further. The following curious dialogue occurred in his cross-examination during a

libel action brought against him in 1915 by a Tammany leader:

Query: How did you know that substantial justice was done?

ROOSEVELT: Because I did it, because . . . I was doing my best.

Query: You mean to say that, when you do a thing, thereby substantial justice is done.

ROOSEVELT: I do. When I do a thing, I do it so as to do substantial justice. I mean just

that. 3

Woodrow Wilson was less naively egotistical, but more profoundly confident of the

identity of American policy and universal justice. After the bombardment of Vera Cruz in

1914, he assured the world that "the United States had gone down to Mexico to serve

mankind". 4

During the first world war, he advised American naval cadets "not only

always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity" -- a feat

rendered slightly less difficult by his explanation that the United States had been

"founded for the benefit of

____________________ 1 Carl Becker, Yale Review, xxvii. p. 452.

2 Count Sforza, Foreign Affairs, October 1927, p. 67.

3 Quoted in H. F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 318.

4 Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson. The New Democracy, ed. R. S. Baker, i. p. 104.

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humanity". 1

Shortly before the entry of the United States into the war, in an address to

the Senate on war aims, he stated the identification still more categorically: "These are

American principles, American policies. . . . They are the principles of mankind and must

prevail." 2

It will be observed that utterances of this character proceed almost exclusively from

Anglo-Saxon statesmen and writers. It is true that when a prominent National Socialist

asserted that " anything that benefits the German people is right, anything that harms the

German people is wrong", 3

he was merely propounding the same identification of

national interest with universal right which had already been established for

Englishspeaking countries by Wilson, Professor Toynbee, Lord Cecil and many others.

But when the claim is translated into a foreign language, the note seems forced, and the

identification unconvincing, even to the peoples concerned. Two explanations are

commonly given of this curious discrepancy. The first explanation, which is popular in

English-speaking countries, is that the policies of the English-speaking nations are in fact

more virtuous and disinterested than those of Continental states, so that Wilson and

Professor Toynbee and Lord Cecil are, broadly speaking, right when they identify the

American and British national interests with the interest of mankind. The second

explanation, which is popular in Continental countries, is that the English-speaking

peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the

guise of the general good, and that this kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic

peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.

It seems unnecessary to accept either of these heroic attempts to cut the knot. The

solution is a simple one. Theories of social morality are always the product of a dominant

group which identifies itself with the community as a whole, and which possesses

facilities denied to subordinate groups or individuals for imposing its view of life on the

community. Theories of international morality are, for the same reason and in virtue of

the same process, the product of dominant nations or groups of nations. For the past

hundred years, and more especially since 1918, the English-speaking peoples have formed

____________________ 1 Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: The New Democracy, ed. R. S. Baker, i. pp. 318-19.

2 Ibid. ii. p. 414.

3 Quoted in Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1936, p. 319.

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the dominant group in the world; and current theories of international morality have been

designed to perpetuate their supremacy and expressed in the idiom peculiar to them.

France, retaining something of her eighteenth-century tradition and restored to a position

of dominance for a short period after 1918, has played a minor part in the creation of

current international morality, mainly through her insistence on the role of law in the

moral order. Germany, never a dominant Power and reduced to helplessness after 1918,

has remained for these reasons outside the charmed circle of creators of international

morality. Both the view that the English-speaking peoples are monopolists of

international morality and the view that they are consummate international hypocrites

may be reduced to the plain fact that the current canons of international virtue have, by a

natural and inevitable process, been mainly created by them.

The Realist Critique of the Harmony of Interests

The doctrine of the harmony of interests yields readily to analysis in terms of this

principle. It is the natural assumption of a prosperous and privileged class, whose

members have a dominant voice in the community and are therefore naturally prone to

identify its interest with their own. In virtue of this identification, any assailant of the

interests of the dominant group is made to incur the odium of assailing the alleged

common interest of the whole community, and is told that in making this assault he is

attacking his own higher interests. The doctrine of the harmony of interests thus serves as

an ingenious moral device invoked, in perfect sincerity, by privileged groups in order to

justify and maintain their dominant position. But a further point requires notice. The

supremacy within the community of the privileged group may be, and often is, so

overwhelming that there is, in fact, a sense in which its interests are those of the

community, since its well-being necessarily carries with it some measure of well-being

for other members of the community, and its collapse would entail the collapse of the

community as a whole. In so far, therefore, as the alleged natural harmony of interests has

any reality, it is created by the overwhelming power of the privileged group, and is an

excellent illustration of the Machiavellian maxim

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that morality is the product of power. A few examples will make this analysis of the

doctrine of the harmony of interests clear.

In the nineteenth century, the British manufacturer or merchant, having discovered that

laissez-faire promoted his own prosperity, was sincerely convinced that it also promoted

British prosperity as a whole. Nor was this alleged harmony of interests between himself

and the community entirely fictitious. The predominance of the manufacturer and the

merchant was so overwhelming that there was a sense in which an identity between their

prosperity and British prosperity as a whole could be correctly asserted. From this it was

only a short step to argue that a worker on strike, in damaging the prosperity of the

British manufacturer, was damaging British prosperity as a whole, and thereby damaging

his own, so that he could be plausibly denounced by the predecessors of Professor

Toynbee as immoral and by the predecessors of Professor Zimmern as muddle-headed.

Moreover, there was a sense in which this argument was perfectly correct. Nevertheless,

the doctrine of the harmony of interests and of solidarity between the classes must have

seemed a bitter mockery to the underprivileged worker, whose inferior status and

insignificant stake in "British prosperity" were consecrated by it; and presently he was

strong enough to force the abandonment of laissez-faire and the substitution for it of the

"social service state", which implicitly denies the natural harmony of interests and sets

out to create a new harmony by artificial means.

The same analysis may be applied in international relations. British nineteenth-century

statesmen, having discovered that free trade promoted British prosperity, were sincerely

convinced that, in doing so, it also promoted the prosperity of the world as a whole.

British predominance in world trade was at that time so overwhelming that there was a

certain undeniable harmony between British interests and the interests of the world.

British prosperity flowed over into other countries, and a British economic collapse

would have meant world-wide ruin. British free traders could and did argue that

protectionist countries were not only egotistically damaging the prosperity of the world as

a whole, but were stupidly damaging their own, so that their behaviour was both immoral

and muddleheaded. In British eyes, it was irrefutably proved that inter-

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national trade was a single whole, and flourished or slumped together. Nevertheless, this

alleged international harmony of interests seemed a mockery to those under-privileged

nations whose inferior status and insignificant stake in international trade were

consecrated by it. The revolt against it destroyed that overwhelming British

preponderance which had provided a plausible basis for the theory. Economically, Great

Britain in the nineteenth century was dominant enough to make a bold bid to impose on

the world her own conception of international economic morality. When competition of

all against all replaced the domination of the world market by a single Power,

conceptions of international economic morality necessarily became chaotic.

Politically, the alleged community of interest in the maintenance of peace, whose

ambiguous character has already been discussed, is capitalised in the same way by a

dominant nation or group of nations. Just as the ruling class in a community prays for

domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces

class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested

interest of predominant Powers. In the past, Roman and British imperialism were

commended to the world in the guise of the pax Romana and the pax Britannica. To-day,

when no single Power is strong enough to dominate the world, and supremacy is vested

in a group of nations, slogans like "collective security" and "resistance to aggression"

serve the same purpose of proclaiming an identity of interest between the dominant group

and the world as a whole in the maintenance of peace. Moreover, as in the examples we

have just considered, so long as the supremacy of the dominant group is sufficiently

great, there is a sense in which this identity of interests exists. "England", wrote a

German professor in the nineteen-twenties, " is the solitary Power with a national

programme which, while egotistic through and through, at the same time promises to the

world something which the world passionately desires: order, progress and eternal

peace." 1

When Mr. Churchill declared that "the fortunes of the British Empire and its

glory are inseparably interwoven with the fortunes of the world", 2

this statement had

precisely the same

____________________ 1 Dibelius, England, p. 109.

2 Winston Churchill, Arms and the Covenant, P. 272.

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foundation in fact as the statement that the prosperity of British manufacturers in the

nineteenth century was inseparably interwoven with British prosperity as a whole.

Moreover, the purpose of the statements was precisely the same, namely to establish the

principle that the defence of the British Empire, or the prosperity of the British

manufacturer, was a matter of common interest to the whole community, and that anyone

who attacked it was therefore either immoral or muddle-headed. It is a familiar tactic of

the privileged to throw moral discredit on the under-privileged by depicting them as

disturbers of the peace; and this tactic is as readily applied internationally as within the

national community. "International law and order", writes Professor Toynbee of a recent

crisis, "were in the true interests of the whole of mankind . . . whereas the desire to

perpetuate the region of violence in international affairs was an anti-social desire which

was not even in the ultimate interests of the citizens of the handful of states that officially

professed this benighted and anachronistic creed." 1

This is precisely the argument,

compounded of platitude and falsehood in about equal parts, which did duty in every

strike in the early days of the British and American Labour movements. It was common

form for employers, supported by the whole capitalist press, to denounce the "anti-social"

attitude of trade union leaders, to accuse them of attacking law and order and of

introducing "the reign of violence", and to declare that "true" and "ultimate" interests of

the workers lay in peaceful co-operation with the employers. 2

In the field of social

relations, the disingenuous character of this argument has long been recognised. But just

as the threat of class-war by the proletarian is "a natural cynical reaction to the

sentimental and dishonest efforts of the privileged classes to obscure the conflict of

interest between classes by a constant emphasis on the minimum interests which they

have in common", 3

so the war-mongering of the dissatisfied Powers was the "natural,

cynical reaction" to the sentimental and dishonest platitudinis-

____________________ 1 Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1935, ii. p. 46.

2 "Pray earnestly that right may triumph", said the representative of the Philadelphia coal-owners in an early strike organised by the United Mine Workers, "remembering that the Lord God Omnipotent still reigns, and that His reign is one of law and order, and not of violence and crime" ( H. F. Pringle, Theodor Roosevelt, p. 267).

3 R. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 153.

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ing of the satisfied Powers on the common interest in peace. When Hitler refused to

believe "that God has permitted some nations first to acquire a world by force and then to

defend this robbery with moralising theories", 1

he was merely echoing in another context

the Marxist denial of a community of interest between "haves" and "have-nots", the

Marxist exposure of the interested character of "bourgeois morality", and the Marxist

demand for the expropriation of the expropriators.

The crisis of September 1938 demonstrated in a striking way the political implications of

the assertion of a common interest in peace. When Briand proclaimed that "peace comes

before all", or Mr. Eden that "there is no dispute which cannot be settled by peaceful

means", 2

the assumption underlying these platitudes was that, so long as peace was

maintained, no changes distasteful to France or Great Britain could be made in the status

quo. In 1938, France and Great Britain were trapped by the slogans which they

themselves had used in the past to discredit the dissatisfied Powers, and Germany had

become sufficiently dominant (as France and Great Britain had hitherto been) to turn the

desire for peace to her own advantage. About this time, a significant change occurred in

the attitude of the German and Italian dictators. Hitler eagerly depicted Germany as a

bulwark of peace menaced by warmongering democracies. The League of Nations, he

declared in his Reichstag speech of April 28, 1939, is a "stirrer up of trouble and

collective security means" continuous danger of war Mussolini borrowed the British

formula about the possibility of settling all international disputes by peaceful means, and

declared that "there are not in Europe at present problems so big and so active as to

justify a war which from a European conflict would naturally become universal". 3

Such

utterances were symptoms that Germany and Italy were already looking forward to the

time when, as dominant Powers, they would acquire the vested interest in peace recently

enjoyed by Great Britain and France, and be able to get their way by pillorying the

democratic countries as enemies of peace. These developments may have made it easier

to appreciate Halévy's

____________________ 1 Speech in the Reichstag, January 30, 1939.

2 League of Nations: Eighteenth Assembly, p. 63.

3 The Times, May 15, 1939.

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subtle observation that "propaganda against war is itself a form of war propaganda". 1

The Realist Critique of Internationalism

The concept of internationalism is a special form of the doctrine of the harmony of

interests. It yields to the same analysis; and there are the same difficulties about regarding

it as an absolute standard independent of the interests and policies of those who

promulgate it. "Cosmopolitanism", wrote Sun Yat-sen, "is the same thing as China's

theory of world empire two thousand years ago. . . . China once wanted to be sovereign

lord of the earth and to stand above every other nation, so she espoused

cosmopolitanism." 2

In the Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty, according to Freud,

"imperialism was reflected in religion as universality and monotheism". 3

The doctrine of

a single world-state, propagated by the Roman Empire and later by the Catholic Church,

was the symbol of a claim to universal dominion. Modern internationalism has its genesis

in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, during which French hegemony in Europe

was at its height. This was the period which produced Sully Grand Dessin and the Abbé

Saint-Pierre Projet de Paix Perpétuelle (both plans to perpetuate an international status

quo favourable to the French monarchy), which saw the birth of the humanitarian and

cosmopolitan doctrines of the Enlightenment, and which established French as the

universal language of educated people. In the next century, the leadership passed to Great

Britain, which became the home of internationalism. On the eve of the Great Exhibition

of 1851 which, more than any other single event, established Great Britain's title to world

supremacy, the Prince Consort spoke movingly of "that great end to which . . . all history

points -- the realisation of the unity of mankind"; 4

and Tennyson hymned "the parliament

of man, the federation of the world". France chose the moment of her greatest supremacy

in the nineteen-twenties to launch a plan of European Union"; and Japan shortly

afterwards developed an

____________________ 1 Halévy, A History of the English People in 1895-19O5 (Engl. transl.), i. Introduction, p. xi.

2 Sun Yat-sen, San Min Chu I (Engl. transl.), pp. 68-9.

3 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 36.

4 T Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, iii. p. 247.

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ambition to proclaim herself the leader of a united Asia. It was symptomatic of the

growing international predominance of the United States when widespread popularity

was enjoyed in the late nineteen-thirties by the book of an American journalist

advocating a world union of democracies, in which the United States would play the

predominant role. 1

Just as pleas for "national solidarity" in domestic politics always come from a dominant

group which can use this solidarity to strengthen its own control over the nation as a

whole, so pleas for international solidarity and world union come from those dominant

nations which may hope to exercise control over a unified world. Countries which are

struggling to force their way into the dominant group naturally tend to invoke nationalism

against the internationalism of the controlling Powers. In the sixteenth century, England

opposed her nascent nationalism to the internationalism of the Papacy and the Empire. In

the past century and a half Germany opposed her nascent nationalism to the

internationalism first of France, then of Great Britain. This circumstance made her

impervious to those universalist and humanitarian doctrines which were popular in

eighteenth-century France and nineteenth-century Britain; and her hostility to

internationalism was further aggravated after 1919, when Great Britain and France

endeavoured to create a new "international order" as a bulwark of their own

predominance. "By 'international'," wrote a German correspondent in The Times, "we

have come to understand a conception that places other nations at an advantage over our

own." 2

Nevertheless, there was little doubt that Germany, if she became supreme in

Europe, would adopt international slogans and establish some kind of international

organisation to bolster up her power. A British Labour ex-Minister at one moment

advocated the suppression of Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations on the

unexpected ground that the totalitarian states might some day capture the League and

invoke that article to justify the use of force by themselves. 3

It seemed more likely that

they would seek to develop the Anti-Comintern Pact into some form of

____________________ 1 Clarence Streit, Union Now.

2 The Times, November 5, 1938.

3 Lord Marley in the House of Lords, November 30, 1938: Official Report. col. 258.

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international organisation. "The Anti-Comintern Pact", said Hitler in the Reichstag on

January 30, 1939, "will perhaps one day become the crystallisation point of a group of

Powers whose ultimate aim is none other than to eliminate the menace to the peace and

culture of the world instigated by a satanic apparition.""Either Europe must achieve

solidarity," remarked an Italian journal about the same time, "or the 'axis' will impose it."

1 " Europe in its entirety", said Goebbels, "is adopting a new order and a new orientation

under the intellectual leadership of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy." 2

These

were symptoms not of a change of heart, but of the fact that Germany and Italy felt

themselves to be approaching the time when they might become strong enough to

espouse internationalism. "International order" and "international solidarity" will always

be slogans of those who feel strong enough to impose them on others.

The exposure of the real basis of the professedly abstract principles commonly invoked in

international politics is the most damning and most convincing part of the realist

indictment of utopianism. The nature of the charge is frequently misunderstood by those

who seek to refute it. The charge is not that human beings fail to live up to their

principles. It matters little that Wilson, who thought that the right was more precious than

peace, and Briand, who thought that peace came even before justice, and Mr. Eden, who

believed in collective security, failed themselves, or failed to induce their countrymen, to

apply these principles consistently. What matters is that these supposedly absolute and

universal principles were not principles at all, but the unconscious reflexions of national

policy based on a particular interpretation of national interest at a particular time. There is

a sense in which peace and co-operation between nations or classes or individuals is a

common and universal end irrespective of conflicting interests and politics. There is a

sense in which a common interest exists in the maintenance of order, whether it be

international order or "law and order" within the nation. But as soon as the attempt is

made to apply these supposedly abstract principles to a concrete political situation, they

are revealed as the

____________________ 1 Relazioni Internazionali, quoted in The Times, December 5, 1938.

2 Völkischer Beobachter, April 1, 1939.

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transparent disguises of selfish vested interests. The bankruptcy of utopianism resides not

in its failure to live up to its principles, but in the exposure of its inability to provide any

absolute and disinterested standard for the conduct of international affairs. The utopian,

faced by the collapse of standards whose interested character he has failed to penetrate,

takes refuge in condemnation of a reality which refuses to conform to these standards. A

passage penned by the German historian Meinecke after the first world war is the best

judgment by anticipation of the role of utopianism in the international politics of the

period:

The profound defect of the Western, natural-law type of thought was that, when applied

to the real life of the state, it remained a dead letter, did not penetrate the consciousness

of statesmen, did not hinder the modern hypertrophy of state interest, and so led either to

aimless complaints and doctrinaire suppositions or else to inner falsehood and cant. 1

These "aimless complaints", these "doctrinaire suppositions" this "inner falsehood and

cant" will be familiar to all those who have studied what was written about international

politics in English-speaking countries between the two world wars.

____________________ 1 Meinecke, Staatsräson, p. 533.

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CHAPTER 6

THE LIMITATIONS OF REALISM

THE exposure by realist criticism of the hollowness of the utopian edifice is the first task

of the political thinker. It is only when the sham has been demolished that there can be

any hope of raising a more solid structure in its place. But we cannot ultimately find a

resting place in pure realism; for realism, though logically overwhelming, does not

provide us with the springs of action which are necessary even to the pursuit of thought.

Indeed, realism itself, if we attack it with its own weapons, often turns out in practice to

be just as much conditioned as any other mode of thought. In politics, the belief that

certain facts are unalterable or certain trends irresistible commonly reflects a lack of

desire or lack of interest to change or resist them. The impossibility of being a consistent

and thorough-going realist is one of the most certain and most curious lessons of political

science. Consistent realism excludes four things which appear to be essential ingredients

of all effective political thinking: a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral

judgment and a ground for action.

The conception of politics as an infinite process seems in the long run uncongenial or

incomprehensible to the human mind. Every political thinker who wishes to make an

appeal to his contemporaries is consciously or unconsciously led to posit a finite goal.

Treitschke declared that the "terrible thing" about Machiavelli's teaching was "not the

immorality of the methods he recommends, but the lack of content of the state, which

exists only in order to exist". 1

In fact, Machiavelli is not so consistent. His realism breaks

down in the last chapter of The Prince, which is entitled "An Exhortation to free Italy

from the Barbarians" -- a goal whose necessity could be deduced from no realist premise.

Marx, having dissolved human thought and action into the relativism of the dialectic,

postulates the absolute goal of a classless society where the dialectic no longer operates --

that one far-off event towards which, in true Victorian fashion, he believed the whole

creation

____________________ 1 Treitschke, Aufsätze, iv. p. 428.

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to be moving. The realist thus ends by negating his own postulate and assuming an

ultimate reality outside the historical process. Engels was one of the first to level this

charge against Hegel. "The whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system is declared to

be absolute truth in contradiction to his dialectical method, which dissolves all

dogmatism." 1

But Marx lays himself open to precisely the same criticism when he brings

the process of dialectical materialism to an end with the victory of the proletariat. Thus

utopianism penetrates the citadel of realism; and to envisage a continuing, but not

infinite, process towards a finite goal is shewn to be a condition of political thought. The

greater the emotional stress, the nearer and more concrete is the goal. The first world war

was rendered tolerable by the belief that it was the last of wars. Woodrow Wilson's moral

authority was built up on the conviction, shared by himself, that he possessed the key to a

just, comprehensive and final settlement of the political ills of mankind. It is noteworthy

that almost all religions agree in postulating an ultimate state of complete blessedness.

The finite goal, assuming the character of an apocalyptic vision, thereby acquires an

emotional, irrational appeal which realism itself cannot justify or explain. Everyone

knows Marx's famous prediction of the future classless paradise:

When work ceases to be merely a means of life and becomes the first living need; when,

with the all-round development of the individual, productive forces also develop, and all

the sources of collective wealth flow in free abundance -- then only will it be possible to

transcend completely the narrow horizon of bourgeois right, and society can inscribe on

its banner: From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs. 2

Sorel proclaimed the necessity of a "myth" to make revolutionary teaching effective; and

Soviet Russia has exploited for this purpose the myth, first of world revolution, and more

recently of the "socialist fatherland There is much to be said for Professor Laski's view

that communism has made its way by its idealism, and not by its realism, by its spiritual

promise, not by its materialistic prospects". 3

A modern theo-

____________________ 1 Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach (Engl. transl.), p. 23.

2 Marx and Engels, Works ( Russian ed.), XV. p. 275.

3 Laski, COMMUNISM, p. 250

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logian has analysed the situation with almost cynical clearsightedness:

Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion, no society will have the courage

to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a just society is an

impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as

impossible. The truest visions of religion are illusions, which may be partly realised by

being resolutely believed. 1

And this again closely echoes a passage in Mein Kampf in which Hitler contrasts the

"programme-maker" with the politician:

His [i.e. the programme-maker's] significance lies almost wholly in the future, and he is

often what one means by the word 'weitfremd' [unpractical, utopian]. For if the art of the

politician is really the art of the possible, then the programme-maker belongs to those of

whom it is said that they please the gods only if they ask and demand from them the

impossible. 2

Credo quia impossibile becomes a category of political thinking.

Consistent realism, as has already been noted, involves acceptance of the whole historical

process and precludes moral judgments on it. As we have seen, men are generally

prepared to accept the judgment of history on the past, praising success and condemning

failure. This test is also widely applied to contemporary politics. Such institutions as the

League of Nations, or the Soviet or Fascist régimes, are to a considerable extent judged

by their capacity to achieve what they profess to achieve; and the legitimacy of this test is

implicitly admitted by their own propaganda, which constantly seeks to exaggerate their

successes and minimise their failures. Yet it is clear that mankind as a whole is not

prepared to accept this rational test as a universally valid basis of political judgment. The

belief that whatever succeeds is right, and has only to be understood to be approved,

must, if consistently held, empty thought of purpose, and thereby sterilise and ultimately

destroy it. Nor do those whose philosophy appears to exclude the possibility of moral

judgments in fact refrain from pronouncing

____________________ 1R. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 81. 2Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 231.

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them. Frederick the Great, having explained that treaties should be observed for the

reason that "one can trick only once", goes on to call the breaking of treaties "a bad and

knavish policy", though there is nothing in his thesis to justify the moral epithet. 1

Marx,

whose philosophy appeared to demonstrate that capitalists could only act in a certain

way, spends many pages -- some of the most effective in Capital -- in denouncing the

wickedness of capitalists for behaving in precisely that way. The necessity, recognised by

all politicians, both in domestic and in international affairs, for cloaking interests in a

guise of moral principles is in itself a symptom of the inadequacy of realism. Every age

claims the right to create its own values, and to pass judgments in the light of them; and

even if it uses realist weapons to dissolve other values, it still believes in the absolute

character of its own. It refuses to accept the implication of realism that the word ought" is

meaningless.

Most of all, consistent realism breaks down because it fails to provide any ground for

purposive or meaningful action. If the sequence of cause and effect is sufficiently rigid to

permit of the "scientific prediction" of events, if our thought is irrevocably conditioned

by our status and our interests, then both action and thought become devoid of purpose.

If, as Schopenhauer maintains, "the true philosophy of history consists of the insight that,

throughout the jumble of all these ceaseless changes, we have ever before our eyes the

same unchanging being, pursuing the same course to-day, yesterday and for ever", 2

then

passive contemplation is all that remains to the individual. Such a conclusion is plainly

repugnant to the most deep-seated belief of man about himself. That human affairs can be

directed and modified by human action and human thought is a postulate so fundamental

that its rejection seems scarcely compatible with existence as a human being. Nor is it in

fact rejected by those realists who have left their mark on history. Machiavelli, when he

exhorted his compatriots to be good Italians, clearly assumed that they were free to

follow or ignore his advice. Marx, by birth and training a bourgeois, believed himself

free to think and act like a proletarian, and regarded it as his mission to persuade others,

____________________ 1 Anti- Machiavel, p. 248.

2 Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ii. ch. 38.

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whom he assumed to be equally free, to think and act likewise. Lenin, who wrote of the

imminence of world revolution as a is scientific prediction", admitted elsewhere that "no

situations exist from which there is absolutely no way out". 1

In moments of crisis, Lenin

appealed to his followers in terms which might equally well have been used by so

thorough-going a believer in the power of the human will as Mussolini or by any other

leader of any period: "At the decisive moment and in the decisive place, you must prove

the stronger, you must be victorious". 2

Every realist, whatever his professions, is

ultimately compelled to believe not only that there is something which man ought to

think and do, but that there is something which he can think and do, and that his thought

and action are neither mechanical nor meaningless.

We return therefore to the conclusion that any sound political thought must be based on

elements of both utopia and reality. Where utopianism has become a hollow and

intolerable sham which serves merely as a disguise for the interests of the privileged, the

realist performs an indispensable service in unmasking it. But pure realism can offer

nothing but a naked struggle for power which makes any kind of international society

impossible. Having demolished the current utopia with the weapons of realism, we still

need to build a new utopia of our own, which will one day fall to the same weapons. The

human will will continue to seek an escape from the logical consequences of realism in

the vision of an international order which, as soon as it crystallises itself into concrete

political form, becomes tainted with self-interest and hypocrisy, and must once more be

attacked with the instruments of realism.

Here, then, is the complexity, the fascination and the tragedy of all political life. Politics

are made up of two elements -- utopia and reality -- belonging to two different planes

which can never meet. There is no greater barrier to clear political thinking than failure to

distinguish between ideals, which are utopia, and institutions, which are reality. The

communist who set communism against democracy was usually thinking of communism

as a pure ideal of equality and brotherhood, and of democracy as an institution which

existed in Great Britain, France or the United States and which exhibited the

____________________ 2 Lenin, Works ( 2nd Russian ed.), xxv. p. 340.

2 Lenin, Collected Works (Engl. transl.), xxi. pt. i. p. 68.

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vested interests, the inequalities and the oppression inherent in all political institutions.

The democrat who made the same comparison was in fact comparing an ideal pattern of

democracy laid up in heaven with communism as an institution existing in Soviet Russia

with its class-divisions, its heresy-hunts and its concentration camps. The comparison,

made in each case between an ideal and an institution, is irrelevant and makes no sense.

The ideal, once it is embodied in an institution, ceases to be an ideal and becomes the

expression of a selfish interest, which must be destroyed in the name of a new ideal. This

constant interaction of irreconcileable forces is the stuff of politics. Every political

situation contains mutually incompatible elements of utopia and reality, of morality and

power.

This point will emerge more clearly from the analysis of the nature of politics which we

have now to undertake.

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