Loe raamatut: «Essays in Liberalism», lehekülg 2

The Mistake of Versailles

These are the two aspects I wanted to bring before you. If we are to get down to the root of the matter; if we are to uproot the old jungle theory of international relations, we must recognise that the chief danger and difficulty before us is what may be described as excessive nationalism. We have to recognise in this and other countries that a mere belief in narrow national interests will never really take you anywhere. You must recognise that humanity can only exist and prosper as a whole, and that you cannot separate the nation in which you live, and say you will work for its prosperity and welfare alone, without considering that its prosperity and welfare depend on that of others. And the differences on that point go right through a great deal of the political thought of the day.

Take the question of reparations. I am not going to discuss in detail what ought to be done in that difficult and vexed question, but I want to call your attention to the mistake which was originally made, and which we have never yet been able to retrieve. The fundamental error of Versailles was the failure to recognise that even in dealing with a conquered enemy you can only successfully proceed by co-operation. That was the mistake—the idea that the victorious Powers could impose their will without regard to the feelings and desires and national sentiment of their enemy, even though he was beaten. For the first time in the history of peace conferences, the vanquished Power was not allowed to take part in any real discussion of the terms of the treaty. The attitude adopted was, “These are our terms, take or leave them, but you will get nothing else.” No attempt was made to appreciate, or even investigate the view put forward by the Germans on that occasion. And last, but not least, they were most unfortunately excluded from membership of the League at that time. I felt profoundly indignant with the Germans and their conduct of the war. I still believe it was due almost exclusively to the German policy and the policy of their rulers that the war took place, and that it was reasonable and right to feel profound indignation, and to desire that international misdeeds of that character should be adequately punished. But what was wrong was to think that you could as a matter of practice or of international ethics try to impose by main force a series of provisions without regard to the consent or dissent of the country on which you were trying to impose them. That is part of the heresy that force counts for everything. I wish some learned person in Oxford or elsewhere would write an essay to show how little force has been able to achieve in the world. And the curious and the really remarkable thing is that it was this heresy which brought Germany herself to grief. It is because of the false and immoral belief in the all-powerfulness of force that Germany has fallen, and yet those opposed to Germany, though they conquered her, adopted only too much of her moral code.

It was because the Allies really adopted the doctrine of the mailed fist that we are now suffering from the terrible economic difficulties and dangers which surround us. I venture to insist on that now, because there are a large number of people who have not abandoned that view. There are still a number of people who think the real failure that has been committed is not that we went wrong, as I think, in our negotiations at Versailles, but that we have not exerted enough force, and that the remedy for the present situation is more threats of force. I am sure it won’t answer. I want to say that that doctrine is just as pernicious when applied to France as when applied to Germany. You have made an agreement. You have signed and ratified a treaty; you are internationally bound by that treaty. It is no use turning round and with a new incarnation of the policy of the mailed fist threatening one of your co-signatories that they are bound to abandon the rights which you wrongly and foolishly gave to them under that treaty.

I am against a policy based on force as applied to Germany. I am equally opposed to a policy based on force as applied to France. If we really understand the creed for which we stand, we must aim at co-operation all round. If we have made a mistake we must pay for it. If we are really anxious to bring peace to the world, and particularly to Europe, we must be prepared for sacrifices. We have got to establish economic peace, and if we don’t establish it in a very short time we shall be faced with economic ruin. In the strictest, most nationalistic interests of this country, we have to see that economic war comes to an end. We have got to make whatever concessions are necessary in order to bring that peace into being.

Economic Peace

That is true not only of the reparation question; it is true of our whole economic policy. We have been preaching to Europe, and quite rightly, that the erection of economic barriers between countries is a treachery to the whole spirit of the League of Nations, and all that it means, and yet with these words scarcely uttered we turn round and pass through Parliament a new departure in our economic system which is the very contradiction of everything we have said in international conference.

The Safeguarding of Industries Act is absolutely opposed to the whole spirit and purpose which the League of Nations has in view. A reference was made by your chairman to Lord Grey, and I saw in a very distinguished organ of the Coalition an attack on his recent speech. We are told that he ought not at this crisis to be suggesting that the present Government is not worthy of our confidence, but how can we trust the present Government? How is it possible to trust them when one finds at Brussels, at Genoa, at the Hague, and elsewhere they preach the necessity of the economic unity of Europe, and then go down to the House of Commons and justify this Act on the strictest, the baldest, the most unvarnished doctrine of economic particularism for this country? Nor does it stop there. I told you just now that for me this doctrine on which the League is based goes right through many other problems than those of a strictly international character. You will never solve Indian or Egyptian difficulties by a reliance on force and force alone. I believe that the deplorable, the scandalous condition to which the neighbouring island of Ireland has been reduced is largely due to the failure to recognise that by unrestricted unreasoning, and sometimes immoral force, you cannot reach the solution of the difficulties of that country.

And in industry it is the same thing. If you are really to get a solution of these great problems, depend upon it you will never do it by strikes and lock-outs. I am an outsider in industrial matters. I am reproached when I venture to say anything about them with the observation that I am no business man. I can only hope that in this case lookers-on may sometimes see most of the game. But to me it is profoundly depressing when I see whichever section of the industrial world happens to have the market with it—whether employers or wage-earners—making it its only concern to down the other party as much as it can. You will never reach a solution that way. You have to recognise in industrial as in international affairs that the spirit of co-operation, the spirit of partnership, is your only hope of salvation.

The Two Causes of Unrest

What is the conclusion of what I have tried to say to you? There are at the present time two great causes of fighting and hostility. There used to be three. There was a time when men fought about religious doctrine, and though I do not defend it, it was perhaps less sordid than some of our fights to-day. Now the two great causes of fighting are greed and fear. Generally speaking, I think we may say that greed in international matters is a less potent cause of hostility than fear. The disease the world is suffering from is the disease of fear and suspicion. You see it between man and man, between class and class, and most of all between nation and nation. People reproach this great country and other great countries with being unreasonable or unwilling to make concessions. If you look deeply into it you will find always the same cause. It is not mere perversity; it is fear and fear alone that makes men unreasonable and contentious. It is no new thing; it has existed from the foundation of the world. The Prime Minister the other day said, and said quite truly, that the provisions of the Covenant, however admirable, were not in themselves sufficient to secure the peace of the world. He made an appeal, quite rightly, to the religious forces and organisations to assist. I agree, but after all something may be done by political action, and something by international organisation. In modern medicine doctors are constantly telling us they cannot cure any disease—all they can do is to give nature a chance. No Covenant will teach men to be moral or peace-loving, but you can remove, diminish, or modify the conditions which make for war, and take obstacles out of the way of peace. We advocate partnership in industry and social life. We advocate self-government, international co-operation. We recognise that these are no ends in themselves; they are means to the end; they are the influences which will facilitate the triumph of the right and impede the success of the wrong.

But looking deeper into the matter, to the very foundations, we recognise, all of us, the most devoted adherents of the League, and all men of goodwill, that in the end we must strive for the brotherhood of man. We admit we can do comparatively little to help it forward. We recognise that our efforts, whether by covenant or other means, must necessarily be imperfect; but we say, and say rightly, that we have been told that perfect love casteth out fear, and that any step towards that love, however imperfect, will at any rate mitigate the terrors of mankind.

THE BALANCE OF POWER
By Professor A.F. Pollard

Hon. Litt.D.; Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford; F.B.A.; Professor of English History in the University of London; Chairman of the Institute of Historical Research.

Professor Pollard said:—The usual alternative to the League of Nations, put forward as a means of averting war by those who desire or profess to desire permanent peace, but dislike or distrust the League of Nations, is what they call the Balance of Power. It is a familiar phrase; but the thing for which the words are supposed to stand, has, if it can save us from war, so stupendous a virtue that it is worth while inquiring what it means, if it has any meaning at all. For words are not the same as things, and the more a phrase is used the less it tends to mean: verbal currency, like the coinage, gets worn with use until in time it has to be called in as bad. The time has come to recall the Balance of Power as a phrase that has completely lost the value it possessed when originally it was coined.

Recent events have made an examination of the doctrine of the Balance of Power a matter of some urgency. The Allies who won the war concluded a pact to preserve the peace, but in that pact they have not yet been able to include Germany or Russia or the United States, three Powers which are, potentially at any rate, among the greatest in the world. So, some fifty years ago, Bismarck, who won three wars in the mid-Victorian age, set himself to build up a pact of peace. But his Triple Alliance was not only used to restrain, but abused to repress, the excluded Powers; and that abuse of a pact of peace drove the excluded Powers, France and Russia, into each other’s arms. There resulted the Balance of Power which produced the war we have barely survived. And hardly was the great war fought and won than we saw the wheel beginning to revolve once more. The excluded Powers, repressed or merely restrained, began to draw together; others than Turkey might gravitate in the same direction, while the United States stands in splendid isolation as much aloof as we were from the Triple Alliance and the Dual Entente a generation ago. Another Balance of Power loomed on the horizon. “Let us face the facts,” declared the Morning Post on 22nd April last, “we are back again to the doctrine of the Balance of Power, whatever the visionaries and the blind may say.” I propose to deal, as faithfully as I can in the time at my disposal, with the visionaries and the blind—when we have discovered who they are.

By “visionaries” I suppose the Morning Post means those who believe in the League of Nations; and by the “blind” I suppose it means them, too, though usually a distinction is drawn between those who see too much and those who cannot see at all. Nor need we determine whether those who believe in the Balance of Power belong rather to the visionaries or to the blind. A man may be receiving less than his due when he is asked whether he is a knave or a fool, because the form of the question seems to preclude the proper answer, which may be “both.” Believers in the Balance of Power are visionaries if they see in it a guarantee of peace, and blind if they fail to perceive that it naturally and almost inevitably leads to war. The fundamental antithesis is between the Balance of Power and the League of Nations.

Balance or League?

That antithesis comes out wherever the problem of preserving the peace of the world is seriously and intelligently discussed. Six years ago, when he began to turn his attention to this subject, Lord Robert Cecil wrote and privately circulated a memorandum in which he advocated something like a League of Nations. To that memorandum an able reply was drafted by an eminent authority in the Foreign Office, in which it was contended that out of the discussion “the Balance of Power emerges as the fundamental factor.” That criticism for the time being checked official leanings towards a League of Nations. But the war went on, threatening to end in a balance of power, which was anything but welcome to those who combined a theoretical belief in the Balance of Power with a practical demand for its complete destruction by an overwhelming victory for our Allies and ourselves. Meanwhile, before America came in, President Wilson was declaring that, in order to guarantee the permanence of such a settlement as would commend itself to the United States, there must be, not “a Balance of Power but a Community of Power.”

Opinion in England was moving in the same direction. The League of Nations Society (afterwards called “Union”) had been formed, and at a great meeting on 14th May, 1917, speeches advocating some such league as the best means of preventing future wars were delivered by Lord Bryce, General Smuts, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, and others. Labour was even more emphatic; and, responding to popular opinion, the Government, at Christmas, 1917, appointed a small committee to explore the historical, juridical, and diplomatic bearings of the suggested solution. A brief survey sufficed to show that attempts to guarantee the peace of the world resolved themselves into three categories: (1) a Monopoly of Power, (2) Balance of Power, and (3) Community of Power. Rome had established the longest peace in history by subjugating all her rivals and creating a Pax Romana imposed by a world-wide Empire. That Empire lasted for centuries, and the idea persisted throughout the middle ages. In modern times Philip II. of Spain, Louis XIV. of France, Napoleon, and even the Kaiser were suspected of attempting to revive it; and their efforts provoked the counter idea, first of a Balance of Power, and then in these latter days of a Community of Power. The conception of a Monopoly of Power was by common consent abandoned as impossible and intolerable, after the rise of nationality, by all except the particular aspirants to the monopoly. The Balance of Power and the Community of Power—in other words, the League of Nations—thus became the two rival solutions of the problem of permanent peace.

The Theory of Balance

The discussion of their respective merits naturally led to an inquiry into what the alternative policies really meant. But inasmuch as the Foreign Office committee found itself able to agree in recommending some form of League of Nations, the idea of the Balance of Power was not subjected to so close a scrutiny or so searching an analysis as would certainly have been the case had the committee realised the possibility that reaction against an imperfect League of Nations might bring once more to the front the idea of the Balance of Power. The fact was, however, elicited that the Foreign Office conception of the Balance of Power is a conception erroneously supposed to have been expressed by Castlereagh at the time of the Congress of Vienna, and adopted as the leading principle of nineteenth century British foreign policy.

Castlereagh was not, of course, the author of the phrase or of the policy. The phrase can be found before the end of the seventeenth century; and in the eighteenth the policy was always pleaded by potentates and Powers when on the defensive, and ignored by them when in pursuit of honour or vital interests. But Castlereagh defined it afresh after the colossal disturbance of the balance which Napoleon effected; and he explained it as “a just repartition of force amongst the States of Europe.” They were, so to speak, to be rationed by common agreement. There were to be five or six Great Powers, whose independence was to be above suspicion and whose strength was to be restrained by the jealous watchfulness of one another. If any one State, like France under Napoleon, grew too powerful, all the rest were to combine to restrain it.

Now, there is a good deal in common between Castlereagh’s idea and that of the League of Nations. Of course, there are obvious differences. Castlereagh’s Powers were monarchies rather than peoples; they were limited to Europe; little regard was paid to smaller States, whose independence sometimes rested on no better foundation than the inability of the Great Powers to agree about their absorption; and force rather than law or public opinion was the basis of the scheme. But none of these differences, important though they were, between Castlereagh’s Balance of Power and the League of Nations is so fundamental as the difference between two things which are commonly regarded as identical, viz., Castlereagh’s idea of the Balance of Power and the meaning which has since become attached to the phrase. There are at least two senses in which it has been used, and the two are wholly incompatible with one another. The League of Nations in reality resembles Castlereagh’s Balance of Power more closely than does the conventional notion of that balance; and a verbal identity has concealed a real diversity to the confusion of all political thought on the subject.

Castlereagh’s Balance of Power is what I believe mathematicians call a multiple balance. It was not like a pair of scales, in which you have only two weights or forces balanced one against the other. It was rather like a chandelier, in which you have five or six different weights co-operating to produce a general stability or equilibrium. In Castlereagh’s scheme it would not much matter if one of the weights were a little heavier than the others, because there would be four or five of these others to counterbalance it; and his assumption was that these other Powers would naturally combine for the purpose of redressing the balance and preserving the peace. But a simple balance between two opposing forces is a very different thing. If there are only two, you have no combination on which you can rely to counteract the increasing power of either, and the slightest disturbance suffices to upset the balance. Castlereagh’s whole scheme therefore presupposed the continued and permanent existence of some five or six great Powers always preserving their independence in foreign policy and war, and automatically acting as a check upon the might and ambition of any single State.