This Inevitable Conflict 9780231898331

Table of contents :
FOR A SCORE

Citation preview

COLUMBIA HOME FRONT WARBOOKS NUMBER 2

THIS INEVITABLE CONFLICT BY C A R L T O N J. H. HAYES SETH

LOW

PROFESSOR

COLUMBIA

NEW

YORK:

COLUMBIA

OF

HISTORY

UNIVERSITY

MORNINGSIDE

HEIGHTS

UNIVERSITY 1942

PRESS

COPYRIGHT COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

1942 PRESS, N E W

YORK

FOREIGN AGENTS: Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford, Amen House, London, E. C. 4, England, and B. I. Building, Nicol R o a d , Bombay, India M A N U F A C T U R E D IN T H E UNITED STATES O F

AMERICA

F

of years past, a curious assumption was widely prevalent to the effect that each nation possesses a freedom of choice between peace and war, that it may embark on war or remain at peace according to its own independent will. Such an assumption was long prevalent in Great Britain and throughout the British Empire, in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, in the Scandinavian and most of the Balkan countries, and it has certainly been prevalent, as we all know, here in the United States. It was, indeed, a common, as well as curious, assumption in all the liberal democracies of the world, and from it was drawn the comforting deduction that, given freedom of choice between peace and war, every people would choose peace—as what sane, decent man wouldn't? OR A SCORE

So strong, in fact, was the will-to-peace within the liberal democracies that the vast majority of their citizens, and consequently their governments, half closed their eyes to the possibility that totalitarian states might choose war instead of peace. It was occasionally remarked that these states were arming themselves a bit excessively and that periodic speeches of their Fiihrers or Duces were unnecessarily boisterous and somewhat lacking in good

[3]

taste. Yet all such phenomena were usually interpreted as springing from peculiar domestic situations and having little or no relevance to international relations. Fiihrers and Duces might be queer mad dogs at home, but surely abroad their bark was worse than their bite. They were canny enough to appreciate what havoc the unleashing of war would wreak upon their own peoples and what a gamble it would be for themselves. It could not be war that they would voluntarily choose. If once in a while they rattled the sword, it could only be to advertise to the world some injustices which had been inflicted on their countries by the peace settlement of 1919-20. But any such injustices, it was argued, could be rectified without recourse to war. All that would be necessary would be to effect a revision, here and there, of that peace settlement and to "appease" the aggrieved nations. By 1930, let me remind you, it had become fashionable, not only in Germany, but everywhere else, to blame practically all the troubles of the world upon the Treaty of Versailles. It was such a convenient scapegoat, alike for Hitler and the Germans and for pacifists in America and England. Persons who did not know much history (their number was legion) and persons who did not know or care what was actually happening outside their own

[4]

country (their number was still more legion)—all such persons were easily persuaded that totalitarian dictatorship was merely a result of the unjust and vengeful peace terms dictated at Paris in 191920 by "have" nations to "have-not" nations, and specifically by lionlike England, France, and the United States to lamblike Germany, Italy, and Japan, and that this totalitarian dictatorship would automatically disappear or be transformed into something nice and progressive just as soon as the countries where it existed were equitably treated and properly "appeased." So, for eight long years, "appeasement" was extolled and practiced by the peace-loving democracies on an ever-widening front. Japan was appeased by being allowed to flout the League of Nations and to conquer Manchuria. Italy was appeased by being permitted to defy the League and to overrun and annex one of its members, the African empire of Ethiopia. Germany was appeased by being left free to withdraw from the League, to nullify the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, to rearm herself on land and sea, and to remilitarize the whole Rhineland. But these appeasements did not satisfy the totalitarian states. T h e more they got, the more they demanded; and, backed by the popular will-to-peace

[5]

elsewhere, the more they demanded, the more they got. By way of continuing appeasement, Japan was enabled to follow up the conquest of Manchuria with war on the Chinese republic and piecemeal subjugation of its richest and most populous provinces; Italy, to intervene forcefully in Spain and to invade and seize Albania; Germany, to extinguish Austria, to despoil Lithuania, and in three quick successive gulps to swallow Czechoslovakia. By this time, the military clique in control of Japan were demanding recognition of what they euphemistically termed a "Greater Far East co-prosperity sphere" but what would actually be Japanese domination of Asia and Oceania; Mussolini was demanding Italian supremacy all over and around the Mediterranean; Hitler was demanding a "new [and Germanized] order" throughout Europe and overseas. Yet why blame the democratic statesmen for the policy of appeasement which they consistently pursued during those eight years from 1931 to 1939? They were simply trying to do what their peaceloving peoples wanted done. They were choosing peace and were using all the means which Christians and liberal pacifists had suggested to guard against war. As Mr. Walter Millis says: They were patient; they were reasonable; they refused

[6]

to take bellicose action; they were slow to build up their own armaments; they tried to see the other side's point of view; they offered concessions. And still the crisis developed. A t last there was Munich. Mr. Chamberlain, in effect, took our advice. He was not going to waste human life for small, uncertain, and ignoble ends. What, in any rational system of human accounting, was the fate of Czechoslovakia worth to the young Englishmen who would have to die to save her? What had war ever achieved except disaster and destruction for all? Who could win a modern war, about which the only certain thing was that everyone would be a loser? Mr. Chamberlain applied these principles, which so many of us had so often elaborated, to the case in point. Mr. Chamberlain did not fight; he did not waste life—and within some eighteen months Europe was filled with the dead bodies of Poles and Finns and Norwegians and Frenchmen and Englishmen and Germans by the hundreds of thousands; the giant bombs were smashing English pubs and churches and homes, the wreck and waste of war was spread over a continent. 1 Indeed, it is now spread over the world. A t Munich, in September, 1938, Hitler solemnly announced that he was finally satisfied with the partition of Czechoslovakia and that he would demand nothing more. Barely six months later he was deWalter Millis, " T h e Faith of an American," Zero Hour York, 1940), pp. 236-37. 1

[7]

(New

manding all of Czechoslovakia and taking it, and barely five months thereafter he was demanding the partition of Poland. Only then was the policy of appeasement interrupted, and then by only two nations. Only democratic Great Britain and France —and these woefully unprepared—undertook to stop Hitler and to save another of his victims. On the other hand, the Russian dictatorship, with loud outcries against "warmongers," carried appeasement to amazing lengths. It positively fawned on Nazi Germany, and, after sharing in the brutal conquest and partition of Poland, proceeded on its own account to subjugate all the Baltic States and to attack and wrest territory from Rumania and Finland. It is well-nigh incredible how, in the face of all these shocking developments, most democratic peoples behaved. They continued to sit apart, in selfrighteous isolation, and to chatter about the rapidly extending war as a "phony war" or an "imperialistic war" and about the blessedness of neutrality and how they did not choose to fight. Norway was so sitting and chattering when she was attacked—and conquered. Holland and Belgium were so sitting and chattering when they were attacked—and conquered—and when the way was opened for successful German Blitzkrieg against France and renewed

[8]

marauding by the ghoulish Mussolini. In vain Greece and then Yugoslavia attempted to resist assaults upon them; when their turn came, they had to stand practically alone and unaided, and they were crushed. Not even the Russian kind of appeasement sufficed; Russia was attacked and invaded without warning. And still the sitting and the chattering continued in the United States. I suppose it might be continuing now in February, 1942, if Japan had not attacked us without warning and in the midst of negotiations for further appeasement, and had not Germany and Italy promptly joined in the attack. We still, in December, 1941—twenty-seven months after Germany's resort to war—we still chose peace, not war. But in that month we finally learned with intense shock what we should have known in September, 1939 (if not earlier), and what Denmark and Norway learned in April, 1940, Holland and Belgium and Luxemburg in May, 1940, Greece in October, 1940, Yugoslavia in March, 1941, and Russia in June, 1941. We finally learned that no real choice is left to a pacific democratic nation when confronted by nations embodying bellicose totalitarianism. T o me it appears self-evident that the present war is an irrepressible conflict—more so than was

[9]

that American civil war to which the adjective has usually been applied. T h e present conflict has been in the making ever since the rise of totalitarian nationalism and clearly so since Japan was mastered by militarists, Italy by Mussolini, and Germany by Hitler. T h e only way in which it could have been averted was for other nations to have surrendered their ideals of liberty and democracy and their quest of a peaceful world order. But even with such abject surrender and such unthinkable sacrifice of what most men prize highest in the heritage of our civilization, there still could be and would be no end to war. War would continue among and between totalitarian dictatorships—it is so natural and essential to them—until one gained dominance over all the others or until all were buried beneath the débris of a ruined world. If the present conflict were purely economic or imperialistic, it might have been warded off, or might now be compromised, by negotiating some new commercial treaties and, perhaps, some "rectifications" of frontier and reshuffling of colonial outposts. Many such arrangements have been effected in the past without abruptly or fundamentally changing the course of history or the general pattern of social and cultural life. Even the imperialistic struggle between Englishmen and Spaniards [10]

back in the sixteenth century, with its religious overtones, was capable of reduction into a modus vivendi which, with few breaks, has endured to the present day. So, too, was that between Englishmen and Dutchmen in the seventeenth century, and that between Englishmen and Frenchmen in the eighteenth century. True, England reaped from those successive struggles the lion's share of colonial holdings and imperialist prestige. But how, in the long run, has that militated against the economic interests or the political or cultural progress of the world at large? England, committed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to free trade and liberal democracy, has been unable or unwilling to make her empire an exclusive or slavish preserve for herself; and, latterly championing the right of national selfdetermination, she has felt obliged to accord the same right, not only to Americans, but to Canadians and Australians and South Africans and Irishmen and Egyptians and Iraqis and to promise it eventually to the swarming millions of India. England has extended self-government to one after another of her dominions, and nowhere in her far-flung possessions does she deny access on the part of anybody to raw materials for modern industry. With England, at least, imperialism of the old mercantilist variety of the seventeenth and eight-

[»]

eenth centuries was becoming extinct in the last forty years. T h e n why should Germany and the other Axis Powers seek to renew and intensify the imperialist struggles of earlier centuries? Prior to 1914, Germany, with far fewer colonies than England, had access to raw materials all over the world, precisely as did England and the United States, and Germany prospered exceedingly. After 1933 when Hitler came to power, Germany still had the same free access to raw materials all over the world, just as again did England and the United States, but Nazi Germany deliberately adopted a policy of economic autarchy which estopped her from utilizing the opportunity—and then complained that she could not obtain what she needed. Italy has behaved similarly, and Japan also. What the Axis Powers want is more than access to raw materials. T h e y demand exclusion of everybody else from them. T h e y seek return to the selfish old mercantilist type of imperialism. I do not contend that the present war has no economic or imperialist stakes. I do contend, however, that in so far as it has such stakes, it matters tremendously whether the imperialism of the future is to be of the "free" kind represented by England and the United States or the "slave" kind represented by Germany, Italy, and Japan. T h e ancient epic strug[12]

gle between Greeks and Persians can be viewed as a struggle of power politics and economic imperialism, but it has mattered enormously to all subsequent generations that in that struggle it was the free Greeks who won and not the despotically ruled Persians. The present conflict is merely incidentally economic, and it admits of no merely economic or imperialist compromise. It is irrepressible—and to the death—because it is basically a conflict between two sets of ideas, and because, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the world cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. The conflict is between two world orders, between two types of nationalism, between two religious conceptions. One of the world orders was projected and one of the nationalisms was legitimized at the close of the First World War. Both were in line with the Judaeo-Christian historic traditions of our civilization and with liberal democratic aspirations. Both were enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles and the other peace treaties of 1919-20. I have again mentioned the Treaty of Versailles, and this time I must pause to contribute my bit toward freeing the peace settlement of 1919-20 of the obloquy which has long and very unfairly been heaped upon it. I readily admit that there were se-

[>3]

rious imperfections in it, especially in its economic provisions. But in my considered judgment, it was far better, as a whole, and far more just, than any other major peace settlement of which history has record. It was certainly quite different in principle and in detail from the supremely vengeful and imperialistic peace which Germany imposed in 1918 upon Russia and Rumania and which she would have imposed upon the rest of the world if she could. The actual treaties which were imposed by the allied nations in 1919-20 redrew the map of Europe approximately in accordance with the principle of nationality and the self-determination of peoples; and from that peace settlement emerged free and democratic states not only for Frenchmen and Englishmen, but for Germans and Italians, and likewise for Poles, Czechs, Irish, Yugoslavs, Rumanians, Lithuanians, Letts, Finns, etc. Thus were crystallized the expectations of liberal nationalists, and the hope strengthened that the world was truly being made safe for democracy. Moreover, in order to keep nationalism within bounds and to make it serve the purposes of a pacific world order, the same treaties proclaimed and guaranteed the special rights of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, and at the same time created a League of Nations, with executive and legislative [>4]

functions, with an auxiliary International Labor Organization, and with a Permanent Court of International Justice. Thereby was seemingly realized a haunting dream of ancient Jewish prophets, of medieval popes, and of modern humanitarians from the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and William Penn to Immanuel Kant and Woodrow Wilson. In other words, the Treaty of Versailles and the whole peace settlement of which it was a part introduced a new world order, under which, it was anticipated, a sane nationalism could flourish side by side with a sane internationalism. It would involve respect for the dignity and freedom of the individual person. It would involve respect for the dignity and freedom of nationalities, small as well as large. It would foster the democratic and cooperative way of life. It would be tolerant and pacific. T h a t was the projected "new order" for which the First World War was fought and won and of which the Treaty of Versailles supplied specific blueprints. We can all now perceive that that "new order" was not realized and that within twenty years the blueprints for it were stultified and rendered inoperative. T h e blame for the tragic outcome, however, should be placed, let me emphasize, not on the Treaty of Versailles or its companion treaties, but rather on the subsequent refusal of certain na['5]

tions to abide by those treaties and of other nations to enforce them. Part of the blame attaches unmistakably to our own nation. Part attaches, too, to the other victors of the First World War, notably Great Britain and France. For all the victors were vouchsafed at the close of that great struggle a vision of an ensuing world order of peace, and then lost it in the selfish pursuit of post-war policies which fell fatally between two stools. Either they should jointly have applied the treaties to the letter and to the limit, or they should jointly have made sufficient concessions, early enough, to reconcile the vanquished. They did neither. They simply bungled. And thereby they played into the hands of those self-seeking politicians and gullible populations whose avowed aim was to tear up the treaties completely and to renew, with heightened ferocity, the international anarchy and the predatory imperialistic nationalism which had been temporarily arrested by the First World War. As agencies of such reaction, bellicose and totalitarian dictatorships came newly to the fore, arming themselves, as pacific democratic peoples were fain to do, and acting jointly and in concert, as pacific democratic peoples still failed to do. Latterly, a "new world order" has been much ad-

m

vertised by the totalitarian states. It is what they would make issue from the Second World War. But it must not be confused with the new world order which was projected and inaugurated twenty years ago. T h e nationalism central to the schemes of Hitler, Mussolini, and the military clique in Japan is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a liberal nationalism, a means to a humanitarian and internationalist end. It is a perverted nationalism which would be an end in itself and which would chain every individual to the state and subject to it his economic, religious, and all other activities. It is a despotic nationalism and one that is imperialistic, one that divides races and nations into "superior" and "inferior" and would reduce the latter to the status of helots and slaves. It is a dictatorial, totalitarian, embattled nationalism, the precise antithesis in all respects to the historic traditions and ideals of Western civilization. Many people in the United States—and elsewhere —have comforted themselves with the thought that if the Germans or Japanese are foolish or unfortunate enough to choose to live under their respective totalitarian regimes, that is exclusively their concern and not at all anybody else's, and that if Germany (for instance) wins this war it will make little difference to us. There would be, it has been stated, ['7]

just the normal changes in frontiers, the reappearance of some German flags on the colonial map, some readjustment of foreign trade to Germany's advantage, but in other respects the same old world. Such a comforting notion betrays a total lack of appreciation of the nature of the men who dominate Germany and the other Axis Powers today and of the absolutely revolutionary ideas which govern their conduct and aims. Said Hitler, in a speech on December 10, 1940, contrasting the world he is trying to conquer with the world he represents, "two worlds are in conflict, two philosophies of life. . . . One of these two worlds must break asunder . . . must crack up." Before Hitler put the case in these categorical terms, his henchmen had openly and repeatedly boasted of how they intended to conquer the world that was not yet theirs and what they intended to do with it once they had conquered it. No doubt should have been left in anyone's mind as to what the Nazi world order would involve; and what has happened to date in territories subjugated by Nazi arms only confirms the certitude. Europe, it is abundantly clear, would be organized with a greatly enlarged Germany as a central core, surrounded by German colonies and, farther afield, by vassal states. The new borders of Germany would include not only all areas now inhabited by

[18]

even a small German-speaking minority but also such additional areas as the Nazis want to populate with German settlers. All property in these regions would be owned by Germans, and all enterprise would be in German hands. T h e process is already well on the way to completion in large parts of Poland and in Lorraine. It would eventually be applied to most of Switzerland and all of Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. Then, reaching out from the central German core, would be regions in which German colonists would have exclusive political power and the native population would be tolerated on an inferior level. These colonies would be pushed down the Danube basin to the Black Sea and extended along the Baltic to the very edge of Leningrad. Beyond such colonies would be vassal states of various ranks. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden might be constituted a single vassal state, slightly favored on the ground that its population is Nordic and hence akin to German. Italy would be accorded a theoretically semi-independent status, out of somewhat ironical respect for brotherhood in conspiracy if not in arms. How France will be treated depends very much on the outcome of Germany's ceaseless efforts to maneuver Vichy into a policy of "collaboration." At best it is intended to make France an

[ ] 9]

economic vassal. At worst the Germans would take over the country, split it into small units, and reduce the French natives to the position of peons. Nazi treatment of Russia would make the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, negotiated by Hohenzollern Germany back in 1918, look like the work of softhearted sentimentalists. T h e Ukraine would be set up as a German-controlled puppet state, and what might be left of Russia would be subjected to the same kind of German domination as that planned for France. Italy would be allowed some extension of her pre-war empire in Africa but would remain "the prisoner of the Mediterranean." For with the exception of small areas intended to assuage Italian vanity and perhaps to satisfy Spanish sensibilities, the entire African continent would be brought under German control, and so, too, in all likelihood, would large reaches of southwestern Asia. The fate of England would surely be drastic. Cut off from her colonial empire, she would be forced down into the economic status of Scandinavia or worse. Her only industrial function would be to build ships for the German navy and merchant marine. Her other industries which now compete with Germany's would be gradually scrapped. Such would be the basis of the new Nazi German

[20]

imperium as it is conceived and frankly outlined in Berlin today. But it would be merely the beginning. German colonies in South America are expected, when the time is ripe, to organize revolutions which will bring them into possession of the several countries there. Germany would then have supreme control over all the trade of Europe, Africa, and South America, while Japan would have the major part of Asia and Oceania. Nazi leaders have said repeatedly during the last two years that Germany has no aggressive designs against the United States. They had previously said the same sort of thing, in turn, about Austria, about Czechoslovakia, about Poland, about France, about Denmark and Belgium. And yet, about the United States, I believe they spoke sincerely and truthfully, except that they omitted an i f . They really have no aggressive designs against us—if we accept their plans for the new German world order. This means that the United States must accept not only complete German political, economic, and financial domination of Europe and Africa but also German control of South America's trade and its economic development, and, of much more direct importance, the United States must trade with Europe and the rest of the world according to German convenience. T h e Nazi imperial dicta[21]

torship would sell us what it chose and buy from us what it chose, at prices fixed by it. Further, all American trade with any part of the world would clear through Berlin. That is not all. The American press would have to be muzzled to prevent expressions "unfriendly" to Germany. American laws and customs would have to be modified wherever they proved irritating or harmful to German sovereignty over the world. It would be a German world, and North America would exist, along with Japan, on the tolerance of racialist, pagan, and dictatorial Germany. Either the two would unite at some future time to throw off the yoke by forcible means, or each would gradually succumb to a degree of domestic interference which would undermine its distinctive institutions and culture and destroy its independence.' Here, in a nutshell, are the stakes of the present irrepressible conflict. If Germany and her allies win, liberalism and democracy, sane nationalism, and sane internationalism are alike doomed, and Christianity, with religious sanction for decency in public life, is consigned to catacombs. If, on the other hand, Germany and her allies lose, there is a ' This and the immediately preceding paragraphs are freely adapted from Joseph C. Harsch's illuminating Germany at War, Headline Book No. 33 (New York, Foreign Policy Association, 1942), pp. 83-89.

[«]

chance, at any rate, of vivifying and putting into effect that liberal and democratic and decent world order which emerged for a moment at the close of the First World War and has since suffered lamentable eclipse. I am counting on the liberal and democratic forces of the world to achieve eventual victory. T h e struggle will be long and hard and grim—very grim —but, with its stakes what they are, it must be fought to a finish, to overwhelming victory. Then, when victory is finally achieved, we must have a peace settlement which will assure the stakes we fight for, and assure them not transiently or superficially, but solidly and long. That peace settlement of the future will have to start, I believe, where the one of 1919-20 left off. No one can possibly itemize it in detail now. But if it is to be at all enduring, if it is not to be speedily stymied by another round of totalitarian war, it must satisfy certain general requirements which, in the light of the history of the past twenty or thirty years, should by now appear self-evident. One is the need of resanctioning and reapplying the principle of nationality. For national patriotism, that is, devotion to one's historic ethnic group, is too deeply embedded in modern thought and ac[23]

complishment to be dug up by the roots and summarily disposed of. Even if it were practical, such treatment would be undesirable. National patriotism can be, and is, a great virtue as well as a great vice. It can be the means to the finest kind of internationalism, the kind that does not level men down to a gray indistinct cosmopolitanism but brings out the best elements in the corporate inheritance of each nationality. T h e task is to foster tolerant and pacific nationalism while discountenancing despotic and imperialistic nationalism. Nationalism and internationalism must be sanely harmonized, and to this end internationalism must be built of nationalist blocks. Wherefore, recognition must again be accorded the right of national self-determination. Provision must definitely be made for the erection of a largely autonomous national state for each and every people that wants it, whether that people be numerous or few. If they want local self-government, Poles and Czechs, Greeks and Irish, Finns and Albanians, Chinese and Ethiopians, even Basques and Catalans are as much entitled to it as Germans, Italians, or Japanese, or as Englishmen, Russians, or Americans. T o be sure, it will not be easy to provide just territorial boundaries for every people—the First World War proved that. And the mixing of peoples, es[*4]

pecially in eastern Europe and the Balkans, a mixing which has existed for centuries, makes it practically impossible to draw political boundaries without leaving minorities on the wrong side of the line. Nevertheless an honest attempt must be made to do the best that can be done for every people, with justice no more denied to vanquished than to victorious peoples. Yet we have learned no lesson from the experience of the last score of years if we imagine that the erection of a lot of national states and the paper guaranteeing of minority rights will of themselves assure the triumph of a sane nationalism and get rid of the perverted kind which is, and ever must be, a supreme menace to world peace. Consequently, a second requirement for any lasting peace is that the sovereignty of the several national states must be restricted in the interest of an effective internationalism. Such restriction will have to be economic and also military. A very grave defect in the peace settlement of 1919 was that it interpreted the right of national self-determination as enabling each and every national state freely to determine not only what its form of domestic politics should be but also what economic policies it would pursue both internally and externally. Thereby was stimulated in every [*5]

country, small as well as large, a mad desire to attain as soon as possible to economic self-sufficiency, with consequent unnecessary duplication of factories, derangement of traditional trade routes, and erection of higher and higher tariff walls. This was strikingly exemplified by the numerous and relatively small succession states in central and eastern Europe. Previously, for centuries, the peoples of these states had lived together in large empires of Austria or Russia, and whatever was the political or cultural oppression from which they suffered, they had almost certainly profited economically from belonging to a relatively large free-trade area. That many of them have not profited from the dismemberment of such areas is evidenced by the economic distress which has beset them during the last twenty years and which has contributed greatly to social and political unrest and eventually to the spread of dictatorship and the disasters of the present war. The remedy to be applied in the next peace settlement would seem obvious. It should consist of economic regional federations of several national states, each federation being charged with the maintenance of free trade and the furtherance of material well-being throughout its own region, regardless of interior national boundaries. It should be practical to effect such a federation for the Danubian

[26]

and other east-central European peoples, another for the Balkan peoples, perhaps one for all the peoples of western Europe. Incidentally, the economic regional federation should ease the otherwise difficult problem of ethnic minorities. Doubtless in some instances compulsion would have to be exercised to constitute and preserve a well-rounded federation, but to that extent, at any rate, the theory of absolute state sovereignty will have to be impaired. But we shall have to go still further. For beyond and embracing all national states and all regional federations, there must be a real world-wide league or association of nations. For the future, too, the constitution or covenant of the league must have teeth in it. That is to say, the league must be something more than a debating society or an occasional conference of diplomats. It must be equipped with an international army or police force, empowered to limit the armaments of any particular country and to prevent aggression, and capable of doing so successfully. Here, surely, the sovereignty of individual states will have to be abridged. There is a third requirement for an enduring future peace, concerning which I would say a few words in conclusion. It has to do especially with the United States and is closely related to our stakes [*7]

in the present irrepressible conflict and to the sincerity and single-mindedness with which we fight for those stakes. I sometimes think that our besetting national fault is smugness, the self-satisfied presumption that we Americans are all right and that foreigners (particularly Europeans) are all wrong—and bad. Be that as it may, we have got to banish our habit and mood of aloofness and any "holier-than-thou" attitude which we may have. There has never been a large-scale war in Europe since the seventeenth century which has not sooner or later involved America. T h a t was true of the War of the League of Augsburg two hundred and fifty years ago. It was true of the Seven Years' War one hundred and eighty-five years ago. It was true of the Napoleonic Wars one hundred and thirty years ago. W e did not stay out of the First World War twenty-five years ago. W e have not been able to stay out of the Second World War now. Our aloofness from Europe, our isolation from the world, is a myth. It always disappears in a crisis. Actually we Americans were the ultimately determining factor in wresting democratic victory from the frightfully deadly and destructive war of 1914, and if like victory is to issue from the still more deadly and destructive war of 1939 it will surely be primarily the achievement [28]

of our machines, our munitions, and our men. Can't we, won't we, learn from experience? We did our part to win the First World War, and then we did more than our part to lose the peace. Victimized by a narrow and selfish nationalism, whose other name has been "isolation," we insisted on our rights in 1920 and spurned our duties. We were first to repudiate the League of Nations which our own President had fashioned, and we thus set the pace for its later floutings by other countries. Besides, by raising our exclusive tariff walls to dizzy heights, we seriously impeded economic recovery elsewhere and contributed immensely to bringing on the depression of 1929 with its dire consequences both to Europe and in the long run to ourselves. Moreover, we stubbornly and shortsightedly refused to forgive the inter-Allied debts and thereby deterred our debtors, France and England, from any timely forgiving of the reparation debts which Germany owed them. The result of all this behavior has been that we helped Hitler into power and on his mad career and that we are now accumulating a national debt for defending ourselves against him which makes the old inter-Allied debts and German reparations together seem absurdly trivial. How silly and how tragic I America, quite as much as Germany or any other

[29]

nation, must be brought to infuse its nationalism with internationalism. America must stay not only with the present war but with the post-war peace; it must not run away from this peace but guarantee it. America must therefore sacrifice a good deal of its exclusiveness and fancied superiority, even some of its sovereignty. It must adhere to the league or association of nations and agree to put teeth into it and to use the teeth. If a Christian sense of justice and charity does not guide us along such a course, practical lessons of experience and an enlightened self - interest should. For the alternative is to go on getting involved in one world war after another, endlessly wasting our substance and manhood and never attaining either peace or security. We ruin ourselves in tolerating the progressive ruin of the rest of the world. T h e present conflict is irrepressible. It is inescapably between two philosophies of life and between two world orders. Let us be sincerely and wholly on one side—on the side of sanity and decency, on the side of historic civilization and respect for the dignity of man and the freedom of peoples— on the side which alone has a bright vision of ultimate and perduring peace. [3o]