England and the Washington Conference
THERE has been little public discussion in England of the problems of the Washington Conference; but on that account people have been thinking the more. Six months ago it used to be said that all roads in English politics led to Dublin, so strongly did people feel that on a just settlement of the Irish problem depended the health of the whole State. In regard to Ireland, the British Government has done everything that it could do to bring about a settlement; and whether it is reached or not rests with the Sinn Fein leaders rather than with England. At any rate, we have done enough, it is hoped, to prove the sincerity of our desire for peace, and to disprove that strange legend of England as a nation besotted with Imperialism and caring nothing for the liberty of mankind, so long as her own interests are served. From this point of view, the negotiations with Sinn Fein, whether they succeed or fail, will serve to strike the keynote both of our policy and of our reputation at Washington.
This is not a Liberal government in the party sense; but in the real sense, especially in the domain of foreign affairs, it is perhaps the most liberal government that England has ever had. Let Americans compare the ease with which a great, humane, liberal idea gains acceptance in official circles now, with the passive obstinacy it used to encounter in the past, and they will realize that this is no idle boast.
Observe, too, how interest and sentiment unite from the most diverse quarters to make Washington the focus of every political orientation just now. Is relief from heavy taxation the dominant desire in the British electorate? It can look nowhere for hope except to the success of Washington in producing some effective scheme of disarmament; for, apart from economy in armaments, the anti-waste compaign is only a succession of cat-calls. Is the conscience overborne with a sense of the horror and wickedness of war? We cannot escape the sense of impending tragedy except by settling before they become acute the political differences in the Far East, which, left alone, are even now shaping themselves toward another great war. Does this man long for the power and opportunity to sweeten the toil of the poor? He too must fix his hopes on Washington, for the expenditure on war is the greatest of obstacles to all political schemes for promoting domestic happiness. Or is that man’s principal interest in the personalities of polities? For him, too, Washington will provide one of the most moving of dramas.
By his offer of peace to Ireland, Mr. Lloyd George has proved that war has not dulled the edge of his Liberal faith. If, in addition, he can in conjunction with American statesmen settle the problem of disarmament, which has defied the efforts of good-will for generations, his power is assured for the rest of his life, and the policy of England will be Liberal for another generation, or more. Mr. Lloyd George knows that, and the spur of ambition will speed him in the same direction as the conscience of the people. America need have no fear that our politicians will not take the Washington Conference seriously. They are desperately in earnest about it, and they have every reason — of ambition, of expediency, and of principle — to work hard for success.
America has been led to propose the Conference for reasons that are parallel to, but not identical with, those which lead us to support her effort so warmly. She has, like us, economic reasons for desiring a reduction in the expenditure on armaments, though they are less strong than with us. America has not passed the limit of her taxable capacity (or so it seems to us here) so far as we have done. On the other hand, her political reasons for desiring a settlement with Japan which shall avoid the occasion of war are stronger even than ours. In no conceivable circumstances, should we go to war against America on the side of Japan; our risk of war lies in the remote contingency of our intervention if America were really hard pressed; for we could not afford to let America be defeated any more than America could have afforded to let us be defeated in the late war. And it is safe to say that, if Japan knew that that would be our attitude, there would be no risk of war between her and America. We hold the keys of peace between America and Japan, and America must allow us to use them in the sense that we think would be most effectual for the purposes of peace. If we were to denounce the alliance with Japan, the danger could be met only by a military alliance between England and the United States, by which we should bind ourselves to provide an army for the defense of China against military aggression by Japan. That is a prospect that is agreeable to neit her of us. As neither of us wishes to engage in difficult and dangerous operations in China, let us rather use the instrument that we have to hand in the Japanese alliance, and, by associating Japan with our policy, prevent the occasion of war from ever arising. It would be a great mistake on the part of America if she were to make the abandonment of this alliance the test of our friendship with her, for that would be to precipitate the danger we are both anxious to avoid. But if America were to say, ‘Make this alliance the means of preserving peace and the interests that we have in common,’ that is a test that we should accept with alacrity, because we are sure that we can satisfy it.
The main motive, however, of President Harding’s invitation to the Conference at Washington is not the outcry against excessive taxation or the fear of war with Japan, but a view of world-policy with which England has a very close sympathy. America fears that, if expenditure remains at its present height, not only will the expansion of commercial enterprise be checked, but an irresistible popular movement will arise for the repudiation of debts. There are people in England who fear it too, and on that account Lord Birkenhead is believed to be anxious to democratize the House of Lords and to give it some control other finance, in order to prevent a chance Labor majority in the House of Commons from measures of confiscation.
A second motive with America is that she has made the discovery what the world is, in the economic sense, all one. Nations live on each other’s prosperity, and the first condition of healthy exchange of commodities is a healthy state of the exchange in money. We had just made up our minds that the ‘economic man’ of the Manchester school did not exist, when lo, a very big economic man comes into life. America is that man; and she is interested in the political and economic health of Europe because (apart from humane reasons) without it her own foreign trade must languish. So true is it that nations, however wealthy and prosperous, ran not live alone.
And, lastly, America, dissatisfied with the political arrangements made at the Paris Conference for preserving the peace of the world, knows that she cannot rest in an attitude of mere negation, but that, if she rejects those arrangements, she must substitute something better for them. That arises from her discovery that the political as well as the economic world is one; indeed, that you cannot separate politics and economics any more than you can separate the head from the tail of a coin.
America is coming into world-politics, not from choice but because she must — that is the first and most important meaning of the Conference. England welcomes the decision, not because she thinks that America will support any particular views of hers, but because she will be a new arbiter in European affairs, who, whether she agrees with us or not, will at any rate speak our idiom. That idiom is the idiom of the Common Law, which we share. Its main characteristic is the view that the State is, after all, only the sum of the individuals that compose it, and has no separate abstract entity, which has rights of its own; and it follows that it resents the conception of foreign politics as a game of the chancelleries, to be played in secret, with human lives as its pawns. It insists that the test of foreign policy is not the welfare of an abstraction called the State, but the sum of happiness among the individuals who compose it.
The Paris Conference was far from realizing that ideal, and, so far from composing the differences between nations, has exhibited in sharp conflict two opposing conceptions of foreign policy: the French conception, which holds that one state is strong by another’s weakness, prosperous by its depression, secure by strategic combinations and alliances, and the AngloAmerican conception, which believes in the family of nations and in a concert of powers based on law and justice. At Paris this conflict could be resolved only by compromise, for, in the face of the enemy, our first duty was at all costs to maintain, at any rate, the semblance of unity. It is nothing to be surprised at that such compromise has aroused dissatisfaction; the wonder rather is that so much promises to be durable. But now the conditions are different. The Paris Conference was governed by the conditions of war; the Washington Conference will be held in an atmosphere of peace — a state, however, not of tranquil acquiescence on the part of the peoples, but of clamant demand that they shall cease to be ridden by the nightmare of the omnipotent State exacting toll of life and treasure from its citizens.
The more one thinks of the work of the Washington Conference, the more one realizes that it must develop into a revision of a great deal that is in the Treaty of Versailles. The article that I wrote for the July number of the Atlantic Monthly insisted that no effective disarmament was possible except on the basis of certain political settlements. It was not, therefore, surprising that, for the reasons then advanced and doubtless for many others, President Harding’s invitation to a disarmament conference was also an invitation to survey some of the problems that make for swollen armaments by the political friction that they engender. But no survey of political conditions can be restricted artificially to one part of the world, even though that part be a hemisphere like the Pacific. For every political settlement implies a political philosophy, and in laying down conditions in the Pacific, we create a presumption in favor of similar conditions, similar guaranties of the peace, elsewhere. Besides, one main motive of the invitation to the Conference was America’s conviction that the world was economically, and therefore politically, one.
One can now distinguish three main divisions of the work of the Conference. These are: —
1. To determine the conditions on which America will be able to take her part in maintaining the peace of the world.
2. To settle certain political problems in the Pacific, more particularly in relation to China.
3. On the basis of this political settlement, to bring about a measure of naval and military disarmament.
Some observations, necessarily general in character, may be offered on each of these divisions in the work of the Conference; more particularly in relation to the policy that England is known to approve, or is likely to advocate there.
It was a great disappointment to England that America could not see her way to join the League of Nations; but her reasons were intelligible, and were not, in enlightened English opinion, referable to mere selfish desire to maintain her old isolation. Nor does it lie with Englishmen, who used to speak of their own ‘splendid isolation’ from the quarrels of Europe, to reproach America, at the other side of the Atlantic, with her detachment on many matters which seem to us of vital importance. In fact, the Covenant of the League, like many other things done at the Paris Conference, was a compromise between two logical alternatives. Your League of Nations could be one of two things. Either you could give it executive power, or you could deny it that power. In the former alternative, your League, if it was to be effective, would have to be a super-state, with an army and navy of its own. In the second alternative, your League would be a purely advisory and administrative body.
The actual League sought to reconcile the objections to either alternative by combining them in one scheme, and, as usual in such cases, it succeeded in combining their faults without combining their advantages. It was criticized, and in America very successfully, because it impaired national sovereignty and committed the people beforehand to a policy which it might not approve when the time came. On the other hand, the League had very little real power, and when any definite action had to be taken in connection with the settlement, it always fell to the national governments (until the last reference of the Silesian problem to the arbitration of the League), and the League showed itself quite unable, unassisted, to curb the egoism of French policy in Europe. These objections to the League as at present constituted are fully realized by the British Government; and, on the other hand, much of the advocacy of the League principles is avowedly hostile to, or at any rate critical of, the present Government.
President Harding is credited with a project for setting up councils of a purely legal character and without executive power, to deal with specific regional problems. He will not find the British Government unsympathetic, for these regional Areopagi, consisting of representatives of the powers concerned, will not necessarily supersede the WorldLeague, but will enable America to pull her weight in the regeneration of the world and in the prevention of future wars. That is an object hardly less important for America herself than for the rest of the world.
The danger in the second part of the programme, namely the political settlement of Pacific problems, is that their nature and difficulties lend themselves to the operations of intrigue. It was for this reason that Mr. Lloyd George proposed a preliminary conference between the powers directly concerned, namely, the United States, Japan, and Great Britain (including Canada and Australia), to explore the ground and to come to provisional definitions of policy; and it was a matter of very great regret to the British Government that the proposal was not approved. Possibly, the objects of the proposal, namely to expedite business and to forestall intrigue, may be achieved in some other way; nor, if they are attacked in the right spirit, are these political problems insoluble. The view strongly held by the British Government is that the best prospects, both of a political settlement and of enduring peace in the Pacific, are to retain the alliance, but with modifications, so as to limit it strictly to the objects of policy agreed upon at the Conference. To repudiate this alliance would be to force Japan to seek another ally and to bring about the system of alliances and counter-alliances which was the basis of European militarism. The logical corollary of a repudiation of the alliance would bean Anglo-American military and naval alliance for the defense of China against the attack that Japan, freed from the obligat ions of her treaty with us, would probably make. If America were to propose such an alliance, it would have some strong advocates in England; but one does not so read present political tendencies in America; and, that being so, our alliance with Japan will be an understructure to the settlement made at the Conference, not lightly to be removed.
To the long discussion in the July Atlantic Monthly, by the present writer, of the problems of naval disarmament, it is not necessary to add anything here. The more ambitious the project is, the more likely it is to succeed; and nothing less than the neutralization of the Pacific outside certain limits should satisfy the Conference. The basis of naval disarmament should be partly political and partly legal, and should include certain reforms in the laws of international law at sea. On the other hand, the rationale of military disarmament is financial. There is no common divisor possible except that of finance, with a universal reduction of military budgets by one half, two thirds, or three fourths, or whatever proportion may be arranged, allowances being made for the military costs of administering a mandate.
But this is a vast and complicated subject and may demand a whole article to itself. One thing, however, can be promised. When the proposals for reduction of armaments come to be discussed, England will not be among the laggards but among the most drastic of pioneers, and the most probable criticism of her will be that she wants to do too much and to go too fast.