The European Chaos
I
FROM month to month the condition of Europe continues to grow worse. The effects of a monstrous war and an unhappy peace make themselves felt with increasing force. Confusion multiplies. Nations are wrangling with each other, and are crushed under the burden of their debts. Distrust spreads apace. Capital is being wasted, or concealed. Governments are losing what little authority they still possess, and are headed toward bankruptcy. Misery, unemployment, and the sullen discontent of the populace are growing. Peace is preserved only by general prostration. We are not even assured that famine, that ancient scourge of humanity, long exiled to the remote places of the Orient, may not lift its head again in Central and Southern Europe.
Out of this disorder a new order will some day be born. But as yet we do not know how or when. The reconstruction of Europe, of which we hear so much, has not even begun. We are still in the process of disintegration. We have not yet reached the point where we can even discuss measures and methods for converting chaos into order. We must content ourselves for the time being with examining that chaos, in the hope that we may analyze its elements, and prepare ourselves to understand its coming phases. Therefore, I propose to point out the three principal causes of European chaos — causes that we must not lose sight of if we aspire to understand what is now occurring, and what is still to occur, in Europe. These three causes are: the instability of Eastern Europe resulting from the Peace treaties, international indebtedness, and the growing tension between Germany and France.
II
No one imagines that Eastern Europe will retain permanently the form imposed upon it by the treaties. Daily alarms sound from that part of the world, sending a shudder through all Europe. Why? What is the danger that glares at us from that threatening quarter of our continent? It is the precarious situation of Poland. Czechoslovakia, and Rumania, between Germany and Russia. Are these countries to be friends, or enemies? Is it to be peace, or war? No man knows. And whenever their fear of Germany and Russia subsides for a moment. Poland and Czechoslovakia let their latent hatred for each ot her flare up.
Poland, moreover, has seized territories that Germany and Russia, whether rightly or wrongly, still believe justly belong to them. Czechoslovakia, nourishes an inextinguishable distrust of Germany, which for centuries oppressed the Slav population of Bohemia. What wonder if the Germans in turn regard their new neighbor with an evil eye! Rumania has invited a standing quarrel with Russia, by seizing Bessarabia. The Little Entente, therefore, must always be prepared to repel attack from two directions — from Russia and from Germany. And meanwhile Hungary lurks at their gates, eagerly awaiting an opportunity to avenge herself for the loss of the territories which, she is persuaded, were unjustly torn from her.
In a word, the new frontiers that the Allies have drawn in Eastern Europe, crisscrossing the ruins of t he Muscovite and Austro-Hungarian Empires, are not recognized by Germany, by Russia, or by Hungary; precisely as, after 1870, the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was not recognized by France. Consequently, the new order established in Eastern Europe by the Peace treaties of 1919 is based on rights recognized only by the victors. That means, in other words, that it does not rest on right, but solely on force.
How, then, does it survive? It survives because, for the time being, Hungary, Russia, and Germany are enchained. Hungary alone is powerless to overthrow the Peace treaties; Russia is powerless because her sword, already blunted by the Tsar, has been broken by the Bolsheviki — the only service (but that no small one) that, they have rendered the Entente. Germany is powerless because she is exhausted by the war, disarmed by the treaty, and threatened at her most vital point by the great armies of Franee and Belgium.
But the chains that bind Hungary, Russia, and Germany to-day will not prove eternal. If these three nations are to-day powerless, how long will that condition, so fortunate for the Entente, continue? This is the pith of the problem. It is folly to dally with delusions. The victorious powers may be able, perhaps, to give the world peace for the moment; but they will not be able to sustain by force the governments which they have created, or to which they have given wider territories, in Eastern Europe.
England and Italy have already reduced their armies to the minimum indispensable for defense. France will soon be forced to follow suit. She is already pawning her last garments, so to speak, to pay for the huge army that now does service as the policeman of the Entente and the guardian of the treaties; and for this she is repaid by the hatred of the world. She will ultimately weary of this ungrateful and ruinous task. What then? What will happen when Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania are thrown upon their own resources? Especially if the Muscovite Samson begins to grow his locks again?
What is incubating in Eastern Europe, no man can predict. At present we see nothing ahead but incurable instability in that region. The victorious powers are themselves responsible for t his instability, of which they are now the victims. They deluded themselves with the foolish fancy that they could remodel Eastern Europe all alone, against the will of Russia and Germany. Their task was one that required the aid of either Germany or Russia: and presumably of Germany, because Western Europe has indignantly turned her back on Russia since the Bolshevist Revolution.
One capital blunder in the Peace Treaty was the failure of its makers to understand that the Bolshevist Revolution, the greatest victory that Germany won during the war, made it imperative for the victorious powers, if they were to avoid plunging Europe into chaos, to impose mild conditions upon Germany; because, although Germany was conquered, she was not reduced, and could not be reduced, to a condition where she might not revenge herself for too harsh a peace. I am saying now only what I said and wrote in 1919. But who, at that time, in Italy, in France, or in England, thought I was right? The moment you mentioned Germany, the truculent frown of a Brennus darkened the countenance of the victors.
What we needed then was the smile of an Alexander I, of a Talleyrand, of a Metternich; because, just as Europe could not be saved in 1815 except with the aid and consent of France, so, in 1919, she was predestined to ruin without the aid and consent of Germany. I appreciate the facts. In 1919 it took superhuman wisdom for men still bleeding from their wounds to smile upon so hated and so cruel an enemy. The resentment that dictated the Peace treaties was human, but that does not make its results less tragic. The blunders committed in the intoxication of victory, when men sought to reconstruct Eastern Europe against both Germany and Russia, are errors that will long haunt us, and that cannot be repaired until we have paid a heavy price for them in suffering and sorrow.
So there is nothing to do but wait for time and events to heal the consequences of this immeasurable mistake.
III
Europe’s second plague is the burden of international and national indebtedness which victors and vanquished alike have inherited from the war. Europe is imprisoned in an intricate network of credits and debits, the puckering strings of which are held by the hands of America, across the At lantic — America, the creditor of all. Confronting the United States, which owes no one, but has claims against all the world, stand Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, as exclusively debtor nations; and England, France, Italy, Belgium, Rumania, Serbia, and Portugal, as both creditor and debtor nations, intermediate between America and the conquered powers.
What is the attitude of America, this universal creditor? She insists that her debts must be paid. To this those nations that are crushed under a burden of debt and possess no credit reply that they cannot pay. The intermediate nations, which are both creditors and debtors, are inclined to take a double attitude: to insist that what is owed them be paid in full, but to default on the debts they owe others. Where shall we find, in this confusion of tongues, a language that all understand?
The American theory, that all debts, old and new, war debts and reparation debts, should be paid in full, is selfconsistent and logical. A nation that makes a monetary promise and does not keep it commits a hostile act, because it arbitrarily defrauds the creditor government. How can we have mutual confidence and coöperation among nations, when some governments threaten others that they will erase the accounts these hold against them, with a mere stroke of the hand? A bond is a bond, and not a scrap of paper!
But, while it is true that debts must be paid, it is equally true that these debts cannot be paid in their present form. Russia can do no more than recognize her old indebtedness and her war debts on paper; Germany cannot repair the damages that she wrought, to the extent and within the period for which she obligated herself in the peace treaty. France and England cannot pay what they owe America — and so on, to the end. This is not so much an arithmetical impossibility, as a moral and political impossibility. No government will ever be able to extract from its taxpayers the sums required to fulfill its obligations. Germany and Italy prove this.
A person who knew Germany before the war, and who visits that country now, discovers at once that she is seriously impoverished. Impoverished— not pauperized! please understand me there. But if she were to fulfill her treaty obligations, she would be pauperized in the full meaning of the word. Some argue that Germany should have a government strong enough to exact from the middle and lower classes, for thirty or forty years to come, and without giving them anything in return, the enormous sums necessary to rebuild what her armies have destroyed in France and elsewhere. As if Germany, where the monarchy has fallen, where the government is now chosen by universal suffrage and is itself flesh and blood of the middle and lower classes, could be expected to strip those classes to the bone! This is asking the voters themselves to put in power a government that would reduce them to despair; to expect the German people to imitate those ascetic hermits of ancient times, who flagellated and tortured their flesh! Dreams and chimeras!
Italy has not been so seriously impoverished by the war as Germany and Austria. But why? Because she was not forced to pay the whole cost of the war out of her ow n wealth. She was able to secure assistance from abroad. Those twenty billions of francs in gold, which Italy owes France, England, and America, measure the difference between her present state and the poverty of Germany and Austria. But, if we have to pay back those sums, we shall reduce ourselves to the same level as that of Austria to-day; and our nation, too, will become a walking skeleton. The Hapsburgs managed, during the war, to wear their Empire down to skin and bone, but they fell precisely for that reason. No government can repeat that cruel operation in times of peace. A cabinet that tried to do so would not survive three days.
There is but a single way out of this difficulty. Not tabulœ novœ, as the ancients said, not a general cancellation of debts, but a general reduction of all debts — Russian, German, Austrian, Rumanian, Bulgarian, French, Italian, and so on.
It is necessary for the creditors to reduce their claims as much as possible; and for the debtors to exert themselves to the utmost to pay their debts upon this reduced basis. America, who will sacrifice most by this arrangement, should be compensated by political advantages.
Is such an act of generous wisdom possible? I do not know. But it seems to me obvious that, unless this remedy is agreed upon, we cannot escape a moral cataclysm of Europe, far worse even than our present debacle. The universal bankruptcy that threatens most governments to-day would leave behind a harvest of hatred and incurable distrust. Every nation would consider itself the victim, regardless of whether it were a despoiled creditor or an insolvent debtor. The justice to which the creditor nations would appeal, in denouncing the fraud from which they had suffered, would be repudiated by the debtors as monstrous — unrighteous! In any case, the peoples of the earth will never agree on such an act of generous wisdom, until each nation has put its own house in order.
How can we expect one government to forgive the debts of another so long as the debtor country continues to lavish money at home with the reckless hand that every government in Europe is using at present? And when shall we see the reforms of domestic finance that every country must carry out before it can begin to discuss its international indebtedness?
No hint of such reforms is in sight at present. So here, too, we are facing questions, the date of whose solution no one can predict. We can merely sit and wait.
IV
This question of debits and credits is particularly serious in the case of France and Germany, because it is associated with one of the most critical issues in European politics — the relations between the two greatest military powers in the world. Let us get a precise idea of the situation. I think that I was one of the first to point out that Germany will never pay more than a small part of the indemnity imposed upon her by the Versailles Treaty. I said in 1919, and I have repeated many times since, that Germany would not fulfill her obligations, because no government would ever exist in that country strong enough to extract from the lower and middle classes the huge sums required. Justice is powerless to deprive Germany of the immunity she has secured by the very vastness of the ruin she has wrought. But though I realized that this was the truth, I recognized that my opinion was a conjecture, and that a conjecture does not bind the reason until it is confirmed by facts. So I was not in the least surprised because others refused to believe what seemed to me self-evident.
And that has been the outcome. While a majority of the people of England and Italy are now convinced that Germany cannot pay, there are many in France who, either rightly or wrongly, are persuaded that she can. Any person who has spent even a brief period in France, and has discussed these subjects with people there, knows that this is the case. Almost any Frenchman will give you a brief, but fairly accurate, enumeration of Germany’s resources as they were before the war; he will argue that Germany could pay even more than is demanded of her; and he will conclude from this that Germany is defaulting upon her obligations because the Allies are not doing what they ought to do to force her to fulfill them. This is the general opinion in France to-day.
This opinion also is a mereconjecture, of course, I believe it a disproved conjecture, but I am not surprised that many people still cling to it. Not all heads are made alike. Human interests diverge more than human minds. Therefore, how can a government that derives its authority from public opinion, and that is invested by one of the most solemn treaties in history with a gigantic credit, renounce even part of that credit simply because English and Italian newspapers are persuaded that it is uncollectible, while its own citizens believe just the contrary? Right here is the noose that threatens to strangle Europe.
When several powers are bound by a treaty, they can observe it to the letter, or modify it by unanimous consent, or fulfill it. There is no other possibility. Italy and England, however, are eagerly searching for a fourth possibility that does not exist.
These two countries delude themselves with the idea that they can, by diplomatic pressure and shrewd international practices, compel France, against her will, to consent to revise the treaty. But diplomatic measures are not enough in this case. The only recourse is war. If treaties of peace are partially impossible of execution, and it is desired to revise them instead of denouncing them, the revision must be by unanimous consent, because an enforced revision is an outright act of war. So the task at hand is to convert France—not only her government, but the rank and file of her citizens, who actuate and guide that government. Unless this is done, conferences and conventions, diplomatic mines and countermines, newspaper campaigns, and books like those of Keynes, amount to nothing. We are headed toward chaos. Wars and revolutions menace Europe like angels of wrath.
But, the reader inquires, what shall we do? Enforce a treaty that is unenforceable? Square a circle? In truth, I do not know what an honest and informed adviser can suggest to our governments, in this most terrible crisis that Europe has confronted for centuries. The inextricable embarrassments in which every nation that placed its signature to the Peace treaties finds itself to-day are so tragically hopeless that it seems to me one of the greatest blessings conceivable just, now to be a private man. And when I think of the presumption and frivolous recklessness with which governments and newspapers, rhetoricians and diplomats, have led their people into this second ruin following the war, I am tempted to believe that our statesmen well merit their fate, until I recall that the innocent suffer worse than the guilty. Plectuntur Achivi proves only too true again.
So in this case, also, we must wait, and trust to the healing hand of time, aided by human wisdom, if any trace of that is still left in the world.