The Political Equivalent of War

IN one of his most memorable essays, William James wrote that ‘so long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the inwardness of the situation.’ He insisted that the motives called into play by pacifists to maintain peace were altogether too weak and tame to touch the military-minded, and that war could not be abolished until men had found some substitute which would promote those ‘conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility’ which are characteristic of the higher forms of militarism.

I do not suppose that anyone who has read James’s essay attentively would venture to dispute his main argument. But the theory which he propounded has, I think, to be carried further before the inwardness of the problem of war has been realized. It is not sufficient to propose an equivalent for the military virtues. It is even more important to work out an equivalent for the military methods and objectives. For the institution of war is not merely an expression of the military spirit. It is not a mere release of certain subjective impulses clamoring for expression. It is also — and, I think, primarily — one of the ways by which great human decisions are made. If that is true, then the abolition of war depends primarily upon inventing and organizing other ways of deciding those issues which have hitherto been decided by war.

I

Among those who take an interest in the effort to abolish war, there are discernible several distinct types of thought. There are those who believe that in order to abolish war it is necessary to eliminate the causes of the disputes which lead to war. They believe that these causes are invariably economic, and that all wars are really wars about property. They argue, therefore, that there can be no radical cure for war until something is done about property. This is plausible, for it would be difficult to name any war in which motives arising out of the ownership and acquisition of property have not played some part. We might even, for the sake of the argument, say a decisive part. Nevertheless, I believe this analysis to be faulty and inconsequential. For, while it is undoubtedly true that men fight usually to protect or enhance what they conceive to be their interest, nobody can possibly make an exhaustive list of the kinds of property which they will be interested in. And even if anyone could make such a list, it would be such a big and complicated list that nothing much could be done about it.

If, instead of talking about the economic causes of war, you try to think about the kinds of property which have provoked the disputes which led to war, what do you find? You find that nations have disputed about oil and minerals and railroads, and waterways, and highways and harbors and mountain passes and fishing rights, and tariffs and markets and contracts and banking privileges, and agricultural land, and grazing land, and shrines and chattel slaves and political offices, and I do not know how many other things of the sort. Granting that these are the ‘causes’ of war, what have you said when you have said that? You have said nothing more than that men have fought for the things they were willing to fight for. That is not a productive idea. For, in arguing that the causes of war are as broad as the interests of the human race, you make the abolition of war dependent upon changing the interests of the human race. You have committed yourself to the theory that you cannot abolish war until, by abolishing the causes of dispute, you have abolished disputes. But that, it seems to me, is as fallacious as it is depressing. Any real programme of peace must rest on the premise that there will be causes of dispute as long as we can foresee, that these disputes have to be decided, and that a way of deciding them must be found which is not war.

At the opposite pole from those who think you can stop men from fighting only by regulating the things they fight about are those who base their hopes on a regenerat ion of the human heart by religious conversion, education, or even by mere propaganda. Among these must be counted, for the time being, Secretary Kellogg, with his proposed treaty to ‘renounce’ war for its ‘tremendous moral effect.’ There is undeniable truth in this view of the question. Plainly, any civilized international order requires men who are more civilized than we are, and unless mankind learns better habits it will not keep the faith on which all pacific arrangements ultimately depend. But, having admitted not only how desirable but how necessary it is to change the human heart, where are we? We are in the same old position we have been in for two thousand years, in which our religious ideals and our actual practices are hopelessly at odds. If, during the millennium in which Europeans acknowledged the spiritual leadership of the Vicar of the Prince of Peace, war was not abolished in Europe, then what reason is there to think that by preaching, and teaching, and prayer, and discipline, it will be abolished now?

I do not mean to suggest that I think it useless to keep on saying that war is a crime, and that it ought to be abolished, and that it is horrible, and that it ought to be outlawed, and that it is hideous and ought to be renounced. No doubt it is worth while to keep on saying all that as solemnly and as often as possible. But to keep on saying it will not abolish war. For it does not apply to the situat ion out of which wars arise. To denounce war as a crime is to denounce something which a nation when it is entering a war never thinks it is committing. Invariably in modern times a nation goes to war to stop another nation from committing the crime of war. As the Austrians saw it in 1914, they did not make war on Serbia. They believed they were acting to prevent Serbia, backed by Russia, from making a criminal attempt to destroy the Austrian empire. The Germans did not make war upon Russia. They made war to prevent Russia from making war. The French did not make war. They defended themselves. The British did not make war. They stopped an aggression. We did not make war. We tried to make the world safe for democracy.

The mere denunciation of war as a crime is no deterrent if it appears that the other fellow is about to commit the crime. It is just as likely as not to make the war seem twice as righteous, and hence to make it twice as fierce, because it can be said that the enemy is committing a crime and is an outlaw. The late war demonstrated what excellent war propaganda can be made out of the ordinary pacifist teaching. For that teaching has this fundamental defect: it supposes that nations on the eve of war are like murderers who are trying to decide whether they will kill their enemies, and that they will decide not to kill if only the heinousness of the crime has been sufficiently impressed upon them. But this is a wholly false supposition: nations on the eve of war almost invariably feel that they are innocent householders who are about to be attacked by robbers, or that they are witnesses of some dastardly outrage which is about to be perpetrated against their neighbors. The choice as it presents itself is not between the crime of war and the righteousness of peace, but between ruin and disgrace on the one hand, and self-preservation, courage, and honor on the other.

This may not be the real choice. As we know, nations may be cruelly deceived as to what the war is about. But this deception is part of the institution of war, and we fail to get at the inwardness of war unless we realize that events which lead to war produce a situation in which war seems less horrible than any feasible alternative. Of course, if nations knew as much on the eve of war as historians know fifty years after, they might feel quite differently. Everything would be different. Their statesmen would act differently. Their people would respond differently. But the fact is that, as the world is now organized, the situation which breeds a war first breeds a state of mind which makes that particular war seem righteous and inevitable. And nothing is done to alter this situation by saying that war is horrible. It is very horrible. But under certain circumstances, which are the only circumstances worth talking about, it seems less horrible to those who have to make the decision than does any other course of action which is open to them.

II

To dwell exclusively upon the horrors of war, and to assume that it is nothing but criminal madness, does not, I believe, advance the cause of peace. It is not even good propaganda, for few men can accommodate their feelings about heroes like Washington, Lincoln, and Lee to the absolute condemnation which pacifists pronounce against war. But the most misleading result of such propaganda is that it obscures the nature of war. For the purposes of thought, then, it is far more useful to dwell upon the function of war than upon its horrors.

The best introduction to an understanding of the inwardness of war is to think about a particular kind of war which the more advanced nations have made some progress in abolishing. I mean civil war. Within the boundaries of the United States this kind of war has now been abolished for a little over sixty years. In France it has been abolished for a little less than sixty years. In Italy there has been a civil war within the last ten years. In China and in Nicaragua a war is still being waged. In England civil war has been abolished for two hundred years.

Now if you ask yourself what is the essential difference between the political life of Nicaragua and of England, you must agree that one of the essential differences is that England has learned to change its government and to change its social order by the ballot, whereas in Nicaragua political changes are effected with bullets. The transition from revolution to electioneering is the most radical change which can take place in the political habits of a people, and, broadly speaking, the abolition of civil war depends upon making this transition.

It took several hundred years for England to make this transition — that is, from the fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth. It was not. until the effort to impeach Walpole failed in 1742 that, as Mr. Dwight Morrow has pointed out, ‘men whose only offense was to run counter to a majority lost their offices but not their heads.’ In support of this he quotes from a speech made by the Earl of Carnarvon in 1678 during the proceedings to impeach Danby, in which the Earl, supposedly under the influence of too much claret, summed up the political history of England from the time of Queen Elizabeth: —

My lords, I shall go no further back than the latter end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, at which time the Earl of Essex was run down by Sir Walter Raleigh. My Lord Bacon, he ran down Sir Walter Raleigh, and your lordships know what became of my Lord Bacon. The Duke of Buckingham, he ran down my Lord Bacon, and your lordships know what happened to the Duke of Buckingham. Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Strafford, ran down the Duke of Buckingham, and you all know what became of him. Sir Harry Vane, he ran down the Earl of Strafford, and your lordships know what became of Sir Harry Vane. Chancellor Hyde, he ran down Sir Harry Vane, and your lordships know what became of the Chancellor. Sir Thomas Osborne, now Earl of Danby, ran down Chancellor Hyde: but what will become of the Earl of Danby, your lordships best can tell.

Danby went to the Tower.

Many years passed before England at last, in the first half of the eighteenth century, learned to use a corrupt and none too competent, but nevertheless peaceable, party system, based on electioneering, in place of the violence of faction and civil war. In the two hundred years which have passed, it, has several times been made manifest that the use of a system of political parties as a substitute for civil war is still not perfectly secure. In times of great strain, as in 1832, in 1848, and again during the General Strike of 1926, the newer method of making national decisions was put to an almost intolerable strain. From this history we are able to see, I think, that the abolition of civil war has depended upon the invention and the habit of using a political equivalent.

If we turn from England to Nicaragua we see the same problem before a solution has been found. The conclusion has now been reached by most students of the Nicaraguan and the Central American revolutions that the heart of the difficulty is that the people of these countries have not learned to use electoral machinery to change their governments, and that therefore, as in England before the eighteenth century, revolution is the only method of altering the personnel and the policy of the régime in power.

This is the difficulty which now exists in the relations between sovereign states. At any particular moment there exists a certain international régime composed of empires and their dominions and colonies, of national sovereignties and their spheres of influence, and in this scheme of things all the peoples of the world have their rights, their privileges, their servitudes, their opportunities, and their frustrations. In the nature of things this international order cannot satisfy the needs or the aspirations of all the peoples within it. Therefore, at a thousand different points there arc conflicts. They arise either from the rivalry of two or more states to acquire some form of vested right or influence or privilege, or from the struggle of a people to shake off servitudes which it dislikes. Because the world is a changing world the status quo is never very stable, and the conflicts and alignments of governments may be regarded as due to their desire either to maintain or to alter the status quo.

But in the relations of sovereign states there exists no recognized pacific method by which the status quo can be altered. It is altered a good deal by diplomatic negotiation as a result of the gradual shifting of political and economic power. Such a change has occurred, for example, during this generation in the relations of the Dominions within the British Empire. But these pacific changes are rather exceptional. Oftener than not — as in the case of China, for example, or of the Turkish, Austrian, and Russian empires — the change from one political system to another is so long delayed, it is so fiercely resisted, it has accumulated such passions of hatred and such extravagances of ambition, that when at last it comes it is catastrophic.

International society possesses no political method, analogous to party government in domestic affairs, for altering the existing régime. On the contrary, such international machinery as the world has managed to set up is based almost entirely on the premise that the status quo must be maintained as long as its beneficiaries desire to maintain it. The presumption is altogether against the nation which challenges this existing order and insists upon a change of status. It is in fact an enemy of the existing régime; if it is a subject people its action is known as ‘rebellion,’ if it is a juridically independent state its action is known in the current language of diplomacy as ‘aggression.’

Obviously not all rebellion and not all aggression are good. But neither are they necessarily evil. The important consideration here is that international society provides no legitimate method of determining whether they are good or bad, justified or unjustified. They are outlawed. The status quo, except in rare cases, cannot be altered except by rebelling against the constituted authorities or by violating established treaties. The process by which, in advanced societies, the opposition can win an election, take office, and alter the law has no counterpart in international affairs. And that is why, as in England two hundred years ago and in Nicaragua to-day, important changes in international society are almost invariably accompanied by disorder.

An examination of the projects for maintaining peace which mankind has thus far achieved will show, I believe, that they provide no pacific method of altering the status quo. The whole theory of arbitration and the judicial settlement of disputes rests upon the determination of existing rights, and, in principle at least, rules out the revision of rights. The European system of alliances, the Locarno Treaties, and the Covenant of the League itself, are inspired by the conviction that the maintenance of peace is synonymous with the maintenance of the status quo.

This statement is subject to one significant qualification. The Covenant of the League contains two articles, XI and XIX, which recognize in principle that the maintenance of peace may in certain cases require the revision rather than the maintenance of the status quo. Article XI says that it is ‘the friendly right’ of all members of the League ‘to bring to the attention of the Assembly or of the Council any circumstance whatever affecting international relations which threatens to disturb international peace or the good understanding between nations upon which peace depends.’ And Article XIX goes even further and specifically empowers the Assembly to ‘advise the reconsideration . . . of Treaties which have become inapplicable.’ These two articles have not been invoked, I believe, in any serious situation. They are, moreover, advisory. But they are of inestimable importance as a recognition of the principle that peace implies change as well as stability. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that only those régimes are stable which have the capacity to change peaceably.

III

It is not in the least surprising that those projects for the maintenance of peace which have been adopted by governments should all be directed at the maintenance of the status quo. The first condition of any workable plan is that it should command the assent of those who have the power to enforce it and have an interest in enforcing it. The weaker Powers, the dissatisfied nations, the potentially rebellious portions of mankind, are more interested in liberty than in order. They care more for what they regard as righteousness than for peace. Therefore any project of peace must in the nature of things be based primarily on the interest of the conservative Powers; it must appeal to those governments which are strong because they enjoy the advantages of the status quo. Only when the support of these governments is assured docs there exist any guaranty of order in international affairs. Only when there is order can any pacific method of effecting change be successfully introduced.

The recent history of Europe is the best evidence of the truth of this assertion. The Treaty of Versailles imposed a régime upon Germany which no strong nation could possibly endure for any considerable length of time. France, which was the chief beneficiary of this régime, saw clearly that Germany was bound to revolt. As a result, France felt her security was menaced, and, in order to save herself, she first sought military alliances with Great Britain and the United States, in the hope that by a crushing combination of military force she could continue to impose the Versailles régime upon Germany. But neither Great Britain nor the United States had any interest in perpetuating the Versailles régime. They rejected the appeals for an alliance. In desperation France then struck at Germany by invading the Ruhr, hoping thus to destroy the German power. Failing in this, she changed her policy, accepted the principle of the revision of the Versailles régime, agreed to the Dawes Plan, and in return obtained the Locarno agreements. These agreements aligned the Powers of Western Europe behind an international order which has as its central principle the understanding that the position in which Germany was placed at Versailles shall not be altered by force, but that it shall be altered by diplomatic negotiation.

This sequence of events illustrates the essential elements which must enter into any workable plan for the abolition of war. There is an agreement based on national interests to defend the status quo against violent attack, but this agreement is redeemed from the curse of rigidity by a working correlative agreement to modify the status quo. Such an arrangement contains the promise of permanence because it balances the conservative demand for guaranties, sanctions, enforcement, with the liberal demand for revision and change.

The defect of the arrangement is that it rests on a more or less personal understanding between statesmen like M. Briand and Herr Stresemann, and is not embodied in an institution. The institutions of Europe are formally devoted only to the maintenance of the status quo. The inner spirit of FrancoGerman diplomacy, which makes the practice so much more enlightened than the theory, is a disembodied spirit — a soul without a body.

A statesmanlike movement to abolish war must seek at once to strengthen the unity of the Powers in defense of the status quo, and at the same time to enlighten that defense by persuading the Powers that the true defense of their interests may mean, not resistance to all change, but a hospitable guidance of changes that sooner or later are inevitable. So far as these principles are really understood, so far as they become the actual practice of the Powers, there is a political equivalent of war, and therefore there is real progress toward the prevention of war.

It might be truer to say that we shall have a modus vivendi which will for a time postpone war. Actually to abolish war is a much larger and more complicated process. We have only to look at the multitude of elements involved in the abolition of civil war to realize how very far we have still to go before we can hope to abolish international war. Those few nations which are more or less secure against revolution have reached that peace only by the most elaborate development of political institutions and a long, hard discipline in the operation of them. Pacifists sometimes talk as if they thought war could be abolished by solemn declarations. They sometimes talk as if war could be abolished by a court; or by codifying such international law as now exists; or by some sort of treaty; or by some sort of league. But surely the history of the establishment of peace in civil societies goes to show that any genuine political equivalent of violence must comprise a vast network of legislative, judicial, executive, social, and cultural institutions. Is there any reason to suppose that international peace is any easier to attain than domestic peace? That there is a short cut to it? That it can be had without great trouble as a result of very excellent intentions?

For my own part I cannot take seriously any project of peace which does not rest upon a clear acceptance of the premise that the establishment of order in international society depends upon the development of agencies of international government. I can sympathize with those who prefer the liberty of our present international anarchy to the responsibilities of an international society. I am inclined to think that a stable international order would be oppressive and unpleasant in many ways, and I am not wholly sure that I am prepared to pay the price which the establishment of peace on earth would cost. There are many advantages, especially for nations as favorably placed as the United States, in the freedom which this disorganized planet permits us. If we prefer to retain that freedom, let us at least not deceive ourselves with the notion that we are in any fundamental sense working to abolish war. For war will not be abolished between the nations until its political equivalent has been created, until there is an international government strong enough to preserve order and wise enough to welcome changes in that order.

We may never live to see that. We may not wish to see it. But that, and nothing less, is what international peace will cost.