England's Duty

I

‘BRITAIN to-day is feverishly rearming; but unless pro-League sentiment once more reasserts itself, this strength will be used, not on behalf of a strengthened world organization, but to bolster up the old system of balance of power which at best can maintain peace only for a few years. If, as a result of the Ethiopian débâcle, Britain should limit its foreign policy to an alliance with France safeguarding the Rhine frontier, Nazi penetration in Central and Eastern Europe would proceed apace, notwithstanding the opposition of France and Italy. Once dominant in this area, Germany in alliance with Japan might eventually reduce France and Britain to the position of second-rate powers and liberalism generally would enter a period of eclipse.’

So wrote Mr. Raymond Leslie Buell, the president of the Foreign Policy Association of the United States, a few days after the collapse of the Ethiopian resistance to the Italian invasion and the flight of Haile Selassie. Mr. Buell is a commentator upon international affairs of exceptional acumen and experience, and the warning he gives to those responsible for the relationship of Great Britain with her neighbors is still very much to the point.

Undoubtedly the authority and prospects of the League of Nations and all that it represents have been gravely and progressively compromised in recent years. The successful defiance of the Geneva Covenant and the Kellogg Pact by Japan over Manchuria, the failure of the Disarmament Conference, the spectacular pulverization of the Treaty of Versailles by Germany, in 1935 over conscription and rearmament and in 1936 by the reoccupation of the demilitarized zone, the impotence on both occasions of the other European powers individually and as members of the League of Nations to resist the lawbreakers by more than unregarded words, and, last but not least, Signor Mussolini’s blustering, brutal, and so far wholly successful flouting of the League of Nations and its half-hearted sanctions — those great events and sundry smaller ones have sadly bothered the League and have raised the gravest doubts whether, as things stand, it could be any more successful in preventing illegal aggression in Europe than it has been in Asia and Africa.

The most immediate and obvious result of this state of affairs is the recapture by the principal countries of the Old World of the same postures of fear and distrust which they took in the years preceding 1914. Once more a Germany, strong and growing stronger, restless and preaching force as the best ultimate medium for the satisfaction of ambition, confronts to the west a nervous France and to the east a nervous Russia; once more France and Russia draw closer and closer together in an alliance which, though actually defensive, is understandably regarded by Germany as a threat; once more England watches anxiously the growing tension, committed to the side of France and Russia, but not to the extent of assuring those countries active support in all circumstances should their fears of Germany prove to be well founded; and once more Italy remains in the background, though essentially on the German side for the present.

This time, too, there are causes for disquiet which did not exist at the beginning of the century. There are specific danger spots such as Danzig and Memel; there is Austria, whose inefficient, cynical diplomacy had so much to do with the actual beginning of the last war, once again a danger to peace on account of an impotence for which she cannot fairly be blamed; there are other more or less misfit arrangements arising out of the peace settlement which tempt their victims to look upon another war as presenting the best opportunity for their removal. And nearly everywhere, in domestic affairs as well as in international affairs, democratic practices and ideas are being abandoned, until in the whole of Europe, east of the Rhine and the Alps, there is only one country, Czechoslovakia, in which free government still exists. Liberalism is in danger of eclipse, and of eclipse by the shadow of an autocracy more formidable than anything that was dreamed of thirty years ago, an autocracy which in its ruthlessness, its general amorality, and its deliberate disregard of the sanctity of contracts, resembles more closely the Italy of Cæsar Borgia and Machiavelli than the system of the older Cæsars upon the inheritance of whose tradition Signor Mussolini prides himself.

Almost every month the dictatorships add to the list of their major aggressions against the peace of mind of their neighbors. Having sent her troops into the demilitarized zone, Germany makes her arrangement with Austria, and Italy’s friendly acceptance of that arrangement is a disquieting and unexpected manifestation of a trade-union spirit heretofore conspicuously absent as between Nazi and Fascist. Then comes a far more disquieting manifestation of that solidarity over the Spanish civil war. There for the first time the authoritarian countries reveal themselves, as the Holy Alliance did more than a century ago, also in regard to the affairs of Spain, as the active champions of reaction beyond their borders. Then Germany swings round to the other end of Europe, and, at the annual rally of his party at Nuremberg, Herr Hitler says things against Russia and Bolshevism which in the old days might well have meant war in twenty-four hours and even in this vituperative age scarcely help the cause of peace.

Nor is it only in the political field that militant and individualistic nationalism is running amuck. Mr. Harold Butler, the head of the International Labor Office, whose reports are among the sanest and most illuminating of the many able but often unnoticed documents emanating from Geneva, says in his current annual report that the rather general improvement in international trade now noticeable must not be allowed to obscure the fact that economic nationalism still holds the field. ‘Clearing arrangements, quotas, exaggerated tariffs, exchange restrictions, still bar the road to the resumption of international trade which is the barometer of real recovery.’ In 1918, Mr. Butler continues, it was thought possible to reconstruct a peaceful Europe without paying any attention to its economic organization. In 1936 the work! had become vaguely aware that territorial claims and armament programmes are not the causes of the present discontent, but the symptoms. The roots of this discontent were to be found in actual or threatened impoverishment, declining standards of life, insecurity for themselves or their children, which darkened the outlook of the present generation in so many countries. Its remedy did not lie in political pacts or frontier rectifications or disarmament conferences alone.

Mr. Butler’s analysis rings terribly true to anyone who has recently traveled over Europe. The continent is the prey of an economic nationalism the insensate virulence of which produces a state of affairs not much less baneful than that which would obtain in the United States if the forty-eight states, or even regional groups of states, suddenly went in for tariffs against each other and started currencies of their own which would not pass as legal tender outside their frontiers. For the moment, rearmament programmes are counteracting locally the effect of this strangulation of trade; but even in Germany rearmament must eventually slacken, and then it is to be feared that, if things are permitted to continue on their present course, political tension will be more than ever accentuated by the maladjustment of the economic fabric.

II

Another thing that strikes one as he probes into the thoughts of Europe is that, if the dictatorships and especially Germany are largely responsible for the fears and uncertainties of the continent, the vast majority of its inhabitants agree with Mr. Buell that the possibility of setting those fears and uncertainties at rest depends very largely upon the attitude of England. In the last few years British diplomatic prestige has been dealt blow after blow. It was hurt by the Manchurian incident; its responsibility for the failure of the Disarmament Conference is held by Europeans to have been considerable; and then came the Abyssinian affair, during the preparatory phase of which Great Britain is rather generally felt to have thrown away the only real chance that existed of turning Signor Mussolini from his design when she failed to warn him that if he persisted she would advocate sanctions, and the second phase of which opened with the ineptitude of the HoareLaval proposal and closed with the failure of Mr. Eden’s sanctions.

But if the prestige of the British foreign policy has suffered, Great Britain has not, so far as an Englishman can judge, lost any appreciable amount of the vast potential influence which she has for good or for evil in the affairs of the Old World. She remains, now that the United States is out of the picture, the one Great Power detached enough and powerful enough to take the leadership in the rebuilding of the League and the formation of a collective system sufficiently strong to make prospective aggressors realize that force cannot be profitably employed as a means to their ends, and to reassure the frightened nations of Europe to the extent of gaining their consent to the righting of such just grievances as their discontented neighbors may have.

Will she take advantage of her position or will she once more declare, as Mr. Baldwin did two years ago, that her defensive frontier is on the Rhine, and let Eastern Europe stew in the juice of its distempers until the pot boils over and war breaks out and almost inevitably spreads to the shores of the Atlantic?

The answer may soon be forthcoming. Negotiations are starting, as this is written, toward another effort at the ‘consolidation of European peace.’ At present they are between Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Belgium, but later on, if things go well, Russia and the other countries will join them. If they succeed, Europe will have to arrange its peace-keeping machine. If they fail, as they may easily do, either on account of dictatorial intransigeance or for any other reason, then the League Powers will have to look to the organization of the defense of peace themselves. In either case it will be difficult for England not to show her hand.

The majority of Englishmen believe vaguely in the League and agree that there must be a collective system for the protection of peace in which Great Britain must take part. They agree that armaments must be increased in order less to mitigate the risks involved by isolation than to enable the country to pull its weight in international affairs. They agree that the Treaty of Versailles was in many respects harsh and unfair, and that the grievances of Germany and the ‘have-not’ countries must be taken into sympathetic account in any effort to liquidate the troubles of the world. In Japan, China, and the Far East, the typical Englishman is not for the moment interested. The United States also is out of the picture. A New England fisherman explained to me in the days when the Treaty of Versailles was before the Senate that he was against the League of Nations because it would involve the United States in Europe, which, he said, was like a bucket of crabs out of which wise people kept their fingers. It is recognized in Great Britain to-day that the fisherman’s view is a perfectly reasonable one for Americans to take. ‘We should be doing the same in their place. Only unfortunately we are now a part of Europe and cannot disassociate ourselves from its problems.’ That is the sort of answer which one constantly gets if one asks people how they feel about American aloofness.

It is in regard to the nature of the collective system in which England should play her part that opinions differ both in the inner ring of politicians, diplomatists, and journalists and also in the outside world. The sentiment so strong a few years ago in favor of the cultivation of special friendship with Germany rather than France is diminishing progressively, though it has not yet reached zero. Sentiment in favor of close relationship with France is proportionately increasing, partly for diplomatic and strategic reasons and partly because of the growing tendency to regard the European situation in terms of a struggle between democracy and autocracy, with France and England standing together as the two chief representatives of the democratic civilization.

It is as to how France and England should stand together that the British mind is not clear. Should England make it the first object of her foreign policy to share with France the leadership in another and perhaps final effort to organize the security of Europe on a really collective basis, or should she, to use the words of Mr. Buell, limit her foreign policy to an alliance with France safeguarding the Rhine frontier?

The word ‘alliance’ is not, of course, to be taken literally. Few people advocate a real Franco-British alliance. Those who desire to limit British responsibilities to Western Europe usually proclaim their loyalty to the collective system and their dislike of alliances of the old type as loudly as anyone. But they envisage a modified collective system and an altered League. The Ethiopian incident, they say, has shown that the League, as at present constituted, will not work. The League, they argue, is a League of Sovereign States. Its members must therefore be prepared to have recourse to collective force in the last resort in order to prevent or defeat a war of aggression. The Ethiopian affair shows that the members of the League are not prepared to do this. Milk-and-water sanetions were all very well; they involved no serious risk of war; but the League feared to impose oil sanctions in the teeth of Signor Mussolini’s intimation that they might well mean war. The Senate of the United States was, in fact, right when it condemned articles X and XVI of the Covenant as being too heavily charged with the danger of the promiscuous use of force for acceptance by reasonably cautious states.

Therefore, say the Western European school, let the Covenant be amended so that it no longer involves an obligation to go to war all over the world. Let t he League be turned into an instrument of international conciliation and coöperation. Let it drop its aspiration to act as a sort of chief of the police for Europe. The European countries should arrange among themselves to police the remoter parts of the continent , and they can best do so upon a regional basis, with the Locarno Treaty as the keystone to the Western system, with another such system of mutual guarantee in the East, and perhaps a third for the lower Danube and the Balkans. Having calmed the nerves of the continent by the administration of this potion of peace pacts, accompanied perhaps by the signature of some general demonstration in favor of peace on the lines of Herr Hitler’s suggested boycott of war for twenty-five years, Europe could then settle down to another effort at the limitation of armaments, to the revision of the peace settlement, and, last but not least, to an attack upon economic nationalism and other obstacles to the revival of international trade.

III

The hundred-per-cent collectivists agree that the Disarmament Conference should be reconvened, the inequalities of the peace treaties examined, and the economic situation attacked as soon as the general state of Europe renders at all feasible undertakings of such magnitude and complexity. But they deny that the security programme of the Western Europeans could ever calm the nerves of Europe sufficiently for that. They deny that the Ethiopian incident was a fair test of the efficacy of sanctions. They consider that the chief merit of the present system of economic sanctions, with armed sanctions in the background, should lie in its deterrent effect. They say that neither England nor anyone else tried to frighten Signor Mussolini with sanctions until it was too late, until he had become too deeply committed to his African campaign to draw back. They are inclined to agree with what I have already described as the continental point of view, that, had England warned him early in 1935 that for her part she would press for sanctions to the utmost at Geneva if he persisted in violating the Covenant and the Kellogg Pact, Signor Mussolini might well have thought twice before he launched his war.

Be that as it may, they are emphatic that no system of regional pacts can serve as an effective substitute for a genuine collective system under which the keeping of peace everywhere in Europe is the business of every European power. Europe, they point out, is confronted by the rise of two dictatorships both of which openly preach, and one of which has just successfully practised, power policy — that is to say, the ruthless use of force for the attainment of ends which cannot be reached by diplomacy. The only sure method of securing that these dictatorships keep the peace is to demonstrate to them mathematically that force cannot pay and at the same time to make it equally clear that their just grievances will have sympathetic consideration. The Spanish civil war has shown that, even in their present state of disorganized weakness, the League Powers can do something if they act together.

The Western European school, continue the collectivists, are no doubt sincere when they say that they want to treat the dissatisfied powers fairly. But countries who feel that they are threatened by those powers will never have their fears calmed sufficiently by regional pacts so that they will be ready to consent to changes in the status quo that are calculated still further to strengthen their enemies. Even as it is, Germany will soon be strong enough to break through any local security pact which Central or Eastern Europe could form. And supposing a Nazi Government comes to the top in Austria, and Austria with apparent spontaneity enters into a partnership with Germany which the powers cannot effectively or indeed properly resist; supposing Germany’s authority grows along the Danube; supposing she, either alone or with Italy, launches some grandiose scheme of acquisitive aggression — what then would be the value of regional pacts or anything short of a solid European collective system, a solid European alliance in defense of peace, with France and England as its pillars? If Germany is really planning, as her neighbors contend that she is, either to make herself the overlord of Europe or to carve an empire out of Russia, or both, then nothing short of the knowledge that the massed strength of the great majority of the Old World powers will be against her will prevent her from moving when she is ready.

Such, roughly, is the collectivist argument. Where does the government stand as between it and the proposals of the Western European, the regional pact, school? The question cannot yet be answered. Great Britain, it is true, did not advocate the abolition of forceful sanctions in the suggestions for the reform of the League which she offered at Geneva. But there is nothing to show that she has strengthened the weak interpretation which she has nearly always given to her responsibilities under Articles X and XVI of the Covenant. In Article X members of the League undertake to ’respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence ’ of each other. In Article XVI they agree that any member of the League which has taken up arms illegally shall be deemed to have committed an act of war against them and that they will ‘immediately subject it to the severance of effective trade and financial relations.’

Effective economic sanctions would almost certainly mean war if invoked against a Great Power, as Signor Mussolini showed by his reaction to the threat of oil sanctions. That is one reason why the British Government has been so unwilling to admit the universality of its police responsibilities. Another reason is that the universality of sanctions runs counter to England’s traditional European policy, which is really the American doctrine of no entanglements, diluted by geography, the narrowness of the Channel preventing her from being one hundred per cent isolationist. She has always been ready to protect by force, if need be, those parts of Europe over against her shores from domination by an aggressively hostile Power. Hence her contests with the France of Louis XIV and Napoleon and with Imperial Germany. The Pact of Locarno, useful sedative as it was in its time to the nerves of Europe, was really only a translation into League of Nations terras of that old Western European policy.

One of the principal causes of the failure of the Disarmament Conference was Sir John Simon’s steady refusal to increase the British police commitment on the Continent and thus purchase the consent of France to disarm a little herself and to allow Germany a measure of rearmament in order to remove the worst of the remaining servitudes of the Treaty of Versailles. Even after the collapse of the Conference and German rearmament had patently increased the danger of war, Sir John adhered strictly to the regional pact idea.

It was hoped by the frightened countries of Europe that Sir John Simon’s replacement at the Foreign Office by Sir Samuel Hoarc meant that Great Britain had realized the futility of any answer to the challenge of the dictatorships except the collective determination of the League of Nation countries, Great Britain included, to support the Covenant always, anywhere, and to any extent in Europe. The Hoarc-Laval proposals dashed those hopes; Mr. Eden’s appointment to the Foreign Office raised them once more, but his failure to ‘make good’ over Ethiopia dashed them again, as did the reception of that failure by some of his colleagues in the Cabinet. It was generally felt, for instance, that Mr. Neville Chamberlain, the strongest member of the Government and Mr. Baldwin’s heir presumptive, was speaking for others besides himself when he proclaimed last June that the failure of the League to protect Ethiopia showed that collective security would not work.

Whether Mr. Chamberlain and his allies will prevail in the shaping of British policy during the coming negotiations cannot yet be said. The spectacular failure of Mr. Eden’s first great venture into high politics as Foreign Minister has, of course, lowered his prestige in the country and may well have weakened his influence in the Cabinet. But he still has good cards to play on behalf of collective security. One is the demonstration which the international reactions of the Spanish civil war have given that the security of Great Britain, or rather the communications of her Empire, cannot be assured by cowering behind the Rhine; another is that it is in the East of Europe that peace primarily needs protection with all the forces that the eirenic countries can bring to bear; and a third is the growing public demand for a definite and constructive European policy.

IV

Englishmen in the past have,: except in times of extreme crisis, been profoundly indifferent to the politics of the outside world. They have been content to leave diplomacy to the specialists of the Foreign Office. In this they have been like the Americans but unlike the Europeans, and especially the French. Even the Great War failed permanently to modify their aloofness. I was given practical proof of this during the Disarmament Conference. As a member of the British Delegation to that Conference, I often motored back and forth between London and Geneva. On the wind screen of my motor was a disk prominently displaying the words ‘Conférence de Desarmement.’ It was meant for the edification of the Geneva police. Almost every time that I stopped at a French filling station the sight of the disk would elicit interested and often acute questions about the international situation. In England it never provoked the slightest curiosity. I doubt whether it would be the same to-day. People in England seem to be realizing that, if things are allowed to continue to drift in Europe, war may easily be the result, and that a European war would almost certainly involve not only their country but themselves. They no longer regard diplomacy as a mysterious business best left to the charge of experts. They regard it as one of the most important processes of government, success or failure of which may affect the intimate lives of themselves and their families. The country is becoming foreign-policy conscious.

Considerations of trade and prosperity are also turning the eyes of Englishmen across the Channel. Great Britain justifiably prides herself on the way in which she has so far come through the economic crisis. But, though her trade and industries are doing relatively well, they are not doing well enough. Of her population of 45,000,000, between one and two millions still lack work, and there is wide agreement that the unemployment problem can only be solved by a great increase of exports. And how, it is asked, can England expect her export trade really to pick up so long as Europe — now, as always, her largest market — remains at sixes and sevens? Rearmament may help industry for a time, but in the end British industry and finance can only prosper if not merely Western Europe but the whole of Europe, including Russia, can feel safe and can settle down under reasonable political and economic dispensation.

This increasing identification of British interests with European interests in British public opinion has stimulated discussion as to what can be done to give the have-not nations the sources of raw materials and the markets which they demand. All sorts of expedients have been suggested, such as the transfer of British and other colonies to the lack-land countries; the placing of vast colonial tracts under some sort of international control, with their markets and their products equally open to the buyers and sellers of all nations; the drawing up of an international convention under which the great colonial powers would guarantee that raw materials from their possessions should be supplied to everybody on equal terms. None of these projects makes much progress. Two very human obstacles stand in the way of the popularization of the idea that the British Empire should give up some of its territories. One is the natural dislike that individuals and countries alike have to parting with possessions; the other is the feeling that neither the Nazi treatment of the Jews nor the Italian treatment of the Abyssinians justifies the handing over of subject races to the modern authoritarian states, even if the principle of ‘self-determination’ could be so far forgotten as to make the process otherwise palatable to the English-speaking democracies.

The feasibility of the international control of colonies is doubted for various reasons, some but not all of which are doubtless insular. Nor is it felt that the handing over of colonies would really settle the economic difficulties of the have-nots, however great the psychological value of the concession might be. It is pointed out, for instance, that the British cotton industry, in its time the greatest export industry which any country has ever had, depended almost entirely upon American raw material. Nor, in point of fact, do the really important raw materials, with the exception of rubber, come to a decisive extent from colonial territories. And if Germany and Italy and Japan could be made self-sufficient, would that really help? In wartime, selfsufficiency based upon colonies would be useless without control of the seas; and as for self-sufficiency in peacetime, the enjoyment of a very fair amount of it would not seem to have been of any real assistance to the United States or to the British Empire in the recent depression.

The English mind is thus moving in the same direction as the mind of Washington seems to be moving under the guidance of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hull — away from belief in selfsufficiency and toward belief that the greater the freedom for international trade, the greater the chance the world has of consolidating peace and recapturing prosperity. It therefore tends to regard the pending effort to renew the Locarno Treaty and to consolidate peace elsewhere, the discussion about the reform of the League at Geneva, and anything that may be done in the sphere of international economics, as parts of a supreme effort to lead the European community back to a rational way of life. It remains to be seen how far it will be able to impose itself on the government. In Parliament the Labor and Liberal Oppositions take Mr. Buell’s view of the British mission. But the national government has such a majority that it can afford to regard their criticism and exhortation as academic.

All that can be said is that Mr. Eden has still a chance to win back the prestige which he has lost. When he entered the Foreign Office, some of his perfervid admirers compared him to Lord Castlereagh. It is possible that even now the comparison may not remain undeserved. Mr. Eden’s position in one respect, at any rate, is not unlike that of Lord Castlereagh at the time of the liquidation of the Napoleonic War. Lord Castlereagh, as the then head of the Foreign Office, had to fight not only his Prime Minister and his colleagues in the Cabinet at home, but also England’s principal allies abroad, to secure for France a place in the sun of European reconstruction. He had, in particular, to persuade a vengeful Prussia that, after a great war, the first essential to an enduring peace is that the vanquished should be given the opportunity of prosperous and self-respecting recovery. Lord Castlereagh owes his high place in the roll of British statesmen largely to his success in that matter. He had, it is true, the immense advantage of the support of the Duke of Wellington.

But, unless the writer is wrong, Mr. Eden can still have, if he and his friends know how to use it, the even more powerful support of public opinion in his efforts to convince his more timid and less imaginative colleagues of the necessity of a forward British policy if the democracies are to recapture the initiative and persuade the dictatorships to coöperate with them in the interests of peace and economic sanity. And in the persuasion of England’s chief ally that Herr Hitler’s proposals, however unsavory their background, deserve serious consideration, the change of government in France may help. While distrust and fear of Germany are burned too deeply into the soul of France for her foreign policy to be fundamentally altered by changes of government, yet, as was discovered when M. Herriot succeeded M. Poincaré in 1924, the Left, if sure of adequate British participation in the police organization of Europe, may well be more ready to try for Franco-German rapprochement than the Right and Centre have been. The great rearmament programme that England, like other countries, is undertaking may also help Mr. Eden. It will make it difficult for the Western school to use the argument with which in the past they have made great play — namely, that England is too weak for membership in an international organization which might involve the use of force on anything except a basis of strictly limited liability.

How it will all turn out only a congenital fool or an inspired prophet would dare to try to forecast. One can only say that the choice before the government and people of England lies between a continuation of the drift and indecision which has so far marked the national government’s conduct of foreign affairs, and a definite policy based upon realization of the fact that in these days — on the eastern side of the Atlantic, at any rate — the best way to be safe from a general war is not to let such a war break out.