What England Will Fight For

I

To write on public affairs in the press of a foreign country is to incur automatically the suspicion of preaching. An Englishman expresses his views about the policies of his own nation; why should he do so if not to hint that America should follow suit?

Let me, therefore, say at the outset of this essay that I have no such thought in my mind. My purpose is, in fact, the exact contrary. Britain has interests which are not, and cannot be, America’s. The interests of the two countries are, in many matters, so wide apart that they cannot even clash. What is, and ought to be, vital to the one is, and ought to be, profoundly indifferent to the other. And it is of these matters that I shall speak. I speak of them to an American audience precisely because Americans do not, and ought not to, think about them as Englishmen do; and it is where thoughts differ that understanding is most necessary.

There are not many democracies left in the world; the few that survive cannot think alike, but they had better know each other’s thoughts. They are not likely to misunderstand each other seriously where their interests touch, for there their judgments on each other are checked by the practical instinct of compromise which guides most men, certainly most Englishmen and Americans, when they do business with each other. But, being democracies, with a free press, we cannot help judging each other also, every day of the week, in matters which, we thank God, are no concern of ours. Those are the judgments that rankle, as they are quoted back and forth in the free press of two countries.

Just now the commonest object of such judgments, in all the democracies of the world, is Britain’s foreign policy. What is Britain playing at in Europe? In this essay I am going to try to provide an answer to that question. I am going to try to judge myself as an Englishman, in the hope that Americans may thereby be the better able to judge me rightly.

II

In 1919 Britain adopted a new attitude toward Europe. She threw all her traditions of foreign policy overboard. It was a revolution, though her people hardly knew it. But it was not, as my friend Frank Simonds used to think, a sentimental revolution. It had hard thinking behind it.

Britain’s traditional attitude toward Europe during the previous three hundred and fifty years had been one of isolation. About once a century she had fought a great European war; but the wars had been great because she had always waited until the European pot boiled over. Geographically a part of Europe, she had cherished no ambitions on that continent; she had been concerned only to see that no European Power grew strong enough to attack her. So she had believed in the balance of power, but she would never join others in throwing the sword into either scale until the balance seemed to be irretrievably destroyed. Then she had intervened, to all appearances too late.

It was by this attitude that she had earned the name of ‘perfidious Albion.’ At its best, indeed, the attitude had been based on grounds very like those on which the United States bases her attitude of isolation to-day. ‘Madam,’ said Robert Walpole to his Queen in 1734, ‘there are 50,000 men slain this year in Europe, and not one Englishman.’ But at its worst it had come perilously near to encouraging other nations to exhaust themselves in order that Britain might step in and dictate peace. It was thus, for instance, that an English ambassador counseled Charles I to treat Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War. He could be used ‘to temper the fury of tyranny and to restore the equality of just government’ because his ‘course of victory’ would stop there. ‘The King of Sweden is not to be considered in his branches and fair plumes of one year’s prosperity, but in his root, and so he is not to be feared.’

On the whole, however, the experience of history had pointed to the wisdom of Britain’s ambiguous policy. Her long-delayed interventions in Europe had never actually come too late. She had little cause to be ashamed of her ‘once a century’ wars against Philip of Spain, against Louis XIV, against Napoleon, and against Germany. The wars which she was inclined to look upon as blunders had been such ‘mid-century’ wars as the Crimean War. Even the Seven Years’ War, in which she had laid the foundations of her second empire, seemed half a blunder when it was considered, as it should be, in combination with the War of the American Revolution, in which she had lost her first empire. In short, the British tradition had been a profound and just dislike for ‘preventive’ wars.

But the experience of the Great War shook Britain’s faith in her past policy. To allow lawlessness to come to a head before fighting it had always been to incur a heavy risk; but under modern conditions the risk was becoming too great. In the twentieth century, a general European war — still more, a world war — might mean the complete collapse of civilization. Britain, therefore, determined to throw over her old policy and to assume a joint responsibility with other nations for checking lawlessness on its first appearance, not only in Europe, but in the world as a whole. That, from Britain’s point of view, was, and is, the significance of the League of Nations.

III

Unfortunately, the Covenant of the League, which was to be the charter of Britain’s new policy, contains one fatal ambiguity.

The bulk of that document implies a view of international relations very like the American’s or the Englishman’s view of national government. According to this view, nations have no absolute rights, any more than the citizens of a state have such rights. In international affairs, as in national affairs, one man’s rights are always to some extent his neighbor’s wrongs. Possession is nine points of international law, but it is never the whole ten points. The only absolute right possessed by any state is the right guaranteed by the American Constitution to the individual citizen: the right to ‘due process of law.’ That, accordingly, is the only right which, in most of its clauses, the Covenant guarantees to the members of the League. No member of the family of nations may make war until it has submitted its case to the judgment or mediation of its fellow members; nor, having done so, may it make war for a purpose unanimously condemned by them. Any nation which does so make war is to be treated as an aggressor, and the duty is laid upon all other nations to resist such aggression.

But this collective guarantee has two aspects. It is a guarantee to the possessor against arbitrary aggression; but it is also a guarantee to the dissatisfied that the ‘process of law’ is a real one. The machinery of conciliation is to be open to any claim, however novel, and to any change, however far-reaching.

If, in any community, property is in the hands of very few citizens, a wider distribution of it is inevitable, either by law or by revolution. But, if it is redistributed by process of law, a balance will soon be reached. In any civilized community property will always be widely enough distributed to secure a majority in defense of its rights. And if this is true of property rights in domestic affairs, it is equally true of sovereign rights in international affairs. In spite of all the hot-headed talk that is going about nowadays, the family of nations is not divided into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ It is a civilized community where a balance of rights has already been achieved. The balance may need some adjustment, and the adjustment may entail some sacrifice; but no nation stands to gain by a general challenge to existing rights. In such a balance, but only in such a balance, can the world find a lasting peace.

That is the spirit of the Covenant in nearly all its clauses. But into the middle of this reasonable and flexible document was thrust one clause which, on the face of it, seemed to represent quite another view of international relations. Article X seemed to confer on every member of the League an absolute right to be protected in the enjoyment of all its existing possessions. Ever since the first meeting of the League at Geneva, efforts have been made to water down this Article, to interpret it away. It has been generally, though not formally, agreed that it means no more than Article XVI. But there the words stand, and they are the most quotable words in the Covenant. In every major dispute in which the League has been involved, the peoples of the world, if not their governments, have tacitly assumed the absolute right of China to be protected in the possession of Manchukuo, the absolute right of Abyssinia to the possession of all the territories conquered by Menelik, the absolute right of France to claim the full observance of all the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles.

The point hardly needs to be insisted on before an American audience. It was against Article X that American opinion instinctively revolted in 1919. What Americans do not, perhaps, fully realize is that at that time a large section of English opinion revolted against it no less strongly, and that the British representatives at the Peace Conference would have been glad to see it eliminated from the Covenant.

IV

The ambiguity of the Covenant is all the more serious because it was drafted and adopted before the terms of the peace settlement were decided. Article X backed a bill which the backers had never seen and of which they did not know the amount. Many Englishmen were, and are still, disposed to accept the Peace Treaties as, on the whole, the best settlement (apart from the reparations clauses) that could have been expected in the circumstances of the time. But very few Englishmen have ever been prepared to regard the settlement as in all respects a permanent one to be permanently guaranteed. Let us look for a moment at its general character.

The first condition of a lasting peace is that it should be deliberately made to last. But that test was just the one that neither the statesmen nor the peoples of the world applied to the treaties of 1919. They prided themselves on applying more ambitious tests. The victory of the Allies was to be used to ‘vindicate justice,’ and ‘justice’ meant three things. It meant punishment — a lesson to the aggressor that aggression does not pay. It meant preventive restrictions — a diminution of the aggressor’s power to disturb the peace in the future. It meant a new map of Europe based upon ‘the rights of small nations.’ From these three principles were derived all the clauses of the treaties: reparations and the confiscation of the German colonies; the disarmament of Germany and the demilitarization of the Rhineland; the breakup of the Austrian Empire and the transfer of German and Hungarian territory to Poland and Rumania.

Now, whatever the merits of this settlement from the point of view of ‘justice,’ it obviously had one grave defect: it could be maintained in its entirety only by a show of force constantly displayed for at least a generation. It had been imposed on Germany with every circumstance of ignominy, but it left her still the strongest nation in Europe. She was not expected to accept it and she retained the power to upset it. Her power of aggression against Western Europe was indeed greatly diminished; she could no longer hope to conscript the inhabitants of Posen and Bohemia, of Croatia and Transylvania, for a war against England and France. But Western Europe had gained this added security at the cost of splitting up Central Europe into a number of weak states, each struggling to establish a new authority over mixed populations. These states could only withstand German domination if they could rely for protection upon the armies of Western Europe. Western Europe had thus gained a new security on the Rhine and the Meuse at the cost of undertaking new responsibilities on the Danube and the Vistula.

And, quite frankly, Britain has never been prepared to accept these new responsibilities, so far as they involve in the last resort an obligation to fight. She has been prepared, as it were, to nurse the new Europe into a new state of peaceful self-government. She has been prepared to join in protecting it against violence until it grew strong enough to settle its outstanding problems by peaceful negotiation. She has hoped to convert an imposed settlement into an agreed settlement by gradual modification of the ‘unequal’ provisions of the treaties. But she has not been prepared to guarantee the principle of ‘nationality’ in the years after the Great War any more than she had been prepared to guarantee Talleyrand’s principle of ‘legitimacy’ in the years after the Napoleonic Wars. In her view, a state has no more absolute right in the twentieth century to include within its frontiers all persons of the same race than a ‘legitimate’ sovereign had in the nineteenth century to the blind obedience of all persons born under his rule. And she has been confirmed in this view by observing, in the new racial propaganda of Germany, the disastrous extremes to which this principle of nationality may be pushed.

V

In other words, Britain’s foreign policy since the war has been based on a pretty clear idea of what she ought to work for, but on no clear idea at all of what she ought to fight for. It is just this that both Americans and Europeans find so difficult to understand. Americans have been accustomed to think of their own foreign policy in terms of the Monroe Doctrine: a clear declaration that the United States will fight for certain things and that she will disinterest herself in all other things whatsoever. Europeans, on their part, have been accustomed to think of the family of nations as one great society — a society which in the Middle Ages was called ‘ Christendom ’ and in the eighteenth century ‘ the system of Europe.’ Hence the modern European dogma of the ‘indivisibility of peace.’ In such a society there can be no limited liabilities; all its members stand or fall together.

Nevertheless, an Englishman must feel that there is much to be said for his noncommittal attitude. It is, after all, the attitude of every individual English or American citizen toward the government of his own country. Every such citizen is a policeman; he is bound by the common law to the duty of repressing civil commotions and of using all the force that may be necessary for that purpose. But in practice he never dreams of having to fight for law and order, or for the constitution; his idea of public spirit is to work for these things as a voter or politician or municipal administrator. In an extraordinary crisis he may rise in his wrath against disturbers of the peace, but he would be rightly shocked if he were told, for example, that he must not vote for Prohibition unless he is prepared himself to fight the rumrunner. Why should he not adopt the same attitude toward international affairs? Why should he not work to maintain the broad outlines of the peace settlement in Central and Eastern Europe without committing himself to fight on the Danube or the Vistula?

True, international affairs are different, because there is no policeman round the corner to whom members of the family of nations may delegate the duty of enforcing respect for treaties. There was a time when every nation kept a standing army or could hire mercenaries to fight its battles; but that time is long past. To-day, if force has to be used between nations, every citizen must take up arms. But when the Englishman is reminded of this hard fact he is inclined to answer that, if international law requires him to expose himself to such hazards, so much the worse for international law.

So crude an answer may shock the jurist, but there is truth behind it. If it is true that the sovereign state derives its just powers from the consent of its citizens, it is even more true that the law which reigns among the family of nations reigns only by the consent of its members. For that reason, international law ought rightly to be more flexible than domestic law — whereas, in fact, it is more rigid. Even more than domestic law it ought to be so reasonably conceived and administered that only the wanton criminal will desire to break it. Against the exceptional wanton the Englishman is in principle prepared to use force, whatever the cost; but if he sees Europe split in two by an attempt to preserve the full rigidity of existing treaties, he begins to look round for a policeman — and is he unreasonable if he suggests that the right policeman is the nation, or group of nations, which stands to gain most from this rigidity? Is he unreasonable in thinking that the main burden of defending the peace settlement on the Danube and the Vistula should rest with the Little Entente, with Poland and with Russia?

Unreasonable or not, the Englishman can claim that this is, in fact, the principle embodied in the Covenant of the League. The authors of the Covenant deliberately refrained from placing on all members of the family of nations indiscriminately the obligation to fight in defense of international law. They placed on all the obligation to boycott the aggressor — they sought, in other words, to abolish among members of the League the old doctrine of ‘neutrality,’ just as under domestic law every citizen is forbidden to give aid and comfort to the criminal — but they reserved the policeman’s duty to those nations only (to quote the Locarno phrase) whose ‘military situation’ and ‘geographical position’ might fit them to perform it effectively in the particular case.

VI

Yet it is at this point that the Englishman must begin to confess his failure to live up to his own principles. By this Locarno test, there are large regions of the world where Britain herself is singled out for the part of policeman. She must play a large part in resisting aggression on the settled frontiers of Western Europe; she must play nearly the whole part in resisting aggression elsewhere, wherever such resistance involves the use of sea power. But until recently her people have closed their eyes to these hard facts. They have allowed themselves to be blinded by a phrase — by the two words ‘economic sanctions.’ Those words represent a fatal misinterpretation both of the Covenant itself and of the economic facts of the modern world.

Article XVI was never regarded by its authors as having invented a new method of stopping wars. They never put any faith in economic sanctions, except as a reënforcement of military power. They knew that the war of 1914—1918 would have been shortened and many lives spared if the blockade of Germany had been more quickly and more completely effective. They believed, therefore, that if an aggressor knew from the outset that the military resistance he would encounter from his immediate adversaries would be reenforced by a universal economic boycott, he would rarely, if ever, be willing to incur that risk. But they remembered also that if the German army had reached Paris and the Channel ports in 1914 the blockade might never have been established. An aggressor who believes that he can count on rapid military victory will not be much frightened of subsequent attempts to rob him of the fruits of his victory by economic pressure.

All this has been forgotten. There grew up among the pacific peoples of Europe, and especially in Britain, a vague idea that economic pressure was an alternative to, not a reënforcement of, military resistance. There was to be peace in the sense that there would be no more messy fighting. O brave new world, where the ministers of justice need no longer grapple with the violent man, but could starve him decently into submission!

Now this was never anything but a dream. Nations are not so economically interdependent as that. There is only one nation in the world that can be starved out before it can have time to win an effective military victory. That nation is Great Britain. To other governments who may contemplate aggression, the threat of economic sanctions is little more than a warning that they must be fully armed and provisioned in advance, and must strike quickly at their enemy’s vitals. It therefore puts a premium on the fait accompli — on peacetime armaments, on economic isolation, and on sudden attack in overwhelming force by land and air. And unless such force can be met by adequate armed resistance and counterattack, economic sanctions will be useless as a protection and futile as a deterrent.

That is the lesson of the Abyssinian dispute. We now know that Italy ran little risk from an economic siege, provided she could finish the war in one campaign. She need have run no risk at all if she had laid in somewhat larger stocks of petrol in advance. Only the British and French fleets could have prevented a rapid military victory, and they could have prevented it only by fighting. For the prime function of a fleet is not blockade. That is a superstition which has no basis in history and has fatally confused all discussions of naval disarmament since the war. The prime function of a fleet is to give mobility to the armed forces of its possessor and to deny mobility to the armed forces of the enemy.

VII

Abyssinia, the Rhineland, Spain — in the last few months these successive shocks have undoubtedly reawakened the British people to realities. They have turned from vague general commitments which do not really commit to a detailed consideration of their special and limited responsibilities.

It is easy enough to define those responsibilities. The integrity of the British Commonwealth of Nations itself, the inviolability of the settled frontiers of Western Europe, the independence of Egypt, the preservation of the Mediterranean as an international highway — these are the elements of international law which Britain can and must defend, if necessary, by force of arms. These constitute her Monroe Doctrine.

But does this definition of, so to speak, her police functions mean that she will disinterest herself in other issues? Will she cease to work for a settled international order in other regions — in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Pacific? Will she refuse to play the citizen where she cannot undertake to play the policeman? In a word, is she retreating toward her traditional policy of isolation?

The answer to this question is still in doubt. It depends on a balance between two considerations, on the eventual outcome of two tendencies which are working in the world to-day. On the one hand is the tendency toward something like a new war of religion, the war between Fascism and Communism. On the other is the tendency toward a more realistic examination of the world’s real economic and social needs.

If the first tendency comes to dominate international relations, if Europe as a whole goes the way of Spain, Britain will undoubtedly retire into isolation. She believes in neither of these rival creeds. It will not be the first time that she has been forced into such retirement. A century ago Canning voiced her determination to take neither side in the conflict between ‘legitimacy’ and the ‘revolution,’ between the dying struggles of absolutism and the first mutterings of the storm which was to break over Europe in 1848.

But though this conflict of creeds seems at the moment increasingly to occupy the front of the international stage, it does not occupy the centre. Other nations in Europe besides Britain are refusing to take sides in it, and even those nations whose statesmen seem most active in fomenting it are perhaps growing a little weary of such incitements. If the young men of Germany or Italy contemplate war, it is not as a crusade against Communism, but rather as a desperate alternative to unemployment. It is, in truth, the problem of unemployment that holds the centre of the international stage, as it holds the centre of the stage in the domestic politics of every country.

We have no space here to develop this thesis, but, by way of illustration, let us glance at the history of Germany since 1919. Accustomed during four years of war to the life of the blockade, forced by the terms of peace and by her own blunders to continue that life in the years immediately succeeding the war, Germany has increasingly attempted to make a virtue of economic isolation. To-day National Socialist Germany seems bent on making a religion of it.

The direct consequence ot Germany’s isolation was unemployment. That unemployment, particularly among her educated youth, became the breeding ground for Communism. National Socialist Germany must therefore create employment — industrial employment for as many as possible, and especially for married men; some sort of disciplined work for the rest, and especially for the young unmarried men. Hence Herr Hitler’s employment policy: rearmament and the labor camp.

And since even rearmament could not supply employment for youth as it issued from the labor camp, some further period of disciplined work must be found for them, lest they ferment in idleness. To enroll them in ‘paramilitary’ formations was too dangerous; the events of 1934 had proved that. Hence conscription. If war comes to Europe it will come, not at the moment when a great new German conscript army is ready for the field, but when the youth of Germany begin to pass out of that army, their years of service completed, and can still find no permanent employment.

Amid the rising clamor of nationalist and internationalist propaganda it may well be too late to attempt a solution of these underlying economic problems. But there is an undoubted demand in the world to-day that the attempt should be made. And that demand many Englishmen feel it to be their bounden duty to meet, if they can. While they recognize that the League has muddled sanctions, they feel even more keenly that it has muddled conciliation. This, in their eyes, is the worse failure.

We have already suggested the cause of that failure, the rigid conception of international relations derived from the incautious words of Article X of the Covenant. If there is yet time to correct that mistake, Englishmen will not willingly abandon their original ideal of the League, the ideal of a great coöperative commonwealth of nations. According to that ideal, the League was to be an instrument of economic coöperation; it was to forestall disputes by continuous discussion of national needs; it was to create an international civil service entrusted with the task of working out policies for mutual benefit. These were the things for which Englishmen were prepared to work in 1919, and they are still prepared to work for them to-day.

Pure sentiment, out of relation with the hard facts? Better to run no risk of entanglement in such delicate and dangerous problems? Better to entrench oneself on the carefully defined ground for which one is prepared to fight, refusing to venture into the no man’s land of general international coöperation and conciliation? Perhaps. The purpose of this article has been to depict and explain, not to argue or justify. But in choosing between these two attitudes the Englishman may well ask himself a question. If war comes, how will the future historian describe it? As a war of religion? Or of wanton aggression? A war of revenge for an unwise peace? A war of nerves, irritated by armaments? Or, perhaps, as a war of popular ferment, an explosion caused by economic pressures which a more constructive statesmanship could have eased in time?