The Fruits of Victory. Norman Angell
extent at least into the present distribution of population, political forces can re-distribute that population. But re-distribution would mean in fact killing.
So to re-direct the vast currents of European industry as to involve a great re-distribution of the population would demand a period of time so great that during the necessary stoppage of the economic process most of the population concerned would be dead—even if we could imagine sufficient stability to permit of these vast changes taking place according to the naïve and what we now know to be fantastic, programme of our Treaties. And since the political forces—as we shall see—are extremely unstable, the new distribution would presumably again one day undergo a similarly murderous modification.
That brings us to the question suggested in the proposition set out some pages back, how far preponderant political power can ensure or compel those processes by which a population in the position of that of these islands lives.
For, as against much of the foregoing, it is sometimes urged that Britain’s concern in the Continental chaos is not really vital, because while the British Isles cannot be self-sufficing, the British Empire can be.
During the War a very bold attempt was made to devise a scheme by which political power should be used to force the economic development of the world into certain national channels, a scheme whereby the military power of the dominant group should be so used as to ensure it a permanent preponderance of economic resources. The plan is supposed to have emanated from Mr. Hughes, the Prime Minister of Australia, and the Allies (during Mr. Asquith’s Premiership incidentally) met in Paris for its consideration. Mr. Hughes’s idea seems to have been to organise the world into economic categories: the British Empire first in order of mutual preference, the Allies next, the neutrals next, and the enemy States last of all. Russia was, of course, included among the Allies, America among the neutrals, the States then Austria-Hungary among the enemies.
One has only to imagine some such scheme having been voted and put into operation, and the modifications which political changes would to-day compel, to get an idea of merely the first of the difficulties of using political and military power, with a basis of separate and competing nationalisms, for economic purposes. The very nature of military nationalism makes surrender of competition in favour of long continued co-operation for common purposes, a moral impossibility. The foundations of the power are unstable, the wills which determine its use contradictory.
Yet military power must rest upon Alliance. Even the British Empire found that its defence needed Allies. And if the British Empire is to be self-sufficing, its trade canalised into channels drawn along certain political lines, the preferences and prohibitions will create many animosities. Are we to sacrifice our self-sufficiency for the sake of American and French friendship, or risk losing the friendship by preferences designed to ensure self-sufficiency? Yet to the extent that our trade is with countries like North and South America we cannot exercise on its behalf even the shadow of military coercion.
But that is only the beginning of the difficulty.
A suggestive fact is that ever since the population of these islands became dependent upon overseas trade, that trade has been not mainly with the Empire but with foreigners. It is to-day.[8] And if one reflects for a moment upon the present political relationship of the Imperial Government to Ireland, Egypt, India, South Africa, and the tariff and immigration legislation that has marked the economic history of Australia and Canada during the last twenty years, one will get some idea of the difficulty which surrounds the employment of political power for the shaping of an economic policy to subserve any large and long-continued political end.
The difficulties of an imperial policy in this respect do not differ much in character from the difficulties encountered in Paris. The British Empire, too, has its problems of ‘Balkanisation,’ problems that have arisen also from the anti-social element of ‘absolute’ nationalism. The present Nationalist fermentation within the Empire reveals very practical limits to the use of political power. We cannot compel the purchase of British goods by Egyptian, Indian, or Irish Nationalists. Moreover, an Indian or Egyptian boycott or Irish agitation, may well deprive political domination of any possibility of economic advantage. The readiness with which British opinion has accepted very large steps towards the independence and evacuation of Egypt after having fiercely resisted such a policy for a generation, would seem to suggest that some part of the truth in this matter is receiving general recognition. It is hardly less noteworthy that popular newspapers—that one could not have imagined taking such a view at the time, say, of the Boer war—now strenuously oppose further commitments in Mesopotamia and Persia—and do so on financial grounds. And even where the relations of the Imperial Government with States like Canada or Australia are of the most cordial kind, the impotence of political power for exacting economic advantage has become an axiom of imperial statecraft. The day that the Government in London proposed to set in motion its army or navy for the purpose of compelling Canada or Australia to cease the manufacture of cotton or steel in order to give England a market, would be the day, as we are all aware, of another Declaration of Independence. Any preference would be the result of consent, agreement, debate, contract: not of coercion.
But the most striking demonstration yet afforded in history of the limits placed by modern industrial conditions upon the economic effectiveness of political power is afforded by the story of the attempt to secure reparations, indemnity, and even coal from Germany, and the attempt of the victors, like France, to repair the disastrous financial situation which has followed war by the military seizure of the wealth of a beaten enemy. That story is instructive both by reason of the light which it throws upon the facts as to the economic value of military power, and upon the attitude of public and statesmen towards these facts.
When, some fifteen years ago, it was suggested that, given the conditions of modern trade and industry, a victor would not in practice be able to turn his military preponderance to economic account even in such a relatively simple matter as the payment of an indemnity, the suggestion was met with all but universal derision. European economists of international reputation implied that an author who could make a suggestion of that kind was just playing with paradox for the purpose of notoriety. And as for newspaper criticism—it revealed the fact that in the minds of the critics it was as simple a matter for an army to ‘take’ a nation’s wealth once military victory had been achieved, as it would be for a big schoolboy to take an apple from a little one.
Incidentally, the history of the indemnity negotiations illuminates extraordinarily the truth upon which the present writer happens so often to have insisted, namely, that in dealing with the economics of nationalism, one cannot dissociate from the problem the moral facts which make the nationalism—without which there would be no nationalisms, and therefore no ‘international’ economics.
A book by the present author published some fifteen years ago has a chapter entitled ‘The Indemnity Futility.’ In the first edition the main emphasis of the chapter was thrown on this suggestion: on the morrow of a great war the victor would be in no temper to see the foreign trade of his beaten enemy expand by leaps and bounds, yet by no other means than by an immense foreign trade could a nation pay an indemnity commensurate with the vast expenditure of modern war. The idea that it would be paid in ‘money,’ which by some economic witchcraft should not involve the export of goods, was declared to be a gross and ignorant fallacy. The traders of the victorious nation would have to face a greatly sharpened competition from the beaten nation; or the victor would have to go without any very considerable indemnity. The chapter takes the ground that an indemnity is not in terms of theoretical economics an impossibility: it merely indicates the indispensable condition of securing it—the revival of the enemy’s economic strength—and suggests that this would present for the victorious nation, not only a practical difficulty of internal politics (the pressure of Protectionist groups) but a grave political difficulty arising out of the theory upon which defence by preponderant isolated national power is based. A country possessing the economic strength to pay a vast indemnity is of potential military strength. And this is a risk your nationalists will not accept.
Even friendly Free Trade critics shook their heads at this and implied that the argument was a reversion to Protectionist illusions for the purpose of making a case. That misunderstanding (for the argument does not involve acceptance of Protectionist