The Fruits of Victory. Norman Angell
of which was not realised. And if the outcome was not realised, although, looking back, or looking at the situation from the distance of America from Europe, the inevitability of the result seems plain enough, I suggest that it is because judgment becomes warped as the result of certain feelings or predominant ideas; and that it will be impossible wisely to guide political conduct without some understanding of the nature of those feelings and ideas, and unless we realise with some humility and honesty that all nations alike are subject to these weaknesses.
We all of us clamantly and absolutely deny this plain fact when it is suggested that it also applies to our own people. What would have happened to the publicist who, during the War, should have urged: “Complete and overwhelming victory will be bad, because we shall misuse it?” Yet all the victories of history would have been ground for such a warning. Universal experience was not merely flouted by the uninstructed. One of the curiosities of war literature is the fashion in which the most brilliant minds, not alone in politics, but in literature and social science, simply disregard this obvious truth. We each knew “our” people—British, French, Italian, American—to be good people: kindly, idealistic, just. Give them the power to do the Right—to do justice, to respect the rights of others, to keep the peace—and it will be done. That is why we wanted “unconditional surrender” of the Germans, and indignantly rejected a negotiated peace. It was admitted, of course, that injustice at the settlement would fail to give us the world we fought for. It was preposterous to suppose that we, the defenders of freedom and democracy, arbitration, self-determination—America, Britain, France, Japan, Russia, Italy, Rumania—should not do exact and complete justice. So convinced, indeed, were we of this that we may search in vain the works of all the Allied writers to whom any attention was paid, for any warning whatsoever of the one danger which, in fact, wrecked the settlement, threw the world back into its oldest difficulties, left it fundamentally just where it was, reduced the War to futility. The one condition of justice—that the aggrieved party should not be in the position of imposing his unrestrained will—, the one truth which, for the world’s welfare, it was most important to proclaim, was the one which it was black heresy and blasphemy to utter, and which, to do them justice, the moral and intellectual guides of the nations never did utter.
It is precisely the truth which Americans to-day are refusing to face. We all admit that, “human nature being what it is,” preponderance of power, irresponsible power, is something which no nation (but our own) can be trusted to use wisely or with justice. The backbone of American policy shall therefore be an effort to retain preponderance of power. If this be secured, little else matters. True, the American advocate of isolation to-day says: “We are not concerned with Europe. We ask only to be let alone. Our preponderance of power, naval or other, threatens no-one. It is purely defensive.” Yet the truth is that the demand for preponderance of armaments itself involves a denial of right. Let us see why.
No one denies that the desire to possess a definitely preponderant navy is related, at least in some degree, to such things as, shall we say, the dispute over the Panama tolls. A growing number feel and claim that that is a purely American dispute. To subject it to arbitral decision, in which necessarily Europeans would have a preponderance, would be to give away the American case beforehand. With unquestioned naval preponderance over any probable combination of rivals, America is in a position to enforce compliance with what she believes to be her just rights. At this moment a preponderant navy is being urged on precisely those grounds. In other words, the demand is that in a dispute to which she is a party she shall be judge, and able to impose her own judgement. That is to say, she demands from others the acceptance of a position which she would not herself accept. There is nothing at all unusual in the demand. It is the feeling which colours the whole attitude of combative nationalism. But it none the less means that “adequate defence” on this basis inevitably implies a moral aggression—a demand upon others which, if made by others upon ourselves, we should resist to the death.
It is not here merely or mainly the question of a right: American foreign policy has before it much the same alternatives with reference to the world as a whole, as were presented to Great Britain with reference to the Continent in the generation which preceded the War. Her “splendid isolation” was defended on grounds which very closely resemble those now put forward by America as the basis of the same policy. Isolation meant, of course, preponderance of power, and when she declared her intention to use that power only on behalf of even-handed justice, she not only meant it, but carried out the intention, at least to an extent that no other nation has done. She accorded a degree of equality in economic treatment which is without parallel. One thing only led her to depart from justice: that was the need of maintaining the supremacy. For this she allowed herself to become involved in certain exceedingly entangling Alliances. Indeed, Great Britain found that at no period of her history were her domestic politics so much dominated by the foreign situation as when she was proclaiming to the world her splendid isolation from foreign entanglements. It is as certain, of course, that American “isolation” would mean that the taxation of Gopher Prairie would be settled in Tokio; and that tens of thousands of American youth would be sentenced to death by unknown elderly gentlemen in a European Cabinet meeting. If the American retorts that his country is in a fundamentally different position, because Great Britain possesses an Empire and America does not, that only proves how very much current ideas in politics fail to take cognizance of the facts. The United States to-day has in the problem of the Philippines, their protection and their trade, and the bearing of those things upon Japanese policy; in Hayti and the West Indies, and their bearing upon America’s subject nationality problem of the negro; in Mexico, which is likely to provide America with its Irish problem; in the Panama Canal tolls question and its relation to the development of a mercantile marine and naval competition with Great Britain, in these things alone, to mention no others, subjects of conflict, involving defence of American interests, out of which will arise entanglements not differing greatly in kind from the foreign questions which dominated British domestic policy during the period of British isolation.
Now, what America will do about these things will not depend upon highly rationalised decisions, reached by a hundred million independent thinkers investigating the facts concerning the Panama Treaty, the respective merits of alternative alliance combinations, or the real nature of negro grievances. American policy will be determined by the same character of force as has determined British policy in Ireland or India, in Morocco or Egypt, French policy in Germany or in Poland, or Italian policy in the Adriatic. The “way of thinking” which is applied to the decisions of the American democracy has behind it the same kind of moral and intellectual force that we find in the society of Western Europe as a whole. Behind the American public mind lie practically the same economic system based on private property, the same kind of political democracy, the same character of scholastic training, the same conceptions of nationalism, roughly the same social and moral values. If we find certain sovereign ideas determining the course of British or French or Italian policy, giving us certain results, we may be sure that the same ideas will, in the case of America, give us very much the same results.
When Britain spoke of “splendid isolation,” she meant what America means by the term to-day, namely, a position by virtue of which, when it came to a conflict of policy between herself and others, she should possess preponderant power, so that she could impose her own view of her own rights, be judge and executioner in her own case. To have suggested to an Englishman twenty years ago that the real danger to the security of his country lay in the attitude of mind dominant among Englishmen themselves, that the fundamental defect of English policy was that it asked of others something which Englishmen would never accord if asked by others of them, and that such a policy was particularly inimical in the long run to Great Britain, in that her population lived by processes which dominant power could not, in the last resort, exact—such a line of argument would have been, and indeed was, regarded as too remote from practical affairs to be worth the attention of practical politicians. A discussion of the Japanese Alliance, the relations with Russia, the size of foreign fleets, the Bagdad railway, would have been regarded as entirely practical and relevant. These things were the “facts” of politics. It was not regarded as relevant to the practical issues to examine the role of certain general ideas and traditions which had grown up in England in determining the form of British policy. The growth of a crude philosophy of militarism, based on a social pseudo-Darwinism, the popularity of Kipling and