Nationalism And After

Books by Prof. E. H. Carr

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SINCE THE PEACE TREATIES
MICHAEL BAKUNIN

THE TWENTY YEARS* CRISIS, 1919-1939
CONDITIONS OF PEACE

NATIONALISM

AND

AFTER

BY

EDWARD HALLETT CARR

PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
IN THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES

a

Of

ustf®* uujai

LONDON

MACMILLAN & CO. LTD
1945

3^ o.i s'

C3I

cw.y

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH

CONTENTS

I. The Climax of Nationalism

The First Period
The Second Period
The Third Period
The Climax
A Fourth Period ?

The Prospects of Internationalism

Individual and Nation

Power in the International Order

Principles and Purposes

Postscript

Nationality does not aim either at liberty or
prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the
neC6SSity 0f makin « the nation the

Ta me f SUre of the state - Its course will
be marked with material as well as moral ruin ”

Acton (1862)

vi

I

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

It is commonly assumed that nations in the modern sense
are the product of the disruption of the international
rather pre-international - order of mediaeva Christendom
and that they represent the projection on a collective* national
plane of the Renaissance spirit of adventurous and .
assertive individualism. It is further assumed thtfinter-
national relations in the contemporary sense of^ the te
date from the 16th and 17th centuries, when Internationa
wars recognizably similar to those of
began to be waged and modern international law first took
shape. These assumptions are broadly correct. But
third assumption frequently made that the fundamental
character of nations and the type of problem P rese ^ J
relations betweenthem have remained more or less JJ n ^ a ^ d
through the past three or four centuries is less well founded,
The modern history of international relations ivi m 0
three partly overlapping periods, marked by widely differmg
views of the nation as a political entity. The first w .

1 The vocabulary of this subject is notoriously full of Smc?

when ^doctrine gradually became Patent Aa

right to political independence and statehood ( national sen

I

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

terminated by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
wars, having the Congress of Vienna as its taiSce and

French°R 8 ! ^ WaS essentiall y the product of the

underminS°f Utl ° n fi and ’ th ° Ugh ite foundation s were heavily

of xoiT^th th^V 870 ,f Ward f ’ kSted ° n tiU the strophe
tL 9 t J ’7 h he J Ver f ailles sett lement as its belated epilogue •
the third period, whose main features first began totake
shape after 1870 reached its culmination between x 9I4 and
1939 - It is still perhaps too soon to say whether we are
already passing into a fourth period, as sharply differentiated

“ectr r from ,he ,hw “ "* ““

* * "at, x vriuu

thJ h !i firSt i Peri ° d b / ginS With the S^dual dissolution of

^ f and church and the establish¬

ment of the national state and the national church. In the

new national unit it was normally the secular arm which
relying on the principle cuius regio, eius religio, emerged
predominant; but there was nothing anomalous in a bishop
or prince of the church exercising territorial sovereignty
The essential characteristic of the period was the identifi-
ca ion of the nation with the person of the sovereign.
Luther regarded the bishops and princes ” as constituting
the Germ an nation Louis XIV thought that the French
ation resided wholly in the person of the King De
Maistre, an early 19th-century throw-back to the previous
period, argued that the nation consisted of “ the ruler and

2

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

the nobilitv”. 1 International relations were relations
between kings and princes ; and matrimonial alliances wer
a regular instrument of diplomacy. The behaviour of
17th- and 18th-century sovereigns conformed per y
this prescription. The absolute power of the monarch a
homl St be contested. Even Frederick the Grea
described ^himself as the “ first servant ” of his state. Bu
nobody questioned that in international relations with othe

monarchs he spoke as one havmg authority over b

jects ” and “possessions”; and these could be treety
disposed of for personal or dynastic reasons The doctrine
o sovereignty made sense so long as this authority remained
remind ‘ ? ou y r sovereign lord the king ” had not yet become

3 Ce TlSsrwefe h the auspices under which international law
was born It was primarily a set of rules governing the ■
mutuafrelatLs of individuals in their capacity as rule^
A treaty was a contract concluded between a

form not yet extinct; and the personal good faith of Ae
sovereign was the guarantee of its execution. ;

concluding chapter of De Jure Belli no Pam appealed *°
*'he Ly of king, to cherish good faith scrupulously to*
forconsdence’ sake, and then also for the sake of the
reputation by which the authority of the royal powers
supported ”. The “ international of monarchs , all speak

■ These and other relevant quotations will be found in 1^Hertz,

Nationality in History and nathJtoAe upper classes still held

eastern Europe the restnction of thenanonto the upp ^ of the

good in the i 9 th century It was °‘ arded his horse than his
I9 th century that ™ d c^n ” (Nationalism, A Report by a

the middle of the i 9 th eentury and even l , r was st;u

- —. -

Polish nation.

3

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

coidnTT langUage ’ ° wnin g a common tradition, and
conscious of a common interest in maintaining the sub-

“a?™ 8ubj r was no * * ,iy *

of vaTues I T ^ reco S nitlon of a common standard
r>u • j ^ sense obligation deriving from the unitv of
Christendom and the validity of natural law — rex non debet

taZ* “ d ‘? De ° “***• in e ~»” ,s <oZrzt-

vived in the secular trappings of the Enlightenment Claim-

the/could^nof V 7 “ t ° f th “ «» ™£X
fteTr rekir fu openly and flagrantly to flout it in
Si ! ® Wlth °ne another. It was not a 17th- or

8th-century autocrat, but a 19th-century America/demo-

“ My ““"W or w*g°

t f , eme ^mgs a common analogy was drawn

between the wars of monarchs and the notions at law™

rSZT Gr ° tiuS - W the Z£

, J. h , ct, ° 11 at kw may justly be sustained are those
whrch make jus. to wage war. A sovereign waging ™

hS r«mv rr 1 ,o , inffia ^ ° r ^ 44*™

his enemy than a citizen going to law desires to inflict them
on the servants of his adversary. They might indeed and
commonly did, suffer from the rapac.^ S ' „f
h.s pressed or hired soldiers; bu, his own subjZwcre
no immune from these hazards. A large part of the

'of ralesT y ° f ‘ nKm ?* ional law consists of the building up
,of roles to protect the property and commerce of non

Sumer Then's*™ 8 W ' re !" e<feCt no * P arties ,0 ‘ h «

quarrel. The x8th century witnessed many wars ; but in

the P educ ! h d f T d ° m 3nd friendIiness of intercourse between

S h Fro?cb ^ “ tI ’ e J pri " dpal E " ro pean countries,
With French as a recognized common language, it was the

most international ” period of modern history* and cTvflians

one^ P Th t0 T-f fr ? 3nd transact their business freely with
e another while their respective sovereigns were at war.

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

The conception of international relations from which these
rules and habits proceeded is obviously something quite
different from that prevailing in our own time.

/'Equally characteristic were the national economic policies
of the period, to which the name “ mercantilism ” was
afterwards given. The aim of mercantilism, both m its
domestic and in its external policies, was not to promote
the welfare of the community and its members, but to
augment the power of the state, of which the sovereign was
the embodiment. Trade was stimulated because it brought
wealth to the coffers of the state; and wealth was the
source of power, or more specifically of fitness for war. As
Colbert, the most famous and consistent exponent of the
system, put it, “ trade is the source of finance, and finance
is the vital nerve of war ”. 1 Internally, mercantilism
sought to break down the economic particularism, the local
markets and restrictive regulations, which underlay the
uniformity of the mediaeval order, to make the state the
economic unit and to assert its undivided authority in
matters of trade and manufacture throughout its territory.
Externally, it sought to promote the wealth and therefore
the power of the state in relation to othef states. Wealth,
conceived in its simplest form as bullion, was brought in
by exports ; and since, in the static conception of society
prevailing in this period, export markets were a fixed
quantity not susceptible of increase as a whole, the only
way for a nation to expand its markets and therefore its
wealth was to capture them from some other nation, if
necessary by waging a “ trade war ”. War thus became an
instrument of mercantilist policy' as well as its ultimate end.
It is a mistake to contrast mercantilism with laissez-faire
as if the one were directed to national, the other to individual,

i Quoted in E. F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, ii, 17- The “ finance ”
referred to is public finance.

5

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

ends. Both were directed to national ends ; the difference
between them related to a difference in the conception of
the nation. Mercantilism was the economic policy of a
period which identified the interest of the nation with the
interest of its rulers. Its aim, as defined by its most authori¬
tative historian, was “ wealth for the nation, but wealth
from which the majority of the people must be excluded ’V

The Second Period

T jl e seconcJ period, which issued from the turmoil of
the Napoleonic Wars and ended in 1914, is generally
accounte t e most orderly and enviable of modern inter¬
national relations. Its success depended on a remarkable
series of compromises which made it in some respects the
natural heir, m others the antithesis, of the earlier period.
JLooked at in one way, it succeeded in delicately balancing
the forces °f nationalism ” and “ internationalism ” ; for
it established an international order or framework strong
enough to permit of a striking extension and intensification
of national feeling without disruption on any wide scale of
regular and peaceful international relations. Put in another
way, it might be said that, while in the previous period
political and economic power had marched hand in hand
o uild up the national political unit and to substitute a
single national economy for a conglomeration of local
economies, in the 19th century a compromise was struck
between political and economic power so that each could
develop on its own lines. Politically, therefore, national
forces were more and more successful throughout the iqth
century in asserting the claim of the nation to statehood
whether through a coalescence or through a break-up of
existing units. Economically, on the other hand, inter-
1 E. F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, ii, 166.

6

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

national forces carried a stage further the :processJ^ugr-
ated in the previous period by transforming a multiplicity
of naSinal e^onomJinto a single world economy. From
yet a third angle the system might be seen as a compr«
between the popular and democratic appeal of politics
nationalism and the esoteric and :autocratic nroag^^
of the international economic mechanism. The collapse
these compromises, and the revelation of the weaknesses
and unrealities that lay behind them, marked the conclud¬
ing stages of the second period. The failure since 1914 to
establish any new compromise capable of.
forces of nationalism and internationalism is t

the contemporary crisis. ,

The founder of modern nationalism as it began to take

shape in the 19th century was Rousseau, who, rejecting

the^embodiment of the nation “

the ruling class, boldly identified nation and people ,
and this identification became a fundamental principle both
of the French and of the American ™olnt.oM.
true that the “ people ” in this terminology did not mean
those who came to be known to a later epoch as the
“ workers ” or the “ common people ”. The jacobm con
stitution, which would have substituted manhood suffrage
“substantial property qualifies™.t o the Nahona
Convention, was never operative. 1 Babeuf went to th
guillotine ; and the solid and respectable middle class, whic
made up the “ Third Estate ”, retained through a large par
of the 19th century a rooted fear and mistrust of the masses.

. .. The ph.>.soph«s and

ing in France a democracy as to repudiate

” 5 ““ English P- . 79 ).

7

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

SrSaT ' Us raM r lass had in i, fr„ m

Z

montrcf ^ ^ sti11 . belongedto'"^ age of kgiWe
. arC , ■£’. treatec * ^' s objects as instruments of his ambition
pised his native language and culture and regarded Prussia
not as a national entity but as his family domain Napoleon
by posing as the champion and mandatory of the emandpated

nationalism He was in many senses the first “ popular ”
a or. Intellectually the transition from Frederick to
Napoleon was paralleled by the transition from Gibb on to
urke, or from Goethe and Lessing to Herder and Schiller •
the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment was replaced bv
e nationalism of the Romantic movement. Th e P implica-

newand no Ch r ge "*** far ' reachin g- The nation fn its
new and popular connotation had come to stay. Inter-

1 natlonal relations were henceforth to be governed not bv

the personal interests, ambitions and emotions of the

e" M"t; 0 fl b n y a ta. in,erc8,s ' ambita “<<

a “

«Krbl' he abS0 ' U,e m ° narCh ^ of

t “ beCame 3 nec essary convenience in international

mocracy 1 ” of‘“ S^democrac f disputabIe ' The “ liberal de-
tinguished from modern “ social X m ° f tbe J 9 th century is often dis-

Some thinkers would regard the restriYmH^I^ ° f Tl democrac y ”•
as liberal but not democratic anrf democracy of the 19th century

modern egalitariaL fo™^ olLs wouldT democrac y for the

essential to democratic forms of r, d argue tbat > whereas liberalism is
proved compatible with them. government > S0Clalism haa not yet been

8

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

relations and international law. But it was far more than
a convenient abstraction. The idea of the personality and
character of the nation acquired a profound psychological
significance. Writers like Mazzini thought and argued about
nations exactly as if they were sublimated individuals. Even
to-day people are still capable, especially in English-speaking
countries, of feeling a keen emotional excitement over the
rights or wrongs of “ Patagonia ” or “ Ruritama ’ without
the slightest knowledge or understanding of the highly com¬
plex entities behind these abstractions. The 19th century
was passionately devoted to individualism and to democracy
as it was then understood; and nationalism seemed a natural
corollary of both. What is not so clear is why the rugged
individualism of nations should have been regarded as less
self-assertive and menacing to peace than the rugged indi¬
vidualism of monarchs, why nations should have been
expected to display the princely qualities of forbearance and
a sense of honour, but not the equally princely qualities
of aggressiveness and greed, why nationalism should have
been regarded as a promising stepping-stone to international¬
ism, and why, finally, it was rarely perceived that nationalism
is not so much the apogee of individualism and of democracy
as a denial of them. But these questions were seldom asked.
A generation reared in the doctrine of a natural harmony
of interest between individuals was readily persuaded of a
harmony of interest between personified nations. And,
after all, the really puzzling question is not why people in
the 19th century thought as they did, but why, in spite oi
theoretical arguments which seems so cogent to the present
generation, the dynamite of nationalism did not produce its
catastrophic explosion for a full century after the downfall
of Napoleon, so that this second period of modern inter¬
national relations looks to-day like an idyllic interlude between
the turbulent first period of warring monarchies and the

9

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

contemporary and apparently still more turbulent, period
of warring nations.

J he , fir , St answer wouId appear to be that the framework
' Q °; llberd dem J ocrac y witI ™ which 19th-century nationalism,

at any rate down to 1870, chiefly operated had certain
common standards of universal validity which, though
different from those of the 18th century, were not less
effective m upholding a measure of international solidarity.

, 6 "P ts ° f natl ° ns were consciously derived from, and
subordinated to the rights of man which were in their
very essence both individual and universal. A nation which
' not ^spcct the rights of its own subjects or of other
nations denied its own essential character. Moreover,
oyalty to this common standard was reinforced by a tangible
solidarity of interest. The ruling middle classes who were
he bearers of the 19th-century nationalism entertained
almost everywhere throughout the middle years of the cen¬
tury a lively fear of revolution from below. The rights
of property were scarcely less sacrosanct than the rights
of man and the functions of the bourgeois democratic
state — the night-watchman state ” in Lassalle’s sarcastic
phrase were largely concerned with its protection. Pro¬
perty, sometimes described as “ a stake in the country ”
was a condition of political rights and — it might be said
without much exaggeration-of full membership of the
nation : the worker had, in this sense, no fatherland. When
Marx appealed to the workers of the world to unite, he was
fully conscious of the strength which unity gave to his
adversaries. The 19th-century bourgeoisie of the propertied
classes m western Europe formed a coherent entity, trained
to the management both of public and of business affairs
(the modern English public school, like the French lycee,
dates from this period), and united by ties of common ideals
an common interests. In their competent hands the

10

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

democratized nation was still proof for many years to come
against the disruptive turbulence of popular nationalism.

The second explanation of the pacific character of
19th-century nationalism goes deeper and is fundamental
to the whole 19th century. What happened after 1815,
though through no particular merit of the peace-makers of
Vienna, 1 was nothing less than the gradual development
of a new kind of economic order which, by making possible
a phenomenal increase of product ion an d population, offered
to the .newly enfranchised nations of Europe the opportunity
to expand and spread their material civilization all over the
world, and, by concentrating the direction of this world
economic order' in one great capital city, created an inter¬
national—or, more accurately, supra-national — framework
strong enough to contain with safety and without serious
embarrassment the heady wine of the new nationalism.
There was thus a real foundation for the Cobdenite view
of international trade as a guarantee of international peace.
Not only were the middle-class governments of the western
nations united by a common respect for the rights of pro¬
perty and for the principle of non-interference in the
management of a world economy which was so triumphantly
advancing the wealth and authority of the middle classes,
but even Habsburg and Romanov relicts of 18th-century
autocracy did not disdain the financial crumbs that fell
from prosperous bourgeois tables and became humble
hangers-on of the bourgeois economic order.

This new international economic society was built on
the fact of progressive expansion and on the theory of
laissez-faire. The expansion of Europe, consisting both in
a startling increase in the population and production of
Europe itself and in an unprecedentedly rapid dissemination

t No such windfall awaited the less fortunate peace-makers of Ver-

sailles.

II

B

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

of the population, products and material civilization of
.Europe throughout other continents, created the funda-
mental change from the static order and outlook of the
i8th century to the dynamic order and outlook of the 19th
The initial divergence which explains the whole opposition
of principle between mercantilism and laissez-faire is that
while the mercantilists believed that the size of the cake
was fixed, the philosophers of laissez-faire believed in a
cake whose size could and should be indefinitely extended
through the enterprise and inventiveness of individual effort.
Restriction and discrimination are the natural reaction of
producers to a limitation of demand. In the 19th century
most people were convinced, on the plausible evidence
around them, that a continuously increasing production
would be absorbed by a progressively and infinitely expand¬
ing demand.

In a world of this kind goods could pass freely from
place to place — and not only goods, but men. Freedom
of migration was an even more vital factor in the 19th-
century economic and political system, and more necessary
to its survival, than freedom of trade. Newcomers were
made welcome by the prospect of their contribution to an
expanding production; unlimited opportunity for all who
were willing to work was an accepted item in the 19th-
century creed. The same kind of welcome awaited new
nations, whether formed, as in Germany, by a belated
application of the mercantilist policy of breaking down
internal barriers to unity, or, as in eastern Europe, by
splitting off from former multi-national units. Nations,
like individuals, had their contribution to make ; and free¬
dom of opportunity should not be denied to them. Human
nature being fallible, clashes might no doubt occur. But
just as order at home was not threatened by sporadic
outbreaks of crime, so occasional wars between the more

12

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

turbulent nations did not constitute a serious menace to the
stability of international society.

The success of this 19th-century compromise between
a closely-knit world economic system and unqualified recog¬
nition of the political diversity and independence of nations
was rendered possible by two subtle and valuable pieces of
make-believe which were largely unconscious and contained
sufficient elements of reality to make them plausible. These -
two salutary illusions were, first, that the world economic 1
system was truly international, and second, that the economic
and political systems were entirely separate and operated :
independently of each other.

The illusion of the international character of the world
economic system rested on the conviction that it was not
an artificial creation of man but part of an order of nature.
Under absolute laissez-faire all valid economic decisions are
assumed to be taken by individuals in the furtherance of
their own interest and any central economic authority (or,
in present-day terms, planning) to be superfluous, so that
the system as a whole remains “ impersonal The
19th-century economic order enjoyed its brilliant success
largely because people believed that its operation was
impersonal and thus in the truest sense international. In
fact the hypothetical conditions of absolute laissez-faire
did not obtain in 19th-century society, or in any other
society which has ever existed. To put the issue in its
simplest and most concrete form, progressive expansion
was the product not of the principle of universal free
trade (which was never applied, and whose application would
have been found intolerable) but of the open British market.
The colonization of the empty spaces, the development of
machine-driven industry dependent on coal and the open-
ing-up of world-wide communications through railways and
shipping services proceeded apap^0^aig : ^i'|rs|]L lgaftership,

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

and stimulated everywhere the emergence and development
of nations and national consciousness ; and the counterpart
of this “ expansion of England ” was the free market pro¬
vided in Britain from the eighteen-forties onward for the
natural products, foodstuffs and raw materials of the rest of
the world. In recent years it has become customary to
dwell on British exports as the foundation of Britain’s great¬
ness. It might in most respects be more relevant to stress
the significance of her position as the. greatest import and
entrepot market. The British have in the past been uni¬
versally regarded first and foremost as a nation of merchants
rather than of manufacturers; and beyond doubt the
primary foundation of the 19th-century economic system
was the provision of a single wide-open and apparently
insatiable market for all consumable commodities. It was
the existence of this national market which made the so-called
international system work.

The international system, simple in its conception but
infinitely complex in its technique, called into being a
delicate and powerful financial machine whose seat was in
the city of London. The corollary of an international
commodity market was an international discount market,
an international market for shipping freights, an inter¬
national insurance market and, finally, an international
capital market. All this required and depended on the
effective maintenance of a single international monetary
standard into which national currencies were exchangeable
at fixed rates ; and this in turn presupposed a central con¬
trol over the currency policies of the different national
units, enforced by the potential sanction of a refusal to deal
in “ unsound ” currencies. The prestige of sterling, proudly
anchored to the gold standard by the Bank Act of 1844,
made it the only serious candidate for the role of inter¬
national money. The Bank of England, as custodian of the

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

integrity of sterling, found itself — unwillingly and for the
most part unwittingly — the final arbiter and court of
appeal and the central executive authority of the inter¬
national system of trade and finance. All gold-standard
countries had to keep pace with one another in expanding
and contracting the flow of money and trade ; and it was
the London market which inevitably set the pace. Just as
mercantilism in the 17th and 18th centuries had transformed
local economies into a single national economy, so in the
19th century the merchants, brokers and bankers of London,
acting under the sovereign responsibility of the 44 old lady
of Threadneedle Street ”, transformed the national eco¬
nomies into a single world economy. It mattered little that
they had never sought the function which they discharged,
tod that they remained unconscious of its scope and im¬
portance. The task was thrust on them. 4 4 Money will
not manage itself ”, wrote Bagehot in the first chapter
of his famous book, 44 and Lombard Street has a great
deal of money to manage.” 1 Here was the seat of govern¬
ment of the world economy of the so-called age of laissez-
faire . '•

If then the 19th-century system was the work of art
rather than of nature, what remains of its international
character ? No other market could hope to challenge the
supremacy of London ; and mere supremacy might be held
to justify its claims in terms of what would be called nowa¬
days 44 functional ” internationalism. The, fetishism of the
gold standard made sterling a real international currency.
The foreign financier or merchant dealing with, or estab¬
lished in, London enjoyed all the benefits of the system,
was treated on his merits and suffered no disability or
discrimination. Above all the London market achieved,
and deserved, a remarkable reputation for probity and

1 W. Bagehot, Lombard Street (concluding words of ch. i.).

15

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

impartiality. It certainly did not seek to serve British
interests in any narrow or exclusive sense; the commerce
of the world was a British concern. Nevertheless the control
exercised from London was continuous ; and because it
was not consciously directed to anything but the day-to-day
task of ensuring the maintenance of sound currency and
balanced exchanges — the control which made the whole
system work — it was autocratic, without appeal and com-
/ pletely effective. Nor was it, properly speaking, international,
/ much less representative. It was at once supra-national and
British.

The second illusion which secured acceptance of the
19th-century world order sprang from the formal divorce
between political and economic power. The secrecy in
which the activities of the city of London were veiled served
to mask economic realities from those who thought in tradi¬
tional political terms; and these activities were altogether
withdrawn from political scrutiny. Yet it was precisely
because economic authority was silently wielded by a
single highly centralized autocracy that political authority
could safely be parcelled out in national units, large and
small, increasingly subjefct to democratic control. This
economic authority was a political fact of the first import¬
ance ; and the British economic power of which it was a
function was inseparably bound up with the political power
conferred by the uncontested supremacy of the British navy.
But these interconnexions of political and economic power
were overlooked; and since it was not recognized, either by
those who exercised the control or by those who submitted
to it, how far the political independence of nations was
conditioned by the pseudo-international world economic
order based on British supremacy, there was no resentment
of what would nowadays be regarded as infringements of
national sovereignty. Thus the democratized nations of

16

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

the 19th century went on from strength to strength pro¬
claiming aloud, and exercising in the political sphere, the
unrestricted rights of nationalism, while tacitly accepting
the discipline of a supreme external arbiter of their economic
destinies in the disguise of a law of nature. On this supposed
separation of political and economic power, and this real
blend of freedom and authority, the 19th-century order
rested.

In the eighteen-seventies the first subterranean rumblings
began to shake this splendid edifice. Germany emerged
beyond challenge as the leading continental power; and it
was in Germany that Friedrich List had sown many years
before the first seeds of rebellion against Britain’s world
economic system. The last imperfect triumphs of free trade
were left behind in the ’sixties. The German tariff of 1879
was long remembered as the first modern “ scientific ” tariff
— a piece of economic manipulation in the interests of
national policy. After 1870 the constructive work of nation¬
building seemed complete. Nationalism came to be associ¬
ated with “ the Balkans ” and with all that that ominous
term implied. When British commercial and British naval
supremacy were first seriously challenged in the ’nineties,
ominous cracks soon began to appear in the structure.
When this supremacy in both its forms was broken by the
first world war, the 19th-century economic system collapsed
in utter and irretrievable ruin. Subsequent struggles to
restore it merely showed how little its essential foundations
had been understood.

The Third Period

The third period brings yet another change in the char¬
acter of the nation. The catastrophic growth of nationalism
and bankruptcy of internationalism which were the symptoms

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

of the period can be traced back to their origins in the years
after 1870 but reach their full overt development only after
1914. This does not mean that individuals became in this
period more outrageously nationalist in sentiment or more
unwilling to cooperate with their fellow-men of other nations.
It means that nationalism began to operate in a new political
and economic environment. The phenomenon cannot be
understood without examination of the three main under¬
lying causes which provoked it: the bringing of new social
strata within the effective membership of the nation, the
visible reunion of economic with political power, and the
increase in the number of nations.

The rise of new social strata to full membership of the
nation marked the last three decades of the 19th century
throughout western and central Europe. . Its landmarks
were the development of industry and industrial skills ; the
rapid expansion in numbers and importance of urban popu¬
lations ; the growth of workers’ organizations and of the
political consciousness of the workers ; the introduction of
universal compulsory education ; and the extension of the
franchise. These changes, while they seemed logical steps
in a process inaugurated long before, quickly began to affect
the content of national policy in a revolutionary way. The
“ democratization ” of the nation in the earlier part of the
century had resulted in the establishment of popular control
over the functions of maintaining law and order, guarantee¬
ing the rights of property and, in general, “ holding the
ring ” for the operations of an economic society managed
and directed from another centre under rules of its own.
The “ socialization ” of the nation which set in towards the
end of the century brought about a far more radical change.
Hitherto, as Peterloo and the fate of the Chartists had shown,
the masses had had little power to protect themselves against
the immense hardships and sufferings which laissez-faire

18

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

industrialism imposed on them. Henceforth the political
power of the masses was directed to improving their own
social and economic lot. The primary aim of national policy
was no longer merely to maintain order and conduct what
was narrowly defined as public business, but to minister to
the welfare of members of the nation and to enable them
to earn their living. The democratization of the nation
in the second period had meant the assertion of the political
claims of the dominant middle class. The socialization of
the nation for the first time brings the economic claims
of the masses into the forefront of the picture. The defence
of wages and employment becomes a concern of national
policy and must be asserted, if necessary, against the national
policies of other countries ; and this in turn gives the
worker an intimate practical interest in the policy and power
* of his nation. The socialization of the nation has as its
natural corollary the nationalization of socialism. 1

The 20th-century alliance between nationalism and
socialism may be traced back to its first seed in the revolu¬
tionary nationalism of the Jacobins ; and in France, where
the Jacobin tradition remained potent, the Left has asserted
itself in successive national crises — in 1871, in 1917 and
again in 1940 — as the custodian of the national interest
against the compromisers and defeatists of the Right. In
its modern form, however, the alliance dates from Bismarck,
who, schooled by Lassalle, showed the German workers
how much they had to gain from a vigorous and ruthless
nationalism — “ no sickness insurance without Sedan ”, as

1 It need hardly be said that the term “ national socialism ” is not a
“ Nazi ” invention. It seems to have been first used in Germany about
1895 by a group of intellectuals formed by Friedrich Naumann. A few
years later it was applied in Austria-Hungary to those Social Democrats
who demanded the organization of the party as a federation of “ national ”
units as opposed to those who wished to maintain a single “ international ”
party for the whole of the Habsburg dominions.

*9

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

a recent writer has put it. 1 In the same period the word
/“ jingoism ” was coined in Great Britain to describe some¬
thing that had not hitherto existed — the nationalism of the
masses ; and a decade later it was answered from the other
side by Harcourt’s famous “ we are all socialists now
The successes of Tory democracy, the career of Joseph
Chamberlain and the adoption by the Liberal party after
1906 of far-reaching measures of social reform were all
straws in the wind. National policy was henceforth founded
on the support of the masses ; and the counterpart was the
loyalty of the masses to a nation which had become the
instrument of their collective interests and ambitions. 2

By the early nineteen-hundreds, therefore, the breach
between the “ two nations ” had been substantially healed
in all the advanced European countries. In the 19th century,
when the nation belonged to the middle class and the worker
had no fatherland, socialism had been international. The
crisis of 1914 showed in a flash that, except in backward
Russia, this attitude was everywhere obsolete. The mass
of workers knew instinctively on which side their bread
was buttered ; and Lenin was a lone voice proclaiming the

* F. Borkenau, Socialism , National or International (1942), p. 51.
This book contains the best critical analysis known to me of the process
which I have called “ the nationalization of socialism ”. Its later chapters
foreshadowing an organization of Europe west of Russia under Anglo-
American leadership bear marks of their date and of a certain anti-Russian
bias in the author.

2 In a work originally published in 1907 the Austrian Social Democrat,
Otto Bauer, argued that socialism meant “ an increasing differentiation
of nations, a sharper emphasis on their peculiarities, a sharper division
between their characters ”, and attacked those who believed that socialism
would “ diminish or even remove the differences between nations ”
(Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitdtenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie , 2nd ed.
pp. 105-6). Writers on international relations in English-speaking
countries had less insight ; for the most part they were content to con¬
gratulate themselves on the increasing “ popular ” interest in inter¬
national affairs and believed that this would promote international con¬
cord.

20

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

defeat of his own country as a socialist aim and crying
treason against the “ social-chauvinists International
socialism ignominiously collapsed. Lenin’s desperate rear¬
guard action to revive it made sense only in Russia, and
there only so long as revolutionary conditions persisted.
Once the “ workers’ state ” was effectively established,

“ socialism in one country ” was the logical corollary. The
subsequent history of Russia and the tragi-comedy of the
Communist International are an eloquent tribute to the
solidarity of the alliance between nationalism and socialism.

The second underlying cause of the modern inflation of
nationalism — its extension from the political to the economic
sphere through the reassertion of political power oyer eco¬
nomic policy — has been everywhere recognized/ But it
has commonly been attributed to the perversity of politicians
or to the nefarious influence of big business, and its far
more significant connexion with the socialization of the ,
nation overlooked. The democratic nationalism of our
second period had proved manageable and compatible with
some kind of international order precisely because its aspira¬
tions were predominantly political and could be satisfied
within the framework of the 19th-century laissez-faire or
“ night-watchman ” state. The social nationalism (or
national socialism) of the third period, by shifting the
ground from political to economic aspirations, brought
about the abdication of the laissez-faire state in favour of
the “ social service ” state. The transition from the pre¬
dominance of the middle class to the predominance of the
masses, or from liberal democracy to mass democracy, was,
so far as concerned the nature of the state, the transition
from politics to economics. Henceforth the functions of
the nation-state were as much economic , as political. The
assumption of these functions presupposed the abrogation
of the international economic order and would, even if there

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

had been no other obstacles, have prevented a revival of that
./ order after 1919. Nationalism had invaded and conquered
the economic domain from which the 19th century had so
cunningly excluded it. The single world economy was
replaced by a multiplicity of national economics, each con¬
cerned with the well-being of its own members. 1

The link between “ economic nationalism ” and the
socialization of the nation emerged clearly in the decisive
and fateful step taken by all the great industrial countries
after 1919 — the closing of national frontiers to large-scale
immigration. The middle-class governments of the 19th
century, concerned with the importance of cheap and
abundant labour to swell the tide of production and profits,
had been under no political compulsion to give prior con¬
sideration to the wage-levels and standards of living of their
own workers ; and for fifty years the exclusion of the
foreign worker had been the hopeless dream of all labour
organizations (it had even preoccupied Marx's First Inter¬
national). Now the prohibition was imposed, contrary to
the patent interests of employer and capitalist, almost without
opposition; 2 and one of the most effective and necessary
safety-valves of the 19th-century international order, the
avenue of escape opened to the enterprising and the dis-
v contented, was closed with a snap. No single measure did

1 Modem policies of economic nationalism, since they represent
a breach with the international order of laissez-faire and are in some
respects identical with practices current before the rise of laissez-faire ,
have sometimes been dubbed “ neo-mercantilist This designation is,
however, misleading. From the standpoint of nationalism they con¬
stitute not a return to the past, but a further stage in a continuous process
of the extension of the nation from the aristocracy to the middle class and
from the middle class to the masses.

2 . ^ s k°tild be forgotten that the attitude of the workers was
precisely imitated by the professional middle class in similar conditions.
Medical opposition in Great Britain to the immigration of refugee doctors
in the nineteen-thirties was a conspicuous and not particularly creditable
example.

22

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

JT

more to render a renewal of the clash between nations
inevitable. No single measure more clearly exhibited the
inherent drive of the new and powerful labour interests
towards policies of exclusive nationalism. When in the
nineteen-thirties humanitarian pressure demanded the admis¬
sion of alien refugees to Great Britain, consent was given on
the condition that they did not “ seek employment The
nation was prepared to receive those whose support would
be a charge on the national wealth, but not those whose
productive capacity might help to increase it.

But this was merely one symptom of a far broader trend.
Only in Great Britain did the interest of the worker in cheap
food keep the labour movement for some time faithful to the
free trade tradition ; and even here, after 1931, the greater
attraction of wage stability won the day. Workers became
interested equally with employers in measures of protection
and subsidies for industry. Advocacy of such measures
proved a fruitful meeting-ground for the hitherto conflicting
forces of capital and labour ; and national and social policies
were welded more firmly than ever together. The same
instruments serve both. The “ monopoly of foreign trade ”
and similar organizations elsewhere conform to irreproach¬
ably socialist principles ; yet they have also proved most
efficient instruments of economic nationalism. “ Planned
economy ” is a Janus with a nationalist as well as a socialist
face ; if its doctrine seems socialist, its pedigree is unim¬
peachably nationalist. A few years ago “ socialism means
strength ” would have seemed, even to socialists, a para¬
doxical slogan. To-day when a nation determines to exert
its utmost strength in war, it resorts without hesitation to
policies of out-and-out socialism. Now that laissez-faire
has succumbed to the joint onslaught of nationalism and
socialism, its two assailants have become in a strange way ^
almost indistinguishable in their aims ; and both have

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

become immensely more powerful through the alliance.

The third cause of the inflation of nationalism — the
3 startling increase in the number of nations during our third
period — is one of which sufficient account is rarely taken.
/. Here too the year 1870 marks a significant turning-point.
^ Down to that time the influence of nationalism had been to
diminish the number of sovereign and independent political
L units in Europe. In 1871 after the unification of Germany and
Italy had been completed there were fourteen; in 1914 there
were twenty ; in 1924 the number had risen to twenty-six.
It would be an understatement to say that the virtual doubling
in fifty years of the number of independent European states
aggravated in degree the problem of European order. It
altered that problem in kind — the more so since the con¬
vention ruling in 1871 that only five or at most six Great
Powers were concerned in major European issues no longer
commanded general acceptance. Nor could the settlement
after the first world war be regarded as in any way final or
p conclusive. National self-determination became a standing
invitation to secession. The movement which dismembered
Austria-Hungary and created Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia
was bound to be succeeded by movements for the dis¬
memberment of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Given
the premises of nationalism the process was natural and
legitimate, and no end could be set to it. After 1914 it
spread rapidly to the Arab world, to India, to the Far East;
though elsewhere the British Dominions offered the more
impressive spectacle of separate nations growing to maturity
within the unsevered bonds of the Commonwealth. More¬
over, this dispersal of authority occurred at a time when
both military and economic developments were forcing on
the world a rapid concentration of power : it not only
ignored, but defied, a trend deeply rooted in the industrial
conditions of the period. The bare fact that there are in

24

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

Europe to-day more than twenty, and in the world more
than sixty, political units claiming the status of independent
sovereign states goes far by itself to explain the aggravation
of the evils of nationalism in our third period.

Although, however, this multiplication of national
frontiers in Europe and the extension throughout the world
of a conception hitherto limited to western Europe and its
direct dependencies have given an immense impetus to
“ economic nationalism ”, it may well seem unfair to apply
this term in an invidious sense to the natural and legitimate
determination of “ backward ” nations to share in advan¬
tages hitherto monopolized by those who had had so long
a start in industrial development. The 19th-century con¬
centration of industry in a few great countries in western
Europe, which furnished their industrial products to the
rest of the world and consumed in return its food and raw
materials, may have been a highly practical example of
the division of labour. But this privileged status of the
industrial nations was self-destructive in so far as it was
bound sooner or later to create a desire and capacity for
industrial production and a development of national con¬
sciousness in the less privileged countries. List had argued
as long ago as 1840 that, while free trade might be the
interest of industrially mature nations, protective tariffs
were ,a necessary and legitimate instrument for developing
backward industries and countries to a state of maturity.
In tlie 19th century Germany and the United States had
both learned and profited by this lesson. It was now taken
up by new and smaller nations all over the world, and the
whole machinery of economic nationalism was set in motion
to develop their industries and bring them some fraction of
the power and prestige which went with industrial develop¬
ment. . Such procedures inevitably curtailed international
trade and multiplied competition for narrowing markets.

*5

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

The results were disastrous : yet nobody was to blame for
them. They arose simply from the multiplication of the
number of sovereign and independent nations, each claiming
its share in the profits and prerogatives of industrial pro¬
duction.

These three factors — the socialization of the nation, the
% nationalization of economic policy and the geographical
extension of nationalism — have combined to produce the
characteristic totalitarian symptoms of our third period.
The combination of these factors has found expression in
two world wars, or two instalments of the same world war,
in a single generation, and has imparted to them a peculiar
quality of embittered exasperation for which it would be
difficult to find a precedent in any war in history.

The Climax

Y The world war of 1914 was the first war between social¬
ized nations and took on for the first time the character
of what has since been called “ total war ”. The view of
war as the exclusive affair of governments and armies was
tacitly abandoned. Before hostilities ended, the obliteration
of the traditional line between soldier and civilian had gone
very far ; attack on civilian morale by propaganda, by mass
terrorism, by blockade and by bombing from the air had
become a recognized technique of war. Popular national
hatreds were for the first time deliberately inflamed as an
instrument of policy, and it came to be regarded in many
quarters as a legitimate war aim, not merely to defeat the
enemy armed forces, but to inflict punishment on members
of the enemy nation. In the second world war any valid
or useful distinction between armed forces and civilian
populations disappeared almost from the outset; both were
merely different forms of man-power and woman-power

26

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

mobilized for different tasks and on different “ fronts ” in
the same struggle. The individual had become little more,
in the eyes either of his own national government or of that
of the enemy, than a unit in the organized ranks of the
nation. In May 1940 an act of Parliament empowered the
British Government to make regulations “ requiring persons
to place themselves, their services and their property at
the disposal of His Majesty ” for any purpose arising out
of the prosecution of the war. Nationalism and socialism
joined hands to applaud the most unreservedly totalitarian
measure ever adopted by any nation at its hour of greatest
need.

The re-establishment of national political authority over
the economic system, which was a necessary corollary of
the socialization of the nation, was no doubt one of the
factors contributing to the situation which produced the
two world wars. But it received from them so powerful an
impetus that its relation to them is as much one of effect
as of cause. The immediate and revolutionary consequence ^
of the outbreak of war in 1914 was the assumption by every
belligerent government of the right to create and control
its own national money and the deposition of sterling from
its role as the universal currency. These measures had their
counterpart in commercial policy. The careful respect
extended for more than two centuries to the private property
and business interests of the ordinary citizen of a belligerent
country was altogether set aside. After 1914 both personal k
relations and commercial transactions, direct or indirect,
with enemy citizens became a criminal offence ; and for
the first time in the history of modern war enemy private
property was confiscated — a devastating blow at the
foundations of laissez-faire society and bourgeois civiliza¬
tion. International law, framed for days when munitions
and military stores were the only contraband and neutrals

27

G

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

traded freely with belligerents, was severely strained by
submarine warfare on the one side and by an “ all-in ”
blockade on the other. More important still, the change in
spirit extended from the methods of war to its purposes.
It soon became clear that the terms of peace, whichever side
' emerged victorious, would constitute an attack on the
standard of living of the defeated nation. The kind of
policy hitherto reserved for colonial wars against backward
peoples was for the first time being turned by European
powers against one another. War among socialized nations
inevitably became an instrument for securing economic
advantages for the victor and inflicting economic disabilities
on the defeated. Modern wars are fought to a finish and
^ the loser has no rights.

Nor would it be a legitimate diagnosis which treated
these symptoms as the passing aberration of nations at war.
In spite of the novel machinery provided by the League of
Nations, the period between the wars was marked by a
progressive and catastrophic deterioration in international
relations, broken only by a brief and uncertain respite
between 1924 and 1929. During these twenty years more
agreement between nations was recorded on paper, but less
substantial agreement attained in practice on major political
and economic issues, than at any recent period ; nor were
acts of aggression confined to those who became the aggressors
in the second world war. It would be erroneous to attribute
this deterioration to an unhappy accident or to the male¬
volence of a few men or a few nations ; evil men will always
be found to turn an unhealthy condition to account. Neither
the delegates of fifty or more nations who met at Geneva
nor those at home who instructed them were abnormally
quarrelsome or abnormally obstinate men. On the contrary
their passion for agreement was shown by the pertinacity
with which they signed meaningless protocols and resolu-

28

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

tions in order to maintain at least the forms of agreement
even where the substance was lacking. These men failed
to agree precisely because they represented nations in this
last and culminating phase of their evolution. In no period ‘
has there been more talk of cooperation between nations ;
in few periods less of the reality. As custodians of the living
standards, employment and amenities of their whole popu¬
lations, modern nations are, in virtue of their nature and
function, probably less capable than any other groups in
modern times of reaching agreement with one another.

The contrast between the comparatively law-abiding
habits of members of a national community and the law¬
breaking proclivities of nation members of the international
community has long been a truism ; and recent rapid decline
m the observance of international law is common ground
among all observers. The decline, like the decline in inter¬
national agreement, is easily explicable in terms of the
preceding analysis. The international law of the 17th and
18th centuries rested on the good faith of sovereigns.
What was at stake was the personal execution of personal
promises and obligations; and the sense of solidarity
among monarchs was sufficient to leave them with a
certain desire to keep their word to one another. In the
19th century solidarity between middle-class governments,
buttressed on respect for the rights of property, and rein¬
forced by fear of offending the international financial
authorities in London by any irregularity in the discharge
of obligations, still sufficed to keep the observance of inter¬
national law and agreements on a tolerably high level.
Paradoxically enough, it was Bismarck who first diagnosed
the symptoms of decline and ascribed it to the unreliability
of democracies. The diagnosis was too narrow. The
decline was due not to any particular form of government
or constitution, but to the socialized nation of which

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

Bismarck was one of the first promoters.

In the contemporary period the discharge of any major
international obligation depends on the will of the nation,
under whatever form of government, to honour it. An
18th-century monarch, operating with foreign mercenaries
or with pressed troops drawn from a social class which had
no voice in the management of affairs, could undertake to
make war in a given contingency with the reasonable assur¬
ance that the undertaking could be carried out. In the
19th century the rise of liberal democracy led Great Britain
to adopt an extremely cautious attitude towards commit¬
ments likely to involve anything more serious than a naval
demonstration; 1 and the American constitution has up to
the present virtually precluded the assumption by the United
States of an obligation to make war in any circumstances
whatever. In the modern age of the socialized nation and
of total war, a prudent government, whatever its constitu¬
tional powers, may well doubt its competence to give such
an undertaking — at any rate for more than a few days or
weeks ahead ; and this caution applies in particular to
unspecified obligations like those in the Covenant of the
League of Nations. Even the policing of conquered enemy
territory with conscript armies is an obligation which no
modern democracy can lightly assume for any prolonged
period.

Financial and economic commitments are equally suspect.
They may be accepted by governments in all good faith,
but without full understanding of their consequences ; and
should these eventually turn out to be detrimental to the
standard of living or level of employment in one of the

1 It is worth recalling the three classic pronouncements on the sub¬
ject : Castlereagh’s State Paper of May 5, 1820 ; Gladstone’s refusal in
the House of Commons on August 10, 1870, to treat the Belgian guarantee
treaty as a “ rigid ” obligation ; and Salisbury’s memorandum of May 29,
1901.

30

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

contracting countries, they will be dishonoured, as Great
Britain dishonoured her financial obligations to the United
States in 1933. 1 Nor can the general provisions of inter¬
national law be any longer observed by a modern nation if
their observance is found or believed to involve loss of
life or risk of defeat in time of war, or serious economic
loss in time of peace. The first obligation of the modern
national government, which no other obligation will be
allowed to override, is to its own people. It would be
absurd to lament this state of affairs as proof of increased
human wickedness ; it might equally well be regarded as
proof of a sharpened social conscience. But whatever view
we take of it, it would be folly to neglect the overwhelming
evidence that modern national governments cannot and will
not observe international treaties or rules of international
law when these become burdensome or dangerous to the
welfare or security of their own nation. Any so-called
international order built on contingent obligations assumed
by national governments is an affair of lath and plaster and
will crumble into dust as soon as pressure is placed upon it.
In peace, as in war, the international law of the age of
sovereigns is incompatible with the socialized nation. The
failure to create an international community of nations /
on the basis of international treaties and international law ■
marks the final bankruptcy of nationalism in the west.

1 The locus classicus on the subject is the statement made by the then
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, on the occasion of
the last full payment made by Great Britain under the American war
debt agreement : “ When we are told that contracts must be kept sacred,
and that we must on no account depart from the obligations which we
have undertaken, it must not be forgotten that we have other obligations
and responsibilities, obligations not only to our own countrymen but to
many millions of human beings throughout the world, whose happiness
or misery may depend upon how far the fulfilment of these obligations
is insisted upon on the one side and met on the other ” (House of Commons
Official Report , December 14, 1932, vol. 273, col. 354).

31

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

Meanwhile the extension of the geographical limits of
nationalism has meant not only a multiplication of the
number of nations, but a planting of nationalism in new and
unfamiliar soils. In western Europe nationalism had grown
in soils fertilized by the traditions of Christendom, of
natural law and of secular individualism. In German lands
the natural law and individualist traditions had struck only
light roots ; in Russia and other countries dominated by
the Orthodox Church they had been ignored or rejected.
Beyond Europe nationalism was now spreading to countries
where every Christian or European tradition was alien, and
where the illogical inhibitions which had for so long helped
to restrain European nationalism were unknown. Even in
Europe the ruthlessness of the first world war did much to
break down these inhibitions. The second world war was
started by a German power which scarcely paid even lip-
service either to the humanitarian tradition of individualism
or to the universalist tradition of natural law. Mass deporta¬
tions of civilians have been carried on all over Europe ; in
eastern Europe a large number of Jews have been deliberately
exterminated. Germany in several cases, and Japan in the
notorious attack on Pearl Harbour, took military action
without any previous declaration of war. International law
had come to seem almost irrelevant except perhaps when
it could be invoked to discredit an opponent. In the conduct
of the war there have been gradations of inhumanity and
ruthlessness, significantly corresponding to the degree in
which the respective theatres of war had participated in
the western European tradition. It has been fought with
greater ferocity in eastern than in western Europe, and with
most savagery of all in Asia and the Pacific. Neither Russia
nor Japan is a party to the Geneva convention on prisoners
of war ; and in Germany powerful and specifically Nazi
organs showed an increasing disregard for its obligations.

32

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

Yet it would be premature to claim for western Europe
any exemption even from the worst brutalities of inter¬
national strife. The collapse of military discipline and the
release of the conquered countries from four years of grind¬
ing oppression may yet lead to outbreaks which will match
in horror anything that has occurred in other parts of the
world. Nor is there much in declared national policies
which holds out hope of an ultimate pacification between
nations. Perhaps the apex of nationalism is reached when
it comes to be regarded as an enlightened policy to remove
men, women and children forcibly from their homes and
transfer them from place to place in order to create homo¬
geneous national units. Such plans were first canvassed in
the first flush of French revolutionary nationalism when the
Jacobins wished to deport the German-speaking population
of Alsace arid replace it with good Frenchmen. 1 Having
remained dormant for a hundred and twenty-five years,
they revived after the first world war. In January 1919
Venizelos was already proposing to tidy up national frontiers
in Asia Minor by “ a wholesale and mutual transfer of
population ” ; and about the same time Mackinder in his
famous essay in geopolitics suggested an exchange of the
German population of East Prussia for the Polish population
of Posen. 2 Minor transfers of population were subsequently
carried out between Turkey and Greece and Greece and
Bulgaria ; and these desperate expedients were unhappily
invested by the League of Nations with a spurious and
untimely air of high-mindedness, which was apparently not
dispersed even when Hitler drew liberally on the precedent
thus created. To-day annexations of territory are regarded

1 Authorities quoted in F. Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics ,

p. 86.

2 H. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (Pelican ed., 1944),
p. 121.

33

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

as more, not less, respectable if they are accompanied by
wholesale deportation of the existing population — not per¬
haps the most callous act recorded in history, but surely
the most explicit exaltation of the nation over the individual
as an end in itself, the mass sacrifice of human beings to
the idol of nationalism.

A Fourth Period?

The second world war thus marks the climax and the
catastrophe of the third period of modern international
relations, and leaves us on the threshold of a fourth period
whose character will probably shape the destinies of mankind
for a century to come. A first view suggests beyond doubt
that nationalism has never been stronger than at this
moment; and this view would lead to almost unqualified
pessimism about the future of international relations. Yet
closer analysis may reveal certain trends, not necessarily more
reassuring, but at any rate sufficiently different to suggest
that, whatever may be in store in the next few years, nations
and international relations are in process of undergoing
another subtle, not yet clearly definable, change.

- Paradoxically enough, certain features of the war itself
seem to mark a retrogression from the unqualified national¬
ism of the preceding period. The absence of any trace of
national exaltation or enthusiasm on the outbreak of the
second world war offered in all countries — and not least in
Germany itself — a striking contrast, which was much
remarked at the time, to the patriotic fervour of 1914.
National hatreds have lost their old spontaneous frankness,
and mask themselves delicately in ideological trappings.
In Germany the “ hymn of hate ” has not reappeared ; in
Great Britain what is called “ Vansittartism ” is the rather
shamefaced rationalization of a frank popular emotion of

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

the last war. Even the “ nationalism ” of Hitler became,
as time went on, less and less specifically German. It was
“ Aryan ” or “ Nordic ” ; and, driven first by the needs
of Grossraumwirtschaft and later by the demand for man¬
power, it began to discover these attributes in unexpected
places. Full and impartial information of the extent and
significance of “ quislingism ” in many countries can hardly
be expected for some time. It was perhaps not surprising
that it should have infected newly created national units
like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia ; but widespread “ col- v
laboration ” in the European country with the oldest and
most deeply rooted national tradition of all was a new and
startling development. Ten or twelve million foreign
workers in German factories, factories in occupied countries
working under high pressure on war production, substantial
contingents of a dozen foreign nationalities embodied in the
German armies, the extensive recruitment of foreigners not
only for the rank and file, but for the officer corps, of the
crack and highly trusted Waffen S.S. — these phenomena ^
are not wholly explicable in terms of brute force, and seem
difficult to reconcile with the picture of an age of unbridled
and militant nationalism. Political warfare, whose contribu¬
tion to Hitler’s victories in 1940 and 1941 can hardly be
denied, is at once a symptom and a cause of the decline of
nationalism. It succeeds only by finding rifts in national
solidarity ; it aims at widening and deepening those rifts.
Some plausibility must be accorded to a shrewd comment
penned at the peak of German power in Europe that “ Hitler’s
successes are basically rooted, not in his extreme nationalism,
but on the contrary in his shrewd judgment of the decay
of nationalism among his neighbours ”. x

These casual pointers might be dismissed as misleading
and exceptional if they did not seem to coincide with other

1 F. Borkenau, Socialism, National or International (1942), p. 165.

35

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

and broader indications. As the second world war draws
to a close, none of the main forces that have gone to make
the victory is nationalist in the older sense. Neither Great
Britain nor the British Commonwealth was ever finally
v^engulfed in the nationalist tide. The word “ British ” has
never acquired a strictly national connotation ; and there
is no name for the citizen of the entity officially known as
“ the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland ”, More significant are the non-national names
and multi-national status of the two new giants of world
politics — the United States of America and the Soviet
Union. It is the pride of the United States to have been
x/ the “ melting-pot ” of nations. In the American army for
the liberation of Europe men of German, Polish, Italian,
Croat and a dozen other national origins have marched side
by side; in the presidential election of 1940 one candidate
could speak with pride of his Dutch, the other of his German,
ancestry. In the Soviet Union a fluctuating attitude towards
the national issue has ended, under a Georgian leader, in the
emphatic promulgation of a comprehensive Soviet allegiance
which embraces in its overriding loyalty a multiplicity of
^ component nations.

The climate at the end of the second world war will
therefore be very different from that of 1919 when the dis¬
ruption of the Habsburg, Romanov and Turkish empires
under the banner of national self-determination was regarded
as a landmark of progress in international relations. This
may well turn out to have been the last triumph of the old
v fissiparous nationalism, of the ideology of the small nation
as the ultimate political and economic unit; for it was
one of those victories which prove self-destructive to the
victor. Political changes, whether evolutionary or revolu¬
tionary, rarely make themselves felt everywhere with equal
intensity or at the same rate of advance. In Asia the demand

36

THE CLIMAX OF NATIONALISM

for self-determination may still be heard, though perhaps
more faintly and less confidently than of late. In Europe
some of the small units of the past may continue for a few
generations longer to eke out a precariously independent
existence ; others may retain the shadow of independence
when the reality has disappeared. But their military and
economic insecurity has been demonstrated beyond recall.
They can survive only as an anomaly and an anachronism
in a world which has moved on to the other forms of organ¬
ization. But it remains to consider what these forms may
be, and whether there is any hope of making them more
tolerable to mankind than the forms of the recent past.

37

II

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

The contemporary challenge to the nation as the final and
acceptable unit of international organization comes on two
fronts — from within and from without, from the stand¬
point of idealism and from the standpoint of power. On
the plane of morality, it is under attack from those who
denounce its inherently totalitarian implications and pro¬
claim that any international authority worth the name must
interest itself in the rights and well-being not of nations
but of men and women. On the plane of power, it is being
sapped by modern technological developments which have
made the nation obsolescent as the unit of military and
economic organization and are rapidly concentrating effective
decision and control in the hands of great multi-national
units. The two attacks are not wholly independent of each
other ; for it is the failure of the nation-state to assure
military security or economic well-being which has in part
inspired the widespread questioning of the moral credentials
of nationalism. The future depends on the strength of
each, and on the nature of the balance which may be struck
between them. The challenge from within may be con¬
sidered first.

Individual and Nation

Every established historical institution acquires vested
interests and stakes out for itself claims which must from
time to time, and especially in periods of crisis, be sub¬
mitted anew to the test of first principles. The challenge
to nationalism does not exclude recognition of the place of

38

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

nations in an international order ; it clears the way for a
better understanding of what that place is. The nation is
not a “ natural ” or “ biological ” group — in the sense, for
example, of the family. It has no “ natural ” rights in the
sense that the individual can be said to have natural rights.
The nation is not a definable and clearly recognizable entity ;
nor is it universal. It is confined to certain periods of
history and to certain parts of the world. To-day in the
most nation-conscious of all epochs it would still prob¬
ably be fair to say that a large numerical majority of the
population of the world feel no allegiance to any nation.
Nevertheless the nation is something far more than a
voluntary association; and it embodies in itself, though
overlaid with conventional trappings, such natural and
universal elements as attachment to one’s native land and
speech and a sense of wider kinship than that of family.
The modern nation is a historical group. It has its place
and function in a wider society, and its claims cannot be
denied or ignored. But they can in no circumstances be
absolute, being governed by historical conditions of time
and place ; and they have to be considered at the present
moment primarily in relation to the needs both of security
and of economic well-being. What has to be challenged
and rejected is the claim of nationalism to make the nation
the sole rightful sovereign repository of political power and
the ultimate constituent unit of world organization— a claim
gradually asserted over the past three centuries, though not
finally conceded, and then only for the European continent,

till 1919.

It is a fundamental tenet of nationalism that any inter¬
national order must take the form of an association of
nations — that, just as the national community is com¬
posed of individual members, so the international community
must be made up of nation members. In the first period of

39

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

international relations reviewed in the previous chapter this
assumption had been natural enough ; the members of the
international community were individual sovereigns. In
the second period the personified nation had taken the place
of the person of the sovereign. The assumption of the
previous period was beginning to wear a little thin. But
the survival of monarchy in all the principal countries helped
to keep it in being. The concert of Europe was originally
conceived as a conclave of monarchs or their personal agents ;
and periodical meetings between sovereigns continued to be
a significant part of its machinery. In the third period even
this myth of an international conclave of rulers was dead,
though one faint attempt was made to revive it in a demo¬
cratic guise through the publicity given to the largely
imaginary personal character of relations between Austen
Chamberlain, Briand and Stresemann. But the myth had
by this time obtained so strong a hold that the substitution
of corporate nation for individual ruler was for the most
part quite unconscious. Few people in the period between
the two wars doubted that the international community
must be composed of nations or were specifically aware that
this enormous assumption was being made.

The supposed analogy between a national community of
individuals and an international community of nations,
which was the stock-in-trade of much international oratory
between the two wars, requires us to believe that the members
of the international community, like the individuals com¬
posing a national community, are known, recognizable and
comparable entities. This assumption is open to question.
The sovereigns who formed the international community
of the 17th and 18th centuries were members in virtue of
their power; the effective test was that of might. The
same held good of the Great Powers forming the 19th-
century concert of Europe. But the European settlement

40

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

of 1919 was based on the admission of two new and revolu¬
tionary claims —■ the claim of racial and linguistic groups
to political independence and statehood in virtue of their
quality as nations, and the claim of all independent states
to effective membership of the international community.
Membership of the international community thus became
ostensibly a matter not of might but of right. In theory
this seemed to mark an immense progress. In practice it
proved impossible to discover any distinguishing marks by
which the right of a self-styled nation to statehood could be
objectively determined, or to exclude either the criterion of
might or the criterion of political expediency, so that member¬
ship of the international community became itself a subject
of uncertainty and dispute. Once it was proclaimed that
nations, like individual human beings, were independent
and self-determined entities, the question inevitably arose,
What nations ? And to this question there was no deter¬
minate answer.

The difficulty became far graver when political thinkers,
pursuing the analogy of the individual, began to ascribe to
nations natural rights such as freedom and equality. The
19th century recognized the freedom of nations as a corollary
of democracy ; and few thinkers either in the 19th century
or between the two wars appear to have enquired into its
precise meaning or validity. Yet freedom is a prerogative
of the individual man and woman : it is only by a con¬
ventional metaphor, which easily becomes a cliche and is
sometimes barely distinguishable from the Hitlerian exalta¬
tion of the nation as an object of worship and an end in
itself, that freedom is attributed to nations. Freedom for
a nation has meaning in so far as it is demanded by the
men and women who make up the nation and felt by them
as essential to their freedom. But national freedom which
opens the way, as it did in some countries between the two

4i

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

wars, for the consistent denial of elementary rights and
liberties to large sections of the nation is little better than a
contradiction in terms. It is well known that a good many
people in central Europe after 1919 regretted the national
freedom which had liberated them from the Habsburg
empire. The assumption that ordinary men and women
gladly accept loss of their means of livelihood or of their
personal liberties as the price of the freedom of their nation
will be readily made only by those who have not suffered the
experience.

The same conclusion is equally valid for another right
conventionally coupled with freedom—the right of equality.
It is a commonplace that no political community can be
established among individuals divided by conspicuous, sig¬
nificant and irremediable inequalities. Within the political
unit this difficulty has usually been solved by including in
the effective community only members of the most powerful
group — white men, landowners, propertied classes and so
forth — between whom some measure of equality exists ;
internationally this was the solution which in the 19th
century gave some reality to an international community of
Great Powers. This exclusive solution is no longer accept¬
able. But its rejection confronts the world with the impos¬
sible task of creating an international community out of
units so fantastically disparate (leaving out of account the
three predominant powers) as China and Albania, Norway
and Brazil. 1 The reference in the draft Charter of the
United Nations prepared at Dumbarton Oaks to “ the

1 For a discussion of the absence of equality as a fundamental flaw in
the international community see E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis
(1939), PP- 206-10. The conclusion there recorded is that “ the constant
intrusion, or potential intrusion, of power renders almost meaningless
any conception of equality between members of the international com¬
munity At that time I still believed in the possibility of achieving a
community of nations : it now seems to me clear that this belief must be
abandoned.

42

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

sovereign equality of all peace-loving states ” must be
regarded as evidence either of a high degree of political
simplicity or of a scarcely less discouraging readiness to
pander to popular superstition. Like the right of freedom*
the right of equality, however interpreted and conditioned,
is one that can be attributed only to individuals, not to
nations. What we are concerned to bring about is not the
putting of Albania on an equal footing with China and
Brazil, but the putting of the individual Albanian on an
equal footing, in respect of personal rights and opportunities,
with the individual Chinese or the individual Brazilian.
The equality of nations is not only unattainable, but is
neither equitable nor desirable. The equality of individual
men and women is not indeed wholly attainable ; but it is
an ideal which, at any rate in some of its connotations,
can be accepted as a constant aim of human endeavour.

The challenge to the socialized nationalism of our third
period thus issues in a protest against an international order
which accepts as its basis the submersion of the rights of the
individual in the rights of the nation. The international
order of the future cannot be a society of free and equal nations
bound together by a constitutional system of mutual rights
and obligations. The freedom and equality which the makers
of the coming peace must seek to establish is not a freedom
and equality of nations, but a freedom and equality which
will express themselves in the daily lives of men and women.
It would not be difficult to detect, even before the outbreak
of the second world war, symptoms of a growing conscious¬
ness of this need. The so-called “ technical ” organs of the
League of Nations, including the International Labour
Organization, imperfect though they were, displayed a far
greater vitality than the political organs ; and it is significant
that they were concerned with matters directly affecting the
welfare of individuals rather than the security of nations.

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

A similar evolution may perhaps rescue international law
from the disarray into which it has fallen. A recent critic
has distinguished “ two strains ” in modern international
law :

One has been concerned with the relations between states as
such . . . the other has used international law for promoting and
protecting, through international cooperation and institutions,
the interests and welfare of the individual. 1

The driving force behind any future international order
must be a belief, however expressed, in the value of indi¬
vidual human beings irrespective of national affinities or
allegiance and in a common and mutual obligation to pro¬
mote their well-being.

On the other hand the demonstrable bankruptcy of
nationalism, political and economic, must not be used to
justify a plunge into the visionary solution of a supreme
world directorate. The plea for the emancipation of the
individual must not be interpreted as a plea for a sentimental
and empty universalism. The sense of the unity of mankind,
sufficient to support the common affirmation of certain
universal principles and purposes, is not yet strong enough,
according to all available evidence, to sustain an organization
exercising a sovereign and universal authority. Popular
^"slogans like Wendell Willkie’s “ one world ” are mislead¬
ing. To reduce the time of transit between two capitals
from weeks to days, or from days to hours, provides no
assurance, at any rate in the short run, of a growth of mutual
understanding and united action. Notwithstanding the vast
improvement in communications, indeed, the world may be
less “ one ” to-day than it was in the 19th century when
Great Britain enjoyed a greater ascendancy than had been

1 H. Lauterpacht, The Law of Nations , the Law of Nature and the
Rights of Man (Grotius Society, 1944), p. 27.

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

exercised from any single centre since the heyday of the
Roman Empire. The contemporary world gravitates towards
several competing centres of power ; and the very com¬
plexity of modern life makes for division. The lure of
universality has had since 1919 a dangerous fascination for
promoters of international order. The universality of any
world organization almost inevitably tends to weaken its
appeal to particular loyalties and particular interests. It was
probably a weakness of the League of Nations that its commit¬
ments were general and anonymous : it imposed the same
obligations on Albania as on Great Britain, and the same
obligation on both to defend the independence of Belgium
against Germany and that of Panama against the United
States. These generalities could be justified in terms of
pure reason but not translated into terms of concrete policy,
so that the whole structure remained abstract and unreal.
The history of the League of Nations, beginning with the
insertion in the Covenant of the original Monroe Doctrine
reservation, bears witness to the persistence of attempts to
escape from a theoretical and ineffective universalism into
a practical and workable regionalism. A world organization
may be a necessary convenience as well as a valuable symbol.
But the intermediate unit is more likely to be the operative
factor in the transition from nationalism to internationalism.

The same caution must be applied to schemes of world¬
wide economic organization. The protest against national¬
ism. will certainly not find expression in a return to the
aristocratic cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment or to the
laissez-faire individualism of the 19th century. The social¬
ized nation of our third period cannot be spirited out of
existence. The mercantilism which stood for “ wealth for
the nation, but wealth from which the majority of the nation
must be excluded ” is dead. But the laissez-faire individual¬
ism which purported to interpose no effective economic

45

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

unit between the individual at one end of the scale and the
whole world at the other is equally gone beyond recall. The
pursuit of “ free competition ”, of an economic principle
of all against all, inevitably tends to create those extreme
inequalities and forms of exploitation which offend the social
conscience and drive the less privileged to measures of self-
defence, which in turn provoke corresponding counter¬
measures. By the end of the 19th century this process
had led, as it was bound to lead, to the progressive develop¬
ment of combination at every level and in every part of the
system, culminating after 1914 in the most powerful com¬
bination yet achieved — the modern socialized nation. Thus
measures of national self-sufficiency and economic national¬
ism which seem to negate free competition are in another
aspect its natural consequence. But a further stage has now
been reached. What was created by a cumulative process
of combination between individuals to protect themselves
against the devastating consequences of unfettered economic
individualism has become in its turn a threat to the security
and well-being of the individual, and is itself subject to a
new challenge and new process of change.

Yet it is abundantly clear that this change cannot consist
in any mere reversal of existing trends. The explicit or
implicit undertone of much current discussion encourages
the belief that the whole course of economic evolution in
the 20th century is an error to be retrieved by returning
to the universalism of an idealized past. Such a view, which
inspired a long series of abortive international conferences
from Brussels in 1920 to Bretton Woods in 1944, is both
false and sterile. The forces which produced the socialized
nation are still operative ; nor will its demands be abated.
Indeed the fact that these demands can no longer be met
within the national unit, and that the same forces are now
at work to break its bounds, is perhaps the best hope for

46

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

the development of an international system in our fourth
period. The just criticism of the economic nationalism
of the period between the two wars should be directed not
so much against the methods it has used —though some
of them were merely restrictive and aggressive, others were
the intelligent and necessary instruments of a first, faltering
attempt to plan international trade — as against the narrow¬
ness and inappropriateness of the geographical limits within
which these methods were employed. It was not that inter¬
mediate units of economic organization were not required,
but that nations had ceased to be convenient, or even
tolerable, units for this purpose. The answer to the socially
and internationally disruptive tendencies inherent in the
juxtaposition of a multitude of planned national economies
is not an abandonment of planning, but a reinforcement of
national by multi-national and international planning.

Recognition of the inadequacy of the national unit on
the one hand and of a single comprehensive world unit on
the other leads to the question of the shape and size of the
requisite intermediate units of organization. Ideally this
should beyond question be determined by the end in view.
Different units are appropriate for different purposes — an
international authority for rail or road transport will not
cover the same area as an international authority for air
transport. Different units are appropriate for the same
purpose at different periods — one of the cardinal inter¬
national problems of to-day is that what might have been
workable economic or military units in the 18th and 19th
centuries have become impracticable in the light of modern
conditions of industrial production or military technique.
Hence the scope and constitution of different authorities
must, on severely practical grounds, be determined accord¬
ing to the purposes which they are required to serve, on
the principle of what has come to be called “ functional ”

47

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

instead of national organization. Even before 1914 there
were, among other examples, two international commissions
controlling navigation on different sectors of the Danube,
an international railway union for Europe, and a Latin
mo netary union. Between the two wars the technical organs
oF the League of Nations, though sometimes hampered by
a fictitious universalism, and sometimes by the absence for
irrelevant political reasons of members who could have con¬
tributed effectively to their work, did good service ; in the
nineteen-thirties international commodity controls became
for the first time a salient feature in world economic organ¬
ization. During the second world war a vast number of
new functional international organizations have been created.
Some of them fulfil purposes which will end with the war ;
others like those which control and allocate essential raw
materials, food and shipping may well be carried on into
the period of peace. Among the most remarkable of all
these creations has been the Middle East Supply Centre
which, starting as a clearing-house for the scanty supplies
available for the civilian populations of the Middle East
in the war crisis of 1940-41, has come to play a vital role
in developing the economic life of some fourteen countries.
Bodies like Unrra and the Food and Agriculture Organiza¬
tion established by the Hot Springs conference of 1943,
which look forward to the period after hostilities, have been
conceived on a universal basis. Nevertheless it is already
clear that they will be effective only in so far as they create
separate organs for specific purposes in different areas.

These organizations have certain common qualities which
explain both their value and the resistance likely to be
encountered by them. In the first place, they are inter¬
national in the sense that, while they operate on national
territories with the tacit or explicit consent of the national
governments concerned, they are not organs of these govern-

48

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

ments and do not formally derive authority from them.
Secondly, they are international not in the sense that they
exercise any authority over national governments, but in
the sense that they operate in a number of countries without
regard to the divisions and distinctions between them.
Thirdly , the nature of their authority is “ non-political ” in
that it does not ostensibly affect the sovereign powers vested
in the national governments. In all these respects they
constitute a striking parallel with the financial and economic
system of the 19th century, operated all over the world by
the organs of an anonymous authority having no precisely
defined status, but enjoying in virtue of its “ non-political ”
services and its prestige the toleration and approval of the
national governments. Nor should another parallel be
overlooked. It would be simple to-day — as it would have
been simple in the 19th century if anyone had thought it
worth while — to point to the fictitious elements in the
separation of non-political from political authority, and to
demonstrate that political power, however disguised and
diffused, is a presupposition that lies behind any authority,
however non-political in name. Nevertheless the world
to-day, like the world of the 19th century, may have to put
up with a certain salutary make-believe if it can find no
way of consciously and deliberately effecting an international
separation of powers. In the national community the con¬
centration of all authority in a single central organ means an
intolerable and unmitigated totalitarianism: local loyalties,
as well as loyalties to institutions, professions and groups
must find their place in any healthy society. The inter¬
national community if it is to flourish must admit something
of the same multiplicity of authorities and diversity of
loyalties.

The view of an eventual world union to which the
application of these principles would lead has been set forth

49

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

by a recent American writer in terms which cannot be
bettered :

Let us not, then, irritate national egoism or offend the pride
of sovereignty by inaugurating the union with flourish of trumpets,
impressive ceremonies, and pledges given and taken for all future
time. All of the words, resolutions, pledges, binding treaties,
and solemn covenants that might conceivably induce the nations
of the world to cooperate for the creation of a new and better
world were uttered after the last war. What is needed is some¬
thing less edifying and more prosaic, something less noisy but
more effective. The contemplated union, league, federation,
or whatever it is to be, will have a better chance of success if it
begins, so to speak, “ unbeknownst to itself ”, if it begins with¬
out declaring, or even professing to know, what nations may
ultimately belong to it, or what the precise rights and obliga¬
tions of its members may turn out to be. It will have a better
chance of success, in short, if it begins with the drafting of
specific agreements between a few or many nations for dealing
with specific problems, and the creation of whatever international
commissions, boards, agencies, may seem best suited to dealing
with the specific problem in hand. . . . Such a union would be
less in the nature of a created mechanism than a developing
organism. It would at any time be what it could be effectively
used for doing, and would ultimately become, in form and pro¬
cedure, what seemed best suited to accomplishing the ends
desired — the promotion of the common interests of its members
and the preservation of amity and peace among them. In so far
as such a union succeeded in accomplishing these ends, it would
imperceptibly acquire “ power ”, and as it acquired power,
nationalism would no doubt be imperceptibly abated and the
independence of sovereign states imperceptibly curbed. 1

It must, however, be admitted that this idealistic view
of a functional internationalism, based on the conception of
international order as association not between nations as
1 Carl Becker, How New Will the Better World Be ? (1944), pp. 241-3.

50

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

such but between people and groups of different nations,
and realized through an indefinite number of organizations
cutting across national divisions and exercising authority for
specific and limited purposes over individuals and functional
groups, would be utopian if it failed to take account from
the outset of the unsolved issue of power. Some organ¬
izations of recognized general utility like the International
Postal Union or the Central Opium Board may indeed
achieve a position almost independent of the distribution of
power. But these will not by themselves carry us far. The
social and economic system of the 19th century depended
on the unspoken premise of British supremacy. The inter¬
national ‘agencies of the second world war were made
effective by the joint will and combined power of the
principal United Nations. Within what framework of power
can a modern international order with its multiplicity of
agencies operate ? Where will the ultimate decisions be
taken that establish or reject its authority ? The dream of
an international proletarian revolution has faded ; and while
prophecy may be hazardous, there are few signs at present
of any new international group or combination of power
splitting national units from within. On the other hand
modern developments of power are, though from another
standpoint, equally inimical to nationalism in the old sense.
These developments, which must now be examined, will
go far to determine the shape of the new international order.

Power in the International Order

Few positive forecasts about the shape of the world after
the war can be made with any confidence. But two
negative predictions may claim some degree of certainty.
We shall not again see a Europe of twenty, and a world of
more than sixty, “ independent sovereign states ”, using the

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

term in its hitherto accepted sense ; nor shall we see in our
time a single world authority as the final repository of power,
political and economic, exercising supreme control over the
affairs and destinies of mankind. The prospect ahead is
a compromise — which, like other compromises, may in
the event make either the best or the worst of both worlds
— between the past confusion of a vast number of nations,
great and small, jostling one another on a footing of formal
independence and equality, and the well-knit world authority
which may or may not be attainable in the future.

If these predictions are realized, the world will have to
accommodate itself to the emergence of a few great multi¬
national units in which power will be mainly concentrated.
Culturally, these units may best be called civilizations :
there are distinctively British, American, Russian and
Chinese civilizations, none of which stops short at national
boundaries in the old sense. Economically, the term
Grossraum invented by German geo-politicians seems the
most appropriate. The Soviet Union is pre-eminently a
Grossraum , the American continents are the potential Gross -
raum of the United States, though the term is less convenient
as applied to the British Commonwealth of Nations or the
sterling area which are oceanic rather than continental
agglomerations. Militarily, the old and useful term 44 zone
of influence ” has been discredited and may well have
become too weak to express the degree of strategic integra¬
tion required ; but the United States has coined the con¬
venient phrase 4 4 hemisphere defence ” to cover the zone
of influence defined by the Monroe Doctrine. These
classifications and divisions are as yet ill-defined. It is
difficult to say whether there is a European civilization and
a European Grossraum or merely a number of separate'and
conflicting units. Eastern Asia, which Japan once dreamed
of organizing as a Grossraum under the strange-sounding

• THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

title of the “ co-prosperity sphere ”, remains fluid. As a
civilization China is a closely knit and coherent unit; eco¬
nomically she is weak and depressed ; militarily her power
is still negligible. India in one sense is a multi-national
civilization, in another sense a part of the British unit: her
political thought, in particular, is a baffling amalgam of
traditional Indian and modern English. In the western
hemisphere an older Iberian civilization, still struggling to
maintain its ties with Europe, flourishes within the orbit of
the modern North American civilization which was itself
originally an offshoot from the British unit.

The fact that these actual or prospective agglomerations
of power have not yet fully crystallized in such a way as to
'divide the world between them in clearly defined regional
groups provides perhaps the best hope for the future. There
would be little cause for congratulation in a division of the
world into a small number of large multi-national units exer¬
cising effective control over vast territories and practising
in competition and conflict with one another a new imperial¬
ism which would be simply the old nationalism writ large
and would almost certainly' pave the way for more titanic
and more devastating wars. But international security can
ultimately be provided — as well as threatened — only by
those who have power, that is to say, for the main part by
units having the status, in the old-fashioned but expressive
phrase, of “ Great Powers ”. These are a small and perhaps
diminishing number ; and it is conceivable that, in a world
whose social well-being and economic smooth working were
adequately promoted by appropriate international organ¬
ization, the experience of the 19th century might repeat
itself and no special institution be required for the main-
tenanpe of peace and security, which could be settled by
i^ak tioc discussion between the Great Powers from time to
time. Two considerations, however, militate against such

53

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

a solution. In the first place, international security in the
modern world is likely to demand the maintenance of some
standing international forces made up of different national
units ; and such a system calls for an institutional frame¬
work. Secondly, regulation is required of the relations of
great and small nations in a system of pooled security ;
common membership in a world organization is the right
and convenient way of solving a problem which has been
made more acute by historical jealousies than by its intrinsic
difficulties.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the convention was well
established that issues of war and peace, that is to say, the
issues on which security turns, were discussed and decided
exclusively by Great Powers. This exclusiveness was not
normally resented by the smaller nations ; for the counter¬
part was that, when Great Powers went to war, smaller
nations were allowed to remain, subject to the observance
of certain rules, in a condition of comfortable neutrality.
By 1914 the developments of military technique and eco¬
nomic power had made this immunity of small nations
precarious; and recognition of the changed situation
inspired in most of them (Switzerland being a striking
exception) a desire to make their voice heard in future on
issues of peace and war. In the period between the two
wars two alternatives seemed open to small countries : to
revert to the old policy of unconditional neutrality, and to
adhere to the new policy of “ collective security ”, which
meant coming to the aid of an attacked country against its
attacker. 1 Unfortunately one alternative was as impracti¬
cable as the other. Unconditional neutrality was no longer
available : the punctilious anxiety with which Holland and

1 The difficulties of applying the criterion of “ aggression” need not
be discussed here, since they did not arise in 1939 : even when this
additional hurdle had not to be faced, the system proved unworkable.

54

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

Belgium, Norway and Denmark, Yugoslavia and Greece
proclaimed their complete unconcern in the war did not
save them from being invaded and occupied. On the other
hand collective security was equally unworkable : not a
single small country in Europe entered the war until it was
itself attacked, not through any lack of wisdom or courage,
but because any such step would have been both suicidal
and completely purposeless. Small nations could no longer
acquire security at the price of neutrality; nor could they
make any serious contribution to a system of security based
on national armed forces taking independent action to be
decided on when war actually breaks out. 1

The two ways out offered to the smaller countries
between the two wars — unconditional neutrality and col¬
lective security — have thus both been closed ; 2 and their
survival as independent entities seems incompatible with the
maintenance by all nations of wholly independent armed
forces which refuse cooperation with those of other powers
until a breach of the peace actually occurs. Fortunately the
present war, which has thrown this dilemma into high relief
and made it a burning issue, also provides the material for
a solution. Among the armed forces of the United Nations
the process of “ mixing up ” has been carried far; and on
almost every front units of the smaller nations are fighting
with those of the three major powers under a common
command. In the same way such units may participate
with those of Russia, Britain and the United States in the
occupation of Germany. Whether this happens or not, the
lines of communication of the. occupying forces will pass

1 The argument in this paragraph has been developed at greater
length in E. H. Carr, Conditions of Peace, pp. 50-60.

2 The statement may not be universally valid outside Europe ; and
in Europe itself the conventional “ no man’s land ” of international strife,
Switzerland, may remain immune. The prospects of safe neutrality for
other neutrals of the second world war seem less encouraging.

55

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

through several countries ; and the principle of leased bases
initiated during the war can be profitably continued after
it. It is through such haphazard and empirical expedients,
rather than through any calculated plan of organization,
that we may hope to achieve some rough approximation to
the conception of international power. Only in some such
way can the smaller nations be enabled to make any effective
contribution to a system of international security and to
maintain their independence by willingly merging some of
its attributes into the common pool. 1

Such a solution provides the only acceptable answer to
the vexed question of national self-determination. As we
have seen, the assertion of an alleged right of national
self-determination was a development of the 19th century.
The peace treaties of 1919 were the first large-scale attempt
to readjust international frontiers on a principle independent
of that of power. The attempt was in some respects faulty.
The principle was not always equitably and impartially
applied ; it was pushed to an extreme through the creation
or recognition of impracticably small units ; and the assump¬
tion was too easily made that language was a test of national
allegiance. But recent reactions against national self-deter-

1 An American writer has recently defined the necessary cooperation
of large and small nations for common security in terms of the “ good
neighbour ” policy : “ The good neighbour relationship is one in which
small states and a great one in the same area of strategic security become
allies in peace and in war. The great state provides protection which —
the technology of modern war being what it is — no small state can
provide for itself. The small state reciprocates : it provides strategic
facilities needed for the common defence, and it uses its own sovereign
powers to protect its great neighbour against infiltration, intrigue and
espionage. . . . Small nations . . . can now assure their rights only by
a general acceptance of the duties of the good neighbour policy. We
must not, as many do, identify the rights of small nations with their right
to have an * independent * foreign policy, that is to say one which mani¬
pulates the balance of power among the great states ” (W. Lippmann„
U.S. War Aims , p. 84).

56

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

mination as a valid principle have been due not to these inci¬
dental shortcomings, but to the perception of its apparently
radical incompatibility with security. Self-determination
raised the issue of military security in the acute form of
strategic frontiers. If frontiers were drawn so far as possible
to meet the wishes of the populations concerned, they would
fail to take account of strategic requirements ; if they met
strategic requirements, they would ignore the wishes of the
inhabitants. The peace-makers of 1919 took on the whole
a low view of strategic necessities. The demilitarization of
the Rhineland was an awkward compromise, reluctantly
adopted to appease French insistence. But the wheel has
now come full circle. A healthy reaction in favour of the
requirements of military security has provoked a corre¬
spondingly strong reaction agjdnst the principle of self-
determination ; and notwithstanding its somewhat guarded
reaffirmation in the Atlantic Charter, many demands have
been heard for its abandonment as the basis of any future
territorial settlement. It is true that these specific demands
have related mainly to enemy territory. But once the
principle were accepted that military considerations were
the primary factor in the determination of frontiers, its
application could hardly in the long run be restricted to
particular cases.

Two powerful arguments seem decisive against such a
principle. The first is that there is no such thing as a
strategic frontier valid as a permanent bulwark of defence.
In 1919 the Rhine was regarded as a strategic frontier of the
highest order ; in the present war, owing to the use of
airborne troops and engineering skill, even the greatest rivers
have not proved very formidable obstacles ; twenty years
hence a river frontier may be strategically worthless. The
developments of military technique, and especially of air
power, are now so bewilderingly rapid that the impregnable

57

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

strategic frontier of to-day, obtained perhaps by flouting
the known wishes of millions of people, is only too likely
to prove the Maginot Line of to-morrow. The next war,
if it is fought at all, will probably be fought in the main
with airborne armies and with projectiles having a range of
several hundred miles. The whole conception of strategic
frontiers may, indeed, be obsolescent; at any rate they can
no longer be regarded as a main bulwark of security. The
second argument is of a different kind, but not less potent.
Self-determination, though it cannot be applied in the
meticulous detail aimed at by the peace-makers of 1919, is
a principle of good government. Small units can enjoy it
only within narrow limits. Larger units cannot enjoy it
absolutely and unconditionally ; for interdependence is now
universal. But the limitations placed on it must be such
as appeal to reason and common sense. A peace settlement
which transferred tens of millions of people to foreign
allegiance — or, worse still, deported them from their homes
— in the illusory quest for strategic frontiers might be
imposed in the heat of emotion at the end of a bitter and
devastating war; but it would not be upheld in cold blood
even by the generation that had fought the war, and still
less by generations to come. Such a settlement would thus
in the long run prove fatal to the security which it sought
to achieve. - ^

/ The issue from this dilemma can be found only through \
/ a solution which seeks to divorce international security and j
, the power to maintain it from frontiers and the national /
\overeignty which they represent. Any international force^
which could not operate freely across national frontiers
would be doomed to inaction. Any system of joint bases
in different parts of the world, in which units of different
nations may participate, will call for a right of passage
across frontiers. If then we can envisage an international

58

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

order in which frontiers lose their military significance, a
^dv escIhT from the dilemma of self-determination is
offered * for in the drawing up of national administrative
frontiers there will be no case for overriding the w ' she * ° f
the population, where these are clearly known and defined,
on so-called security grounds. Qnce
of international security is established, the full P Y
'be given to these wishes in determining the number,
functions and boundaries of the national units exercising

“ThtySeVovWes the only Arable interpretation
whkh can be placed in practice on the right of nahonal
self-determination. National self-deternunatron can tardly
hone to survive so long as it is interpreted m a way which
nullifies security and limits economic well-being and eco¬
nomic opportunity. But the complexity of human relations
fortunately makes it natural and imperative for human beings
To combine for various purposes in a vanety of group o

varying size and comprehensiveness; and this leave
abundant scope for the development of that community
of national thought and feeling, of political
tradition, which is the constructive side of nationalism.
The existence of multi-national units of mihtary and eco-
nomic organization does not stand m the way of the main-
tenance or indeed of the further extension, of national
administrative and cultural units, thus encouraging a system
of overlapping and interlocking loyalties which is in the last
resort the sole alternative to sheer totalitarianism.

If therefore, we seek to define the forms of power m
the new international order, the picture we obtain is one
of an international general staff, or series of ‘ nte ^ t10 ^
general staffs for different regions, operating under the
general direction of a world security organization with
national or joint forces in occupation of strategic bases

E

59

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

iLtZ couTd'f V 068 W , ith ° Ut Sayin § that such ^ organ-

“ to ° n l y - f thC thfee Great P ™ers were
in agreement to give it their approval and sunnort Tt

rr P d no * in z « p™;

between the Great Powers themselves. But it is sheer
lusion to suppose that any institution or organization

«r" r ,»T£ls n T' d “ d pta “ d '

bv the Gret t h b ° f ^ 00peratlon and common action
by the Great Powers would undoubtedly tend to remove a

predisposing cause of war between them. It is obvious too

that such an organization would not be free from the daneer
o ab„,e. Of powe , Bu , jt is of the essence m of th ' d “S-

ft ™ nMUre and ^Parable fronf it that

alternative 10^^° tL uftimMe

% **. r

imnartia Htv « err i ectlvel y and with reasonable

s™frf„ ’ T y ’ that ° rder k ■“Stains shall

heW It? ? r- P ro, «t S widely diffused social well-

-KSSwastan

Principles and Purposes

Ilithert 0 the discussion has turned on what may be called
the mechamcs of international power. But the exercise of
authority can never be an end in itself. The settlement of
.9.9 was strong influenced by the I9th . cen ^ ,< ^

world or ganiz ation caniurt ^‘ ' • ™e

War Aims , p. 161). placemen (W. Lippmann, U.S 9

60

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

of the laissez-faire state. Those reared in this tradition were
likely to take a limited and negative view of the functions
of an international organization. Like the state itself,
international authority was thought of primarily as some¬
thing that prevented unnecessary violence and safeguarded
the rights of property — a policeman wielding a truncheon
in defence of international law and order ; its social and
economic functions were subsidiary and optional. To-day
the broader view of freedom involved in its extension from
the political to the social and economic sphere calls also for a
more positive and constructive view of international author¬
ity, The substitution of the “ service state ” for the “ night-
watchman state ” means that, internationally also, the
truncheon must be reinforced by the social agency and
subordinated to it. The belief apparently held in some
influential quarters that security can be maintained, and
war averted, through a perpetual alliance for defence against
future aggression from Germany or Japan (who would in
the meanwhile, according to most proponents of this view,
have been reduced to complete impotence) does not with¬
stand serious examination. Any international order which
seeks to conjure the spectre of war and win the allegiance
of mankind will have in future to set before it some higher
ideal than orderly stagnation. Its primary function will
have to be not to maintain the international status quo or
to defend the rights of nations, but to seek by active policies
to improve the conditions of life of ordinary men and women
in all countries. No international organization of power,
whether* it be called a “ world security organization ” or an
“ international police force ” or by any other name, will
prove durable unless it is felt to .rest on certain common
principles, and to pursue certain common purposes, worthy
to command the assent and loyalty of men and women
throughout the world.

61

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

No thinking man will seek to deny or underestimate the
dangers that threaten a world whose fortunes are inevitably
dominated by a diminishing number of increasingly power¬
ful units — dangers inherent both in the marked diverg¬
ences of tradition and outlook and of standards of living
and in the potential clashes of interest between them. If,
however, we hope — as we rightly do and can hope — to
avert these dangers, we must neither seek merely to stabilize
an existing situation by artificial measures of security, nor
look into the past for our remedies. Taking into account
the nature of these great units of power, we must enquire
not so much what potential conflicts divide them, but what
principles and what purposes they can develop in common.
We must seek to build our international order on principles
and on purposes which, because they conform to the prin¬
ciples and purposes of the leading powers, will be acceptable
to them, and, because they promote the well-being and
minister to the aspirations of men and women everywhere,
can become the focus of wider loyalties. It is neither necessary
nor in the first instance possible that these loyalties should
in all cases be world-wide. Organizations for different
purposes can be built up on different international groupings
whose scope will vary with the functions they perform ; and
this variety and multiplicity is one of the most important
safeguards against the accumulation of exclusive powers and
exclusive loyalties under the control of the great multi¬
national units. But common principles and common pur¬
poses must be established and resolutely pursued ; for these
alone can afford the underlying basis of unity which is a
condition of international peace.

A modern Spanish writer has defined a nation as “an
invitation issued by one group of men to other human
groups to carry out some enterprise in common ”, and has
added that contemporary nationalism has failed because it

62

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

has become “ a pretext to escape from the necessity of
inventing something new, some great enterprise
other words, because it has become an end in itself An
international order which exists merely toj defend itself and
is unmoved by the ambition to undertake “ some enterprise
in common” will quickly lose all realty and forfeit all
respect Nor is there serious doubt what the great
enterprise ” of to-day should be. It cannot be defined in
constitutional terms or expressed m constitutional forms,
for it is on the issue of constitutional forms that the nations
are most divided. Any project which demands unity on
“ democratic ” or on “ communist ” lines (to use words
both of which have lost something of their pristine clan y
of definition) is doomed to failure. Not only is the rivalry
between them strong, but there are large areas of the world,
including most of Asia and much of Latin America, whic
seem as far removed from one as from the other, ihat
government should be “ popular ” and should be broadly
based on the consent of the governed is anj accepted principle.
But there is no general acceptance — perhaps less to-day
than fifty years ago — of the claim of political democracy
to provide by itself the only and self-sufficient expression
of that consent. Nor are political rights and political prin¬
ciples the dominant preoccupation of the contemporary
world. The statement often, and justly, made that t e
future of democracy depends on its ability to solve the
problem of full employment illustrated the subordination
of political to social and economic ends in the modern wor *
Internationalism, like nationalism, must become social. .

The main unifying purpose in the contemporary world,
or in those parts of it where effective power resides, is the
common ideal of social justice latent in such slogans as the

i Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (English trans., 1932),
PP. 183, 107.

63

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

common man ”, “ the worker and the peasant ”, “ the sub-
merged tenth ” or “ the minimum standard of living
Ill-defined though it is, and susceptible of innumerable
ivergencies of interpretation and application, social justice
has assumed m the 20th century the international significance
attaching m the previous century to the equally vague but
cquaily powerful concepts of political liberty and political
rights. Whereas, however, the political ideals of the 10th
century, being attainable by and through the nation,
strengthened its political authority and prestige, the national
unit seems at best irrelevant to contemporary ideals of
social justice and at worst recalcitrant to them. If we seek
to analyse what is meant to-day by social justice, we shall
find it composed of three main elements — equality of
opportunity, “freedom from want” and, as the dynamic
actor lending reality to both the other elements, “full
employment ”.

The equality of opportunity which social justice demands
is an equality between human beings. It is not merely
independent of the demand for equality between nations
which wrought havoc and confusion between the two wars
but may be irreconcilable with it; and it can be realized
only m a world which rejects the principle of discrimination
on grounds of nationality. It would be utopian to suppose
that the rejection of the principle would everywhere and
immediately lead to a rejection of the practice. Yet the
large units of power which confront us in the modern world
are not national in the traditional sense; and the kind of
internationalism for which they stand at any rate constitutes
a step forward from the old nationalism. Whatever defer¬
ences of outlook and method divide the three Great Powers
they are all united in loyalty to one principle. In the British

C °wf,°u Wea th of Nat i°ns one may be an Englishman, Scot
or Welshman, a Frenchman or Dutchman, in the United

64

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

States a German, Pole or Italian, in the Soviet Union a
Lithuanian, a Moldavian or a Kazbek without finding any
avenue of political and economic opportunity closed on that
account, or any barrier placed on devotion to one. owa
language or national customs. In the Soviet Union ,
predominant emphasis is laid- except m the s P here ^
language and culture - not on the national rights of the
Kazbek republic, but on the equality enjoyed by the
Kazbek throughout the Union with the Uzbek or with
the Great Russian. 1 The success of this policy is confirmed
by a careful observer in the late nineteen-thirties, who re¬
ports that “ there is such an absence of favour to particular
nationalities, and such a constructive effort to mate. their
equality real, that national jealousy and friction are dimin¬
ished though not yet eliminated ”. 2 In the United Sta es
fulled equal rightlare accorded to every citizen irrespective
of national origin; but any tendency towards the growth
or survival of national consciousness m particular groups
watched with anxiety and any step calculated to encourage
it studiously avoided. Moreover, both in the Soviet Union
and in the United States a conscious attempt is made,
through educational and other channels, to substitute a
wider allegiance, conceived in terms of common ideals for
narrower national or racial loyalties - to inculcate the virtues
of a Soviet or an American “ way of life ” ; and if the British
way of life has been the subject of less positive mdoctrina
tion, few will doubt that some such conception, rather than

i Act 12.1 of the 1936 constitution is an emphatic enunciation ofthis
EauahW of rights of citizens of the USSR, irrespective of their
nght • ,.® q " al ^ e |u spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and

,s Russian Peasant and Other Studies, p. 4°°-

65

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

W^VT 1 ? 8 7 3ny narrower sense, is the unifying
which has held together a multi-national British

Commonwealth of Nations.

It would be rash to deny that these multi-national

dfngem^ofX- ° f P ° Wer are sub J ect to abu ses and present
clangers of their own — m particular, the danger that thev

ronHelj de . Vel °P a new imperialism which would
Sued that ‘‘1 ° n u Sm Writ Iarge - Acton once main-
state is as n. C ° mbmatio , n of di **ent nations in one
combinatSn nf ^ * COndition of civilized life as the
suStantkUv th™* “ S ° C f y and that “ those states are
Austrian F hC m ° St ? CrfeCt Which ’ like the Br i tisb ^d
Whhout nn mpires ’ u de Vari0US distinct nationalities

Tr It a n P rt SS1 ? g e u •' Whether this view be acce pted
or lan ’ ? u ’T based not on exclusiveness of nation

or language but on shared ideals and aspirations of universal

be to repres “* ”<5™“

or eve/nvl 1 ^ 7 * Slmply on the cult of a nation,

or even over a political unit like pre-1939 Yugoslavia or

s™?' ■“ ' he differm “ ta the whether
Lithuanian ^Tt ’ ^7 ^ Slovene ’ a Pole > Ukrainian or
formnn'L W °? f SCem theref ° re th3t ’ Whatever °ther
expansion of thT m oIerance may become prominent, the
2 mustllo P° wer and influence of great multi-national
units must encourage the spread of national toleration. The

tha"t qi iu2 d P T ° frehgl0n and nationalism would suggest

he diva r a i- r VemCnt f ° r reIigious toleration followed
he devastating religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries

o the movement for national toleration will spring —since

there is no reason to suppose that mankind^asSost Z

‘ The . Hlstor y °J Freedom and Other Essays, pn 200 208

discriminatio^ atinTt coW^ T’- Mly Swit Z erland, and of
Commonwealth and in the United^tates. 1 ” S ° me ° f ^ Br ‘ tish

66

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

will to survive — from the destructive 20th-century wars of
nationalism. The shift in emphasis from the rights and
well-being of the national group to the rights and well-being
of the individual man and woman which we already see at
work in the multi-national state, if it could now be trans- ,
ferred to the sphere of international organization, would
mark the beginning of the end of the destructive phase of
nationalism.

The second element in social justice — “ freedom from
want ” — is more familiar, more concrete and requires less
discussion. It could indeed be argued that freedom from
want is often as easily attainable by suitable policies within
the nation as by international cooperation. In some cases
this is, broadly speaking, true. But just as the social con¬
science calls to-day for mitigation of extremes of wealth.
and poverty among classes within the nation, so it has begun
to recognize the close juxtaposition of nations with widely
divergent standards of living as a menace to peace and to
seek mitigation of such conditions as one of the initial
constructive tasks of an international order. On the other
hand it would be utopian to seek the attainment of this
goal through universal or uniform action and organization.
The issue presents a striking illustration of the need for
adapting social policies to social conditions. The ideal of
freedom from want is universal. But the problems of its
application to advanced regions with a relatively inelastic
birth-rate will be different not merely in degree, but in kind,
from those of its application to regions where population
constantly presses on a marginal level of subsistence. No
single issue reveals more starkly the underlying lack of
homogeneity which blocks the way to realization of the ideal
of world unity and imposes division and diversity of policy
in the pursuit even of aims recognized as common to
mankind.

67

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

The third element — full employment — holds a some¬
what paradoxical place in the contemporary programme of
social justice. In one sense it is not an end in itself, since
employment is always employment for some purpose, and
nothing is more barren than the notion that the cure for
unemployment is to provide otherwise unwanted “ public
works In another sense, however, full employment is the
master key to social justice in the modem industrial state,
the dynamic force which alone can cure the major social evils
of our time; and for this reason the central place occupied
by it in modern thought is fully justified. The dependence
of freedom from want on full employment is immediate and
obvious; for though the breakdown of the economic system
has been more conspicuous on the side of distribution than
on that of production, it remains true that the wide exten¬
sion of higher standards of living can be made possible only
by increased production, and that this in turn demands the
full employment of all resources, human and material. But
it is less commonly recognized that full employment is also
a primary condition of that equality of opportunity between
man and man which we have recognized as the first element
of social justice. Unemployment or fear of unemployment
has been the most fertile cause of exclusion and discrimina¬
tion in the modern world. It has sharpened and barbed
every restrictive instrument of economic and finan rjaf
policy; it has dammed and severely restricted the flow of
migration from country to country; it has intensified dis¬
crimination against minorities, often raising it to the pitch
of organized persecution; it has closed almost every door
to refugees. Unemployment has been the specific social
scourge of the contemporary western world and takes a high
place among the ultimate causes of the second world war.
It will serve no purpose to inveigh against these evils if the
condition which produced them is allowed to recur. Full

68

THE PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONALISM

employment is the only solvent powerful enough to break
down the static and restrictive policies which dominated
western civilization before 1939 an< ^ enable the present
generation to build a social and international order on new
and firmer foundations of equality of opportunity and free¬
dom from want.

There would be no insuperable difficulty in drawing up
ambitious international plans to assure full employment
throughout the world, though even such plans could not be
uniform, since backward and undeveloped countries would
inevitably appear in them as objects rather than as origina¬
tors of policy. But as a matter of practical politics, the
prospects of making effective provision for full employment
by agreements or machinery of world-wide scope are slender.
Diversities in technical and economic development, with
the conflicts of interest which these create, are too great
to permit of a completely homogeneous system ; and it is
a symptom of these diversities that agreement about ends
is not matched by agreement about means. Here again
we shall probably have to be content with systems of joint
planning and organization between countries or groups of
countries agreeing to pursue full employment policies in
common, or to share in the economic development of
backward areas; and such regional policies may corre¬
spond in part, though not necessarily or exclusively, with
the multi-national groupings of power. The stability of
the framework of international order will thus come to
depend partly on the balance of forces between the Great
Powers, and partly on the success of common policies
directed towards the realization of equality of opportunity,
of freedom from want and of full employment. It is an
illusion to suppose that security for the individual or for
the nation can be attained through the limited resources of
the small or medium-sized nation-states or through the

69

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

untrammelled and independent action of national govern¬
ments. It is equally an illusion to suppose that the demands
of social justice ran be attained through a return to the
tree international market economy of the 19th century.
1 o achieve these results through an executive world author¬
ity planning, directing and controlling from a single centre
remains a dream of visionaries. The best hope of achieving
t em in the next period lies in a balanced structure of inter¬
national or multi-national groupings both for the mainten¬
ance of security and for the planned development of the
economies of geographical areas and groups of nations,
this seems the surest prospect of international advance
open, at one of the crises of history, to a world bewildered
by the turmoil of nationalism and war.

70

POSTSCRIPT

In this pattern of the modern world, dominated by new
concentrations of power in great groups of nations, but
crossed with strands of common social and economic policy
and woven loosely together in a system of pooled security,
the position of Great Britain is unique, and not free from
anxiety. By herself, Great Britain is no match for the other
great multi-national units and, with a population about the
decline steeply, might be well on the way to become a
secondary power. Were this to happen, British policy
would be faced by a fearful dilemma; it would have the
choice of subordinating itself to the policy either of the
Soviet Union or of the United States of America, or of
attempting, as other secondary powers have done in the past,
to play off the more powerful units against one another —
with inevitably disastrous results. But if this is not to
happen, Britain must fulfil two conditions.

In the first place, a considered policy of economic and
social organization is required to bring about that marked
increase of efficiency in the production and distribution of
wealth which will alone enable Britain to retain a leading
place in the affairs of the world and convince other nations
of her ability to retain it; and it would be reckless to
underestimate the opposition to this far-reaching readjust¬
ment which will come from traditional inertia as well as
from vested interests. Secondly, British conceptions of
international policy must be radically changed. In this
field Britain has a great potential source of strength, not only
in the reinforcement which the British Commonwealth of
Nations brings to her position, but in the lesson that can
be drawn from inter-Commonwealth relations. These do

7 *

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

not rest on treaties or on formal obligations ; even the
follies of the treaty-ridden period between the two wars
left relations between members of the Commonwealth
unaffected. The crucial lesson of the Commonwealth can
now be given a wider application. In relations with
members of the Commonwealth, with nations which had
already before 1939 been drawn into the fraternity of the
sterling area, and with other friendly nations which may
in future be drawn into a close community of interest with
them, Britain should proceed not by way of generalized
international engagements or long-term mutual guarantees,
but by way of agreements issuing in direct and specific
common action, of military conventions involving joint
planning by a common General Staff and of trade agree¬
ments which approximate more closely to commercial
transactions than to international treaties in the time-
honoured form. These are the international policies which,
combined with industrial and social reconstruction at home,
will entitle Britain not only to retain a leading position
among the nations of the world, but to make a first and
constructive contribution to the creation of a lasting inter¬
national order.

Among the nations with whom Britain might perhaps
establish closer relations of this kind are those of western
Europe. The plight of western Europe is graver than that
of Great Britain, and is in some respects tragic. In the
first place, western Europe is the home of the “ national ”
epoch from which the world is now emerging. It is organ¬
ized on a basis whose military and economic foundations
have been irrevocably sapped — the basis of independent
nations, each tenaciously clinging to its own traditional
civilization; and either the sudden downfall or the slow
decay of a powerful and traditional form of organization
which has been overtaken by events and rendered obsolete

POSTSCRIPT

is inevitably marked with tragedy. Secondly, western
Europe, even if she can renew her vitality and escape from
the thrall of traditions once glorious, but now stifling to
fresh growth, still lacks the leadership and central focus of
power which would be necessary to place her among the
great multi-national civilizations of the “ hemisphere ” or
Grossraum epoch. Both Italy and France have in the past
laid some of the foundations of a common European civil¬
ization ; but both abused their power and fell behind in
the race. In the 19th century Germany developed some
of the qualifications for the leadership of a modern industrial
Europe ; but Germany has irretrievably abused her power.
As the second world war comes to its end the unprecedented
position has arisen that the two European powers most able
to influence the destinies of Europe — Russia and Britain —
are situated at its eastern and western extremities and are
not exclusively or primarily European powers at all.

The outlook remains, therefore, dark and uncertain. It
is conceivable that a shattered Europe, rising above the
national hatreds and conflicts of the past, may throw up
from within a new and unifying leadership which would
enable her to develop and hold a position independent of
both Britain and Russia. But no such prospect is yet visible
above the horizon ; and failing this, it seems likely that the
European nations will inevitably be drawn into closer
relations with both Russia and Britain. There are already
signs of such an association between Russia and the nations
of eastern Europe. A natural corollary would be the
establishment of more intimate links, couched in terms
appropriate to the western tradition, between Britain and
the nations of western Europe. Such links, military and
economic rather than political in the narrower sense, would
rest on a solid basis of common interest. The same pro¬
blems of security are common to the whole region. Most

73

NATIONALISM AND AFTER

of them are faced with the same problems of economic
readjustment arising from balance of payments in dislocation,
a high degree of independence on foreign trade, and a
developed industry working on imported raw materials.
The same challenge of social justice will be encountered
and accepted by them all; and they may be united by the
same desire to find an answer based on principles which
diverge both from the Soviet ideology of state monopoly
and from the American ideology of unrestricted competition.
Several of them have vast dependent colonial territories,
the greater part of the African continent being divided
between them. Common economic planning, as well as
joint military organization, will alone enable western Europe,
Britain included, to confront the future with united strength
and confidence. The pride and prejudice of ancient tradi¬
tions, as well as the innate conservatism of those who refuse
to believe that the past cannot return, stand in the way
of such a course. But many old traditions will have to be
discarded, and new ones created, before Europe and the
world can recover their balance in the aftermath of the age
of nationalism.

THE END

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