An introduction to world politics

Front matter

THE CENTURY

POLITICAL SCIENCE SERIES

Edited by FEEDEKIC A. OGG, University of Wisconsin

Preface

At the beginning of the World War I wrote a book about the relations among the great powers during the years immediately preceding the assassination at Serajevo. * * The New Map of Europe ' ' dealt particularly with Near Eastern problems and wars and with the foreign policies of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy in the events affecting the Balkan States, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and the countries on the African littoral of the Mediterranean. The purpose of the book was to attempt to explain how the relations among the great powers were vitally influenced by the conflict of interests that arose in their diplomatic and economic activities in the regions formerly under the exclusive domination of the Ottoman sultans. The reception accorded **The New Map of Europe'' encouraged me to complete the survey of contemporary international relations by writing *^The New Map of Africa'' in 1916 and ''The New Map of Asia" in 1919. The latter two volumes outlined the development of European overlordship in Africa and Asia.

None who lived in daily contact with international questions, and who was reporting from the spot wars and rumors of wars during the decade before 1914, could be satisfied with the prevalent idea that it was unnecessary to go farther back than the famous ''twelve days" of diplomatic correspondence, from July 20 to August 2, 1914, to settle the responsibility for the World War. However great the guilt of the Imperial German and Austro-Hungarian governments for deliberately forcing the war upon Europe, their power was not so great that their will alone could have led us into the calamities of 1914-18. The most vi PREFACE

bitter and unthinking partizan of armistice and peace conference days sees now that the elimination of Germany and Austria-Hungary from world politics has not brought us peace. Europe is still in arms, and the victorious powers are pitted against one another in the Near East and the Far East. Must we not admit, then, that Realpolitik and Weltpolitik are human, and not simply German, phenomena, and that they call for attention no less after our victory than before the war?

This is the justification for the study of world politics as a separate branch of political science. Anthropologists write of race; geographers of climate; economists of finance and trade and commerce ; demographers of population; sociologists of living conditions; missionaries of cultural conquest in the name of religion; jurists of international law; diplomatists of the technique of dealings among nations ; military experts of the conduct of wars and the role of armies and navies in peace and war ; statesmen of the immediate and ostensible causes of war and aims of peace; propagandists of national movements and particular interests; humanists of improving world conditions; publicists of current events; and general historians set forth and interpret the activities of nations comprehensively, stressing political evolution and states of mind as well as recording events. Up to the nineteenth century the specialist in international relations is not needed. But since the birth of nationalism, the use of steam in production and transportation, and the consequent rise of world powers, he has a field of his own.

The field is difficult, however, because the problems discussed and the questions raised have been the storm center of men's thoughts for the past ten years. These problems have been approached unintelligently, and opinions have been formed without knowledge. Teachers of the historical and political sciences in American universities and colleges have had a curious experience. Their colleagues in other

PREFACE vii

departments would be astounded if professors of history and political science should presume to lay down the law to them in their particular fields. And yet professors of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, languages, engineering, chemistry, medicine, theology, and law have written books and articles and have lectured on problems of world politics, without having acquainted themselves with even the rudiments of the subject. An architect, who has created masterpieces, told me one day that a lecture I gave on African colonization was wrong from beginning to end. He could contradict none of my facts, and when I pressed him he confessed that he had never read a book on the extension of European control over Africa. **But I have been in Algiers,'' he declared. **And I have been in a Gothic cathedral,'' I answered; **but what would you think of me if I contested, without any supporting facts, your statements in a lecture on Gothic architecture?"

In attempting to put within the compass of one volume an introduction to world politics, it has been necessary to omit much of interest and importance, and to exclude, except where clearness demanded it, historical narrative. The writer confesses frankly that his sympathies are with the smaller nations in their struggles to maintain or win independence, and that he believes it is possible to use **one weight and one measure" in international relations. But he has tried to allow the facts to speak for themselves, and urges the reader to do the supplementary reading indicated for each chapter. References have been given, not as sources, but as guides to further information. In selecting them different points of view and the general availability of materials have been taken into consideration. Some books, excellent as sources, are not widely circulated, or are not written in the condensed form demanded by the general reader or student. When used as a text-book, the chapters are intended to acquaint the student with the skeleton facts upon which the lectures are based, to amplify viii PREFACE

the lectures on certain points, and, above all, to provoke discussion. In the advanced study of political science no text-book can take the place of lectures and class-room quizzes and comment on assigned reading.

If British statesmanship and officialdom come in for a larger share of criticism in a course on world politics than those of other great powers, it is only because Great Britain is more involved overseas than any other power. I am of pure British stock, and am an intense admirer of the civilization and culture that are my heritage. My point of view is in no sense anti-British. In fact, it is peculiarly Anglo- Saxon. F^om our ancestors we have learned to lean backward in our desire to be fair to the other man and to put ourselves in his place. The most precious English intellectual tradition is to write with detachment and impartiality. In the atmosphere of passion and prejudice born of the war many of us departed from our moorings. But we are finding ourselves again. Facing facts and holding to common ideals of liberty and justice are the bases of Anglo-Saxon solidarity.

I can not adequately express my appreciation of the help and light in the preparation of this volume that have come to me from unknown friends in many countries. Ever since 1914 numerous correspondents have been pointing out to me errors of fact, or have entered into stimulating and suggestive discussion provoked by statements in my books and magazine articles. All this has been grist to my mill. My friends in American, British, and French universities have given me encouragement audi equally helpful criticism and admonition. The opportunities for personal investigation in different parts of the world have been enjoyed through the constant and generous interest of the late James Gordon Bennett and of Mr. Rodman Wanamaker. Professor William Starr Myers, of Princeton University, and my brother. Professor Oliphant Gibbons, of the Buffalo Technical High School, read the manuscript. Pro-

PREFACE ix

f essor Frederic Austin Ogg, of the University of "Wisconsin, has edited manuscript and proofs with a thoroughness for which I can not express too highly my admiration and thanks. My publishers have shown the interest and care that long years of happy association have taught me to expect from them.

Herbert Adams Gibbons Princeton, May 1, 1922

Contents

CHAPTER FAGB

I The Beginnings of World Politics 3

II Nationalism and Steam Power (1789-1848) ... 17

Chapter I

WHEN political organisms were small and communities self-sustaining, problems of government were not complicated by considerations of foreign policy. At first, travelers were killed and their possessions confiscated, unless they were stronger than those they met. On sea, men took their chances with pirates as with the weather. Until means of transportation and a guaranty of protection were furnished them, few traveled in inland countries. None traveled for pleasure, and the quest of knowledge or gold was attended by great and constant risks. Later, when means of transportation increased and regular routes were established, travelers purchased protection by paying tribute to the strong. And strength was not so much a matter of numbers and of fighting ability as of geographical position. Consequently, there was virtually no intercourse, social or commercial, between peoples of different blood, language, customs, and religion.

Before the Christian era the history of ** civilization, ' ' as we understand that term, was developed in Mediterranean lands. There the three monotheistic religions originated and spread, and there the cultures, the written languages, and the social and political background of modern Europe were created. The Egyptians and Chaldeans and

Assyrians did not go far afield in their wars. The Persians and Greeks invaded each other's countries mainly as adventurous explorers. The Phoenicians and Greeks traded in the Mediterranean and founded colonies without the urge of a united racial impulse behind them. Rome did not allow Carthage to become a consolidated empire; and the Greeks, like the Italians of the Middle Ages, instead of standing together in their expansion, exhausted their energies in fighting each other. Although the Romans colonized, it was rather by taking aliens into partnership and by organizing a governmental system than by making their own race dominant. The Roman Empire was not conceived in the spirit of ruling the world for the benefit of the Italian peninsula. When they conquered the Greeks, the Romans succumbed to Greek culture, and as the empire grew, Rome itself did not remain the political, much less the economic, metropolis. There never was a Roman race in the sense that there was a Greek race and later an Arab race.

The Roman Empire had neither geographical entity nor national foyer. Rome did not mean a place from which a race had come and which was the heart of the nation. Possessing no common economic interests and no consciousness of oneness of blood, the peoples of the Roman Empire were easily weakened by, and then fell prey to, the migrating peoples of Europe and Asia. Our Teutonic ancestors colonized Europe by subjugating and becoming assimilated with, if not by actually exterminating, the indigenous inhabitants. As soon as new political organisms took the place of the defunct Eastern and Western empires, migration ceased. Whole races no longer passed from Asia to Europe or from one part of Europe to another. In the medieval period of European history, migratory conquests ended in every part of the continent simultaneously with the appearance of stable centralized governments. This was accomplished just in time to stem Mongolian and Semitic invaders, who attempted a new migration. Only the

Balkans, parts of Eussia, and northern Africa passed under the domination of the later Asiatics.

But our ancestors, once they had settled in their new homes, still found causes for war. On the surface the wars were feudal, religious, dynastic; underneath was the conflict among large national groups in the process of formation. Leaders and peoples were instruments of irresistible currents of whose very existence they did not know. Placed within certain geographic limits and welded into groups by the growth of common economic interests, Europeans evolved different languages and characteristics, and thus became separate nationalities. Except in a few specific instances of borderlands, national evolution was more rapid and more thorough in western Europe than in central and eastern Europe.

To illustrate, a Scotchman or a Welshman may retain his pride in his blood and perhaps in his language, but he long ago became a Britisher by every instinct in his being. Proximity, development of intercourse, political equality with the once dominant Englishman, and, above all, equal economic opportunities accomplished this. The Irishman^ on the contrary, separated by water from other Britishers^ and as potently by different cultural and religious ideals> held in economic and political subjection to the dominant Englishman by means of a land-owning alien element and by the descendants of a colony of alien conquerors in one corner of the island, remained unassimilated. A Breton or a Provengal can be proud of his origin and can cherish the cult of his language and his local customs, but he is none the less a good Frenchman. The Breton is isolated on his peninsula from other than French influences. The Provengal is cut off by mountains from any other race that might have influenced his national self-consciousness. In this way geography has played the most important role in assimilation.

Border peoples in central and eastern Europe were worked upon by, and became successively subjects of, rival national groups. In eastern Europe, where the conquerors were in the minority and of the ruling class, little attempt was made at assimilation through education or through the creation of economic interests in common and mutually realized between the conquered people and the dominant alien invaders. Long after the peoples of western Europe and, to a lesser extent, those of central Europe were freed from the menace of migratory invasions, and had been left to themselves to develop their civilization, the peoples of eastern Europe remained under Mohammedan rule or continued to be subjected to recurrent Tartar invasions. Another disruptive influence, which has persisted through the centuries and has formed a barrier from the Baltic to the Adriatic between peoples whose common blood and language would otherwise have caused them to develop a common nationality, has been the division of allegiance between the Eoman and the Orthodox churches. Of the two most powerful branches of the Slavs, Poles looked to Rome and Russians to Constantinople. The Ukrainians were divided, and Serbians were separated from Croats and Slovenes.

Early in the history of modern Europe, international relations became important from an economic, as well as a political, point of view. Commerce led to the establishment of traditions and customs in the dealings among nations. These were embodied in diplomacy and international law. Treaties of friendship and commerce were sought as a means of reciprocally guaranteeing the interests of nationals. When migratory conquests ceased, when religious and dynastic wars ended, when nationalist movements reached and accepted the limits imposed upon them by geography and economics, it was reasonable to suppose that the state of peace attained within the great political organisms might be extended to the European community of nations.

But when Europeans began to trade overseas, and established colonies and companies for exploiting newly discovered regions of the world, competition gave rise to friction that would not have existed had the European nations been able to continue to find sources of prosperity within the borders of their own political jurisdictions. Wars broke out among Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French, which, although provoked by religious and dynastic questions of European origin, were complicated, extended, and prolonged because of the interests and ambitions of their governments and private companies in America and Asia. And the gains and losses to victors and vanquished have proved to be permanent, and have influenced the course of history more by the transfer of territories and privileges outside Europe than by boundary changes in Europe. That this is true is largely the result of developments of the nineteenth century. As long as sovereigns and governments fought, with mercenaries, for prizes of whose value the contending peoples were dimly if at all aware, extra-European rivalry and colonial wars did not have a profound influence upon the relations between the European peoples. A great change, however, began to take place during the Napoleonic era.

The rapid increase of population in Europe, with the accompanying over-production of manufactured articles and over-consumption of raw materials, radically changed international relations. Each nation felt compelled to shape its foreign policy according to the opportunities and necessities of acquiring beyond the confines of Europe areas for colonization and new markets. This situation, unique in history because the conditions that created it had not before existed, gave rise to a new branch of political science — world politics.

World politics is the science of government as practised in international relations, under the influence of real or fancied interests in other than neighboring countries or those with which relations of reciprocal advantage are naturally maintained. All nations, for their security and material and moral well-being, can not detach their domestic policies from those of nations near them and with whom they do business. But when they become friends or enemies because of rivalry for political influence and economic advantages in regions where their aim is to enjoy, exclusively if possible, the fruits of economic imperialism, friends and enemies are made, not by natural affinities or by good or evil done to each other, but by considerations of world politics.

It is not impossible to build up a thesis for the beginnings of world politics in the struggle of Assyria and Egypt over Syria and Palestine, of Greece and Persia over Asia Minor, of Athens and Sparta over Sicily, of Rome and Carthage over Spain and the hegemony of the Mediterranean, and, since the era of overseas exploration, in the wars of the original maritime and colonial powers. But before the nineteenth century world politics had comparatively slight influence upon international relations. It was the introduction of steam power into industry that made overseas markets profitable, and then indispensable, to European nations. The use of steam power in transportation made it possible to carry manufactured articles to foreign markets on a large scale and to fetch raw materials and food-stuffs. To the European nations prosperity began to be dependent upon a new world-wide division of labor, in which the roles of manufacturer, merchant, banker, and carrier were played by the European peoples.

While one may claim that international relations have always been affected by outside interests and ambitions, it was not until the nineteenth century that Europe began to exploit the rest of the world. This exploitation is a cause as much as a result of surplus population and capital. The industrial nations, finding, maintaining, and developing new markets, at the same time exported the population and the capital that was, in part at least, due to this exploitation. European nations came more and more to vie with one another for exclusive political control of colonizing areas where white men could live. To make secure the hold on colonies already acquired, fortified ports of call were needed. Hinterland and islands were annexed, in addition, to protect the ports of call or to prevent other nations from installing themselves in near-by vantage-points. Colonies and protectorates, in turn, began to create a demand for goods and to become profitable fields for investment. This wealth had to be guarded ; and, as there was no disposition to share with other nations, defense of the sources of wealth began to be a heavy tax upon those who had accumulated it.

Unless we have in mind the colonial situation in 1815, we can not rightly estimate the foreign policies of European peoples, and of the United States and Japan as well, since the rise of nationalism and steam power. We must know also how each of the European nations won and lost overseas possessions up to that time.

At the opening of the modern age, the Italians were the foremost international bankers, traders, explorers, travelers, and geographers. Italian princelings ruled over states in the Greek peninsula, and the Italian city-states controlled the trade of the Adriatic, ^gean, and eastern Mediterranean. But the Italians were not yet on the road to political unity. They fought one another up to the point of depleting their maritime strength; and, even after the Ottoman Turks began to war on Christendom, the Italians continued to undermine one another. The Turks conquered the Balkans, the ^gean islands, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and gradually extended their power around the Black Sea and across northern Africa. The Mediterranean became and remained for several centuries an unsafe and unprofitable sea for Europeans. But half a century after the fall of Constantinople the period of world discovery and colonization began. The people who gave birth to Christopher

10 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORLD POLITICkS

Columbus and many other intrepid and successful navigators had no part, except as individuals, in the expansion of Europe overseas, and their last city-state, Venice, was put out of existence by the treaty of Campo-Formio in 1797.

The Scandinavians, also, were pioneer explorers. But their political unity was broken up four years before Columbus discovered America. For two hundred years Danes and Swedes were engaged in intermittent warfare against each other. Sweden, on the whole victorious, attempted to play the role of a great power. She, however, did not seek an empire outside of Europe, but spent her strength, in vain, against the Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs. The Norwegians formed a union, on the basis of equality, with the Danes, which lasted until 1814, when Norway was joined to Sweden. Sweden and Norway founded no colonies. Denmark colonized Iceland, made settlements on the coast of Greenland, and took possession of three islands in the West Indies — St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John. The Danish fleet was destroyed by the British at Copenhagen in 1807. Denmark never recovered from this blow, and she had no part in the colonial expansion of the nineteenth century.

Before the discovery of America and of trade routes to the east, the German cities of the Hanseatic League formed the strongest organization for international commerce. But geography and the retarded state of political development in Germany were factors against their success in competition with the merchants of countries better situated from a maritime point of view and more advanced politically. The Danish peninsula divided the coast of Germany and made a formidable, and generally hostile, barrier to egress from the communities. The Holy Roman Empire, which was the loose Germanic bond, did not include all Germans and was never interested in the future of the German people overseas. The empire lived on until 1806, and at the

THE BEGINNINGS OP WORLD POLITICS 11

peace settlements of 1814 and 1815 Prussia and Austria had no maritime interests to safeguard and no thought of the world beyond the confines of Europe.

Land-bound Russia could not take part in the discovery and development of world trade routes and colonies. Poland struggled unsuccessfully for existence, and, after having been cut off from the sea, disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century. Hungary ^s outlets to the sea were controlled by the Turks and the Italians. The Balkan States, which were incorporated in the Ottoman Empire during the century of the discovery of America, did not emerge from bondage until the nineteenth century. Belgium is a creation of the post-Napoleonic era.

From the beginning of the expansion of Europe to other continents, then, the way was open for the nations of western Europe bordering on the Atlantic. Geographical position had much to do with the ability of Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, and Holland to forge ahead of the other nations of Europe in their political unification. It had everything to do with their ability to follow exploration by colonization and to preempt the extra-European world. In 1815 these five European countries of the Atlantic coast found their culture, their racial stock, and their political control well established in different parts of the world. The English, French, and Spanish spoke and spread their language and planted their political institutions in North America, the Spanish and Portuguese in South America, and the Dutch in South Africa. The Dutch, the French, and the English had footholds in Guiana in South America. All five were established in Africa. English, French, and Portuguese were in India, and Dutch in Ceylon. The Dutch had planted their flag in most of the East Indian islands, and the other four peoples were there too. The English had settled in Australia and Tasmania. It was a case of first come, first served.

But those who came first did not in every instance stay.

Among the five colonizing states there were wars, followed by changes of title, some of them of vital importance in their influence upon the history of the world. Spain and Portugal passed their zenith and became decadent before the discovery of steam power. Holland lost the mastery of the sea and her choicest colonies. France could not maintain herself against Great Britain in North America and India.

With the exception of Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Florida, which Spain lost before the large movements of population from Europe to America, Spain and Portugal did not extend their dominions over regions situated in the temperate zone. Their colonies were countries to which Europeans could not transplant themselves without deterioration of stock. Instead of sending for women of their own race, Portuguese and Spaniards mixed their blood with natives, and later with negroes introduced from Africa. Spaniards and Portuguese went overseas, not to seek and establish homes in a new country, but to convert the heathen or carry away existing wealth. The Spanish gravitated to Mexico and Peru, the Portuguese to India and China and Japan, because they discovered in those countries ancient civilizations whose treasures of gold and precious stones, of silks and spices, they could seize and carry home. In the heyday of their power Spain and Portugal were represented in their colonial empires by missionaries and looters, not by colonists and traders. They had little to sell to the countries they controlled and no intention of settling them on a scale that would amount to a migration. Their acquisitions did not attract the British and French. The Portuguese were able to hold their colonies by infeodating themselves to the English from the beginning of the eighteenth century, a relationship that has not been disturbed in two hundred years.

With the exception of Louisiana, which passed from France to Spain, to France again, and finally to the United

States in 1803-04, Spain, although defeated in wars several times, managed to retain title to most of her colonies until they themselves began to break away from her.

Colonial rivalry among the other three nations was on a different basis. French, Dutch, and British staked out territories in the New World for the purpose of active colonization, and their claims overlapped. The Dutch picked out the best port on the American coast. The French, not content with Canada, attempted to extend their control over the hinterland of the North American continent from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and included in their claims the tributaries of the Mississippi to their head-waters. By colonizing the Cape of Good Hope and by succeeding the Portuguese in Ceylon, the Dutch made a bid for control of the trade routes to the Far East and India. The French challenged the British in India.

From Louis XIV to Napoleon I, the wars by which Great Britain acquired all of France 's colonial empire and a portion of Holland's arose from causes within Europe. The extension of these wars to other parts of the world was incidental,^ and the colonial advance of Great Britain, marked by the successive treaties, can not be regarded as the fulfilment of plans and hopes of statesmen. Men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not have realized what these gains were to mean to the British Empire. Exceptions to this general statement, however, may be taken in regard to the conquest of New Amsterdam in 1665, and to the fighting in India between the British and the French.

During the Napoleonic wars the British began to think of the advantages of a victorious peace in consolidating and

^ The wars between the British and French in America were provoked and terminated by causes arising in Europe, with the exception of the final struggle that eliminated France from the Ohio Valley and Canada. The French and Indian War (1754-63) differed from King William's War (1689-97), Qiieen Anne's War (1701-13), and King George's War (1744-48) in that the first fighting, and also the laattles that decided the American issues of the war, occurred on American soil. However, the Seven Years' War, as it was known in Europe, powerfully influenced the fortunes of the fighting in America, and in a very real sense contributed to the disappearance of French power in America.

adding to the empire that was being built up throughout the world. The contemptuous reference of Napoleon to the British as ^^a nation of shopkeepers'^ proves that during the upheaval at the beginning of the nineteenth century considerations of world politics were entering into European diplomacy. World politics certainly influenced British naval and military activities, while continental European nations were devoting their undivided energies to keeping Napoleon in check. By the peace of Amiens, in 1802, Great Britain gave back to France and her allies a number of choice morsels that her enterprising naval officers and overseas expeditions had picked up, with the exception of Trinidad, ceded to her by Spain, and Ceylon, taken from Holland.

The battle of Trafalgar, in 1805, broke forever the sea power of France and Spain, and gave Great Britain a free hand, as far as these two countries were concerned, in the extra-European world. Never since that day have Spain and France been able to make effective resistance to the extension of British colonial power. The events of the last ten years of the Napoleonic regime played squarely into the hands of British colonial aspirations. Denmark and Holland were forced to ally themselves with France: so the British seized the Cape of Good Hope and the northern parts of Dutch Guiana permanently and destroyed the Danish fleet. Spain, although as unwilling an ally of France as other European states after 1808, suffered as much abroad as if she had been waging war voluntarily. Portugal saved her colonies by the flight of the royal family to Brazil, and by a refusal to submit to the French. The British naturally refrained from operations against African and Asiatic territories of the country that was a valuable and friendly base for them in the Peninsular War.