The rebuilding of Europe; a survey of forces and conditions

Front matter

.0

«J O - c^

V'V-

Preface

The world is passing through the birth pangs of a new historic period. Europe, because it controls the destiny of the greater part of the earth, was the first to feel these convulsions, but the transformation taking place is essentially a world movement.

The struggle now going on has been variously called "a trade war," a contest regarding "the destiny of the smaller states," "a war for democracy," and "a war for principles." No one of these expressions quite definitely conveys the real significance of the Great War, because no one of them adequately presents to the mind its relation to the changes in political thought that have occurred during the last few decades.

What has been most completely overlooked is the fact that the Great War was not in its beginning, and is not now, so much a struggle between different forms of government as it is a question regarding the purpose and spirit of all governvi PREFACE

ments. The Austrian-Serbian-Russian conflict, promoted by Germany with ulterior designs, did not in any way involve forms of government. All the participants were monarchies, and no issue for or against democracy was presented. When France and England, acting as their interests and obligations required, were afterward forced into the fray, even then there was no question of the internal organization of governments, but it was seen to be a war for the salvation of Europe as a society of independent states. It has never become a war for democracy in the sense that there is an attempt by any nation to universalize a democratic form of government. That would be a doubtful venture, inconsistent with the true nature of democracy.

The truth is that the Great War is a revolution against the alleged rights of arbitrary force, rendered necessary by the failure to reach the goal of a secure international organization by an evolutionary process.

Modern nations have succeeded, with a few exceptions, in developing constitutional governments in which ideas of justice have been embodied in systems of law, but they have also in-

PREFACE vii

herited international traditions that were originated in an age when military force was the basis of state existence. These traditions are embodied in the following four propositions:

(1) The essence of a state is "sovereignty," denned as "supreme power."

(2) A sovereign state has the right to declare war upon any other sovereign state for any reason that seems to it sufficient.

(3) An act of conquest by the exercise of superior military force entitles the conqueror to the possession of the conquered territory.

(4) The population goes with the land and becomes subject to the will of the conqueror.

Such monstrous doctrines as these would never have been invented by any jurist or statesman under the constitutional regime, yet they are the postulates that underlie all the great European settlements, and have never been repudiated by any European international congress, not even by the conferences held at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. On the contrary, these propositions were tacitly assumed as composing the unwritten constitution of the European system of sovereign states, and virtually all the powers there repre-

Vlll

PREFACE sented had at some time, and in some cases habitually, put them into practice.

What gave to the Hague conferences their great interest for the public generally was the hope that there would come out of them some new enunciation of international law that would put an end to war and conquest. This was the strong human current that circled about the conferences, but among the delegates it was well understood that a direct blow aimed at any one of the four propositions just stated would mean the dissolution of the conference, and, if insisted upon, would involve a general war, for there were still national ambitions which war alone could satisfy.

Peace, it was hoped, might be prolonged by reliance upon the old see-saw, "The balance of power," fortified by increased armaments. Supplementary to this was the pious wish, which in the clearer heads never amounted to faith, that no nation would be guilty of dishonor by an abuse of power, although its freedom to do so was undisputed. Gently and timidly, restrictions upon the too barbarous exercise of the state's traditionally recognized prerogatives were proposed in the form of conventions about war on

PREFACE ix

land and war on the sea, with provisions for an honorable settlement of differences if any nation desired to be just; but even these measures were long contested, and the more important of them persistently opposed by certain powers.

The process of peaceful evolution toward international justice having failed to throw off the thraldom imposed upon Europe by the tradition of absolute sovereignty and its corollaries, it required no special clairvoyance to see that a revolution would some day come born of blood and fire. It has come. Great powers, appealing to the infamous dogma of unlimited right on the part of the state, have placed their wicked "necessities" above all law, above all morality, above all hunanity, and have plunged Europe and a great part of the world into a yawning gulf of death and devastation. To resist that arrogance and to end not only this war, but any war based on these assumptions, is the aim of the resisting powers. It is the making of a new world ; but there can be no new world until there is a new Europe in which the dogma that the state is a licensed brigand is smitten dead.

It is the purpose of this volume to show that x PREFACE

this dogma, and not any particular form of mere state organization, is the real enemy that must be destroyed. The incidents of the Great War are well known and require no mention here. It is to the deeper problems that attention should be directed. Nor is it the intention of this little book to add to the array of purely subjective solutions of these problems, — for the true solution can be found only by the united efforts of a preponderance of the great powers, — -but rather to point out what are the really fundamental issues involved in the Great War, and to take account of the forces and conditions which may aid or hinder the solution.

Six of the chapters contained in this volume were, in substance, first presented to the public last March in the form of lectures on the Schouler Foundation at the Johns Hopkins University; five of them were in part printed in the Century Magazine for May, June, July, September, and October of the present year.

Washington, D. C

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Europe's Heritage of Evil 3

II International Ideals 38

Chapter I

IN the retrospect of future historians the year 1914 may have a place not less important than the year 1453, which has been accepted as marking the dividing line between medieval and modern history. The fall of Constantinople and the establishment of the Ottoman Turks in Europe revealed the insufficiency of the bond that had held Christendom together. In like manner the present European War reveals the inadequacy of purely national conceptions for the complete organization of mankind; for as Christendom failed to unite the whole world by faith, so civilization has failed to maintain itself by a mere balance of forces.

The great tragedy of history has been the conflict between the universal humanism that Rome endeavored to establish, first by law and afterward by faith, and the tribalism of the primitive European races. In the fifteenth century tribalism triumphed. The moral unity of Europe, which Rome had vainly tried to secure, wholly disappeared. Both the empire and the papacy, in which great minds had placed implicit faith, proved unable, in the face of racial conflicts, either to rule the world or to preserve the coherence of Christendom. All that had given grandeur to Rome seemed to have ended in failure when the Greek Empire, the last bulwark of Roman imperialism, already long and bitterly alienated from the Roman Curia, paid the penalty of separatism, and fell before the Ottoman assault. With it the splendid postulates of the Roman imperial idea — the essential unity of mankind, the supremacy of law based upon reason and divine command, the moral solidarity of all who accepted the formulae of faith, and the effective organization of peace as a condition of human happiness — suffered a fatal catastrophe. In place of the Pax Romana, Faustrecht, the right of the mailed fist, widely prevailed within the confines of Christendom. Slowly dying during a thousand years, the traditions of the ancient world, which the Greek Empire had endeavored to preserve long after they had been undermined by tribalism in the West, were now definitively abandoned. The future was seen to belong to the separate nations, which alone possessed a strong sense of unity. The disparity of races, the spirit of local independence, the conflict between the spiritual and the temporal forms of obedience, combined to render possible the development of powerful national monarchies, and dynastic ambition was eager to make use of them for its own designs.

There was, indeed, an element of progress in this reassertion of the tribal spirit. The rule of Rome had destroyed the balance between law and liberty. The vital energies of the primitive races could not be thus suppressed. All the rich variety of human diversity pressed the issue of nationality. In order to give to law its complete authority, it was necessary that it should be developed out of experience rather than imposed as a dominant system. Each nation must arrive at the common destination by pursuing its own path and under its own leadership. The formation of nation-states was, therefore, morally inevitable. It was essential to the full development of human capacities.

The defect in this process of evolution lay in the cruelty and ignorance of the barbarians out of whom these nation-states were formed. The procedure was of necessity a work of force rather than a work of intelligence. On the part of the masses of the population the instinct of avoiding danger gave to any efficient protector a vast authority. On the part of natural leaders the instinct of domination became the shaping power of the state. As a result, the nation-state, slowly evolving from the feudal state, became a dynastic creation, in which race, the natural basis of nationality, played a subordinate role. Conquest seldom proceeded along strictly ethnic lines. The task was primarily geographic expansion and strategic security. Once conquered, the different races gradually coalesced with their conquerors to form distinct national units in which blood yielded supremacy to national traditions, and the most opposite diversities of race, language, and religious belief were thus finally compounded into the substance of the nation-states.

This, in brief outline, is the history of virtually all the nation-states of Europe. Not one of them can boast of absolute purity of race. Not one of them can establish a claim that its statehood is founded on ethnic homogeneity. Not one of them can profess that it is the product of conscious and voluntary adhesion to a predetermined theory of what the state should be and who should compose its substance.

And yet these nation-states are in no sense mere accidents. However self-conscious some of them may have become, they were originally the creations of dynastic purpose. The unity they now possess was derived from the sense of community that gradually grew up within them through close contact, common interests, common sufferings, and common triumphs; but they are all in reality creations of force, exercised chiefly by dominant dynasties, under which in the process of time they have arrived at a condition of national selfconsciousness.

This in some cases has been so intense that the will of the nation has become more powerful than the will of the dynasty; which, therefore, has either been cast off entirely, as in France, which exists by the will of the nation, or permitted to survive as a mere symbol of national unity, as in England. Only in a few instances does the dynasty continue to exercise uncontrolled authority.

In the process of forming the nation-state two instruments have been employed for the realization of dynastic purposes: war and marriage. The territorial expansion obtained by the warlike energies of a conquering tribe under the leadership of a hereditary chief has been vastly aided by the union of such tribes through the intermarriage of their chiefs and the process of inheritance, thus producing a tribe within a tribe. Great empires have been formed by wedlock, as mighty rivers are produced by the confluence of many tributaries into one stream. The house of Hapsburg, for example, owes more to Venus than to Mars. In the course of its history whole peoples, remote from one another in space and still more remote in character, have been transferred to these foreign rulers by marriage contracts. The nation-state has seldom been ruled by the pure blood of even its own dominant tribe. From the very beginning royalty has been in some degree an international institution, a kind of super-tribe destined to rule by the mere fact of heredity, composed of kinsmen at the altar, but of foemen in the field. And, notwithstanding the devotion of monarchs to nationalism, there has always existed a secret solidarity of royal interests.

Success in war always creates its own moral standards, and dynasticism has not failed to do so. Republican Rome took pride in never waging an unjust war, and had its college of fetials to determine whether an action even against barbarians was just. This practice arose from a supreme devotion to the idea of law and a reverence for human reason as the source of law. The founders and expanders of the nation-states have entertained no such scruples. They have adopted the motto that the will of the prince is law, and that there is no binding law above it. The nation-states, and, in truth, most others, have assented to this dictum, the only question in debate being who really possesses the authority of the prince.

The "sovereign," whoever he is, being without a law to govern him, an abstract attribute of the ruler, called "sovereignty," has been generally accepted as the substance of the state, and its powers have been conceived to be, as those of the absolute prince confessedly were, altogether unlimited. Since Christendom was abolished, and tribalism has prevailed, unlimited power has been recognized, and is still recognized, in the public law of Europe as the foundation of the state.

The most fundamental of all the questions arising out of the Great War is, Can this open repudiation of humanism in the interest of tribalism be permitted to endure? Is it true that a sovereign — any sovereign, even the totality of the so-called "sovereign people," of any tribe or nation-state — has a right to claim unlimited authority or even authority limited only by the extent of its power ? Is there not a law for the conduct of states, written or unwritten, which all sovereigns should be required to obey, wholly irrespective of the theoretical source or actual extent of their power? But if there is such a law, recognized or unrecognized, the conception of sovereignty as in its nature absolute and unlimited is evidently false.

It was Machiavelli who expounded the tribal theory of the state and the methods of securing its advancement ; and in this he was inventing no system of his own, but merely stating in definite terms the principles which successful monarchs were already putting into practice. " 'The Prince,' " declares Villari, "had a more direct action on real life than any other book in the world, and a larger share in emancipating Europe from the Middle Ages" ; but it would be more exact to say that Machiavelli's work, written in 1513 and published in 1532, was the perfect expression of an emancipation from moral restraits far advanced. The Christian idealism of the Middle Ages had already largely disappeared. The old grounds of obligation had been swept away. Men looked for their safety to the nation-state rather than to the solidarity of Christendom; and the state, as Machiavelli's gospel proclaimed it, consisted in absolute and irresponsible control exercised by one man who should embody its unity, strength, and authority.

Thus began the modern world. The conceptions of the Roman law, especially those of imperium and majestas, were partly revived in support of the royal dynasties in their struggle with the residues of feudalism, which resulted in the development of the national monarchies; but they had lost their note of universality. Even Christianity ceased to be ecumenical. There remained, indeed, a traditional fellowship and fraternity of kings, but it was virtually little more than a code of formal etiquette.

With the dissolution of the feudal organization through the predominance of the national monarchies disappeared that sense of mutual obligation which under the feudal regime had constituted an ethical bond between the different orders of society. What remained was the bare conception of irresponsible "sovereignty" considered as a divinely implanted, absolute, unlimited, and indivisible prerogative of personal rule, the charter right of each dynasty to seek its own aggrandizement, preponderance, and glory regardless of all considerations of race, reason, or religion.

With such a conception of the nature of the state, the whole system of international relations was necessarily based upon military force. Casually formed customs, usually the expression of superior power or of temporary expediency, supplemented by transitory alliances and enforced conventions, supplied the only rules that obtained general recognition. Until Grotius appealed to the ethical motive, and the treaties of Westphalia recognized the de jure rights of territorial sovereignty, there was among the nations of Europe no semblance of public law which jurisprudence could recognize. But even after the Peace of Westphalia, the so-called "law of nations" was little more than a theoretical acceptance of the equal rights of autonomous sovereigns, each of whom could work his will without interference within his own domains, leaving to each ruler the unquestioned prerogative of dictating the religion of his own subjects, of taxing them, of arming them, and of making war with their united forces for his own advantage. In effect, the Peace of Westphalia, by rendering even petty princes absolute, permitted more than three hundred and sixty independent rulers to carry on the sanguinary game of war for plunder or conquest without restraint; and all, left free to destroy one another, were thus entitled by public law, through war and diplomacy, to seek their fortunes with complete autonomy. Sovereignty, denned as "supreme power," regardless of any principle of right, was conceived to be the very essence of the state. It remained simply to discover by a trial of strength which power was in reality supreme.

When in its moral awakening the Europe of the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century began to think for itself, — or at least to follow the thinking of Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, and others who sought to find the true foundations of the state in the conception of law based upon the nature and necessities of men rather than upon dynastic power, — Europe found itself under the incubus of this sinister inheritance.

Without a convulsion that would shake the whole of Europe to its foundations it was powerless to throw it off. Rousseau had in "Le contrat social" merely transferred the idea of sovereignty from the monarch to the people, but he had not essentially altered its character. It was still "supreme power," still the "absolute, indivisible, and perpetual" thing which Jean Bodin, seeking to give royalty a philosophical pedestal to stand upon, had said it was. Inherent in the people, it was still the personification of all the public powers ; and the volonte generate, the general will, regardless of its moral qualities, was for each separate state, the unlimited, irresponsible source of law.

When the French Revolution judged and condemned the king, it was done as a sovereign act; and was, therefore, not permitted to be questioned by the rest of Europe. Was not sovereignty absolute ? Then it belonged to France. Was it not indivisible? Then it belonged to the French people. Was it not perpetual? Who, then, could ever take it away or in any way dispute it? And thus the volonte generate of one nation, in the person of the residuary legatee of the Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, made emperor by the assent of the volonte generate of France, assumed to act as sovereign over the whole of Europe.

There was no moment during the whole revolutionary period when sovereignty ceased to be conceived as unlimited supreme power. And thus the malign inheritance of Europe, in so far as it was affected by the Revolution, was essentially unchanged. Monarchy and democracy alike, without distinction, have regarded sovereignty merely as "supreme power," "absolute, indivisible, and perpetual." Thus it stands in the text-books of the law of nations. So many sovereignties, so many absolute autocrats. Being the sole sources of law, how can they be subject to law? And there being no law which they may not set aside, since it is but their creature, sovereign nations are irresponsible, and have no more to do with moral right or wrong than so many untamed animals seeking to satisfy their appetites. The right to make war at will and to be answerable to no one, that was, and is, the accepted doctrine of the old Europe, which merely asserted itself anew in 1914.

This does not signify that it has never been contested. More than three hundred years ago, a now almost forgotten German jurist, though recognizing sovereignty as the foundation of the state, denned it as an attribute, not of the people as an unorganized mass, but of a "body politic" organized for the promotion of justice, deriving its authority as a moral entity from the rights of its constituent members, whom it is organized to protect against wrong, and therefore from its very nature charged with mutual rights and obligations.

Here is pictured no irresponsible autocrat clothed with supreme power, but a responsible member of a family of nations, fitted to unite with other members of that family in extending over the whole earth the reign of law and justice, but above all required by the very nature and purpose of its authority to conduct itself in all its relations, outward and inward, in accordance with the principles from which its authority as an organ of justice is derived. Founded upon the inherent rights of persons, and existing for their protection, a state in this sense can arrogate to itself no sovereign right of conquest, whatever its power may be. The only authority it can claim is authority to defend the rights and interests thus committed to its guardianship. As a moral entity — for this is what Althusius taught that a state founded on rights necessarily is — it should be ready to apply the principles of justice and equity in its dealings with other states.

Thus understood, sovereignty is not merely a name for supreme power. It is a right inherent in a free and independent group of human beings, possessing a definite territory, to form and maintain a government. Reduced to its simplest terms, it is the right of a free community to provide for self-regulation and to maintain its own existence. Whatever is necessary to that, and nothing more, is included in this conception of the state. Only in an incidental manner does it belong to the category of might. In its essential attributes it belongs to the category of right.

Were this conception of sovereignty generally accepted, justice and equity would not halt at the frontiers of a nation. The right of war would exist, but it would not be, as the old Europe has universally recognized it to be, a virtually unlimited right. There could be, under this conception, no permanently subject peoples. There could be no world dominion. There could be no legal schemes of conquest. War would mean the punishment of offenders against the law of nations, the suppression of anarchy and brigandage, resistance to the ambitions of the conqueror.

But the old Europe has never been disposed to give to sovereignty that meaning. It could not do so while it was identified with royal legitimacy. That principle triumphed a hundred years ago in the Congress of Vienna, which strove to neutralize the effects of the French Revolution by ending forever the sovereignty of the people. Then followed the effort to establish Europe firmly upon the principles of absolutism by crushing out all constitutional aspirations. To accomplish this the unlimited right of war was necessary, for without armed intervention by the allied sovereigns the task was hopeless. Legitimacy was to be everywhere sustained by the Holy Alliance. Wherever a state adopted a constitution, the powers bound themselves at the Conference of Troppau, "if need be by arms, to bring back the guilty state into the bosom of the Alliance."

The unlimited right of a sovereign state to make war for any reason it considered sufficient, or for no reason at all, thus seemed to be written into the public law of Europe. That was the unhallowed inheritance which even modern democracies have received from absolutism. Being entitled to all the prerogatives of sovereignty as historically understood, they have not repudiated the heritage. And thus they have tacitly accepted the evil principle of the despotisms against whose iniquities they have rebelled, and whose pernicious influence they were struggling to throw off.

In the call for the first Hague Conference "all questions concerning the political relation of states" were expressly excluded from the deliberations of the conference. In that, and in the second conference, rules were laid down regarding the manner of conducting war, both on land and sea, but nowhere were any regulations prescribed regarding the causes or conditions of declaring war that were to be considered legal or illegal, just or unjust. As one of the best accredited authorities on the subject says:

Theoretically, international law ought to determine the causes for which war can be justly undertaken; in other words, it ought to mark out as plainly as municipal law what constitutes a wrong for which a remedy may be sought at law. It might also not unreasonably go on to discourage the commission of wrongs by investing a state seeking redress with special rights, and by subjecting a wrong-doer to special disabilities.

In fact, however, it does nothing of the kind. The reason is not merely that there would be no means except war for enforcing such rules, — for that would apply equally to the regulations concerning the manner of conducting war that have been explicitly laid down, — but because no sovereign state has thus far been disposed to pledge itself not to engage in war except under conditions that in harmony with its own principles of legislation would be considered just. "Hence both parties in every war are regarded as being in an identical position, and consequently possessed of equal rights." Aggressor and victim alike, triumphant force and helpless innocence, these are held in equal honor by the public law of Europe as it now stands, and this law has been tacitly accepted by the whole "family of nations" !

It is upon this unlimited right to resort to war, and the consequent general irresponsibility in international relations, that the idea of neutrality reposes ; and yet neutrality is historically an immense step forward in the path of progress when compared with the Machiavellian doctrine that no opportunity for gain from the quarrels of others should be allowed to pass unutilized. In every war, Machiavelli declares, one side or the other will win, and the wise course for an intelligent prince to pursue is to join at the proper moment with the probable winner, whoever he may be, in order to be able to share with him the spoils of victory.

The modern doctrine of neutrality, which considers war an unavoidable evil, is no doubt an amelioration of Machiavelli's policy; for, instead of widening the range of hostilities, its aims to narrow the area of conflict. It is inspired, however, chiefly by the consideration that it is a national right to avoid the infection of a pestilence which the neutral power has not caused and for which it is not responsible. So long as the belligerents, who are conceded the privilege of mutual destruction, — but often with very unequal facilities for engaging in the conflict, — do not too deeply offend the neutral states by their activities, powerful nations feel justified in standing silent and inactive while weak states are crushed into subjection and the laws of war, which they themselves have helped to make, are violated.

From a moral point of view this appears to be a strange proceeding for a member of the '" family of nations"; but it must be considered . that this is a family of a very peculiar kind. In it each member, by tacit consent, is believed to fulfil his whole duty by looking solely after his own interests. Governments, it is held, are in each case responsible to their own constituents for the preservation of the safety and well-being of the nations intrusted to their care, and consequently they cannot act with the freedom of a private person. They may not, therefore, incontinently plunge their people into war without reasons that involve the national interests. Until there is a better organization of international relations, this condition must continue ; but it is rapidly coming to be perceived that, if civilization is not to suffer shipwreck, a better organization must be sought.

Before attempting to find a basis for a revision of international relations it is necessary to consider how intimately national interests have become associated with war. For a long time, all the interests of the state were regarded as personal to the sovereign. All its territory was his territory. All the property of the nation was his property, of which the people enjoyed only the usufruct. Even their persons and their lives were at his disposal, for they were in all respects his subjects.