The economic causes of modern war

Introduction

The present volume is an effort to trace the chain of economic causes which produce modern wars. It is an effort also to show that the same series of causes, at the same time that they bring about wars, are working (somewhat less effectively) towards increasing international solidarity. And finally, it is a very modest attempt to indicate, tentatively, the general lines on which the operation of these economic causes in the first direction may be limited and in the second forwarded.

Originally it was a study only of the economic causes of war; but as the research progressed it speedily became apparent that there was another side to the picture. By an ironic paradox the same forces were producing two effects: they were working toward war and peace at the same time.

The rise of industrialism has led to a struggle for markets and for food supplies and raw materials. These have led to international friction culminating in war, mainly through questions of colonial policy. But since industrialism and colonial expansion are impossible without a high degree of financial inter-relationship among nations, and since the interest of the financier is usually (but not by any means always) in the preservation of peace for the sake of his investments' safety, the forces that generate wars also generate a force which tends to prevent them. Moreover, the extreme complexity of these inter-relationships between modern industrial states, through the need for international transportation, communication, standardization of weights and measures, publication of tariffs, and the like, has bred a viii Introduction

spirit of co-operation among nations which is opposed to the war spirit.

But it is quite apparent that as matters have stood hitherto, the economic causes are working a good deal faster towards war than peace. The ratio of four peaceful years to thirty-nsix years of war during the period 1878-1918 scarcely indicates that the war god is going out of business immediately. It is for this reason that I have stressed the causation of war, rather than its prevention ; and have tried only in the concluding chapter to indicate very briefly where the most promising remedy lies. For those who are familiar with their writings, my debt to Mr. J. L. Garvin of the London Observer and to Mr. H. N. Brailsford will be too obvious to need the acknowledgment that I make most gratefully.

The three quotations prefixed to the text serve to indicate pretty accurately in advance the approach to the subject. There is here no effort to advance a purely "economic theory of history"; there is, however, an attempt to demonstrate that the root of modern war lies in economic conditions, even though other causes are sometimes operative to a less extent. There is also a constant effort to strip off the disguises which purely economic motives are likely to assume.

The study was begun while I was still in military service at Camp Lee, Virginia. The duties of a battalion adjutant having proved scarcely conducive to research, it was laid aside and resumed some months later, after which it was presented in skeletal form before the Seminar in the Philosophy of History at Harvard. As a result of the criticisms received there, several changes were made, and the subsequent revision has led to the introduction of much additional data.

The manuscript has been read by Professor William Ernest Hocking, of Harvard University, by Professor Walter

Introduction ix

Wallace McLaren and Dr. James Washington Bell, of Williams College, and by Mr. Lennox Mills, Rhodes Scholar from British Columbia, greatly to its benefit and my own. I owe to the Reverend Father Campbell, of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, first hand information relative to conditions in the Far East; to Dean J. H. Latane, of Johns Hopkins University, and to Professor I. W. Howerth, of the University of California, assistance in locating references; to Dean Le Baron Russell Briggs, of Harvard LTniversity, aid in the revision of manuscript; and to Colonel James B. Gowen, Executive Officer, General Staff College, United States Army, the compilation of the list of wars on page 46.

Although I am greatly indebted to these gentlemen for many suggestions of the greatest value, the responsibility both for statements of fact and for conclusions is, of course, entirely my own.

John Bakeless.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 26 October, 1920.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Inteoduction . . vii

I. The Causes of Wars 1

Chapter I

Sharp distinction is always to be drawn between the real and the apparent occasions of wars. The real, as contrasted with the ostensible causes, are not often clear and can seldom be entirely understood. No international conflict was ever due to a single cause, but all have been rather the result of a group of causes, of which only a few have ever become apparent.

Nor are the incidents which precipitate wars likely to be anything more than sparks, igniting magazmes already primed for explosion. A dispute with regard to a pig is said at one time to have threatened war between the United States and Great Britain, and on another occasion between France and the Republic of Texas, then independent of the United States.^ Difficulties between Vienna and Belgrade over the export of Serbian pigs had much to do with the bitterness which culminated in the Sarajevo murder and the World War. The cutting off by Spaniards of the ear of an English sea captain named Jenkms was the immediate cause of the war of 1738 between England and Spain,

'I. W. Howerth: "The Causes of War," Scientific Monthly, 2:118:F '16. See also D. W. C. Baker: A Texas Scrap-Book, p. 315.

which later became part of the War of the Austrian Succession, but which was first known as "Jenkins's Ear War." ^ Some of the fiercest fighting of the ■ Nineteenth Century occurred during the war between Peru and Chile, which followed a dispute over manure. The blowing up of the battleship "Maine" in Havana harbor could never have produced war between the United States and Spain had not the two states been prepared for hostilities by a variety of economic, idealistic, and humanitarian motives. Nor could Bismarck's alteration of the Ems telegram have brought about the Franco-Prussian War had not both countries been already upon the verge of a conflict, from a number of causes of varying natures, dynastic, nationalistic, economic, and territorial. In all these cases, the incidents, tragic or grotesque, to which the wars that followed have been directly due, are evidently in no real sense the actual causes. For them, one must look deeper and further back in history.

Religious differences; dynastic ambitions; efforts to divert popular attention from domestic strife; "altruistic" motives for the spread of a superior culture; the defense of neutral rights; compliance with the terms of alliances; efforts at national unification; struggles for national independence; aid extended to rebels; ambition for hegemony in the family of nations; affronts, real and fancied, to the national honor; revenge, distrust, hatred, or mere misunderstandings between nations, leading to increased armaments, and culminating in "defensive" onslaughts upon one another; the chauvinism of professional military or naval castes; plotting against the peace and security of neighboring states; and finally, a wide variety of economic motives, over-population, immigration and emigration with their attendant international friction, territorial expansion, colo-

* Edward P. Cheyney: Short History of England, p. 557.

nies, trade rivalries, the needs of industrial states for markets, raw materials, and food supplies, security for vital arteries of trade, access to the sea, "scientific" frontiers, and the possession of strategic points — all these have been important causes of wars at one time or another. Although certain of them seem more important at present, almost any one can be found in some form or other, usually not very thoroughly disguised, in the great war which has just come to an end.

In the kingless and apparently godless world of 1920, it is difi&cult to believe that either dynastic or religious considerations could really produce wars; yet it is but a few years since the divine right of kings was being proclaimed in all seriousness, and since Russian, Austrian, and German troops were marching in the names of gods as truly tribal as Allah and Yahweh ever were, to support the threatened Romanoff, Hapsburg, and HohenzoUern dynasties. During the same period, the Jehad, or Holy War, was proclaimed in the Moslem world ; and although General Allenby's campaign in Palestine can hardly be called a Holy War, there is no denying that a strong religious interest attached to it throughout the Christian world. ^

^ In 1866 Lecky regarded religious difficulties as a group of war causes soon to become obsolete, for he wrote: "The great raajority of wars during the last 1,000 years may be classified under three heads — wars produced by opposition of religious belief, wars resulting from erroneous economical notions, either concerning the balance of trade or the material advantages of conquest, and wars resulting from the collision of the two hostile doctrines of the Divine right of kings and the rights of nations. In the first instance knowledge has gained a decisive, and in the second almost a decisive victory. Whether it will ever render equally impossible political combinations that outrage national sentiment is one of the great problems of the future." — Lecky: Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii, pp. 219-220.

The history of the last fifty years renders his error as to the economic factor so glaringly obvious that one is inclined to question the accuracy of his conclusion as to the "decisive victory" which knowledge has gained over religious hostilities. The civil war in Ireland is a case in point.

We must go further back in history to find wars which have been fought with the religious motive well to the front, but in all times and in all religions we find them. The Old Testament teems with religious wars, Mohammedanism has spread itself over half the world with the sword for

Mr. Oscar T. Crosby, President of the World Federation League, a graduate of the United States Military Academy, who was for five years a lieutenant of engineers in the United States Army, points to the complex intermingling of faiths on both sides in the World War, as precluding the entrance of the religious motive. (International War, Its Causes and Its Cure, p. 230.) His religious tabulation of the warring powers, slightly enlarged, is as follows:

Allied Powers

British Empire — Protestant, Roman Catholic, Anglican Catholic, Agnostic, Hindu, Mohammedan, Parsee, Buddhist, Jaina, Animist, Jewish, Agnostic.

France — Roman Catholic, Agnostic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Buddhist, Confucian, Animist, Jewish.

Russia — Greek Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Buddhist, Armenian, Jewish.

Italy — Roman Catholic, Agnostic, Jewish.

Japan — Buddhist, Shinto, Christian (of diverse shades), Agnostic.

America — Protestant, Anglican Catholic, Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Jewish, Mohammedan, Agnostic.

Serbia — Greek Catholic.

Central Powers

Germany — Protestant, Roman Catholic, Agnostic, Jewish, Buddhist.

Austria — Roman Catholic, Protestant, Agnostic, Jewish.

Turkey — Mohammedan, Armenian, Jewish.

Bulgaria — Greek Catholic, Jewish.

The religious motive is no doubt of minor importance in the wars of the modern world, but the well-known fact that the German General Staff deliberately counted on a Mohammedan Holy War, together with the other facts that I have given, serves to show that it is not dead by any means. So astute an observer of international events as Dr. E. J. Dillon remarks: "It is a fact — not yet realized even by the delegates themselves — that distinctly religious motives inspired much that was done by the Conference on what seemed political or social grounds." (The Inside Story of the Peace Conference, p. 489.) Although Dr. Dillon later (p. 496) regards "the plea that war may be provoked by such religious inequality as still survives" as "unreal" it is evident that — however "religious inequality" may be considered) — a force which is still so vital as "religious motives" were at Paris, is seriously to be reckoned with.

missionary, Christianity itself did not disdain to go crusading, and the history of Europe is filled with the battles of Catholic and Protestant.

The clearest modern instance of a series of wars resulting primarily from dynastic ambitions, is to be seen at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, in the Napoleonic Wars. Although even here we do not have a case of wars produced solely by dynastic ambition (for there were, of course, other causes), we have at least an example of an ambitious ruler, would-be founder of a dynasty, thirsty for power, deliberately embroiling Europe for a period of many years, for the sake of gratifying his own ambitions.

Not only may a ruler who regards the interests of his dynasty as paramount engage in a war to enhance its prestige, or to enlarge its domains; but he may also find in war a convenient means of solidifying its power at home by diverting popular attention from domestic difficulties. The unanimity with which the widely diverging parties of the German Empire, from Junker to Socialist, jomed in 1914 for the period of the war, is a case in point. Nor is warfare as a means of promoting harmony within the state unknown even to republics. Immediately prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, Secretary Seward and his followers are said to have been casting about for a foreign war as the most convenient means of allaying the growing discord between North and South. ^ Only in the union before a common foe resulting from the Spanish-American War did sectional hostility in the United States finally vanish.

To talk of an "altruistic" war seems almost a contradiction in terms, and yet there can be no question that France in the days of the First Republic was ready to carry

^ 0. T. Crosby : International War, Its Causes and Its Cure, p. 335.

the gospel of "Liberie, egalite, fratemite," to an unwillm,^ world by force of arms, just as in the recent war our German adversaries went forth with the avowed intention of bestowing upon a benighted globe the inestimable advantages of a superior Kultur.

Phrases like "the white man's burden," — which, as we shall presently see, is a highly profitable load — are efforts to cast the cloak of altruism over the stark economic motivation of European colonial conflicts. England in Egypt and Africa, the United States in the Philippines, Italy in Tripoli, France in Tunis, Algiers, Morocco, and Indo-China, insist that they are altruistically and with sublime self-abnegation doing their share in caring for the

". . . new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child."

War also assumes an ethical aspect when the warring powers profess to be engaged in a struggle on behalf of the rights of neutrals, as was the case when the United States went to war with Great Britain in 1812 in defense of neutral rights at sea, or when in 1914 Belgium struck in defense of her neutrality, or Great Britain (partly) in defense of the same neutrality. But Great Britain, in addition to the enormously important economic motives to be discussed later, was also engaged by alliance to uphold Belgian neutrality, one of the numerous examples afforded by the World War of compliance with the terms of an existing alliance as an occasion, though not a true cause, of war.

What appears to be an innate human tendency to group in increasingly large units, has contributed its share to the wars of the world. The ancient world grouped and regrouped itself, at the price of endless warfare, again and again, as Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian Empires rose and fell. Out of the large unit which was the Roman Empire came the grouping and regrouping of the Holy Roman Empire.

The last century has seen the unification of the German Empire, the unification of Italy, and the settling, once for all, of the question of the unity of the United States. Sometimes such processes of national unification can be brought about by agreement. More often, in the past, unification has come through war. It was the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870 that made possible the union of the scattered German states; it was through battle that a United Italy came together; and it was only after four years of bitter warfare that our own country became forever a united land.

Colonies and dependencies, and even countries which are merely political associates, can usually become free and independent states only by appeal to arms. The peaceful separation of Sweden and Norway was a most unusual incident. Every Republic in North and South America won its freedom with the blood of its citizens. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Roumania, have one by one cast off the yoke of Turkish suzerainty through war. Because the desire for national independence leads to conflict, we have within the last three years seen one small state after another split from the empire of which it had hitherto been a part, and with an army in the field assert its right to an independent existence.

When a subject nation is thus engaged in a war for independence, other powers, already hostile to its suzerain from a variety of reasons, may make use of the occasion to come to the assistance of the rebels, paying off old scores under the convenient cloak of idealism. Thus it was that France sent troops to the aid of the rebellious American colonies of her traditional foe. Great Britain; and both in

European and South American countries the United States has been credited with a similarly Machiavellian policy in the Cuban intervention.

The rise and fall of German hegemony in Europe, comprised within the period 1862-1918,^ furnished an excellent example of a series of wars fought for the sake of the leadership of one nation among the rest. Under Bismarck's adroit statecraft, the war of 1864 aggrandized Prussia at the expense of Denmark, and furnished the spark which, judiciously fanned, burst into flame in the war with Austria in 1866. With the defeat of Austria, Prussia won the hegemony among the scattered German states, and after that, by the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, the hegemony of Europe. Since then a series of threats, demonstrations, diplomatic crises, and war scares have gone to the maintenance of that hard-won hegemony, culminating at last in the grand debacle of the present war and the disappearance of German leadership.

The desire to maintain the hegemony of a nation leads its statesmen to be highly sensitive when that extremely nebulous quantity known as the "national honor" is involved, and to be ready to threaten war over incidents trifling in themselves, but regarded as tending to belittle the prestige of the nation and to open the way to further and more serious infringements of its dignity by the offending nation. A case in point is the scuffle at Casablanca in which a German consul's cane was broken. That broken cane very nearly brought all Europe into war.

Mutual hatred or the desire for revenge between nations is another potent cause of war. The forty years of suspicion between France and Germany, the policy of

^ From Bismarck's accession in 1862 to the office of Chancellor to the King of Prussia, to the signing of the armistice which ended the World War in 1918.

"revanche/' the rankUng wound of the economic and sentimental loss of Alsace-Lorraine, have all but produced war again and again and again. The distrust of Germany which implanted itself in the English mind between 1890 and 1914, and the growing dislike and jealousy of England which made itself apparent a little before, if not quite simultaneously, in Germany, served to open the way for hostilities.

Of the numerous causes from which such national distrusts may grow, the most prolific is the sheer difficulty of one nation in understanding another. The mere barrier of language, where it exists, is in itself a contributing cause, since there is no opportunity for the two peoples to know and understand each other. Where this barrier does not exist, there is unfortunately, an appalling opportunity for friction through differences of custom, habits, manner of life, all of which may in the end lead to bitterness because of the very fact that through community of language, adverse utterances in the journals of one nation are readily comprehended and copied by those of the other.

Where international hatred, distrust, or jealousy exists, the national armament is certain to be increased. It was in obedience to this law that France fortified her northern frontier, that England added continually to her fleet, and that the work of the German Flottenverein resulted in the building of the one fleet capable of rivalling that of Great Britain. Likewise, where these national jealousies exist, a professional military caste is almost certain to spring up, its whole life given to preparation for war — a caste always on the lookout for war (with which its whole prospect of preferment is bound up), favoring war, and quite capable of indiscretions which may bring it about. Such was the case in Germany prior to 1914; such was the case to a much less degree in France; such was the case to some degree in the British fleet.

National jealousies and hatreds, with the perpetual virus of a military or naval hierarchy, even if the last be not allpowerful, distrust and suspicion between the nations involved, have as their results constant uneasiness and evergrowing tension of the national nerves. This ends in ultimatums, war-scares, and "defensive attacks" to take advantage of speedier mobilization — all, sometimes, over disagreements which were trifling in their origin, or at least capable of peaceful solution, but which have at last bred terrific conflicts.

All this leads naturally to what has always been one of the chief reasons for warfare — the economic. From the earliest days, when primitive tribes fought one another for hunting grounds, for slaves, or for loot, economic considerations have been involved in war. Economics and finance do not merely enter into the provocation of modern war, but are themselves among the means by which it is carried on. The blockade is a device which was long ago discovered, but today trade and tariff wars precede the use of force, and economic pressure helps to force the enemy into submission.

That economic conditions have stimulated war in all ages is a commonplace of history. The great mercantile powers of the world have always fought one another, whether for markets, over trade routes, or out of the sheer bitterness engendered of their commercial contests. But it has remained for the economic foes of our day to penetrate into the furthermost comers of the earth with quarrels and bickerings which have in the end been productive of the bloodiest of wars, to carry "civilization" — and the surplus products of their industries — throughout the world, mercilessly crushing the unfortunate natives that have stood in their way, and in the end coming into armed conflicts with one another because of the demand of each for more and yet more opportunity for economic expansion.

Without going to the extremes of the out-and-out exponents of the economic theory of history, one may say with safety that there has never been a war into which economics did not enter to some degree, and that there has seldom been a war into which economics did not enter to a great degree.

Pressure of population has always been a potent cause of wars. It was this that sent the Goth and Hun south to the Mediterranean as the Roman Empire tottered to its fall — the pressure of other populations, behind them, pressing out of Asia. It is this that has caused modern wars. A fecund nation grows so rapidly that it has no longer room within its borders for its citizens. Then comes either emigration, with its consequent loss to the state of its citizens, or else expansion into the domains of a neighboring state. Encroachment upon another's territories means war, inevitably. Colonization means war, too, either with other colonizing powers, or with the natives whom the new settlers displace.

As the states of Europe have grown in population beyond the capacity of their own soil to feed them, they have turned from agriculture to industry. They have had to look beyond their borders for food for their populations, for raw materials for their industries, and for markets for their wares. They have required access to the sea, and strategic points along the trade routes by which these things are brought to them.

It is the increase of population, followed by the rise of industrialism, and the consequent economic interdependence in vital commodities without guaranties of economic security save by force, that have rendered war inevitable in the modern world. The imperative need of food supplies, of raw materials, of markets, and the insecurity of a world organization which makes it possible for any of these to be cut off at any moment by a hostile fleet or army, lead to a frantic effort for the acquisition of~the portions of the earth where raw materials and food supplies are to be had, as well as to the quest of colonies as prospective consumers of the wares produced by the fatherland in excess of its own (and general European) consumption.

This is the situation which stimulates the trade rivalries that serve to embitter national quarrels already existing for other reasons. Witness the increasing national hatred between Great Britain and Germany, which grew apace as German enterprise and scientific methods gradually displaced the British in the markets of the world. Out of trade rivalry comes colonial rivalry, colonial wars waged by the mother countries for the possession and safeguarding of their domains, and in the end, wars between the great colonial powers themselves because of quarrels engendered in their colonies. Witness Fashoda, witness Agadir, and witness the whole miserable business of the Far and Near East.

The chapters that follow are an effort:

First, to trace the economic forces that have driven European nations into constant collision with native tribes and with one another in the backward lands of the earth — primarily overpopulation, followed by manufacturing beyond their own capacity to use, with resultant shortage of food supplies and raw materials;

Second, to examine the actual working in history of this theoretical chain of war causes, by a study of the origins of the wars of the period 1878-1918;

Third, to set forth the paradox by which international finance both produces and prevents wars;

Fourth, to show the way in which the economic causes of wars affect internationalism, and their relation to the League of Nations.

Chapter II

Ever since states began, they have founded colonies, although the objects and methods of the colonization have radically differed, as has the status of the colonies in relation to the parent nations. Ancient Greek colonization, for example, was a very different process in every respect from the colonization of our own day, for the Greeks — to whom the state was necessarily a city — regarded it as being naturally a small organization, and drew the obvious inference that the surplus population was to be accommodated only by the founding of a new state. Hence the classic colony consisted of a body of emigrants from the parent state, who withdrew from it and went elsewhere to set up a new ttoKls which should carry on the traditions, customs, ideals, habits of life of the old state, but without any political connection. Thus were founded all the colonies which dotted the shores of the ^gean; and thus it was that Carthage grew from Phoenicia.

This was the earliest and most natural method of colonization, but it was not the only one; nor was it — especially as means of communication gradually improved — the only natural one, for to the bonds of blood, customs, and religion could well be added that of political connection. A prototype of the classic colonizing tradition is the city of Miletus, with her daughter cities flourishing all about her; and of the modern tradition, the British Empire, which has grown gradually but surely through the centuries by the most successful application that the world has yet seen, of the more modern method.

A change, then, has come over the methods of founding and administering colonies, and it is a change which has grown directly out of the increasing complexity of modern civilization. Not only has there been a change in methods, but new motives also have come to make themselves felt.

The most important, and mdeed the fundamental cause of the demand for colonies is the growth of the populations of European states beyond the capacities of the territories of the various nations to support them. Throughout the entire continent an increase of population has been going on, in some countries more rapidly than in others, but in almost all fast enough to cause the numbers of the population to exceed by far the productive capacity of their own land. The population of Prussia would double itself by natural increase in 49.2 years; that of England in 59.1 years; that of Italy in 65.7 years; that of Austria in 74.1; and — though the population of France lags behind — even there in a period of 591 years a similar increase would result.^

Evidently a constantly increasing pressure on the means of subsistence must follow in all nations ; nor is the pressure upon the other European states relieved, nor the colonial or military rivalry lessened, by the slow rate of increase in a single nation. By a paradox, the political effects of a rising birth rate in Germany and a falling birth rate in France have been precisely the same; for Germany, like every other European Power, has believed herself compelled to seek an outlet for population in a world empire; and France has been forced to look to new colonies for the native troops with which to meet the long-expected onslaught of