CHAPTER XXX THE NEXT MOVES IN THE INTERNATIONAL GAME

Previous

Out of the Peace Conference and the welter of policies that followed it students of international affairs have learned one thing, if nothing else: to distrust the efficacy of formulas to improve relations among nations. Despite the sacrifices and the heroic deeds of countless millions of civilized human beings, despite the educational propaganda of the war years, despite the high ideals for the triumph of which we believed that we were fighting, there was a scramble for spoils immediately the war was ended. The Paris Peace Conference conclusively proved that there had been no conversion of statesmen from their faith in traditional foreign policies to the widely heralded and much vaunted principles of “self-determination,” “rights of small nations,” “making the world safe for democracy,” “a durable world peace,” and “the league of nations.” No effort was made to repudiate the Prussian idea that “might goes before right,” and it was soon evident that the war fought to liberate subject peoples had resulted in the destruction and ruin of some of them and in bringing out in the rest of them the bad traits we condemned the Germans for showing.

The story of Europe since 1918 gives us furiously to think; for we have seen our statesmen and leaders unable to abandon the traditional rules of the diplomatic game in their efforts to solve post-bellum problems and the great mass of intelligent men and women unwilling to inform themselves about and think constructively upon questions affecting world peace. It was natural that there should have been indulgence in prejudices and passions during the war. Whether in a righteous cause or not, fighting implies the abandonment of the inhibitions of civilized society and a return of the law of the jungle. Violence and the reasoning faculty cannot be used coÖrdinately in the settlement of disputes. The excuse for putting our trust in force was that our opponents would listen to no other argument, and that when we had won we intended to restore the rule of reason. Our methods and our aims were totally different from those of our enemies, so we said, and we were saving civilization while they were trying to destroy it.

In fairness to our statesmen it must be recognized that public opinion in all the victorious countries called out for a victors’ peace and that if the world now exhibits symptoms of social disintegration and is for the time being on the down grade, it is because the passions engendered by the war did not die out and because hysterical peoples forgot or disclaimed in the hour of victory the goal that had made them capable of stupendous sacrifices and effort during the war years.

The Entente Powers and the United States are beginning to recognize that their failure to agree upon a common policy in Europe and the Near East is condemning them to forego the advantages of their victory in the World War. Protagonists and critics of the Paris peace settlement are still poles apart. On one point, however, all must agree. The Treaty of Versailles, and the other treaties modeled after it and dependent upon it, have failed to bring peace to Europe and the world. It is fruitless to talk about the bad faith of Germany, the abstention of the United States, the disconcertingly long lease of life of Soviet Russia, the imperialism of Great Britain, the militarism of France, and the unreasonableness of small states and subject nationalities; for each of these factors, taken by itself, is a result rather than a cause of the failure of the treaties. If we content ourselves with calling each other bad names and seeking to find in some one unruly national current or attitude the source of our ills, the universal chaos will only increase. It would not be hard to build up a convincing brief against the foreign policy followed by every nation, friend and enemy, since the armistice of November 11, 1918. But we get nowhere unless we are able to show that the present state of affairs is due, not to the errors of statesmen dealing with specific problems, but to fundamentally unsound and irrealizable concepts in the general bases of the treaties.

Among the errors of the Paris settlement we can point out: (1) creating a League of Nations whose charter provides for the permanent hegemony of five nations, with widely divergent interests; (2) reserving the advantages of the treaties to a few nations but making all members of the League responsible for their execution; (3) treating the vanquished enemies as criminals without right to counsel or appeal to an impartial tribunal, but at the same time not providing jailers to keep them in prison during the period of punishment; (4) denying the principle of reciprocity in contractual obligations; (5) declaring that the treaties are based upon the policy of freeing peoples from alien rule, but limiting the application of the policy to a few especially favored peoples, and violating it in other cases; (6) failing to apply one weight and one measure in passing upon the claims to reparations of peoples who had suffered in the World War through aggression, invasion, and the violation of international law; and (7) maintaining the old balance of power theory.

When we analyze the treaty, and study the course of the negotiations, we see that the first six errors are the children, that is, the outgrowth, of the seventh. It is possible to explain all the treaties by keeping in mind that the dominating idea of the Peace Conference was the recognition of the transcendent rights of the powers that had big armies and navies. The battle had been to the strong; so likewise should be the spoils. A new balance of power had to be created by virtue of which the strong could remain permanently strong by compounding their rivalries and by allowing one another strategic frontiers and the privilege of forming new international combinations for the purpose of keeping weak the peoples that had been conquered. The methods of waging war and of gauging strength, however, had radically changed during the nineteenth century. No longer were man-power and geographical position decisive elements. Coal, iron, oil, and access to food-stuffs and raw materials had become vital factors in the power of nations.

Far from being discouraged by the alarming condition of international relations five years after the war, we should feel relieved that we have been afforded a salutary demonstration of the futility of the Paris peace settlement at so little cost. If our eyes are now opened to the dangers of the international game, as it has been played since 1918, there is yet a chance to mend our ways before irreparable damage is done. Most of those who are writing on European politics are neither cynics nor pessimists, and they do not record the failure of these years with ghoulish delight. In discussing the possible dangers ahead they do not relish the rÔle of Cassandra. The purpose of writing is to show how policies, approved in the beginning by public opinion, are likely to work out. Is the game worth the candle? That is for the reader to decide.

The twofold mandate from voters to those who represent them in matters of foreign policy is: make us secure, and make us prosper. That is why the struggle for the possession of coal, iron, oil, and world markets, and not international coÖperation as embodied in the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice, underlies the history of Europe since 1918, and furnishes an appallingly sordid explanation of the policies followed by European statesmen in the Saar, the Ruhr, Upper Silesia, Eastern Galicia, the Banat of TemesvÁr, the Donetz region of Ukrainia, the Caucasus, northern Persia, and the Mosul region of Turkey. If Germany and Russia could be permanently deprived of the resources essential to war that abound in these disputed territories, their man-power would count for little. They would be reduced to a state of vassalage, and the strength of the nations possessing or controlling these regions would be correspondingly increased.

Under the spell of this idea France is trying to reconstruct Europe, and she has been able to find support for her policy among those to whom German and Russian coal, iron, and oil have been allotted, and to whom German and Russian sea-ports and provinces have been given. In the Near East France was willing to let Great Britain have a free hand in the Caucasus and Persia and to sacrifice the right to Mosul recognized in the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. To Rumania were handed over Bessarabia and the iron and coal in TemesvÁr. Germany’s coal supplies passed under Franco-Polish control, and the French hope that Poland has become by the possession of Upper Silesia and Eastern Galicia a state strong enough to be a permanent barrier between Germany and Russia. As an additional safeguard against the regrouping of the Teutonic element in central Europe and its contact with Hungary and Russia, the Little Entente was formed.

For France the next move in the international game is to settle the reparations question with Germany and to make peace with Russia in such a way that Germany will lose control of her essential resources for war making and will be cut off permanently from the temptation of forming with Russia an alliance to shake off the stranglehold of the victors in the World War upon these two powers. France believes that Great Britain’s interests in Asia and her anxiety to prevent Germany from making another effort to compete with her for world markets and the carrying trade will eventually induce the British to acquiesce in the French scheme for a new European balance of power directed against both Germany and Russia.

The flaw in the French program is the failure to realize that France’s control of the Rhineland and the Ruhr and the dependence of Poland upon her give rise to the suspicion that her aim is the military and economic domination of Europe. The protestation or the fact of innocence of any such plan makes no difference to those who fear it. France has a great reservoir of African troops. With control of German coal and with Poland as a vassal she will be in a more advantageous position to impose her will upon Europe than Germany was in 1914, with Austria-Hungary as a vassal. The control of the Ruhr mines and factories will inevitably cause other European states to combine with Great Britain against France as they combined in the decade preceding the World War against Germany.

Great Britain is in an unhappy frame of mind over the political and economic situation of Europe. To get France out of the Ruhr and to release the hold of France on Germany, British public opinion is prepared to forgive the French debt—and the other interallied debts, for that matter. It is more important for Great Britain to-day than ever that no power dominate Continental Europe. The British are eager for the return of normal economic conditions and the restoration of their European markets. Outside Europe they have made many sacrifices, as in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and India, to get rid of military burdens and financial outlay by adopting an attitude of compromise toward demands of native populations for self-government. The imperialism of British foreign policy after the World War was, as we have seen, very quickly checked. British public opinion is alive to the danger of disregarding the aspirations of Asiatic and African peoples, and is prepared to go to almost any length to keep together the empire that has been centuries in the building. The greatest difficulty ahead for Great Britain comes from the insistent demand of Continental European countries that the world’s raw materials be pooled and that equality of access to them be granted by the great colonial power.

Italy’s next move in the international game is undoubtedly along the line of unhampered access to raw materials in Asia, and Africa, and Australia, and unrestricted emigration to the United States and the British Dominions. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that Italy stands in the same relation to the outside world in which Germany and Japan stand. The three great powers have become industrial nations with a rapidly growing population, and to exist and prosper they must import raw materials and food-stuffs and export manufactured goods. They need also an outlet for surplus population and opportunities for capital investment in countries where such investment helps their trade. There would have been no World War had not Germany felt herself deprived of “her place in the sun.” Other nations were ahead of her in preËmpting colonizing areas and the regions upon which Europe could draw for raw materials and rely for markets. The war did not solve Germany’s problem. It was her own fault, we can assert, and leave it at that. But how about Italy and Japan, our comrades in arms? Their need of world-wide equality for trade and emigration are as great as Germany’s, and they have not forfeited consideration of their claims, as Germany has done. On the contrary, they have a greater claim to the consideration of the more fortunate powers than they had a few years ago.

In attempting to put into one volume the eventful story of Europe since 1918 we have given very little space to the League of Nations and the United States; for during these years neither one nor the other has had a vital part in European affairs. What the future will bring forth none knows. But it is safe to venture the prophecy that Europe will successfully solve her own problems as she had done in the past, and that the rÔle played by the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice will be negligible compared with the individual rÔles of France and Great Britain. These two colonial powers hold in their hands the raw materials upon which all Europe except Russia and the Balkans depends for its well-being. What will be the colonial policy of Great Britain and France toward other European nations, especially toward Italy and Germany? What will be their policy toward Japan? Does not the peace of the world depend upon how the colonial powers will solve the problem of giving to Italy, Germany, and Japan a fair share in the privilege of developing and trading with Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world over which fly the British and French flags?

If Russia were still an ally of France and Great Britain, in sympathy with the doctrine that to those who have should be given and from those who have not should be taken even that which they have, the danger of a war over raw materials and trade and emigration outlets would not be imminent. As matters now stand earnest men should not be devoting all their attention and effort to creating and maintaining machinery to prevent war when no serious attention is being paid to the great cause of war, which is, in our generation, inequality in trade, colonization, and investment opportunities among powers of equal size, strength, standard of living, and productive capacity.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Clyx.com


Top of Page
Top of Page